p.opus

Starmaster is an awesome game. It's what Star Raiders should have been on the 2600. In my opinion, nothing beats the original Atari 800 Star Raiders, but Starmaster distills that games essential elements into a great looking and playing 2600 package. If you can actually save all 4 bases at the hardest difficulty, you've accomplished something. If you even survive the highest difficulty, you have something to be proud of. If you are used to Star Raiders for the Atari 800, then Starmaster will be a little confusing in how bases get destroyed. In Starmaster a base doesn't have to be surrounded to be destroyed. Any ship adjacent to a starbase will attack the starbase. The more ships that are attackng the base, the quicker it will be destroyed. This causes a fundamental difference in strategy. In the original Star Raiders, you picked off the smaller squadrons first because they could cover more ground and surround a starbase faster. In Starmaster you go for the big 3 ship squadrons first as they have the highest concentration of enenies and will bring down a base quicker.

The problem is that the 2600 hardware was not designed for this. There are no hardware interrupt lines from the cartridge port that would reboot the machine. The only thing you can do from the cartridge side is simulate a "hot plug" of the cartridge, and this was specifically discouraged by Atari. The 2600 was designed for the user to power off the system, change the cartridge, and power the system on. As soon as the ROM is loaded, the cartridge looks identical to the VCS as if it is a normal cartridge. Thus to exit out of the existing game, you have no safe alternative but to turn off the device. And while some sort of warm reset might be possible by simulating a hot plug of the cartridge, I for one do not wish to jeopardize my 2600 by doing something its designers warned against. The 2600 power switch was designed to be cycled continuously, it is a high quality switch. It is designed to be cycled often. I prefer it remain that way.

My Vote: 1. Starmaster 2. H.E.R.O. 3. Missile Command 4. Space Invaders 5. Galaxian 6. Chopper Command 7. Superman 8. Adventure 9. Asteroids 10. Battle Zone. Home Brew: 1. Space Rocks 2. Conquest of Mars 3. Juno First 4. Star Castle Arcade (not yet released) 5. DK VCS (not yet released)

I guess it depends on what the "new 2600 owner" is looking for. If he's looking just to play games, It's hard to go against a 2600 and a Harmony Cart.

You're probably right. In fact ET is much like the movie Pink Floyd The Wall. Both are better experienced when stoned.

Pac-Man sold 7 million units and it is almost universally panned. It is the highest selling 2600 game of all time. Pac-Man sold 5 times more units than Space invaders, yet Pac-Man is viewed as a dissapointment, and Space Invaders is hailed as "The Killer App" for the 2600. So sales numbers alone can't be used as a criteria. You can make the argument that ET could have never made back it's investment, given the outrageous amount of money paid for the property. But it is my opinion that ET could have sold 1/3 the amount it did, and still would have been considered "classic" if the gameplay warranted it. Atari was marketing ET at little kids, LITTLE KIDS. As a result, it should have been a pickup and play kind of game. It wasn't. That's not in dispute. Perhaps there was a disconnect between Atari management and HSW on how this game was going to be sold. But even the most ardent HSW supporter can agree that the complexity of ET was much more suited for older players, and not the 6 to 10 year old set.

Hitting one out of the park, is a generous description. He is credited with creating the "best selling original Atari title". While it was technically an original game, everyone, including me, at the time saw it as an unofficial "Star Castle" clone, which he was asked to make in the first place. There is no doubt that he was a very capable game designer, but I think the recent love affair and rush to canonize HSW is a response more to the documentary Atari: Game Over, and the unfair blame he got for ET than to his actual greatness as a game designer. None of HSW's games are on my top 10. And while ET is nowhere near as BAD as it was claimed to be, there is no doubt that it was one of the 2600's biggest disappointments. And it can be argued that one of the reasons for that disappointment is the audiences failure to connect with some of his design decisions. And while it is commendable the effort he put into ET, it should also be mentioned that he was asked to make a game, not commissioned to do a work of art. Atari was not asking HSW for his interpretation of the movie. He was asked to make a blockbuster game, and in that he failed.

