What is the ultimate A8 game you have ever played?

[leech]

18 hours ago, CharlieChaplin said:

- Archon (vs. computer only, since I once played vs. a human player and he only moved to his dark squares and in a battle he always waited in one corner and never moved away from it, so he almost always had more power than me and he almost always could shoot faster than me; simply did the same thing he did to show him how boring the gameplay then becomes)

That is why the middle power points are important to get, they change colors each turn and you can then over power them.  The game reallly has some awesome strategy to it.  Though it is one of the games that would cause me to punch my cheating ass little brother.  😜

[Keatah]

I had A2-FS1 on Apple II way before FS2 was out. Naturally. Thought the wireframe graphics were pretty futuristic and computery back in closing months of 1979. Nothing like it was on any console or in the arcades. Or on any hobbyist computer either.

 

Was so looking forward to FS2 when we got wind of it. It was a significant upgrade despite slower frame rates. Myself and my buddies weren't disappointed. We understood the amount of computation happening and made mental allowances for it. Loved all the adjustable perimeters/settings.

 

It was just nice to be "out of the cage" with the scenery disks. Appreciated it for what it was worth. Eventually I'd go on to lust after the FS franchise on the PC. Played it briefly on an 8086 - a time when kids weren't allowed to even look at the grups' new toy. Then the 286 version. Then 486. Followed each iteration until about 2010, then the dry spell hit, no more releases until the XBOX version.

 

Somewhere in there I would get the Amiga/ST version of FS2 and it's companion product, Jet. The scenery/graphics were similar to Apple/Atari, but of course the colors were more varied and the framerate improvement was magical. These were staples in my short-lived Amiga gaming career.

 

XBOX version seems so closed off. Not an open modifiable world anymore. Not like all previous releases. Sandbox gone. Not to mention the online requirements. So I didn't take a liking to it. Not even the PC version. But I do recognize the graphical achievements.

Edited March 6, 2023 by Keatah

[zzip]

43 minutes ago, Keatah said:

Was so looking forward to FS2 when we got wind of it. It was a significant upgrade despite slower frame rates. Myself and my buddies weren't disappointed. We understood the amount of computation happening and made mental allowances for it. Loved all the adjustable perimeters/settings.

 

It was just nice to be "out of the cage" with the scenery disks. Appreciated it for what it was worth. Eventually I'd go on to lust after the FS franchise on the PC. Played it briefly on an 8086 - a time when kids weren't allowed to even look at the grups' new toy. Then the 286 version. Then 486. Followed each iteration until about 2010, then the dry spell hit, no more releases until the XBOX version.

 

Somewhere in there I would get the Amiga/ST version of FS2 and it's companion product, Jet. The scenery/graphics were similar to Apple/Atari, but of course the colors were more varied and the framerate improvement was magical. These were staples in my short-lived Amiga gaming career.

I think the real value of FS2 is teaching you the controls of an aircraft and flying techniques.    But since I never had the desire to be a real pilot, I wasn't much interested in that,  I just wanted some kind of action-oriented flying game.   But at 1-2fps, FS2 certainly wasn't that!   Rescue of Fractalus was better suited as an action-oriented flying game.

 

Yeah the ST version of FS2 was a significant improvement in frame rates and the picture-in-picture feature was cool.   Scenery was still minimal even though it was somewhat improved.

 

Ultimately 8-bit systems aren't suited to games with 3D environments and 16-bit systems are barely suited for them.

[leech]

1 hour ago, Keatah said:

a time when kids weren't allowed to even look at the grups' new toy.

Thanks for the Star Trek reference.

[leech]

43 minutes ago, zzip said:

I think the real value of FS2 is teaching you the controls of an aircraft and flying techniques.    But since I never had the desire to be a real pilot, I wasn't much interested in that,  I just wanted some kind of action-oriented flying game.   But at 1-2fps, FS2 certainly wasn't that!   Rescue of Fractalus was better suited as an action-oriented flying game.

 

Yeah the ST version of FS2 was a significant improvement in frame rates and the picture-in-picture feature was cool.   Scenery was still minimal even though it was somewhat improved.

