What is the ultimate A8 game you have ever played?

[Jetboot Jack]

Donkey Kong - to my young 80's eyes it was arcade perfect 😛

 

Still play it...

 

sTeVE

[baktra]

I didn't have games that would really "stick", because as a kid, I was rather impatiently jumping from one game to another, but I spent a rather generous time playing these:

• Vanguard (a surprisingly decent shooter)
• Rescue on Fractalus (a classic)
• Montezuma (the 8K version)
• Ghost Busters (only to be disappointed in the end, time waster)
• Star Raiders (replayability)
• Fred (good platformer from Poland)
• Spy Hunter (always happy to get to the icy roads. If only I knew how to use the 2nd joystick)
• Hero (only if I knew then that one doesn't need bombs to get through the walls)

On the other hand, my father had a tendency to stick to one game and keep playing until he mastered it.

• BMX Simulator. His record for the first course was 19.8 seconds. 
• Ollie's Follies
• Pastfinder
• Arkanoid 
• Tapper

[oky2000]

11 hours ago, ClausB said:

Maybe that's why they haven't done a port. Plus it would destroy their fantasy that theirs was the best 8-bit.

Can't speak for all the forums but the people on Lemon64 are quite open minded. We've discussed the merits of various computers and they all have their charms for us  IIRC Atari Star Raiders uses the 160x192 16 shades of one colour mode which no other home computer except the TED based machines could even hope to match. C64 does have 5 greyscale BUT dark grey is more like medium grey, quite a jump from black. Actually the Plus/4 is probably a better machine to port Star Raiders to, should be able to manage VCS sort of SFX too. 1mhz 6510 I would imagine would make the game sluggish and just like with Elite on the C64 I played at home vs Acorn BBC version at school it's not going to be as nice and it will lose something in the transition.

 

Amstrad had its place for certain genres, until the 520STFM matched the price of the 128K CPC models in 1987, the Spectrum was a lot less grim than the specs would imply for the poorer of the people wanting to play games on the absolute minimum budget and I am sure a few of us have said "if you couldn't have a C64...." the Atari 800XL would have been just as welcome etc. Perhaps places like Reddit or other forums I don't go on have fanboys but they are extremely rare on L64 I have found in the last few years.

 

Ultimately for most of us budget dictated what you had, and sometimes pure luck in my case as I was supposed to be the owner of something other than a C64 until that machine went kaputt and there was no more in stock. Equally my friend's C64 went kaputt and he ended up with an Amstrad because that Summer you couldn't find a C64 in stock anywhere etc etc. Said it before and I will say it again, an Atari with 48/64k is the only other machine I would have had as much fun with as I did with half a decade of C64 gaming before I got my Amiga 1000. If I had the money I would have bought an 800XL too, for the same reason I had a PS1 AND Saturn and N64. 

 

Encounter and Stealth were two other games I used to play regularly on the Atari, and also Elektraglide. 2 player games of Ballblazer were indeed very fun. I think the first Atari 800 game I played back in 1980/81 was Pac-Man.

[oky2000]

5 hours ago, baktra said:

I didn't have games that would really "stick", because as a kid, I was rather impatiently jumping from one game to another, but I spent a rather generous time playing these:

• Vanguard (a surprisingly decent shooter)
• Rescue on Fractalus (a classic)
• Montezuma (the 8K version)
• Ghost Busters (only to be disappointed in the end, time waster)
• Star Raiders (replayability)
• Fred (good platformer from Poland)
• Spy Hunter (always happy to get to the icy roads. If only I knew how to use the 2nd joystick)
• Hero (only if I knew then that one doesn't need bombs to get through the walls)

On the other hand, my father had a tendency to stick to one game and keep playing until he mastered it.

• BMX Simulator. His record for the first course was 19.8 seconds. 
• Ollie's Follies
• Pastfinder
• Arkanoid 
• Tapper

I used to play Vanguard in the arcade as a kid, loved it. I don't think I ever got to try it on the Atari home computers but loved it on my VCS. Gyruss was cool too thinking about early arcade conversions and A8 Spy Hunter has much nicer handling, the C64 port I had handled like a Skoda/Lada P.o.S. Not sure if I played Atari Tapper either come to think of it but Tapper is a fun game.

