Re: Aw: Re: [stella] Starmaster disassembled

Subject: Re: Aw: Re: [stella] Starmaster disassembled
From: "Glenn Saunders" <cybpunks@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 30 Jul 2001 10:06:18 -0700

The ultra-hard part of doing Star Fire is, that it has to compete
with Starmaster, which unfortunately is - just perfect!
<<

It's good, but I don't think Starmaster is perfect if you compare it to the original Star Raiders.

There are some features of Star Raiders which no 2600 space sim has yet implemented. These are:

1) variable speed thrust (Star Fire also has this, via analog control, and also reverse, which Star Raiders doesn't have).
2) aft view
3) Long-range scanner


More importantly, the gameplay of Starmaster is more lumbering Trek rather than Star Wars. The ships don't move anywhere near as quick and furiously as Star Raiders.

Also, Starmaster only presents one enemy at a time. Star Raiders can have two or I think even three enemies attacking at once.

It also doesn't allow you to shoot your own starbases.

I've always thought that given enough memory the 2600 could do a very close port of Star Raiders. I think the 2600 version of Star Raiders is 8K, which is as much as the 400/800 version, but I guess all the extra overhead of the manual kernels takes up more space than the 400/800 version which uses the built-in hardware. I think a really good Star Raiders port probably could be done with 16K and Superchip RAM.

2600 Star Raiders gets the main action display down well enough, it's just that the whole galactic map with just one starbase and one group of enemies is ultra-lame. It takes all the strategy out of the game. That's probably a byproduct of a lack of RAM. With more ROM and RAM, most of the other features could probably creep back in.









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