 

Ultimately 8-bit systems aren't suited to games with 3D environments and 16-bit systems are barely suited for them.

F15-Strike Eagle is the one I played more of.  Loved it!

[Keatah]

As a side note before I get to rambling. I do wish there were more Atari 400/800 ports of Apple II stuff. And done so in a way that utilized the graphic prowess of GTIA/ANTIC. And the nearly 2MHz CPU.

 

On the other hand there was platform exclusivity to be had by not doing ports. Not that that was the reason more weren't done. A2 had many firsts, especially from pre-homebrewers, more or less known as basement hacks. Selling software in baggies. What IS that!!??!! So cheap!!

 

1 hour ago, zzip said:

Rescue of Fractalus was better suited as an action-oriented flying game.

I don't think I ever heard a bad comment on that game. Oh maybe some squabbling about a control implementation or something like that or scoring.. But as a whole, no one really complained about the speed or graphics or gameplay.

 

1 hour ago, zzip said:

Yeah the ST version of FS2 was a significant improvement in frame rates and the picture-in-picture feature was cool.   Scenery was still minimal even though it was somewhat improved.

I never used the PiP feature. But I did love the tower view (and arbitrarily placed tower view) features in Jet. That was novel to me. And with a little imagination it was like an R/C airplane.

 

I'd be remiss in skipping mentioning the RealFlight R/C simulator franchise of today. It's crazy realistic. But back in the day there was RCFSII the first of the niche genre. It wasn't a GreatPlanes or subLOGIC product, however.

 

1 hour ago, zzip said:

Ultimately 8-bit systems aren't suited to games with 3D environments

Maybe. I thought BattleZone and Enduro and PolePosition on the VCS were pretty good. And that's about as 8-bit as you can get. Granted they aren't 3D like a wireframe projection, but the illusion to a kid was complete.

 

If anything, most 3D vector stuff runs slow on A2. Think Stellar-7 or Elite or Atarisoft Battlezone. Stuff that relies on floating point. On the other hand the pseudo 3D stuff like Horizon V, Zenith, Epoch, Hadron, seem to do ok. Flickering right along at 12fps.

 

A small set of standout games were from Bill Budge, Trilogy of Games, and Space Album. All the games ran pretty quickly. And he wisely kept the 3D wireframe models simple and small. Is it a 3D environment? Probably not. Again the stuff was new and novel at the time. It's the novelty (at that time) which we remember today. It elevates those 1st attempts at 3D into greatness today. If that makes any sense..?

 

IDK. I was just glad to have video output in the first place! A big one-up from teletype printout games, which I barely understood to begin with. Still have this one book titled "Consumer's Guide to Personal Computing and Microcomputers". It mentions that having CRT display capabilities and a realtime interactive keyboard were major features in hobbyist/system.

 

Because previously it was data entry by calculator keypad and output by 8-digit Red LED or VFD display. Kim-1, ELF, RCA COSMAC VIP. That sort of old-man stuff. And before that there were switches and lights!

 

So whoever first fleshed out the features and put them in a home/hobby system did good. Was it a magical breakthrough? No. It would happen sooner or later.

 

Blahh blahh blah!

 

1 hour ago, zzip said:

and 16-bit systems are barely suited for them.

I don't know about that.. I thought we were improving rapidly in the 16-bit era. We were now doing polygons at a good clip. As long as one stuck with I Robot and STUN Runner type graphics, 16-bit was doing fine.

 

StarGlider 2 on Amiga was a hit with me. I'd debate it was one of the better 3D space games of the time, if not the best.

 

If you're thinking Doom style games, then of course not. A 386-16 is going to be the minimum requirement for good fun.

Edited March 6, 2023 by Keatah

[Wrathchild]

tbf, even a flight sim like the ZX81 16K Flight Simulator lets your imagination 'dream' of being that pilot

[MrMaddog]

I know everyone else said Star Raiders, so I'm saying it too...

 

It's just the combination of flying & fighting through 3D space in real time while strategizing where to go next, after a nearby sqaudron or defend a base that's currently after attack.

