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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