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So true, and if you ask you'll get admonished by both the people who know the potential but refuse to explain, and the people who believe in mythical untapped Jaguar potential. But due to Moore's Law, you can make a reasonable guess of what it's capable of for a system of that timeframe and price.

I guess the same reason why when you need a winter coat in February all you can find is a few on clearance but plenty of swimsuits.. retail stocks months ahead of demand. Plus in those days you had all those printed Christmas catalogs which I'm sure take a while to put together and you want your game to be included.

Aren't we due for Xbox Vista? Instead we get "Wii U Wii U Wii U" like an ambulance. Or a Huey Lewis song "Do you believe in love? Wii U Oh-Oh Wii U"

It's actually easier to mix graphics modes than it is to add a DLI to change colors, DLI requires extra code, while changing modes only requires altering bytes in the display list. Basically all the 8-bits of the era are very limited in resolution and color placement. RAM was expensive, the 6502 can only access 64K directly and graphics chips were not that good. A 160x200 mode that could put 16 colors anywhere on screen would require 16K RAM and 320x200 at 16 colors would need 32K ram. That's a big ask for such limited systems! Instead systems like the Apple II, Atari and C64 limited graphics memory to about 8-10K and used various tricks to boost on screen colors. The common Apple II high res mode was 280x192 with 6 colors. But it really was a 2 color mode and relied on artifacting to produce colors. That gives four effective colors, but they also used one bit of every graphics byte to swap between orange + blue and green + purple. This color bit use is why it's 280x192 and not 320x192 like Atari. Atari can get 4 colors with artifacting, but not the 6 that Apple could. But on Apple you can't put green and blue pixels next to each other in the same byte, or orange and purple. So you have to keep those limits in mind when designing graphics On C64 160x200 mode is 4 color and 320x200 mode is 2 color just like Atari, but C64 divides the screen into character-sized cells where you can change the colors of those cells (4x8 cells in 160x200 mode and 8x8 in 320x200 mode). 320x200 with 2 color cells is hard to work with, but if a game manages to pull it off, the C64 version will look better than Atari, because Atari's color use is more limited in high-res. Many C64 games run in 160x200. Instead of using color cells, Atari uses DLIs to define color regions That means colors can change line-by-line instead of cell by cell- each approach is good for kinds of games, and worse for others. I've noticed if a game was designed on Atari, it will look best on Atari, If designed for C64, it will look best on C64 and so on. Finally differences in ports could be due to technical limitations, but it could also be due to quick and dirty ports. I've never played Druid, but looking at the graphics, it looks like a better job could have been done on Atari, but it also appears to be tile-based, and the color-cell approach of C64 can better suit tile-based games than the Atari DLI approach.

This one (Master of Lamps) had always fascinated me because it shows 9 different colors on the lines where the gongs are + the Sprite for the player on top of them, and this is at a 160-width res. I always wondered how this trick was done since it's obviously not DLI'ss, and can't be using PM graphics to add colors (not enough). I think the CPU is counting cycles and swapping out the palette mid-scanline.

yeah that mode is common, there's also a character/tile mode that has the same resolution but can do 5 colors. And of course DLIs and PM graphics were commonly used to boost colors on screen much higher.

HighRes is 320x192 @ 2 colors, There's two GTIA modes that can display 16 colors without tricks

Maybe your keyboard is faulty? Someone rearranged the letters as a prank when you weren't looking? Would explain things

Maybe a 3D version? And not just limit to the moon- high gravity / low gravity planets. Planets like Mars where the atmosphere is too thin to slow you down adequately and you need to deploy a tricky exotic landing system similar to what NASA has used. Could be a fun physics simulator.

The main issue for me is it looks like a game that has very little to do with classic Lunar Landar at all- it just uses the name. And whatever the game is, I can't tell from the trailers whether I'd enjoy it at all. So $30 is too much for a game that is a complete risk for me.

Damn, I was hoping for a spiritual sequel to one of his other games, maybe titled "Generic Non-Spielberg Space Alien"

It's not necessarily a bad thing to have third parties develop your games, but you get the quality that you are willing to pay for. A lot of XEGS games were disk games ported to cart.. cheap! Even today a lot of exclusives are developed by third parties, and sometimes those studios are bought by the platform holder if they do good work. Atari today has been doing that, but back then I don't recall Atari buying any game studio back then. Epyx would have been a good purchase and fit for them, certainly better than the money Atari wasted buying Federated or Abaq (the Transputer workstation)

To be fair, Suzy Parker did tell me! But she was a Parker Sister, not Brother.

Could be their cartridges were designed to share common labels and lower printing costs? BITD it may have seemed that putting the system on the box was enough and they didn't have the foresight to know that an online, secondary market selling loose carts will spring up some day.

We've had similar discussions in other threads. The main problem I see is Adventure hasn't had any evolution over the years, so to drop a modern version it risks feeling too different or be packed too full of cringy fan-service. You don't get from Legend of Zelda to Tears of the Kingdom without a lot of steps in between. I'd personally like to see a new Adventure that uses an 8 or 16-bit pixel art style, keeps the familiar gameplay elements while expanding them. That seems like the next logical step and pixel art games are fairly popular these days.