 

And there were other games that used that forumula like Star Raiders II (both Alric & Last Starfighter versions), Rescue on Fractalus and Final Legacy.  I feel those are the best games to play on the Atari 8-bit or just about any computer.  It's also nicve to have arcade style games for quick playthroughs in-between the long sessions as well.

 

TBH, I've never really been into the more traditional and drawn out computer games like text advetures, war sims and RPGs.  (Except for Temple of Apshai Trilogy)

[ClausB]

Yes, Star Raiders combines those awesome first person shooter tactics with longer term strategy of energy management and protecting star bases. That part came out of older text-based Star Trek games, which themselves had elements of text-based adventure games. 

[Keatah]

1 hour ago, zzip said:

I think the real value of FS2 is teaching you the controls of an aircraft and flying techniques. 

FS2 came with 2 manuals, one for program operation. The other for aircraft and aerodynamics. So yes, big emphasis on education.

 

You know.. So much early 8-bit software was about teaching. Some early titles like The Planetary Guide and The Stargazer's Guide (from Synergistic Software) seemed to come with comprehensive manuals that were well-written and much bigger in scope than the contents on the floppy. One could learn all kinds of concepts through the manuals. Some of which were 50 pages in size. 100 pages. And the software seemed to be built on what-if scenarios. Letting you try out variations on what was presented in the manual. But little more. The knowledge was in printed material. This especially applied to Atari Planetarium.

 

In the late 80's there was a program on PC called CHAOS. It was all about fractals and chaotic/random/semirandom motions on things in general nature. Fractals, magnets, pendulums, oscillations, forces, that sort thing. It was a full-on "course" geared toward the inquiring consumer science buff. The included manual by James Gleick was chock-full of theory and information. When done with the reading the book and playing with the software it felt like a whole new way of looking at the physical behavior of phenomena we normally don't pay attention to was revealed right before my eyes. It was well worth the quintessential $39.95 price. And I so wish today's (software and manual) were as well integrated, demonstrative, and wholesome.

 

Dance of The Planets (286-486 PC era) yet another. Beautifully comprehensive printed material came with it. Each time I bought one of these I felt like I was buying part of the Universe, a viewport into how things behaved behind the scenes.

 

I suppose this is all a natural progression - as we were transitioning from centuries of printed books to a new electronic medium. Not forgetting the early micros were pretty limited at their early juncture. As microprocessors advanced so did their software. And I think we reached a balance somewhere between 1988-1997 where the sophistication of the main program was equally and evenly match by its documentation.

 

Prior to 1988, documentation was more in-depth and rich than the software.

 

1988-1997, docs/manuals and their accompanying software were equal and highly complementary. Best ever. Interactive. Everytime you went back and forth between the two you discovered something new. Same feeling like you were a kid in a cartridge store!

 

Post 1997, program sophistication exceeded what was in the manual, online, pdf, chm, whatever. Programmers and software publishing houses started cutting back on supplementary material. First the printed stuff went bye-bye, to be incorporated in pdf & chm. Then even that increasingly morphed into online references and thinned out. Pdfs and chms are practically no longer used like they were. Seems like publishers just got lazy. Seems they consider it too costly to do that stuff. And that takes away from the learning experience! It's like it's no longer important.

 

There are exceptions of course. Stellarium has a nice manual, as does Emulator Altirra and MAME.

 

DiskTrix' Ultimate Defrag is great on explaining disk defragmentation. A passing thing in this day and age of SSDs. But key for those with Spinners for archiving or looking to eek out that last bit of performance on older dotcom era PCs with mechanical drives. The concept of file-placement and zoning are beautifully explained.

 

[Keatah]

1 hour ago, leech said:

F15-Strike Eagle is the one I played more of.  Loved it!

I never got much into it. I thought it was slow-moving at the time. Blame it on me seeing flightsimming on PC - with buttery smooth framerates, even if only with filled in polygons and not much more. Certainly nothing like Gouraud shading, which would become a hot topic of late 90's 3D gaming. And that there was so much else going on. Just keeping up with the proverbial Joneses in terms of WaReZ was a huge timesuck. So many Apple and Atari games (some still in their boxes still) that I have yet to play through.

