Coleco screws Atari...Atari the 'Better-Man'....

[NE146]

heheh.. although I was still a kid, I felt pretty burned by Coleco's obvious attempts at making the 2600/intellivision look inferior (and simultaneously snagging a piece of their large user-base pie) by porting and selling piss-poor versions of their licenses to them.

 

And I don't BUY that line that it was "rushed production" or any other reason. I truly believe it was intentional

 

Then again... some people do prefer 2600 Smurfs....*cough*

[Vic George]

In my opinion, I don't think Coleco did a bad job porting arcade games over to the Atari 2600, regardless of what people thought of Coleco's corporate strategy. There were only a few cases, however, where their ports were extremely poor (Donkey Kong Jr. was badly done on the 2600) or that they couldn't figure out how to make it exactly like the arcade (Zaxxon being that example). But overall, I think the concept of Coleco purposefully sabotaging the quality of their ports to the 2600 was mostly hearsay and very little substance. Consider that two of their ports, Donkey Kong and Carnival (both pretty good), were programmed by the Kitchen brothers (Dan and Steve) who went on to doing Activision games. And the Atari 2600 Smurf game was a quality port of the original ColecoVision version.

[mos6507]

All 3rd parties were at a disadvantage vs. Atari because they had to reverse engineer the 2600 just to figure out how to program it.

 

Only 3rd parties that had seasoned 2600 veterans in their midst like Imagic and Activision could be expected to produce A list titles.

 

That great titles came out of other 3rd parties was a testament to how quick a study those programmers were.

[+Trebor]

Clearly, Coleco ports of Games for the 2600 was poorly done (ie Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr.)

 

However, when looking at Atarisoft titles for ColecoVision, it clearly shows Atari put a fine effort behind the game. This especially became *VERY* clear with the latest two of three Atarisoft Protos, Dig Dug and Pac-man. They are both (especially Pac-man) excellent ports of Arcade games.

 

Too bad Coleco didn't put forth the same effort in porting stuff for the 2600 :-P

[spider-ham]

Same for the intellivision. Man in fact they got shafted even more because their games looked exactly like the really poor atari ports.

[Jess Ragan]

I always called this sort of thing "slanderware", because it's software specifically designed to sully the reputation of another console. It happened a lot to the Genesis, too... I saw a LOT of games on that system that were nowhere near as good as their Super NES counterparts. Some examples include Smash TV and just about anything released by Konami or Interplay.

 

JR

[Jess Ragan]

Well, to use your example of digitized fighting games to illustrate the point that slanderware did exist for the Genesis, look at the Mortal Kombat series as a whole. The first game (despite the whoop-de-doo blood) was pretty pathetic, and the second, while an improvement, was nowhere near as good as the Super NES game. But once Acclaim lost the Mortal Kombat license and Williams/Midway started making their own MK games, the Genesis games weren't nearly as wimpy as they had been... they were much closer to the quality of the Super NES Mortal Kombats than when Acclaim had the license.

Mortal Kombat 3 on the Genesis still wasn't as impressive as the Super NES version graphically, but the gameplay was better than in the previous two Genesis games. It also had a lot more of the sound effects from the arcade version, and even some impressive music with realistic sounding instruments (unlike that reverberous, completely rewritten crap in Mortal Kombats 1 and 2).

I dunno... maybe Acclaim wasn't intentionally trying to destroy the Genesis, but they definitely didn't give a crap about releasing quality products for the system. All of their Genesis games felt like afterthoughts in comparison to their Super NES counterparts. I think Williams/Midway treated the two systems much more fairly... their Super NES and Genesis games were actually comparable, rather than being seperated by a huge chasm in quality.

 

JR

[Ze_ro]

Though I've heard a lot of bad things about Coleco and their games, I have to say that some of them are pretty well done. Mouse Trap is a good translation, Venture wasn't half bad (Though since I played it after the CV version, I was spoiled a bit), Smurf's was much better than I would have expected, and Front Line is one of my favorite games!

 

That being said, I'll agree that Donkey Kong Jr and Zaxxon are terrible. Donkey Kong itself wasn't so bad... especially considering the limitations of the system. Carnival wasn't terribly exciting, though it was faithful to the original.

 

--Zero

[mos6507]

<<

I always called this sort of thing "slanderware", because it's software specifically designed to sully the reputation of another console. It happened a lot to the Genesis, too... I saw a LOT of games on that system that were nowhere near as good as their Super NES counterparts. Some examples include Smash TV and just about anything released by Konami or Interplay.>>

 

It's hard to prove it. These companies are in it to make money, presumably. I find it hard to believe that they would deliberately write crap just to slander a console. I don't think any programmer would ever go along with that willingly.

 

Hardware differences do matter to some degree. That was certainly the case with Zaxxon. It would have been really tough to do smooth diagonal scrolling in the 2600 port. And economy dictated cart size. The 2600 might be able to do an awesome Donkey Kong in 16K with all the levels, but for whatever reason (and nobody else was using 16K at the time anyway for the VCS) Coleco wasn't going to splurge on a 16K ROM size for its 2600 games.

 

You will notice that the M-Network titles improved significantly as they got more experienced and used larger cart sizes. I really think it's experience and cart size that had more to do with the quality of the games than anything else.

 

As for Genesis vs. the SNES, the Genesis does have clear weaknesses in max colors per screen vs. the SNES, which is glaring in digitized sprite games like Mortal Kombat. And the Saturn could not do hardware transparency which resulted in ugly dither patterns on the lace clothing in the port of Toshinden from PSX to Saturn.