Supercharger games are way over rated!

[godzillajoe]

There. I said it. Let the flaming begin!

 

Aside from Party Mix, what's the big deal?

 

Parker Bros. Frogger is just as good minus the slight gfx difference

Communist Mutants is a boring Galaxian clone. Nice square aliens up there.

Never liked quest games so Dragon Stomper sucks

Fireball doesn't have anything over Super Breakout

Killer Satellites is a boring Defender clone

Phaser Patrol is Star Raiders which I was never that into

Rabbit Transit is at least slightly original but gets boring fast

Suicide Mission just looks dumb and no where near as fun as Asteroids

No opinion on Survival Island or Sword Of Saros

 

But in general for supposed "super" games with more RAM and blah blah blah, I don't think they live up to the hype.

 

OK let's hear it people.....

[+remowilliams]

Pass some of whatever that is you're smoking.

[godzillajoe]

OK I'm exaggerating a wee bit but seriously, I don't think any of the games are THAT much more impressive than regular old 2600 titles.

 

No bong hits here.

[rheffera]

I concur with godzillajoe on this. Yes, ok the games are bigger like escape from the mind master and amre more expansive but other than that...nope! no dice! i mean come on look at survival island! BIGGEST WASTE OF TIME AND CODE EVER!

Edited December 8, 2006 by rheffera

[+SpiceWare]

what ROM?

[Crazy Climber]

I still haven't played any of these, they are a few of the only 2600 games (released) that I have never owned. I should be playing them soon though and I'll add my opinion.

Edited December 8, 2006 by Crazy Climber

[shadow460]

In order to enjoy Survival Island, you have to be willing to look up or make a map of the game. I've still got the one I drew 20 years ago.

If you don't like that one or Sword of Saros, you probably aren't putting enough time into them.

 

Star Raiders and Phaser Patrol are totally different games on the 2600. Anyone can hate Star Raiders--in fact, beat the rush and hate 2600 Star Raiders now! It's pretty well known that Star Raiders is a bad port on the 2600. StarMaster, on the other hand, is much closer to Phaser Patrol.

 

Escape was one of, if not the first game that was rendered in first person. By today's standards the gameplay might not be much. I like it since it's still a good puzzle game, and success with it depends on a lot more than simply solving the puzzles. Once again, you have to spend time with it to appreciate it. What's the other game that's close to it? Tunnel Runner? That's first person Pac-Man. Hmm, that's kinda in the same vein as "First Person Space Invaders" and we all know that went over well.

 

I think Rabbit Transit and Frogger are very similar titles, only executed differently.

 

As for Dragonstomper, it's an RPG. You either like them or you don't.

 

Give the tapes a little more time. Serious. I wasn't sure about them at first, but after a few plays, I was hopelessly hooked.

 

Oh, something else, most R6 titles are worth what...$20 to $25? Frogger is worth twice that much, and there's a reason why. Most of the R3-R4 Arcadia titles are worth $30 by themselves. The reason they are worth that is because they are pretty decent.

[Lord Thag]

That's crazy talk. While I will admit that the arcadey titles (while good) are nothing that wasn't surpassed when the later VCS titles started adding extra ram (which is all the supercharger really is), the other games (Sword of Saros, Dragonstomper, Survival Island etc) are incredible. I used to play Dragonstomper for hours, and even beat it once. Great stuff! Oh no! Maniacs! Phasor Patrol is one of my favorite VCS games ever. Seriously, you need to give them some more time. There's some great gaming on the supercharger.

[NovaXpress]

The Supercharger games were all right, hit-and-miss. They weren't worth the extra money back then and they aren't worth the extra money now. The question isn't if the games are good or not, the question is whether they're so much batter that they justify the added expense. No way in hell. Dragonstomper is good stuff if you're into RPGs, Pasher Patrol is cool, Frogger kicks ass, the rest are pretty blah.

 

I understand why today's collectors want them, but for the rest of us we can get more game for our dollar if we skip the Supercharger. The same held true back then, which is why it was a flop in the market. I knew a hell of a lot of 2600 gamers back then and no one had or even really wanted a Supercharger. There were better ways to spend the money, especially as the 83 crash started up.

[CPUWIZ]

Pasher Patrol

 

Some unreleased proto, I don't know?

