>Astro Attack? Who makes that one? Is this a "pirate" game? I would've
>thought it a clone of Super Cobra, except that's on your list too. I
>don't suppose you have a BIN and/or screenshot of it?
I bought it packaged by Hot Shot, but I'm not sure who actually made it... I
believe it said "Goliath" at the bottom. I believe I have a BIN of it, but
it's on my Win 3.1 harddisk, and I've got the Win 95 one in right now and
don't remember the BIN's name. Meanwhile I gave the cart to Jeff, who is a
2600 collector and was interested in a few PAL items although he can't play
them... ;-) maybe he can give you more information about this game if he
reads this.
Astro Attack is not exactly a clone of Super Cobra. You do die when you
touch the walls, as you do in Vanguard too, but you can shoot only forward,
not up or down (as in Vanguard), nor lay bombs (as in Super Cobra, which
seems to be a improved version of Scramble, which wasn't adapted to the
2600).
>>Parker Brothers wrote this game and
>>also adapted it to the Magnavox/Philips Odyssey/G7000, which is a far more
>>ugly platform for horizontal scrolling than the 2600.
>
>Well.. if I remember correctly, the Odyssey version of Super Cobra doesn't
>scroll at all :-)
Hmmm... I remember it differently. As far as I remember, it scrolled
screen-by-screen (similar to the Coleco Smurf). You entered a screen and
flew through it, and when you were at the right border, it would quickly
scroll everything to the left (but not simply switch the screen) and then
you'd again start at the left of that screen.
But Parker had to butcher nearly every game severely for the Odyssey
version. In Q*Bert the cubes turned to simple lines next to each other (and
I still wonder how they displayed that), and the characters don't even jump
from platform to platform, but slide quickly (At least that could have done
better). Also the original scoring was divided by 25 in order to not need
more than 4 digits for scoring - which means a coloured platform scores 1
point instead of 25 and so on. Frogger was broken up into 2 screens, where
you only see the road first, and when the frog has crossed that, you see the
river. I think that was due to the fact that the Odyssey can't display more
than 16 characters at once. At least they included the original starting
melody (well, at least one voice of it), which isn't that easy since the
Odyssey normally can only play a couple of different notes without help from
the CPU.
--
Archives (includes files) at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/archives/
Unsub & more at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/
