p.opus

I am not a coder, or else I'd be doing this instead of posting about it. Star Raiders is easily my favorite computer game of all time. There have been more epic space adventures, there have been better looking ones, but I think Star Raiders creates the perfect balance in a space combat game. There is strategy, tactics, skill, and the unnerving race against time. There have been three attempts to recreate this on the 2600 and all of them have their shortcomings. I don't count Star Voyager, since it's simply an endless journey from one sector to another. 1. Star Raiders completely gutted the tactical environment by distilling it to "one fleet/one starbase". The took a game that required some thought about how to engage the enemy and turned it into a complete twitch fetch. Heck, the enemy continues to advance on your base even while you are fighting? So what's the point of hyperwarp? 2. Starmaster, by Activision is much closer, in that it incorporates a navigational component to hyperspace and the need to protect starbases from multiple waves of enemies. However all the enemies are the same, there is one ship type, they attack one at a time, and the "beam effects" just can't compare to the originals' "torpedos" 3. Phaser Patrol has better graphics and multiple enemies that attack you, but there is no moving starfield, no need to find or dock with the starbase, and it just feels, a bit sterile. Considering the fine work some have done here on titles like Space Rocks and Star Castle, it seems possible to combine the strengths of each to create the Star Raiders that should have been created in the first place. I understand the limitations of the 2600, but the original game only took up 8K. And while a clone of the original 8 bit game is probably not possible, (long range scan, rear view, computer tracking), it seems that it could get a lot closer. Heck, even the "pad" that shipped with the original cartridge only used 5 of the available 12 buttons. Is there any folks out there as passionate about Star Raiders as I am that has the skills to take up this challenge. I mean, just how close could one get on the 2600 hardware? If there is no interest then this can just be an "appreciation" thread, and I can play Starmaster on my Sears Light Sixer, and the real deal on my PC through my 800 emulator.

I'm going off partial memory (I was 20 at the time) and what Wikipedia states (of course they could be wrong, but their dates are referenced (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Nintendo_Entertainment_System)). By the age of 20 I was completely into computers so the NES did not hold any interest to me. I wouldn't get interested in Nintendo until game boy hit the market. By that time I was in the Navy on Submarines, and a portable game system like the Gameboy was just the ticket to play video games 500 feet below the ocean.

My favorite cover art was for missile command. Reagan/Brezhnev, WarGames, The Day After. It seems in the early 80's we were convinced that nuclear war was right around the corner. Missile Command was a reflection of the political climate more than any other game of it's period. Heck, even the instruction manual for the Atari 400/800 had the old Civil Defense Triangle in a Circle symbol on it. How much more clearer did you need to be? The cover art chillingly recreated this with incoming and outgoing missiles, cities aflame. The 2600 even replaced the generic circular explosion of a city in the arcade version with a mushroom cloud. Heck, even the instruction manual for the Atari 400/800 had the old Civil Defense Triangle in a Circle symbol on it. How much more clearer did you need to be? The manual wove a thinly veiled backstory that placed this nuclear armageddon on another planet against an alien race, but we all knew it was those Pinko Commie Russians that had pushed the button, and that mushroom cloud from that smart bomb I missed used to be New York City. Little did we know that by the end of the decade the Berlin Wall would be in pieces. The very same man we were convinced was marching us towards nuclear fisticuffs with the Russians was urging Mr. Gorbachev to "tear down this wall". Missile Command remains one of my favorite but most terrifying games. It still brings up the same old fears I had as an early teen, just old enough to understand what was going on around me and too young to do anything about it but pray the "grown ups" weren't stupid enough to ever go through with it.

If the following guide is any indication, it looks like you got the real deal: One of 125. For me the permanent marker on the chip seems to give it a way. The handwriting looks very similar, as if it was marked by the same person. If it is a fake, it's a pretty convincing fake. http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-2600-vcs-pepsi-invaders_11875.html

Touche' (Are you done with Draconian yet? No?!!? Turn 2 sailor..... )

I love SuperBreakout variant number 7. I find Kaboom over rated (duck and cover!!!). Perhaps it's because I suck. The difficulty on that game just ramps up too quickly and once you lose one bucket, you're hosed. I understand that most Atari games were pretty Ecclesiastical (Meaningless Meanlingless, all is meaningless). But at least I can play Super Breakout long enough to make it worth while. Kaboom is nothing but a harsh lesson in futility....

I don't remember being able to rent games. I think if you had it might have deterred some of the schlock that got released. Sometimes you could see what a game looked like as the local store that was demoing the 2600 would show games, but they never showed the cheap shovelware ones. But they did show off pac-man and defender which is why I decided I didn't want them. Chopper Command was much nicer. Also, ET was such a hot property that the box could have been packed with still steaming manure and still would have sold 1,000,000 copies. ET sold the world on Recees Pieces for god sake....yuk...