[NovaXpress]

Last week I said Phaser Patrol while talking about Planet Patrol, to the horror and amusement of all. Flubbing a game name around here is like wearing a Stormtrooper suit to a Star Trek convention.

[Paranoid]

I love the Supercharger games. At the time, there simply wasn't an Atari title that could match it. Certainly after the Coleco and 5200, as the Atari went on, the 2600 games progressed tremendously. But I don't think it is fair to compare those titles, from that era, directly to the titles that were available PRIOR to the release of the 5200 and Coleco.

 

They were super-innovative, too. Hold Killer Satellites (1982) up to Defender... or even Chopper Command... and KS was the best Defender going at the time. Mind Master was innovative on several different levels, and was TOUGH. It had mini-games, it was first person, it combined mind-challenges with arcade action... Dragon Stomper and Adventure were *it*... I used to complete Dragon Stomper on a regular basis. I've done it once since I got into retrogaming. But you just can't compare the complexity of Dragon Stomper to Adventure, even game 3. Suicide Mission versus Atari 2600 Asteroids? Are you kidding? Phaser Patrol was better than Star Master. I had both.

 

Now... the 5200 and Coleco came along shortly thereafter, and made the Supercharger pretty much a moot point... and the entire 2600, for that matter. Sure, it hung on for a couple of decades after that, and the cart games got as good as the Supercharger games... sorta. A cart could never approach the complexity of a multi-load cassette title, though. I remember the first time I played 5200 Star Raiders, I knew Star Master and Phaser Patrol were simply over for me.

 

In retrospect now... the few times I turn to a 2600 game it is often a supercharger game. I enjoy Quadrun... I like the various Pac Man games for it, and a few other classics (circus atari and skydiver come to mind). But for such a huge library, I'd say the 2600 has a 9:1 ratio of turkeys... until you get to the Supercharger library, where it turns around to more like a 1:9.

[jpfalcon2003]

Don't know much about the others, but I'd love to own the Frogger one.

[Lord Thag]

Don't know much about the others, but I'd love to own the Frogger one.

 

Just put all the roms on a CD or your iPOD

[NovaXpress]

Actually, the Supercharger came out just about the same time as the CV and the 5200. It was also going up against killer 2600 releases like Pitfall, Vanguard and Turmoil. So the question at the time was wheter or not the Sc was worth the extra expense. Sure Phaser Patrol is cool, but is it THAT much better than Star master to warrant the expensive add-on? I like Asteroids better than Suicide Mission, but even if you dont is it THAT much better? While Dragonmaster and Mindmaster are cool for the 2600, these games are firewood examples of their overall genres.

 

The Supercharger was a lousy idea. It was the 32X of its day.

[thomasholzer]

you wanna own this (on the left):

 

Edited December 8, 2006 by thomasholzer

[Atarifever]

Any online stores stock the supercharger by the way? I'd really like to have one.

[+Nathan Strum]

I was never really impressed with most SuperCharger games. Sure, the graphics looked better (sometimes), but I never thought most of the games were all that fun.

 

I do like Phaser Patrol, and Escape from the MindMaster was pretty cool. But Commie Mutants (yeah, nice squares there - really "improved" graphics), Killer Satellites (a third-rate, and downright boring Defender rip-off) and Fireball (I mean c'mon... why do Breakout again?) all just left me bored. Suicide Mission was okay, although it added nothing new over Asteroids (and from a "medical procedure" genre standpoint, Fantastic Voyage is far, far better).

 

I never bought any of the others back in the day, although I did get the Stella Gets a New Brain CD, and have tried them all out. Frogger looks nice, but that's never been one of my favorite games anyway. Frankly, I always thought the SuperCharger was more of a hassle than it was worth. Having to dig out a tape player, dealing with cassettes - compared to the instant gratification of cartridges - just wasn't worth the meager payoff. It was a nice idea, but they needed much, much better games.

[Thomas Jentzsch]

It was a nice idea, but they needed much, much better games.

Probably the hardware isn't as good as we all expect it to be.

