At 21:18 -0700 2-09-1997, Glenn Saunders wrote:
>Finding a way to make it into a game is easy. Starting with a concept and
then having to get the
>2600 to jump through the hoops to pull it off can sometimes be frustrating
>and disappointing
Sometimes I like to play the arcade ports for the 2600, thinking about how
bad the programmers in charge for a particularly difficult port must have been.
Sometimes the results were surprising... Rock'n'rope, for example: not
really a kind of game made for the 2600 (all those creatures going up and
down and left and right, stairs and platforms, and, uh, a rope)... the game
IS different from the original, but after all many of the most importants
elements have survived, and gameplay isn't bad at all. Also, I'd say that I
like it.
Other times the programmers were lucky: Frogger is a very 2600-friendly game
(everything except the player moves horizontally at fixed vertical
positions... hmmm, sounds like my game ;) so it's no surprise that the two
ports are very good.
But there were situations where the 2600 must have been a "torture machine"...:
CONGO BONGO
I've been looking at the first screen for 10 minutes the other day...
incredible :)
They tried to mimic the beatiful 3D screen of the original, and probably
what they did is the best possible result. But it sucks... it shouldn't have
been done at all.
BTW, did you see the second screen? They dropped the view used in the
original arcade game for an "easier" first person view, a kind of 3D
frogger... much better than the previous screen, with some very interesting,
playfield based, "water-simulation" effects. Hmmm, is there a 3rd screen?
[Color striping]
> It's something that the 2600 does very
>well, and is the best way to get the 2600 to give the illusion of having a
>shitload of colorful sprites when it only has a few monochrome ones.
Whithout color striping the 2600 wouldn't have been the same.
The Philips Videopac (oops, Magnavox Odissey for you in the US) comes from
the same era of the 2600, and probaby has better sprite capabilities than
the 2600. But it can't do color striping at all, and everything ends looking
less colorful and definitely sadder. It wasn't a bad system, it was just
sad. :-)
Ciao,
P.
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