Return of Stupid Game Ideas: Lunar Lander Arcade
Entry posted by Nathan Strum
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Wow... it's been awhile since I posted a Stupid Game Idea (idea... idea... idea... idea...).
They're not so much "stupid" I suppose, as "speculative". But since this blog doesn't have "Speculative" in its name, "Stupid" is what I'm sticking with.
I've got a few of these I've been planning to write up for awhile, and another recent speculative project has given me the incentive to finally dust these off.
So... several years ago (in fact, around the time of the last Stupid Game Idea (idea... idea... idea...), I had been working on some mockups for a more arcade-like 2600 version of Lunar Lander. Lunar Lander was among the earliest arcade games I have a distinct recollection of playing, and I've always wished that a really good version of it existed on the 2600.
These were based off of the version written by John Champeau for the Flashback 2. Which looks like this:
As you fly closer to the surface, the game zooms in to show more detail. In practice, it only zooms in to twice its size, and jumps from screen to screen, rather than scrolling. The whole zoomed-in area is only two screens wide:
I wanted to mock up something closer to the arcade version, and John was kind enough to give me feedback on it. (I was hoping he might make this version as well, but it never progressed that far.)
This shows the whole landing area in the arcade version (zoomed out) and all of the possible bonus landing sites. In the actual game though, you just see a handful of the sites lit up at any given time:
When you zoom in, thanks to the awesomeness of vector graphics, you get to zoom in quite a lot:
What was really cool about the arcade version, is that you could actually land anywhere, as long as you safely touched down. Even on a slope. You didn't get any bonus multipliers for doing that, but I thought that was a pretty neat feature of the game.
So here's what I came up with. The zoomed-out view, showing the entire surface. Here you only need to pick out the area where you're going to land, so precision isn't critical:
Then, the zoomed in view where you actually have to land:
So this would require a larger, full-sized map that would scroll as you flew near the surface. Here's the entire full-sized map with all of the bonus landing areas (the above screen area is outlined in red):
Hopefully, this could employ Thrust+ style scrolling as you moved across the surface.
The tiny lander would just use sixteen rotation positions. (Actually, I don't think you can turn the lander upside-down in the arcade game anyway, so it'd only be eight.)
The close-up lunar lander would use 32 positions (or 16 if half-rotation), and need to use both sprites, so the thrust vectors (not shown) would likely have to be drawn with the two missiles. With luck, the ball could be used to add some stars as well, if it isn't needed for the flashing platforms.
These were originally done so long ago, I don't recall much of the discussions surrounding them, or what the potential problems inherent with them were. There was never any actual coding done, but I think the end result is pretty doable. I suspect the Harmony cartridge would handle this with no problem. After all, if Space Rocks can be done on the 2600, I would assume this could as well.
We'd just have to come up with a catchy new name for it.
Like "Huge Space Rock Lander" or something. 
(Also... the Harmony cart has me wondering how more likely Bosconian could be now... 
)
Up next: The Turbo that never was!
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