 

I recently discovered the arcades version. I haven't yet officially added it to my MAME setup. Gameplay is fast and short, as arcades are designed to suck your wallet dry.

[Keatah]

45 minutes ago, MrMaddog said:

I know everyone else said Star Raiders, so I'm saying it too...

It's just the combination of flying & fighting through 3D space in real time while strategizing where to go next, after a nearby sqaudron or defend a base that's currently after attack.

It is a good combination and worked well enough to define a generation.

 

I loved the manual. It had (to me) the right amount of story, gameplay, strategy, and technical tips. When I wanted more from the game I could always reference the scoring system or those tips.

 

In school I would often wander away into a world of strategizing how to take out the enemy and protect the starbaseses. I even made an Applesoft BASIC proggie to print the grid so I could have worksheets.

[zzip]

21 hours ago, Keatah said:

I don't think I ever heard a bad comment on that game. Oh maybe some squabbling about a control implementation or something like that or scoring.. But as a whole, no one really complained about the speed or graphics or gameplay.

Fractalus was just so novel at the time.   Kind of like the space game we Star Wars/Battlestar Galactica kids always wanted,  or at least a big step in that direction,  The worst thing I could say about it is it gets repetitive after playing a few levels.

 

21 hours ago, Keatah said:

I never used the PiP feature. But I did love the tower view (and arbitrarily placed tower view) features in Jet. That was novel to me. And with a little imagination it was like an R/C airplane.

The tower view was great too!  Touches like that is what made me enjoy the ST version more than I ever did the 8-bit.

 

21 hours ago, Keatah said:

Maybe. I thought BattleZone and Enduro and PolePosition on the VCS were pretty good. And that's about as 8-bit as you can get. Granted they aren't 3D like a wireframe projection, but the illusion to a kid was complete.

Those games aren't real 3D..  objects in the game tend to be bitmaps that get rendered at different sizes depending how close they are.

 

The thing is,  I don't consider "pseudo 3D" to be any kind of insult.  If you can make a a game that feels 3D to the player, you've done your job!   I think every racing game was fake 3D until maybe Hard Drivin' in the late 80s

 

FS2 is doing real 3D where objects exist in a persistent 3D space and can be rotated and scaled to reflect where the camera is. 

 

21 hours ago, Keatah said:

23 hours ago, zzip said:

and 16-bit systems are barely suited for them.

I don't know about that.. I thought we were improving rapidly in the 16-bit era. We were now doing polygons at a good clip. As long as one stuck with I Robot and STUN Runner type graphics, 16-bit was doing fine.

 

StarGlider 2 on Amiga was a hit with me. I'd debate it was one of the better 3D space games of the time, if not the best.

I liked StarGlider 2 as well!   But it also illustrates what I meant about 3D on the 16-bit systems.   Very basic, no-frills 3D-   Everything is made of solid polygons,  but no shading, no texture mapping,  no hardware assisted 3D, not even a math coprocessor!   The frame rate suffers, but still just good enough to make it semi-fluid.   If you knocked a couple mhz off the processor the game would be like a slideshow and not much fun.   So the systems were just barely able to deliver 3D in an acceptable way.

 

22 hours ago, Keatah said:

If you're thinking Doom style games, then of course not. A 386-16 is going to be the minimum requirement for good fun.

No I was thinking along the lines of Starglider 2 and other games with similar graphics.   

 

Like I said, I was also perfectly happy with pseudo-3D.   We had the brilliant Dungeon Master series on ST/Amiga.  First person fake-3D but looked so good for its time!  And isometric is another way of representing 3D environments using 2D techniques.   And isometric games often look great even on 8-bit systems!

 

There was a tendency for developers to push 3D before it was ready.  I can think several game series on PC that were great in 2D/isometric but then they released a new installment with 3D graphics  (not because they were needed but because they can!) meaning a good portion of the user base suddenly didn't have the specs to run the new game and beautifully-rendered 2D graphics of previous releases were replaced by blobby 3D graphics (early 2000s or so primitive 3D hardware)

[kiwilove]

For me, it was the illusion of speeding through space at very high speed that Star Raiders enabled, and you can vary this effect in increments.  I loved it so much that I would leave it in this mode until you eventually hit an asteroid.

