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ATARI 7800 Pack In Game: Asteroids or Pole Position II?


Shawn

ATARI 7800 Pack In Game: Asteroids or Pole Position II?  

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  1. 1. ATARI 7800 Pack In Game: Asteroids or Pole Position II?


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i picked asteroids, purely from a financial standpoint i was happy to pay for pole position 2 but whilst asteroids is a great game it would have been well down my "must buy" list since i already own the cart on my 2600 and 800 so to me getting it as a pack in was a nice bonus.

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Someone at Atari should've been smart enough to select "Food Fight" as the pack-in. What a great family-fun game! In addition, it would've helped if Atari actually advertised the 7800 and placed demonstration units in stores. No one knew it existed!

I really agree with that one. That is such a fun game to play, and I love the fact you sometimes will get a replay of your performance after completing a level. That was a cool and innovative feature in the mid 80's. And definetley a family fun game.

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I picked Asteroids because its my favorite Arcade game and the 7800 port is great. Its one one of my go-to games on the 7800 and clearly better than Pole Position II (IMO).

 

Having said that, Food Fight would have been a killer pack-in.

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Pole Position II - I think Asteroids is a better game, and the 7800 version is great in co-op, but PP2 was more contemporary and the 7800 library was a bit dated out of the gate in 1986. I might feel different about the limited 1984 release.

 

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Asteroids is the better game, but as others have said, at least Pole Position II was a little more current. The 7800 was missing that currency for the first three quarters of its life and it by then it was too late.

Pole Position II really isn't even that bad a game, although there's nothing really remarkable about it, either. If nothing else, it's a racing title, which is a pretty dry genre on the 7800 (yeah, there's Motorpsycho, and Fatal Run involves driving but I don't know if I'd call it a racer per se).

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I don't buy into the idea people didn't know about the 7800 here in the US. It was in the Sears catalogs. It was prominently carried in Toys R Us and Kay Bee. Atari Corp did advertise it on television albeit not as much as Nintendo with the NES.

 

The game for me that totally sold the 7800 in early 1986 was Xevious. Had that been the pack-in, that would've generated more excitement than Pole Position II. Of course, on its own, Pole Position II probably would've had to have been sold with a driving controller [a la the Colecovision Steering Wheel] but alas, Atari Inc and Atari Corp never created one. For the record, Dan Kramer was working on a steering wheel controller and a yoke controller for the 5200 but Atari Inc's downward spiral during the Crash prevented him from finishing both.

 

I like Pole Position II and really liked playing it back then but in retrospect, the audio is inferior to 5200 Pole Position and has less controller options than its 5200 counterpart since you can't use a Paddle or Trak-Ball with it natively.

 

I'm voting for Asteroids as the better pack-in. Certainly more fun due to 2-player simultaneously.

 

I imagine had Atari Inc survived, the 7800's pack-in would've switched to Paperboy by 1986 unless Atari Inc decided to hold their best arcade titles over for their Amiga Lorraine-based console code-named "Mickey" which was slated for a Christmas 1985 release.

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I picked Pole Position II for a few reasons. I'm sure a large number of people who bought the 7800 already had some VCS/2600 games to use the backwards compatibility, so they likely already had the VCS/2600 version of Asteroids. The 2600 version of Asteroids looks almost as good as the 7800 version, whereas Pole Position II has pretty good graphics and game-play which helps to show off the new hardware you just bought. I like Asteroids for the 2600 slightly better than the 7800 version and I think it's better than the arcade version or the 7800 one (my wife flips the score over and over like it's nothing and that's cute to watch). I also had a lot of fun with Pole Position II when I first got my 7800 back in the day. It can be frustrating, but I think that has more to do with the controllers than anything else. Once I got Double Dragon that was the go to title for me and my brother to play together. Now I like Rampage a lot for the 7800. Joust would have shown the hardware off pretty well, and I enjoy that game. Especially if you already owned the 2600 version of Joust, which I like a lot and often play, too.

 

 

GO 7800!!

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Xevious is a great suggestion. If they had been able to develop a version of Gauntlet THAT would have moved consoles. Alas - they didn't.

 

I went with PP2 even though Asteroids is better. Nobody would suspect Asteroids to be anything other than a slightly updated version of the 2600 version, and it just wouldn't have excited anyone about the 7800.

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Xevious is a great suggestion. If they had been able to develop a version of Gauntlet THAT would have moved consoles. Alas - they didn't.

 

I went with PP2 even though Asteroids is better. Nobody would suspect Asteroids to be anything other than a slightly updated version of the 2600 version, and it just wouldn't have excited anyone about the 7800.

 

Agreed concerning Gauntlet. Hell, I would've totally preferred Tengen's Gauntlet IV for the Genesis ported over to the Jaguar and included as its pack-in instead of Cybermorph but that's just how I roll...

 

Of course, to do justice to Gauntlet on the 7800, they would've had to have figured out how to add 2 more joysticks to the system. I wonder if that would've required a cart-based POKEY and 2 DB9s added to the cartridge itself...

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  • 2 weeks later...

My issue with Pole Position II being a pack-in is that it's not that much better than the 5200 port. In some way's it's worse. The sound is a worse and the 5200's analog controller is better suited for for this type of game. If you had a 5200 and pole position then the 7800 wouldn't have seemed like that big of an upgrade.

 

Atari needed to launch with something a little bigger and bolder.

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