Touche'

That's not too tough when two out of three of your games are based on two of the hottest Hollywood properties of the decade.

I would defintely say that of HSW's games. Even Yar's revenge required a comic book to place the game in some sort of context. Most people I know simply played it as a simplified form of Star Castle, which was really what HSW's bosses were looking for. Although I will get flamed for this, but the whole imagination/interpretation argument doesn't hold water for me. Adventure was a very deep 2600 game but didn't need a ton of instructions and a comic to put the game in context. HSW has always been a little out there. Yar's revenge is a fun game, and it's about as simple as one can get, but there's still some head scratching stuff about it. That big "neutral zone" where the drone can't kill you but you can still be tracked killed by the Quotle? The fact that your "super cannon" can only be activated by nibbling on the enemies shield or touching the enemy directly? Touching the Quotle directly???? That's so counter intuitive, you need a comic to explain it away. HSW was unfairly judged as the author of the "game that destroyed Atari", but now as the pendulum swings back he's being hailed as an under-appreciated genius. The truth lies somewhere in the middle.

Ok then, I guess that's a reason to buy the cart. It worked in version 101 so I thought it might be an issue. And yes, the game ramps up to be a "run fest". I'm going to have to get a different controller, the joystick just isn't precise enough to run an plant an accurate shot simultaneously.

Personally I think ET is the classic "reach exceeding ones grasp". I've played it, and enjoyed it quite a bit. The gameplay is rich, requires resource management and with a little polish would have been a runaway hit. HSW did not have the time to put on the polish and as a result, a lot of kids, at whom the game was targeted, didn't "get it". I mean "power zones" are a pretty abstract concept. I mean it makes sense that ET has to find a secret spot to "phone home" but to find zones to eat his candy? I mean the game has some really cool concepts, but there just wasn't enough time to see "what worked and what didn't". Had HSW simply done a PacMan Clone with Recees pieces as dots, and the Scientists as the "monsters" then the game would have been able to be picked up immediately, and guessing from the luke warm reception the "official" PacMan got, he could have had a runaway hit. HSW had done similarly with Yars Revenge. He took the recognizable elements of Star Castle and added some original pieces to it and created a masterpiece. ET is a much richer game, IMHO, but it certainly was not very accessible to it's target audience and I think that's where it failed. "Dad....This game is broke, ET, keeps falling in a pit and I can't get him out". "Here, son, let me show you how it's done........uh......yeah.....it's broken...How about a game of Space Invaders?"

What would you consider to be the "Holy Grail" for collectors. For example, a copy of Pepsi Invaders, NIB would be such a find, but since they were in plain boxes, it would be impossible to verify without opening the box, thus voiding NIB. So what would you consider to be the "ultimate" find that could indeed be verifiable? Are there any NIB's that would be verifiable or would you need to open everything. Just seeing what people think the ultimate find would be.

...either that, or randomize your spawn point to minimize the cannon from firing at you immediately after spawning, causing almost instantaneous death.

High Scores still are not remembered on the Harmony cartridge. After each game the high score is reset and every game ends with your current score being the high score. This appears to ONLY happen on the Harmony bin file. The non-harmony bin file saves the high scores until the device is powered off. I verified using the latest stable release of Stella. The game is a technological wonder and a great adaptation of one of my favorite games from the golden age of the arcade. The game can be maddening if you don't move from your initial spot. The game will fire at you as soon as it can, and if you died in the original spawn spot, you will lose a lot of lives if the cannon has a clean shot. It would be nice if there were a period of about 1.5 to 3 seconds after spawning that would allow the character to move but not fire. This would prevent the AI from killing you immediately upon respawn and allow you to move from your spawn point .

Thanks, One thing that I noticed playing on my Harmony Cartridge was that on the 101 build (where you could still choose one shot ring destruction) it would save the high scores, but only while the device was on. Once you power cycled the device the high scores cleared which is understandable. On 140, it doesn't remember any high scores at all. The last score you play is always Number 1, and there are no others below it. Is this an intentional disabling of the high score subroutine? I'll check it out in .152 to see if it behaves the same way.