 

When I tried to write Paradroid for the SC, I soon found out that:

- SC RAM access is too slow when you want to use it a lot

- 6K isn't really a lot of space for complex games

- multi-loads are no good substitute for bankswitching

[NovaXpress]

It was just a gimmick. With the exception of the multi-load games, they all could have been squeezed into regular carts. The idea was to sell people the add-on, making them feel obligated to buy tapes for it instead of spending the money with other companies. But it had nothing special to offer. The 2600 programmers were doing impressive things even with 4K at the time and the new systems blew it out of the water. It was actually a fairly rare item in the day, only carried by video and a few toy stores.

 

It's totally the 32X of Atari

[128bytes]

Any online stores stock the supercharger by the way? I'd really like to have one.

 

Until recently, you could have bought the Cuttle Cart 2 - it can play all the supercharger games.

 

 

By the way, one innovation some of the Supercharger games (like Communist Mutants From Space) have is three and four player joystick games - the system keeps track of all the scores, and people pass the joystick around after their turn. The only regular cartridge games that could do this were sports titles such as Activision Decathlon, Summer Games, Winter Games, and California games.

[NovaXpress]

Let's be honest, how many times have any of us played Atari with even two people, let alone four? Consider our overall playing history and I doubt that any one of us played solo less than 90-95% of the time. Again, a nice feature which didn't justify the expense back then.

 

I understand why people want them today, collectability and conversation piece and all and the Stella CD is way cool. But I hope that none of the kids get mislead into thinking that the average gamer cared about the Supercharger whatsover back in the old days. It was a marketplace failure, the wrong gimmick at the wrong time.

[Mezrabad]

Aside from Party Mix, what's the big deal?

I notice you didn't mention Escape from the Mindmaster or Dragonstomper.

 

Those were the only two I got to play back in the day. My friend owned a Supercharger with those tapes, so I borrowed his once to spend a weekend playing the above mentioned two games. So unique, to me, was the experience that I made a mix tape of all the music that I had been listening to while playing the games so that I could relive them when I listened to the tape. When most people hear the music from Raiders of the Lost Ark they think of the movie; I think of Dragonstomper and Mindmaster. (Actually, what that means is that it's been too long since I've seen Raiders.)

 

Those games took me to another place. There is nothing else, with the possible exception of Adventure, that I've played on the 2600 that compares with my experience with those two games. I was completely immersed in them for hours. It wasn't until I played Gateway to Aphsai on the Commodore 64 (two years or so later) that I felt, again, like I'd been to another place. Though my experience with Gateway was significantly enhanced by the fact that a friend and I played it as a team the first time through.

 

I can't speak for the other Supercharger games, but Mindmaster and Dragonstomper were awesome for me. If you haven't played them, you should give them a shot, though your experience may differ from mine.

[Paranoid]

I agree with Mezrabad on this.

 

Completely different level of immersion on the Supercharger games. The Supercharger preceded the 5200 and Colecovision by a good year or so... and dropped quickly in price so that when you counted Phaser Patrol in, it was about twice the cost of a typical new release cartridge at that time.

 

It brought PC quality games to the 2600. The 2600 was never able to do adventure type games (Indy, ET, The Swordquest series) as well as the Supercharger.

 

I agee that in general, the typical supercharger game wasn't a significant improvement over the BEST cart games of the era...

 

Asteroids wasn't tremendously better. But it was... Fireball wasn't tremendoulsy better, but it was... Frogger... was a helluva lot better. Phaser Patrol, not hugely better, but...

 

But, I think that is kind of the point.

 

Communist Mutants From Outer Space is a unique one. That was *it* for Galaxian at home, at this point... and it was tremendously better. The squares are one thing... but the overall game mechanic, the Gorf like queen breeds the squares, the squares drop down and metamoprh into these Phoenix Attack like aliens that sweep around the screen. There is a lot going on in this title, and if you're knocking it, you haven't given it much time.

[NovaXpress]

Completely different level of immersion on the Supercharger games. The Supercharger preceded the 5200 and Colecovision by a good year or so... and dropped quickly in price so that when you counted Phaser Patrol in, it was about twice the cost of a typical new release cartridge at that time.

That is flat out not true. The CV, Supercharger and 5200 were all released in the fall of 1982. By the time the SC price dropped, other games had dropped as well so it was more four times the typical cart. Communist Mutants was also competing with good vertical shooters like Phoenix and Megamania, which were far more interesting.

 

So for the price of Starmaster, Parker's Frogger, Megamania and Asteroids you could get a Supercharger with Phaser Patrol. Not a wise deal.