If I had the games on separate cartridges and wanted to swap games, I would have to power cycle the unit to swap games.. No one in their right mind would pull a cartridge while the game is on. Yet some how power cycling the device to change games in a Harmony cartridge is too much to ask? Really?

It was released in october of 85 in New York City. It was released again in Feb of 86 in LA, followed by Chicago, San Francisco and other major cities. for a second round of limited sales in test markets. The NES did not receive a national release until Sept of 86, which is when it was widely available. If you lived in NYC, then yes, you saw one in 85. Some of us may have seen them in the wild in early 86, but it did not release nationwide until Sept of 86.

I think crash is a harsh term. Definitely it applied if you were a video game manufacturer, but for the end user it was more of an evolution. There was a growing sentiment about the amount of complete shovelware that was being thrown at the systems. While some arcade transitions were better than their arcade counterparts (Space Invaders) and some games were groundbreaking (Adventure), a lot of games were huge disappointments (Defender and Pac Man). Corporate greed had taken over and the quality of the games had become suspect. E.T. did not "break" Atari, but it was a reflection of the corporate attitude that had become to pervade the market. Get a license, create a crappy game that bore little resemblence to the source material, put it in a fancy box with fancy artwork and ship it out as quickly as possible. There were no places to "rent" or try games out at that time, so you were taking your chances, and in the 80's, $20 to $30 bucks was not a small investment. Also, by 1984 personal computers were becoming more and more affordable. The Atari 400/800, Commodore Vic-20, Commodore 64 and TI-99/4a and Radio Shack Color computers were all low cost computer options that beat anything available in console format The C-64 was the same base price as a VCS had been in 1977. Parents, wanting to give their kids something more educational than a video game, turned to personal computers. And as kids, we were more than willing to move our gaming over to a computer if mom and dad thought it was "good for us". As a kid, you simply played video games on your computer, and they kicked the crap out of anything the 2600 could put out. Heck, the commodore 64 and Atari 800 used the same controllers, so you could simply plug in your Atari Joystick and play the same games you were playing on the 2600, but they looked SOOO much better. So we played our arcade favorites on home computers instead of consoles. It was also during this time that the gamer expected "more" from their games. We wanted an experience that was beyond the 3 lives and your done gameplay. We began to want more complex adventure type games that you could save your location and games that you could actually win. At that time, Video Games could be picked up for a song, and Atari 2600 cartridges filled bins the same way DVD's fill the 5 dollar bins at WalMart today. When the NES came out in 1986, those of us who were Atari and Intellivision owners were pretty much convinced the computer was the future of gaming. The NES was for our younger brothers and sisters, and the early Nintendos's were clearly marketed to the under 10 crowd. The NES also had better "quality control". Nintendo had total control on who could make cartridges for their system, something Atari, Mattel and Coleco had never bothered with. So with a Nintendo game, you had confidence in that Nintendo seal. Heck, it even LOOKED like a "seal of approval". The industry had learned from the wreckage of three years ago.....or so we thought.

Just Bumping this. Darrell, you do awesome work, space rocks is amazing (I'm not even sure I boot into regular Asteroids anymore), and this is another one of my favorite 80's arcade games that plays so faithful. Can't wait until you finish or at least get to a point to be able to shoot the incoming ships. I get it about priorities though. I just hope you eventually finish this one. Sitting with baited breath.

Wow quite a bit of mileage for what I considered to be a humorous fluff piece. No one EVER expected box art to match content. We were well aware of the limitations of the VCS and similar video games. The Colecovision came the closest to rendering arcade quality graphics (pre NES) at the time, and even state of the art arcade couldn't replicate box art, unless you were playing an interactive Video Disk game like Dragons Lair, or Firefox. I just didn't expect so many of my peers to take the article seriously or be so mortally offended. One thing I did notice about the old Atari games is just how BRUTAL they are. Only a handful (Superman, Adventure, Haunted House, Starmaster) even had the option to last more than 15 minutes let alone WIN. Some games you could exploit the programming patterns to play for extended periods of time, but for the most part, death was quick and brutal. I'm still trying to get past Level 11 in H.E.R.O. and am still trying to remember how I routinely rolled over the score in space invaders. The final levels give you a frighteningly short time to kill the low hanging invaders before they turn the corner and land on top of you. But that was some of the magic. You didn't have to invest HOURS into a game. You did, only in 5 minute blocks at a time, and a lot of destroyed joysticks later.