 

I had completely forgotten about Archer's outside the box thinking excellent A8 version of International Karate, which I didn't realise back then had so much extra stuff going on in the background as I was not technically minded back then in the mid 80s.

 

[zzip]

11 minutes ago, oky2000 said:

I used to play Vanguard in the arcade as a kid, loved it. I don't think I ever got to try it on the Atari home computers but loved it on my VCS. Gyruss was cool too thinking about early arcade conversions and A8 Spy Hunter has much nicer handling, the C64 port I had handled like a Skoda/Lada P.o.S. Not sure if I played Atari Tapper either come to think of it but Tapper is a fun game.

Vanguard was one of my favorite arcade games too.  Atari's home ports were pretty good, The 8-bit/5200 version were even closer to the arcade than the 2600 version..   But no home version ever quite matches the arcade,does it?    The voice synthesis is sorely missing for a start.

[ClausB]

1 hour ago, oky2000 said:

Can't speak for all the forums but the people on Lemon64 are quite open minded. We've discussed the merits of various computers and they all have their charms for us  IIRC Atari Star Raiders uses the 160x192 16 shades of one colour mode

Good to hear many are open minded. But I've seen many not so much.

 

Believe it or not, Star Raiders uses the 4-color 160x96 mode. Though it flickers the stars' brightness values to simulate more grey levels.

[+MrFish]

10 hours ago, Lostdragon said:

This scratched my Star Raiders itch on the C64. 

This is what I was hoping someone would do: point me to a decent clone on the C64 (because I'm by no means completely familiar with its huge catalog). I knew there had to be something comparable on the C64.

 

Definitely a clone, and looks to be pretty good. I like the way they overlay the galactic map.

The only big difference I can see in performance is that it doesn't look like this game has selectable speed control. On speed 9, the starfield is moving pretty fast in Star Raiders.

Sound effects are pretty cool sounding too -- although I have to prefer Star Raiders there (Neubauer just got so many things right, especially for an 8KB outing).

 

I'll have to download this one and see how it plays.

 

[zzip]

13 minutes ago, ClausB said:

Good to hear many are open minded. But I've seen many not so much.

Yeah It's amazing to live in a world where fans of crappy C64s and awesome Atari 8-bits can finally get along!    (just kidding, don't shoot me)

 

[zylon]

Threshold, A8, c64, vic-20 Love it and rolled them all.

[Keatah]

1 hour ago, zylon said:

Threshold, A8, c64, vic-20 Love it and rolled them all.

Gosh I thought that game (on Apple II) was nearly endless. A nice variety of patterns and alien design.

[zylon]

8 minutes ago, Keatah said:

Gosh I thought that game (on Apple II) was nearly endless. A nice variety of patterns and alien design.

A8 & VIC-20 are practically identical in play, following the A2 release faithfully, with c64 being tad different, also easier.

Edited March 1, 2023 by zylon

[kiwilove]

I am surprised that no one has so far mentioned Blue Max?

 

I've been a long time lover of the coin-op Zaxxon and never liked the A8 conversion, which looks perfectly fine compared to other conversions done - Colecovision anyone?  But for Zaxxon coin-op purists it is severely lacking.  There was little there, for me to like.  I'm hard to please because graphics is my interest, but I wanted playability also.  Many years later on I had to go over to the C-64 to play the Synapse conversion and play it, and can say it's the best home conversion of Zaxxon done.  Although I haven't played others.  Sega did market their own conversion?  Couldn't find a video of it but I'll guess it'll rate poorly along Synapses' seeing that it is not easily found.

But BitD, along comes Blue Max - and it has all the hallmarks of a Zaxxon game in spades.  While graphically it is rather plain looking, but it's graphics are effectively done for functionality.  I can't fault this game much.  It's not easy to get into the city and even harder to bomb the required targets there.

Equally impressive to me, was Encounter.  I had a brief chance encounter with the programmer and was able to view the game before it was released.  It's truly immersive and gave you the realism of being in that world.

