Big_Mo

So, reviving this old thread... while looking through the code I was trying to figure out how the screen layout is handled. Is it literally just each screen having pointers for four other screens for exiting in each direction? Because I think one way to make the game less maddening would be via a more sensible and memorizable layout of screens. Sort of a recognizable geography. I still wonder what the programmer was thinking with the subways screen backgrounds. I mean, are those rectangles supposed to be windows on the subway cars? One other thing that I always thought the game should have included, perhaps as a difficulty setting, was that if you reassemble the bridge before putting Lex in the slammer, he blows it up again after X time. That would've added a little strategy to the game. Being able to get rid of the helicopter somehow would be helpful as well.

Wow, I just found this thread and... wow! I knew about the Black Whale and all, and I've spoken to Keith Robinson and others about INTV development, but this discussion is a treasure trove! BTW, maybe I missed it if someone identified it upthread, but the terminal in the photo in the first post looks to be a C. ITOH CIT-101, which was a DEC VT-100 clone.

Very neat. What was the artists's name? It wasn't John Alvin, was it?

Cool. Again, can you tell us how big these are?

Super cool. Can you tell us the size of these?

True that. But I was giving the Readers Digest Condensed version.

Is the root subject here if anyone has done multicolored ATASCII art using the default character set and if any such thing is comparable to the PETASCII art?

Will do. I reached out to Bill last night.

I could plug you into both of them. They're old friends of mine. I dunno what I could offer in an interview about the Atari 8-bits as what I did with them with mostly animations with MovieMaker. I have a lot of thoughts on the implementation of various games for them from the perspective of someone who worked in the game biz later, but I dunno how germane that would be.

I'd love to see this completed. I'd also love it if he could update the sensor scan the way the 5200 version did, with the scanner actually showing what each object is as opposed to a flashing dot.

Have you considered interviewing William G M Leslie and/orThomas R. Carbone pf Omnitrend Software, which did UNIVERSE for the Atari 800?

Coming to this thread late. Cool stuff. BTW it's Pooka, not Puka I was in charge of all the classic Namco IP for mobile for a few years, so I know these things hee hee. To my eye the upper ghost eye version of the Pooka is more correct in the original graphics than in the updated version in the comparison chart. The melon slice ought to be slightly thicker vertically.

Digitizing speech in the early 1980s was very expensive. It cost something like $1000 per word to digitize the audio for the original Berzerk arcade game, and the digitized audio took lots of space. It's why RealSports Baseball is such a big cart (albeit Keithen Hayenga says he got the bigger cart because of the audio but didn't use all that extra space for it).

That's nice to hear. I was a real stickler on our mobile games that the "original' modes look exactly like what we were porting, but when we'd do the "enhanced" mode the trick was not to lose the spirit of the original look. I've seen too many games that get graphic updates which end up looking utterly unlike the originals and thus they feel "false" on some level.

Interesting. I'll have to try the game again when I get back home. The funny thing about this game is that so much of what you learn to do in the original Star Raiders ends up being useless in this game. For instance, on the original I am really good at using the instruments to zero in on a distant target, fire some photons just before the ships come into visual range, and nail them when they are specks in the distance. Since the enemy ships pop in at a much larger size, and due to the weird targeting, those skills are worthless in this game. I'm crack shot in Star Raiders, and not at all in this one.

Well, as I said, the "enhanced" version was designed to look like a Max Fliescher cartoon, so we went with a more Bluto look instead of Brutus, as opposed to the "original" mode, which retained the arcade graphics. I need to get a good J2ME simulator so I can run the game and get more screenshots.

On the trakball the fire buttons are side by side. That's what I was referring to, not the left and right button banks on either side of the ball.

The J2ME version you see there was executive produced by moi at Namco when we licensed the game from Hearst. One fun thing we got to do was we included both an arcade accurate version of the game plus an "enhanced" version which is what you see in the video (starting at 18:29) in which we tried to make the game look more like an old Max Fliescher cartoon, including the costumes. The best part was we were able to add two new custom-designed levels to the game, including one based on the old Popeye cartoon "A Dream Walking". I personally animated Olive Oyl's sleepwalking. We even got Eugene the Jeep in there. As to the punch animation. I know this is a hack and that limits the possible solutions re the punch length of Popeye;s arm, but it occurs to me that if you were doing this game from scratch you'd just use a DLI to change the player widths on the lines which feature the extended arm so that only those lines of the player doubled at the appropriate moment.

