A Sprite

Weren't the Sega Master system cards SG-1000 holdovers? The SG-1000 could display 32 sprites, same as the Colecovision. Also, how many Colecovision games display all 32 sprites?

If I were a 5200 collector, and you found a way to make it black, I imagine at least $150-300 for the time and effort to handcraft it. Is this closer to the fair price you're trying not to reveal? I wonder if it wouldn't be easier for Songbird or Atari Age to look over your design, pay you a set amount, and manufacture them at a price the market can afford.

First the bad news.. - Gamecritics/com I-Ninja clocks in at a "brief" 10 hours for a hardcore player, but - Super Mario Sunshine gets a mixed review - easy to get into, but the game is long , worse the penalty for missing a jump is often swimming back to the beginning of the level to try again. You'll grow to miss bottomless pits. Most people feel it was flawed, but Tempest prefers it to Mario 64, so maybe it'll be fun for you too. Viewtiful Joe I can recommend with no reservations. Other games you might want to try are TimeSplitters 2 ( No other 1st person shooter would risk making it's storyline so unnecessary. It's just an excuse to throw as many characters and scenarios at the player for them to amuse themselves with as possible. If you choose, you can skip it completely and go straight to shooting things. ) And Wario World - it was almost universally panned for being beatable by a good player within less than 6 hours. With 4 worlds containing 3 stages each, it's shorter than some NES games. Perfect for anybody wanting to just beat a game without exchanging wedding vows with it.

The Game Gear can handle 64 sprites.

Or - What if the play field was letterboxed, and a radar provided? Edit: So it can be done with background? What are the restrictions? I'll do up a screenshot.

How fast can the Atari 2600 draw missiles? What if the Robotrons were represented as basically bricks, (red brick basic robotron. Big green brick is hulk robotron) and mirrored all over the map with basic movement goals preplanned while chasing humans (both human and nearby robotrons told to go to co-ordinate y), and a basic diagonal approach to chasing the player? The humans could be basic 5-6 pixel high sprites, since there's less of them. Would this limit the flicker to a reasonable amount? Edit: If possible, I like the approach above me.

What if the fire was constant, and the fire button was used to lock on to the nearest occupied coordinates until all enemies within x amount of space away from y were eliminated from the game? ( think Z-trigger in Ocarina of Time) Releasing the button returns control to the player's stick. Takes some getting used to, but it'd help the players get themselves out of most bad situations.

Mwahahahaha! I <3 this list. We need a challenge. Here's my stab at Robotron. All enemy types are mirrored in horizontal rows. The playfield scrolls vertically, in the sense that the enemies on screen appear to scroll up and down only in response to player actions. The player character is a missile. The idea is to try and rescue every human before the Robotrons in the same horizontal row walk into them, since the 2600 can't make the enemies all blitz you. How did I do? I'm not afraid of honest criticism - it's the only way to learn.

I think the only way we can resolve this is to have someone play someone else's copy on someone else's machine. If it's just technique, it can be taught. If there's a bad factory batch, with either the program or the controllers, it's one more colorful story about how Atari shot itself in the throat.

Published or developed? Tony Hawk 1 or Spider Fighter?

Yeah, we're waiting for you. What will YOU do for it, eh? Cheer on from the sidelines while people who can speak hexidecimal figure out how it could actually be done. I learned in the Jag forums not to trust a demo as a test of a machine's capabilities. Doing everything in that demo, plus running a game, and keeping a playable frame rate isn't as easy as asking the programmers here to cut and paste the code, even if it was given to them. Not saying that kind of graphics can't be done for a Doom port, only that the verdict still isn't in. If you're asking me to help or get out of the way - tell me what the engine can do, and I'll custom design every graphic you need, free of charge.

Have you ever tried to guess at what was on the screen, only to discover you weren't even close? I thought I was immune. I knew those ducks were dragons, because despite the clever disguise no duck ever stood 50 feet tall and tried to eat my hand instead of the bread (of course the square has hands. Look closer. )But worse was to follow. Imagine trying to play Indiana Jones without instructions or an internet. Somehow, I turned it into ET, only Indy never survived his fall. Based on that evidence, I went back to ET. The first time I played Desert Falcon, I successfully avoided every power-up on my way to dying on the first stage. I still have no idea what EarthWorld is trying to be. I keep looking for Wario to show up in monocolor sprite form and shout a random instruction like "Shoot!" or "Dodge!" or "Go Back To ET! It's Really Underrated!" Anyone else have any?

No enemies, no gunplay, no AI, no doors, no user input. Good demo, but the trouble isn't getting the Atari to play Doom, it's letting the players in on the action. That said, I wonder how hard deathmatch alone would be as a trial? 1st person shooters have been doing it since before home computers existed.