For platform fun, it was Miner 2049'er for me, getting use to it's quirky platforms and jumps required.  Donkey Kong was not fun at all for me maybe because I never played the coin-op game much at all.  Also fun was Bristles in which you can safely fall down or be knocked down.  The control was a bit quirky to get use to, but once use to it, it's more than OK to play.

 

Harvey

 

[+MrFish]

4 hours ago, kiwilove said:

I am surprised that no one has so far mentioned Blue Max?

Love Blue Max... awesome game that I always go back to. A lot of great things to say about the game, but anyone who's played already knows...

 

[+Philsan]

Another game I think should be mentioned is Pitfall II.

It's a good 1984 game and A8 version has a second part missing in original VCS version and in C64 port.

[zzip]

12 hours ago, kiwilove said:

 

I've been a long time lover of the coin-op Zaxxon and never liked the A8 conversion, which looks perfectly fine compared to other conversions done - Colecovision anyone?  But for Zaxxon coin-op purists it is severely lacking.  There was little there, for me to like.  I'm hard to please because graphics is my interest, but I wanted playability also.  Many years later on I had to go over to the C-64 to play the Synapse conversion and play it, and can say it's the best home conversion of Zaxxon done.  Although I haven't played others.  Sega did market their own conversion? 

I thought A8 Zaxxon was underwhelming too.   But part of it was I kept seeing screenshots in magazines supposedly of the Colecovision version that looked super detailed like this,  and the A8 version seemed wayy inferior compared to that!

 

Only much later did I find out it's a fake screenshot mock-up and the actual Colecovision version is a lot sparser looking.  I recently watched a video of all the home versions and most were not great either, and many looked much worse than A8.    I guess Zaxxon was one of those games that was hard to do right on home 8-bit systems.

Edited March 1, 2023 by zzip

[Lostdragon]

11 hours ago, MrFish said:

Love Blue Max... awesome game that I always go back to. A lot of great things to say about the game, but anyone who's played already knows...

 

Another vote for Blue Max, another of my go-to A8 games. 

[Atari8guy]

The games I played in my youth:

 

Pac-Man (best version in my opinion of the ports at the time)

Bruce Lee

Goonies (today's replayability suffers, but in the 80's I played it a lot)

Raid Over Moscow

Hardball

Leaderboard

MULE

 

All classic A8 games in my family growing up...

[leech]

On 2/24/2023 at 9:57 PM, Rybags said:

Although technically very high up the scale, the Lucasfilm games never individually keep me there for hours at a time.  Koronis Rift probably more than the others has that time factor you need to put in but ultimately I found it to frustrating in that you'd get your arse kicked and not make a great deal of progress so just put it away.

 

The Alternate Reality games might just be there.  I spent more on those than any other I'd think.  In The City you had to practically double the XP for each level-up and I think I got 2 characters to Level 11 and another to 10.  I didn't have a proper copy of Dungeon so didn't get so far there.

 

In the modern day there's been games that have kept me going for a long time but still not as long as AR and I found once I'd completed them I didn't go back so much.  Examples there are RGB, Ridiculous Reality and the other I can't remember the name of but it was the one where you jumped around and cleared squares and got powerups etc, completing each puzzle before the next one.

I still maintain that AR should just get a homebrew team behind it and finish it on the Atari (fixing the bugs / security in The City and Dungeon so you can actually transfer characters around).  Granted I don't know if we could get some of the original coders on board with this or not, but I bet there could be a group that could potentially be dedicated enough to finish off each bit one at a time!

[leech]

5 hours ago, zzip said:

I thought A8 Zaxxon was underwhelming too.   But part of it was I kept seeing screenshots in magazines supposedly of the Colecovision version that looked super detailed like this,  and the A8 version seemed wayy inferior compared to that!

 

Only much later did I find out it's a fake screenshot mock-up and the actual Colecovision version is a lot sparser looking.  I recently watched a video of all the home versions and most were not great either, and many looked much worse than A8.    I guess Zaxxon was one of those games that was hard to do right on home 8-bit systems.

Was this the where they really got the screenshot?  I used to love Super Zaxxon on the 8bit, the original wasn't quite as good.

[Rybags]

I don't regard the AR transfer issues as a bug - more likely the character/location data wasn't sufficient to cater for what they had planned for future games so they did it the way they did.