One thing I didn't like in Star Raiders was when the screen turned green with shields enabled.  I would have liked instead, that the bottom part of the screen turned green, to remind you of this, so that you could have a black background for the stars, etc, during combat.  I always found the green screen offputing.

The ace in Star Raiders were the numbers in the instrumentation had meaning to them, and you had to rely upon them when your scanner was damaged or destroyed.  That you had to rely upon your own visual orientation and view to find a much needed starbase out there with the aid of those numbers.

That Star Raiders was delayed until it was released, I guess the programmer had the time to add the spit and polish to the game that made it stand tall against others.

 

Harvey

 

[Keatah]

29 minutes ago, kiwilove said:

One thing I didn't like in Star Raiders was when the screen turned green with shields enabled.  I would have liked instead, that the bottom part of the screen turned green, to remind you of this, so that you could have a black background for the stars, etc, during combat.  I always found the green screen offputing.

Green shields is incorrect, the result of an improperly adjusted computer or display.. The official color (according to the man himself and how I remember it as a kid) is a hazy blueish shade. Altirra and Atari 800 Emulator both get it right.

 

There's a hack IIRC that changes the lower part of the display only, but at the same time it also changes the background in the galactic chart screen. So not a perfect shields-only mod.

 

[drpeter]

17 hours ago, Keatah said:

Green shields is incorrect, the result of an improperly adjusted computer or display..

That's true if you're playing NTSC, but under PAL green is the 'correct' colour- sort of... as noted above, it wasn't the original design intention, but no PAL-corrected version was officially released.

[_The Doctor__]

I'd always been told/taught that is was to be adjusted to the cusp of blue turning to bluish green turquoise so not completely blue nor completely green. I'd suspect it's just as easy to say blue is the color to avoid complicated explanations in the matter. Such fine adjustments are difficult and if you go to a normal screen it's easy to be off enough to make other screens unpleasant. It dances on the top of a needle point. Who want's to do that? oh that would have been me when I was a patient perfectionist. Who knows what colorspace the current crop of modern LCD what have you displays are today, many don't even accept antennae these days, so you really can't accurately call them 'TELE Visions'

oh my- get off our lawns!

Edited March 8, 2023 by _The Doctor__

[+MrFish]

4 hours ago, drpeter said:

That's true if you're playing NTSC, but under PAL green is the 'correct' colour- sort of... as noted above, it wasn't the original design intention, but no PAL-corrected version was officially released.

Yeah, this... it's an NTSC/PAL thing. Definitely not supposed to be green; but you get what you got in PAL country back in the day. That being said, the source code is available... hack it!

 

[+Philsan]

If I am not wrong, in 2015 @phaeron released an enhanced version of Star Raiders with fixed explosions.

It would be nice if he could make a version with correct palette for PAL. 

[leech]

24 minutes ago, Philsan said:

If I am not wrong, in 2015 @phaeron released an enhanced version of Star Raiders with fixed explosions.

It would be nice if he could make a version with correct palette for PAL. 

I may have to try this out... though I also should try the ST version of Star Raiders.

[HiassofT]

3 hours ago, _The Doctor__ said:

I'd always been told/taught that is was to be adjusted to the cusp of blue turning to bluish green turquoise so not completely blue nor completely green.

Well, in PAL land TVs didn't have any tint control settings - those were only needed in Never-The-Same-Color land 🙂

 

Other than that artifacting woks at best very poorly with PAL - so most of the time we saw some barely colored odd black-and-white dot patterns.

 

so long,

 

Hias

[+MrFish]

1 hour ago, Philsan said:

If I am not wrong, in 2015 @phaeron released an enhanced version of Star Raiders with fixed explosions.

It really doesn't just fix the explosions, per se: he upgraded the maths; so, essentially, the physics are sped up all around. It changes the character of the game, and, in some instances, I feel that it makes the game less playable. Neubauer created gameplay in line with the physics/maths that he had come up with; speed those up and some things improve, some things become a bit... er'm... twitchy.

