Ransom's Random Posts - The A8 Library: Not all I believed it was

[RSS Bot]

There are so many bad ports of games out there.

 

Take Donkey Kong, Jr. on the A8. It's a pile of poop! The feel is wrong, the colors are wrong, things are squished up too much, and it's incredibly easy to accidentally walk off the side of a platform. It's virtually unplayable, and it's the reason I never liked the game all these years.

 

Or take the same game on the CV. Again, the colors are wrong. And the sizes of objects is wrong. And the behavior of the beasties is wrong. But at least you don't fall from platforms quite so easily! It's playable, but not really worth the cost (dollars and storage space).

 

The only good home implementations of this of which I'm aware are on the 7800 and NES. The 7800's has crummy sound, of course, but at least it looks and plays reasonably well. And my recent acquisition of the 7800 version gave me a chance to learn that I'd been wrong about this game all these years. It's actually quite fun.

 

The NES port is near-perfect, naturally. Some day I'll pick up DK Classics for the NES.

 

It's a shame that so many games were ported so poorly over the years. And it's shocking that Atarisoft did such a great job on so many platforms, but Atari did poorly on their own platforms! You look at the Atarisoft products for CV, Intellivision, TI 99/4a, and so on, and they're some of the finest games on those platforms. But back home on the A8? Piles o' poop!

 

All of this is causing me to reevaluate my opinion of the various gaming platforms I own. I've always been fondest of the A8, because it's where I learned to program. But the fact is, Atari seems to have assigned some really poor programmers to the system, way back when. Or it didn't give them the resources they needed. Whatever. I have to admit that, when looked at without the rose colored glasses, the first-party A8 game library is decidedly a mixed bag.

 

So perhaps the time will come when I go through and cull even my A8 collection. I don't know if I'll ever be able to bring myself to sell my original 400/800 large black box and large silver box games, despite liking most of those games more in their 5200 incarnations, though. It'll be a tough decision.

 

I still love so many A8 disk-based games. But most of them were better implemented on the Apple ][. So when you get right down to it, the A8 has a few original games (like M.U.L.E.) that are worth keeping, and then a bunch of ports that are of varying quality.

 

Being disillusioned on something I so fundamentally believed for so many years is disconcerting to say the least. But it's better to go forward with fewer illusions, and make my buying decisions more carefully than I did twenty or thirty years ago.

 

When I got back into video gaming a few years ago (at which point the only classic systems I still had were the SNES, Jaguar, and A8, along with a large library of A8 software), the way I decided to go about it was to collect systems with little software overlap. I only have so much space, money, and time, so it was important to maximize the amount of fun I could get from each system. So A8, 2600, Intellivision, NES, SNES, Jaguar: logical. Lots of good games for each that never appeared on any other platform. 5200? 7800? Forget it. Very little original software. Not worth it.

 

But it turns out that at least about the 5200 I was wrong. Many of the games on that console are significantly more pleasurable to play than on any other Atari platform, thanks to the linear tracking joysticks, the wonderful trak-ball controller, and the extra polishing many of the games ported from the A8 library received. Now, playing Centipede, Missile Command, or even Star Raiders on the A8 seems silly. Why limit yourself when you can play a much better version on the 5200?

 

I'm withholding judgement on the 7800. Obviously it does have a few good games. But whether it's worth keeping around for those few is an open question. Next year I'll try to get Midnight Mutants, Scrapyard Dog, and Food Fight. Then we'll see.

 

As for the ColecoVision, I still plan to get one next year. The overlap with other platforms is minimal, and where there is overlap, the first-party titles are clearly better on the CV. I'm thinking here of Venture, Lady Bug, and Zaxxon, in particular.

 

Well, I've gone on long enough for now. Just trying to put my thoughts together. Time to sign off.

 

 

http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?a...;showentry=5971