 

Star Raiders C64 - I think it would be possible and with optimisations could be as fast as the original.

Though the incentive?  It's an Atari holy-grail killer app so I'm in no hurry to see it ported elsewhere.  It was bad enough that they did SR2 for other systems.

[leech]

1 hour ago, Rybags said:

I don't regard the AR transfer issues as a bug - more likely the character/location data wasn't sufficient to cater for what they had planned for future games so they did it the way they did.

 

Star Raiders C64 - I think it would be possible and with optimisations could be as fast as the original.

Though the incentive?  It's an Atari holy-grail killer app so I'm in no hurry to see it ported elsewhere.  It was bad enough that they did SR2 for other systems.

I was speaking of the bug that triggered even with official disks, where you would be attacked by the FBI and the long arm of the law, if you went from City to Dungeon.  Something to do with the way they duplicated the masters, or something like that.

[oky2000]

On 3/1/2023 at 12:54 AM, ClausB said:

Good to hear many are open minded. But I've seen many not so much.

 

Believe it or not, Star Raiders uses the 4-color 160x96 mode. Though it flickers the stars' brightness values to simulate more grey levels.

There will always be in-fighting between groups, it's like a digital patriotism I guess. 

 

Forgive my n00b technical knowledge, IIRC that 16 luminance 1 colour screen mode may have been exclusive to the GTIA replacement for CTIA of the originally released 400/800 models which may have come after Star Raiders was being developed/manufactured? You still have the issue of the obtuse layout of the C64 'bitmap' screen and the 80% faster CPU of the Atari double whammy to contend with.

[Keatah]

Star Raiders is an Atari brand and it'd seem awkward on a Commodore product. And most games on C-64 seem sluggish compared to Atari 400/800. In fact Apple II is quicker on the draw than the 64. SR would need to remain snappy and responsive, and I don't think that's gonna happen.

[oky2000]

On 3/1/2023 at 12:58 AM, MrFish said:

This is what I was hoping someone would do: point me to a decent clone on the C64 (because I'm by no means completely familiar with its huge catalog). I knew there had to be something comparable on the C64.

 

Definitely a clone, and looks to be pretty good. I like the way they overlay the galactic map.

The only big difference I can see in performance is that it doesn't look like this game has selectable speed control. On speed 9, the starfield is moving pretty fast in Star Raiders.

Sound effects are pretty cool sounding too -- although I have to prefer Star Raiders there (Neubauer just got so many things right, especially for an 8KB outing).

 

I'll have to download this one and see how it plays.

 

I like that game and I played it a fair bit 2019 when I found it on some crack disks with my SX64. It is the best alternative you can get but I couldn't remember how closely it copies the gameplay of A8 Star Raiders or even VCS Star Raiders I had as a kid. There is also another one by Supersoft called Star Crash that is graphically quite nice but limited in complexity compared to Sentinel. I did spend ages going through Star Raiders type games/clones on the C64 and did do a video on some of them so you might find something else interesting in the video below. (there is swearing in the video sometimes so you might want the audio off and skip through the games I tried). Played others too like Starfire by Epyx and one by Bruce Carver in various other videos that are not here.

 

A good place to start is here, only 5 pages in total, 45 games per page, and it's obvious which are not going to be like Star Raiders via the screenshots in the results and also ones that look like magazine type-ins from the screenshots so 5 minutes you should have a few options to try out. http://gb64.com/search.php?a=5&f=5&id=10&d=45&h=0

 

 

[oky2000]

On 3/1/2023 at 12:09 AM, zzip said:

Vanguard was one of my favorite arcade games too.  Atari's home ports were pretty good, The 8-bit/5200 version were even closer to the arcade than the 2600 version..   But no home version ever quite matches the arcade,does it?    The voice synthesis is sorely missing for a start.

Yeah the VCS port is sort of a re-imaging of the original graphically but still it was a lot of fun and I played it a lot back then. I remember I wished the speech was in Pole Position back then too but it actually plays fine. I never saw 5200/A8 Berzerk, or the arcade either IIRC, but that was another VCS arcade game I had and the box art is awesome.