I've repeatedly stated that my critique of the game acknowledges that it was a work in progress, and if the source code is ever recovered/the game polished these are the issues I think should be addressed. As to the Black-Hole Insta-Kill, I'm gonna put my game designer hat back on for a moment: This is a game of strategy and tactics and risk to reward. If I get hit and my shields begin to fail, I can hyperspace it outta there and not risk taking a shot that will kill me, or I can choose to try to finish off the enemy ships knowing I could die with one more hit. The former is safer but costs time+energy, which means a potentially lower final rank and that the Zylons can do more damage/make the situation worse whilst I am at the starbase. If I choose to remain and fight I've decided to accept the risk of the insta-death in exchange for the potential rewards for more quickly polishing off the Zylons and maybe getting a higher rank. (Yes, the random asteroid smashing your unshielded ship is also a risk, but one that's actually easier to mitigate since you can spot them on the long-range scan.) The fact that one twitchy move in a clumsy hyperspace steer can end my game after 30+ minutes is at odds with that from a play-mechanics standpoint. Simple enough.

If you mis-steered in hyperspace you could land in a black hole and game over. Personally, that's too random and risky. I hate strategy games with an accidental insta-kill like that. If anyone could polish this game the space combat portion remains the part which needs the most work. The reticle steering and the wonky targeting.

The targeting definitely needs work. The ranking system feels weird, too. I blew myself up at the start of a Commander Mission and got Fledgling Class whatnot. I did the same after destroying over 100 ships and got basically the same rank. Maybe any self destruct makes you a fledgling? The galactic chart is, as the interview indicates, obviously unfinished. I got a message that a system was under attack, but it wasn't obvious which one that was. Also, Earth got blown up while I was engaging one of only two small 5 ship groups nearby it, and after it happened, there were no enemy ships nearly. Did they ram into the sun and blow it up or something? Also, I plotted a hyperspace course directly over a black hole to arrive just on the other side of it, and it affected by steering or exit position not one bit.

Which I've acknowledged multiple times. Funnily enough, I just got to play an arcade standup Atari Star Wars arcade game a couple of hours ago (it's in the lobby of my local cinema due to The Force Awakens) and I paid a lot of attention to the reticle behavior there for obvious reasons. And, to answer an earlier question, yes, the original SR had the Manual Target Selector feature.

Sure, but this shouldn't be the case in the first place, It's poor design to momentarily invert a control scheme.

Okay, I played it some more. I do like it, but if the source code is found and it gets polished up there are still some things which I think need fixing. While I've gotten used the hang of the hyperspace steering thing, what makes me crazy about it is that the controls get reversed on the vertical axis! Throughout the game pushing up makes the ship climb ad down makes it dive, chasing the reticle. Here, there's no reticle, and now up is dive and down is climb! it forced you to flip vertical orientation for a few seconds each time you hyperspace, which is a game control no-no. The way the starbases get destroyed makes it much harder to save them. There's no clear feedback to tell you when you've saved one after it;s been surrounded, so it's difficult to know when it's safe to jump away and deal with some other looming threat. I'm also not fond of the game starting with bases being destroyed or starting with a situation where a base is about to be destroyed and you really have little chance of saving it. If the self destruct doesn't have a tactical use, it ought to. I really dislike the absence of the Manual Target selector. It makes it impossible to pick which of two targets you want to zero in on, especially when two of them are circling you. The more I play, the more I'm convinced that the moving reticle tied to steering has some compatibility issues with to a game like this, which is based on a free-steering 3D model. When in Tracking mode and pinging between fore and aft views the fact that the reticle leads the steering becomes really annoying. Say you're in fore view and you push the reticle to the right edge of the screen pursuing a ship. well, when the view flips to aft the reticle remains in the same place on the screen, so you're now turning away from the target and your guns are aimed at the opposite side of the screen from where the target you were steering towards will likely appear. If the reticle popped back to center at the view change, maybe it would be less bothersome, because you wouldn't have to swing it all the way back across the screen. It really needs to recenter automatically after you let go of the stick, period. There's a general twitchiness to everything that I am sure is related to the frame rate. The original Star Raiders is mostly glass-smooth so it's very frustrating to see things jump around. I also feel like I miss a lot because of it.

I know what it plays like. I just find it too touchy.