[AQUARIUS] what is your favorite Aquarius game

[rietveld]

My wife bought me the Aquaricart for my birthday. So far Astrosmash and Stalactites are my two favorite games 

[ed1475]

My favorites are Night Stalker and Tron Deadly Discs.

[+MattelAquarius]

That's a tough question to answer.  

 

AD&D is such an achievement for the Aquarius, I marvel at it every time I play.

 

BurgerTime is a an excellent port, even considering the graphical limitations of the Aquarius.  The music is spot-on, game-play experience is captured, and the graphics are surprisingly effective.

 

Utopia is the ultimate 2 player Aquarius game.  An outstanding port of the Intellivision game, just make sure you get the left island. 

 

NightStalker is a whole lot of fun to play, even though it seems it got a bit of the rushed or "budget pack-in" treatment by Mattel.  The survival intensity in the original game play is there.  Who doesn't love to see the robot graphics from the character set get some screen time?  The spider is such a creative and effective use of the running-man characters, it makes me smile.  Would have loved some more sound, though.

 

SNAFU is an excellent port of the Intellivision game.  A great two player game (should have had a third or fourth player option with the keyboard and Mini-Expander).  I'm a sucker for those two music tunes.

 

Astrosmash is my favorite in-the-zone game for the Aquarius.  Other than the shape of the space rocks, and the single size of the spinners (though the speed varies to simulate the various "depths" of the spinners), it is a pretty dead-on port of the Intellivision game.

 

Tron.  Not one of my favorites.  As a youngster, my friend had the Intellivision version, so the Aquarius version was my secret shame.    In later years, I realized it's not really so bad.  They could've tried harder on the graphics (the grid background), and game-play (where are the Recognizers?).   Apart from that, it's not a terrible port.  If I hadn't seen the Intellivision version as a kid, I would have been able to blissfully enjoy it more. 

 

Chess = Good.  Always wanted that one, as a kid.  Always wanted to play against the AI. 

 

Melody Chase.  This one is not one of my favorites.  I really think the programmer didn't get a chance to refine the game-play before Mattel pulled the plug.  The sets go on too long, especially with a bonus set, and the game occasionally misses critical key-presses on the controllers.  My suspicion has been there is sometimes a missed read of the controllers when the game is updating the music notes sent to the AY sound chip, as the player shoots more notes.  If a newly struck note makes it to the right side of the screen, it gets added to the list of notes being played in the tune.  If you happen to make a shot at that exact moment, it can be missed.  The game allows MANY players, but I can only imagine the boredom of the third+ player waiting for their turns.

 

Cassette games.  There are many fun games of varying levels of polish that were only available on cassette tape from third party developers, mostly in the UK.  You can play them on the emulator, or create your own cassette to play them on real  hardware using tools with the emulator.  Hopefully, in the future jaybird3rd, the creator of AquariCart, can find a way to compile them on a cart for easy access.

[jaybird3rd]

That is a tough question!  It's hard to pick just one.  The Aquarius may offer only a small number of games (and I still hope to change that someday when I can find the time!), but I've found things to like about most of them.  Snafu and Astrosmash are indeed excellent translations of the Intellivision originals; in particular, Snafu's block-oriented graphics are a perfect fit for the Aquarius.  Utopia is a fantastic port, too; I played the Aquarius a lot with my nephew while I was "play-testing" the Aquaricart, and Snafu and Utopia were the two games that we always came back to the most.

 

I also appreciate the Aquarius port of Night Stalker.  I too wish they could have done more with the sound effects; given the large number of copies they made, I suspect that they were desperate to limit it to 8K for cost-saving reasons.  Nevertheless, it's an excellent port that actually improves upon the Intellivision version in at least two ways: the action on the fastest speed is more fluid and satisfying than the somewhat sluggish Intellivision version, and thanks to the simplified Aquarius hand controller design, you can actually move and shoot at the same time!  (This fact was mentioned several times in the manual, so Mattel must have received negative feedback over that limitation in the Intellivision version.)  I also like the color scheme; the black background and glowing red walls successfully evoke a spooky underground environment.

 

Aquarius BurgerTime has its critics, and I can understand why.  I wasn't especially impressed with it when I first saw it, but it's since grown on me.  I've always had a special fondness for BurgerTime, and in the Aquarius version, the arcade sounds and gameplay are all intact.  The Aquarius character-oriented graphics make it possible to "clump" the enemies so that they perfectly overlap, allowing you to achieve incredible scores.  I didn't see any good reason why the peppers and spare chefs should have been limited to nine each, and the junk characters in the screen border (a likely programming glitch) also bothered me, so I took the opportunity to "fix" both of those problems in the Aquaricart with a lightly patched version that I called "BurgerTime Plus."

 

TRON Deadly Discs suffered a bit in translation with the loss of the Recognizers and the overall plain look of the background, but taken on its own terms, it's actually a fun game.  The character graphics feel too chunky at first, but once the game gets going, the action is so fast that this isn't a problem anymore.  Here is my highest score so far:

 

 

I (still!) haven't played enough of AD&D Treasure of Tarmin, but out of all of Mattel's games, it probably makes the most impressive and sophisticated use of the Aquarius's graphics capabilities.  If the Aquarius had enjoyed a longer retail life, I'm sure that it would have gotten more and better exclusives that would have pushed the envelope even further.  That's certainly what I hope to achieve with my own games ... just as soon as my more-than-full-time job stops soaking up all of my free time and creative energy.

[jaybird3rd]

1 hour ago, MattelAquarius said:

Hopefully, in the future jaybird3rd, the creator of AquariCart, can find a way to compile them on a cart for easy access.

I'm still leaving that option open!  I hesitated to take that step immediately after I released the Aquaricart because it seemed that some sort of flash storage device to replace the cassette was imminent, but the few solutions which have appeared since don't offer the convenience and ease of use that I think an "Aquaricart Volume 2" would offer.  What I would need to do is to go back and playtest the cassette games, identify the top 25 or so (with the community's input, of course), and modify them all to run entirely from the cartridge, particularly those which originally required expanded RAM.  I'd also need to collect the original game instructions that shipped with the cassettes.