Bristles graphic corruption..

[Rybags]

I think they're nothing more than plain sight easter eggs.

Remember we're talking an era where most Atari games stiffed the user in that there was no fancy ending, often little or nothing in way of intermissions.

Such messages even though trivial were sufficient to place your game above the pack.

[Keatah]

Yes I can see that. I only had beef that the instructions told you you were going to be given an ultimate challenge. I believe it would have been more mysterious and enticing to say nothing at all. And you discover the message on your own.

Edited April 9, 2015 by Keatah

[Rybags]

Sometimes documentation and reality are far apart.

 

Like Shamus - the so called portal rooms that lead to another dimension or whatever the story was... total crock.

[Keatah]

Yeh I get it. Sometime some things hit me the wrong way. Maybe I was pissed off with that annoying music and non-eye-pleasing palette?

 

Btw: I loved Shamus from Synapse. I remember I could deflate an entire family sized bag of chips while playing that. one.

Edited April 9, 2015 by Keatah

[Rybags]

Great game for sure, like most of their earlier ones.

 

But it's not nice to keep people playing a game chasing some rainbow that doesn't exist. The game was good enough on it's own merits, no need for false advertising.

[Jetboot Jack]

That "corrupted text" is correct on the interstitial screens - it resolves into the message level by level.

 

However the version of Bristles in the A8 game pack is broken - running under either emulator provided, your character when hit and does the head bob animation can get stuck doing this animation, not the roll, but the head bob and become jammed against the screen edge bobbing manically until a random joypad input frees them up..

 

sTeVE

[Keatah]

I would always read the controls and options sections straight away. I would only get into the story and bonuses and strategies once I felt I discovered and explored everything on my own. That had the effect of sometimes giving me a whole new game when it presented objectives that were different from my own.

[phaeron]

Bristles is actually one of my favorite A8 games. Colorful, dynamic music, and lots of fast animation. Not a lot of depth, though.

 

Regarding the random junk on the word screen -- the game is throwing random memory at ANTIC as a "character set" by constantly copying RTCLOK+2 to CHBAS, so it is indeed just supposed to be random garbage. Bit of a hazard for anyone trying to put it on a banked cartridge.

 

The EXE dumps I have seem to have an uninitialized memory access bug, as they corrupt parts of the status bar when memory randomization is enabled. The base game probably has some of these bugs too, but they don't happen often because memory is mostly wiped from the OS boot. Definitely not the first game to have this kind of bug.