If you're old enough to worry what people will think if they see you playing a system that also carries kid's games, you're still too young to understand why this thread is hilarious.

I've no idea whether it can be done, but here's a quick go at sketching the hero's sprite. .

Steel Empire was rereleased for GBA.

Then why give Defender, Centipede, and 3 Deep high marks? We can argue his opinions on individual games, but if he's out to convince people to avoid the 5200 he needs to stop being so loose with the words "best version."

I'll be the insane one, then. My dream list: 1. Guitar Hero - if you don't want to rock out to bit bop Guitar Hero, then you have no soul. Also, it needs a secret MegaMan 2 track. 2. Space Giraffe - for the visual upgrade. 3. Fight Night - Muhammad Ali's Punch Out. 4. Enemy Zero - if you must do a 1st person shooter in 8 bit, it helps if the enemies can't be seen. 5. SuperMario Land series - since Nintendo isn't attempting to make a pile of money by adding color with a few mouse clicks, it's obvious they wouldn't mind if someone saved them the trouble. 6. The Atari Flashback's 7800 games - was that the best they could do?

Show us all of your ideas. It's not hard to mock up screenshots. How can programmers judge the value of working on the project if all you have is a list of what you can't do? How is your game balanced? What are the level designs? Do enemies stalk the player or only fire if X is at Y? How many objects on the screen simultaneously does your design call for? Are you willing to sacrifice high resolution/multicolor sprites for speed and better enemy variety? Other people here can probably come up with better questions for you to consider; I'm not a programmer either... But you've got a good start. Don't stop now.

Or, you could do this...

What if you pulled a Ballblazer? Only allow turns at sharp 90 degree angles, with foward and backward movement, plus left and right strafe being the primary way of moving? This simplifies calculations needed to display the playfield - if levels were adapted around it, it'd be like Doom was designed as an 8 bit original, with the original versions just adding more eye candy to the experience.

Sounds good, so on the NES the look follows the gameplay? Doesn't "The 3-D Battles of World Runner" just prove the opposite? Amazing idea! You can download that one from the nesdev boards I think... I've seen several... what was the word again... "Hong Kong Originals" of that already... shudder... Nobody has attempted a serious port. The "Hong Kong Originals" are all hacks of the very poor "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Tournament Fighters" Both the original Gameboy and the Sega Game Gear were able to manage respectable versions of Samurai Shodown - a much more demanding game in terms of what the screen is asked to display at any single given time. It can be done. The question is whether anyone is willing to take on a homebrew project that complex, just to show off their skills.

I thought so as well, until I discovered the shocking truth: The NES has no R-Types! The NES can do SID-style music, there's some very impressive tunes from European composers, especially to be found amongst the NES games from Codemasters. It's just the made-in-japan games that all have muzak instead of music Also try Silver Surfer for an original SID style soundtrack.

Much as I'd like to agree with the post that started us out, too often hardcore is more like: Hardcore gaming is when you can claim the Final Fantasy series is both an obscure favorite the mainstream will never understand, and a mainstream favorite that you can't understand in two separate rants within the same sentence. ( Bonus points if you can claim any one of 7, 8, 9, X, or XII is the worst in the series, without batting an eye, and not even think to mention the first two NES sequels, X2, or XI. ) Odds are you love Megaman games, and wish that companies would show more innovation. You think Dead or Alive is a shallow attempt to target your pants, and would prefer to play Guilty Gear instead. Same with Tomb Raider - you don't see Samus wearing tight or revealing clothing in order to sell her games, do you? If you didn't get how those last two sentences contradicted themselves, you might not be hardcore. If you've played every game in every series mentioned to completion, and you still don't get the contradiction, put your pencil down; you passed. You're hardcore. If you make your girlfriend sleep alone 6 or more days in a week because she gets in the way, you wish you were hardcore. It's actually an addiction. But enough with the easy targets - here's who else is hardcore... Anyone who thinks the NES ruined gaming. Anyone who thinks DOS made them more of a man. Anyone who believes liking any one thing more than any one other thing about their hobby gives them a moral high ground over the mass audience, come on out, and admit it, you're hardcore. To me, it seems hardcore is more about being better than someone else - it's elitism, or reverse elitism, the systems change, but the people are all the same: it's Atari fans, Nintendo fans, Sega fans, Commodore fans, and Speccy fans; it can be anyone. All it takes is wanting less options in the world, in the name of fighting blind conformity. Nobody else needs to use the term - as Jess said, we're just gamers who like to have a little fun.

Never played the 5200 until now. Thank you a billion times over for letting me in on what I missed out on. It's like a 2600 juiced out and lost it's mind. The best games are a wonderful way to waste your lives, and even the bad games are bad in ways I've never seen before. Looking at this, I can see why Atari thought their 8 bit line could compete in the post crash world; at least it scrolls better than an MSX...