I laughed hard at both articles. And I surely didn't mean to start a sh1t storm. Some folks really have to lighten up. I was an "Atari Kid". It was one of the more shocking Christmas presents I ever received. In my house $50 was pretty much at the top of the limit. We waded through the Sears holiday wish book with the best of them. The catalog could almost open itself to the Atari page. I played the VCS (Tele-games Video Arcade) whenever I went to Sears (my parents had to literally on more than one occasion drag me away from the thing), I longingly wished for one but never bothered asking. At 4 times our gift limit. I knew in reality that my chances in owning one was roughly the same as obtaining the Hope Diamond. So we had less expensive video games like "Video Pinball/Breakout" and Pong hooked up to an old 12" black and white TV in the corner of the living room.. Those were "affordable". That year I had my heart set on a Coleco "tank" game that featured head to head tank battles with the twin dual stick arrangements just like the arcade and fit right into the gift budget at $29.99 or $39.99, something like that. Had it not been for poor quality control at Coleco, I might have never gotten the revered VCS. My dad bought three of those Coleco systems (unknown to me) and tried setting them up. All three were broken pieces of crap. I guess in the meantime he really wanted to play a tank game because after the third one, he just broke down and got an Atari VCS with Combat included...HOLY CRAPOLY.... Of course it was still in black and white (no game system would interrupt my father's TV watching), but at the time it was glorious. And it wasn't until I started back into Atari recently, that I actually played for any extended period of time in color. I loved the artwork, but they pushed the bounds of Creative license. The Starship one was especially fun. Take a look at it. There is a huge space battle erupting while our poor astronauts are stuck in the lower left corner just trying to take another small step for man.....

Actually I'm glad that Demon Attack doesn't live up to it's artwork. Chrome dinosaurs?

I laughed at all of these....so true. And remember how cool the Defender artwork was? Yeah....Come to think of it, was there ever an Atari 2600 game that lived up to it's artwork? https://games.yahoo.com/photos/deceptive-atari-box-art-1439493824-slideshow/flag-capture-photo-1439495120995.html

I remember saving my allowance for "Starship". I wanted a 1st person space game soooo baad. Atari's Starship 1 was lighting up the arcade, and I had just seen Star Wars so it all made for a pretty epic "perfect storm". I remember being a bit disappointed in the 2600 version of Starship (It wasn't close to the same) , but it was the only thing out there and I put my imagination to the test and killed countless bad guys with my laser cannons. 4 years later, Activision came out with their Star Raiders, clone and I was in heaven, Starship offically became a dust magnet.

I just recently got involved with 2600 games after a 3.5 decade hiatus and have a Sears Telegames Sixer (don't know if it's heavy or not) with a Harmony cartridge, and as I was looking around the interwebs, I found one of my favorite Activision games, (Laser Blast) getting seriously "blasted" as one of the worst games ever released for the system. (Of course Superman was on that list, and I destroyed countless joysticks on that game...perhaps I have poor taste). Maybe it's me, but at the time, I loved that game. It was one of the only Atari games that emulated a "beam" laser and I thought it was fantastic. Yes, it was hard. Yes it was repetitive, but there was something satisfying sparking off that gun and having a tank disintegrate almost immediately. It was the game that really opened me up to Activision. This was one of activisions initial carts that released at the same time as Tennis. (Boxing, Dragster, Fishing Derby,Skiing, being the only ones released earlier) and I thought it was a great first effort. Of course, Activision would really hit its stride a year later with some of it's seminal titles (River Raid, Pitfall, Chopper Command). But at the time, Laser Blast had clean graphics and the laser effect alone kept me playing. Any other fans out there?

Just picked up the Harmony Cartridge and relived my favs. Missile Command H.E.R.O. (that game is brutal) Superman Space Invaders (Also Brutal) Demon Attack (Love the birds phasing in, also brutal)

I just picked up my standard Harmony and it is absolutely amazing. The H.E.R.O. Rom I initially had must have been a PAL version since it only displayed in black and white. That was remedied by a quick search on the internet. This cart is simply astounding. If you are a collector, that's cool, but if you simply want to play the games, "as they were made to be played", then this cartridge is a no brainer. Heck, the homebrew, Conquest of Mars, the incredible "Caverns of Mars" port of the under appreciated 400/800 game is nearly worth the price of admission alone. Get a Harmony and you won't regret it.

I registered to Atari Age solely to respond to this thread and give my heart felt thanks for this wonderful piece of hardware. After unsuccessfully trying to scratch a 2600 itch using a variety of Flashbacks (2, 3, and 5), I was told by a friend about the availability of 2600's on ebay and something called a "harmony cartridge". Well fast forward and now $120 poorer, I have a vintage Tele-Games "sixer" proudly sitting in my living room with a standard Harmony cartridge filled (well not really "filled") with Homebrews and seemingly every game released for the 2600. I physically giggled several times last night booting up classics like Space Invaders, Missile Command and Frogger. I played my first Superman in decades and remembered why I loved the Atari so much. I even played the classics that I had forgotten like H.E.R.O. And as a Cavern of Mars fan I found the Conquest of Mars to be an amazing port of this under appreciated gem from the 400/800 series. (Although I have some issues on what the programmer classifies as "novice" as that game is BRUTAL. It was all like slipping into a warm blanket. A simpler time, with simpler games but no less engaging. Overall an evening of reminiscing and nostalgia which instantly transported me back 3 1/2 decades. Thanks again to all involved in this amazing piece of hardware.