The game is a bit short on replayability, I mean you can only dock with a satellite so many times. But it was a brilliantly complex simulator for its time. If I remember, it had different skill levels. On skill level 1 it was like a guided tour. The player could survive all sorts of bad things. However on the higher skill level, you had to follow procedures pretty closely. It even simulated overheating of the shuttle bay if you forgot to open the cargo doors. If you screwed up AOA during re-entry or went too far off course you would burn up on re-entry. It was pretty brutal and a successful mission at the highest difficulty was not easy to do. It is amazing what they packed into the cartridge given the system limitations.

Technically that is not a "fry". Frying was purposely turning on and off the console quickly to try and get the cartridge to boot in an anomalous condition. Some interesting results often occurred and some of them repeatable. The Harmony cartridge does not support "frying" because it is basically a boot loader that allows the user to choose which rom image to load into memory. However, the Space invaders doubleshot is completely supported by the harmony cart. Simply highlight the Space Invaders rom as normal, and instead of using the fire button on the joystick to load the rom, simply HOLD down the reset switch. This will simulate it powering on with the reset button held down, and you will start game 1 in doubleshot mode.

I'm a complete noob so forgive the noob question. I have version 140 in a bin, but notice that going to source code shows version 152. Is there a link to the 152 bin file for the harmony cart? Thanks.

Totally agree. Crash is a term that the businesses used. Like others mentioned, Atari's video game division was gutted with when Tramiel took over, and the company tried focusing it's business on the personal computer market. You can't really view the video game market "correction" in a vacuum. You really need to take into account several factors. 1. Atari, Intellivision and Colecovision had no control on who could make games for their systems. Thus a lot of fly by night companies made cheap games hoping to "cash in". (sounds familiar.....). Atari was specifically affected since it was the overwhelming leader in market penetration. 2. Personal Computer prices dropped dramatically with the decrease in RAM prices. Around the same time, Sinclair paired with Timex and offered a rudimentary computer for less than $100. The Vic-20 was selling for around $149, and the C-64 was sitting at $200, which was unheard of for a computer with 64K RAM. 3. Kids were also playing "electronic games" such as Football, basketball, Simon, Merlin, etc. So this was also taking away from sitting in front of the TV. 4. Arcades in the early 80's had hit their zenith and had flooded the market. Every mall had an arcade, every convenience store had one or two video game machines, The video game market, both home and commercial had simply become over saturated. So the market corrected itself. The NES hit about a year or two later, and dominated the market. They implemented their Nintendo "quality control" measures to discourage development of shovelware. They initially targeted their games to the younger brothers and sisters of those of us who grew up on the 2600. They provided nearly arcade level graphics at home. It's safe to say that the NES proved to be the final nail in the Arcade coffin. And while vestiges of the arcades still exist in Chuckie Cheese and Dave and Busters, they are predominately filled up with ticket and prize games. The video game arcade as shown in movies like Wargames, Tron, and Fast Times at Ridgemont High died with the rise of the NES.

Like I said...bad joke.

I was being sarcastic. Turn 2, is a naval term that means get to work. When the work day starts, an announcement is made to the crew to "Turn 2 Ships Work". Work continues until it's "Knock off" time. I have no idea where the terms came from. But navy lingo to get busy is "turn 2". I know you are busy, I was trying to make a joke. if failed miserably.

Solaris strikes me as a game that exceeds it's grasp. The Graphical complexity of Solaris shows that they can do so much better. The manual is very cryptic and although I have done some playing, it just doesn't grab me like Star Raiders did. There are some interesting concepts, but they don't feel fully realized, and while I can grasp hyperspace, some of the concepts in Solaris just seem to be "out there".

I started getting back to Atari gaming via the Flashback consoles. Then I realized the ultimate flashback is a 6 switch woody with a Harmony cartridge. I'm playing games that will NEVER make it on any Flashback (Like Star Wars Empire Strikes Back, Starmaster, and Superman). The Flashback still has it's place. It's sitting upstairs in my bedroom when I want a quick game of missile command before I go to bed and I have already put away the sixer.

This looks awesome. I know that I will play Atari today...