 

Anyway... I like what @phaeron did for the explosions, and I like the sped-up gameplay in many places, but some places don't feel quite right. One quick for instance would be the hyperspace crosshair-centering challenge. You thought it got difficult to keep steady before? Bwahahahahahahaha!...

 

There's another hack that attempted to fix just the explosions. It did so by lessening the amount of particles in explosions. It works pretty well (still some slowdown, but less than before), and keeps the rest of the game where it already was. The only criticism, who doesn't like more particles in their explosions?? I think this is the hack that also changes the colors, which are ok, but some I don't like so much. No big deal, the colors could be changed back easily enough.

 

[Keatah]

6 hours ago, _The Doctor__ said:

I'd always been told/taught that is was to be adjusted to the cusp of blue turning to bluish green turquoise so not completely blue nor completely green. I'd suspect it's just as easy to say blue is the color to avoid complicated explanations in the matter.

In the official version, green, turquoise, shades of green-anything, are not present in the shields. A hazy muted blue is the color and that is canon.

 

6 hours ago, _The Doctor__ said:

Such fine adjustments are difficult and if you go to a normal screen it's easy to be off enough to make other screens unpleasant. It dances on the top of a needle point. Who want's to do that? oh that would have been me when I was a patient perfectionist.

Nah it wasn't that hard to adjust our vintage televisions back in the day. Granted CRTs were pretty bad for color and geometrical accuracy, but they showed the shields as blueish. Didn't have to mess with it when going back and forth between broadcast and videogames.

 

6 hours ago, _The Doctor__ said:

Who knows what colorspace the current crop of modern LCD what have you displays are today, many don't even accept antennae these days, so you really can't accurately call them 'TELE Visions'

oh my- get off our lawns!

IDK. I don't think the colorspace matters unless it's so bad as to be in the gutter. My old 4:3 displays featuring 6-bit color from the dotcom era did the colors right as do my modern IPS and QD displays, without having had to tweak their settings. The only thing I tweak on new displays I get are brightness/contrast and saturation. Maybe gamma. I do like a saturated colorful picture overall - but that doesn't affect the phasing or relationship of the colors.

 

I tend to think a lot of the "green shields" bias developed from seeing screenshots and vids sourced from early emulators - which did NOT get the colors right.

 

[reifsnyderb]

Of the games I've played....

 

M.U.L.E.

Star Raiders

M.U.L.E.

Prince of Persia

M.U.L.E.

Montezuma's Revenge

M.U.L.E.

Flight Simulator II

M.U.L.E.

F15 Strike Eagle

M.U.L.E.

Silent Service

M.U.L.E.

[Keatah]

2 hours ago, MrFish said:

It really doesn't just fix the explosions, per se: he upgraded the maths; so, essentially, the physics are sped up all around. It changes the character of the game, and, in some instances, I feel that it makes the game less playable. Neubauer created gameplay in line with the physics/maths that he had come up with; speed those up and some things improve, some things become a bit... er'm... twitchy.

This is so very true. It's nice to see mods and variants and changes. At the same time it's important to strictly adhere to the original so you always have a reference.

 

2 hours ago, MrFish said:

Anyway... I like what @phaeron did for the explosions, and I like the sped-up gameplay in many places, but some places don't feel quite right. One quick for instance would be the hyperspace crosshair-centering challenge. You thought it got difficult to keep steady before? Bwahahahahahahaha!...

Oh sure. I'm just happy to have different takes on a childhood fav.

 

2 hours ago, MrFish said:

There's another hack that attempted to fix just the explosions. It did so by lessening the amount of particles in explosions. It works pretty well (still some slowdown, but less than before), and keeps the rest of the game where it already was. The only criticism, who doesn't like more particles in their explosions?? I think this is the hack that also changes the colors, which are ok, but some I don't like so much. No big deal, the colors could be changed back easily enough.

There were times I thought that vintage Amber phosphor was the pinnacle of sophistication. Playing SR on an Amber display is a real hoot.