Jolt Country

Now I remember the other thing which I ended up disliking about Asteroids Deluxe, which is that it makes you LAZY. The shield is so reliable, and so easy to use, that you often stop even worrying about the random asteroid flying out of nowhere, or an alien ship shooting you -- hey, I'll just use the shield! No problemo!

Combine that with the fact that the ship accelerates so much quicker in Deluxe, and you've got the makings for a potentially very lazy Asteroids player.

Go ahead, get nice and comfortable with the Deluxe, and then try going back to the original Asteroids and not losing all three ships within about 10 seconds.

Goddamn. Is Defender like, a lot harder than it used to be when it first came out? Seems like after the first two waves, if a human gets abducted, you have approximately 0.3 seconds before that dude gets mutated. Then you're screwed totally. Damn!

And how the hell come nobody is continuing this exciting conversation about games of yesteryear (which, based on the previous three hours I've spent downloading the old favorites, are still the best video games ever made.)

My first experience with Defender was the Atari 2600 version. It's much, much easier than the arcade version. Overall they did a pretty good job with Defender on the 2600, though -- a lot of games for that system have only a passing resemblance to what they were based on. That one came out pretty well.

I didn't like the arcade version because the thing just seemed overtly satanic and evil. There can be 256 colors on the screen at once, if I remember right, but I recall it being dominated by red. Oh, and considering I could get a good 5 or 6 minutes out of Pac-Man on a quarter and all of ten seconds in Defender, I didn't play it enough to get decent at it.

I always felt bad for the humans in the thing. I mean, hell -- feeling bad for human beings -- truly, Defender had something going for it.

Back in the day, I put a lot of time into a C64 game called 'The Captive!' released by Mastertronic. You wander around collecting parts of scrolls; once you put one together, you get a power (at some point, you get the ability to fly to an island to the north).

I was pretty close to beating the game and despite its random nature and simplicity, I was hooked. Then my disk went bad or I lost it or something.

Sometime in the last couple years, I downloaded it from the net and played it on an emulator. Truly not so good, of course, but I still keep it around just in case one day I'll somehow have the motivation to get back into the thing.

At least on Stargate, you can get a pretty respectable score almost instantly by doing the SUPER AWESOME WARP-AHEAD trick. Try it, warp ahead, then smart bomb a screenful of pods. Instant 25,000, with a couple extra ships. BLAMMO!

At some point I'll also have to do a compare/contrast analysis of Defender and Stargate, except that where I am great at Asteroids and Deluxe, I totally suck ass at Defender and Stargate.

I remember being decent at Stargate when it was in the arcade. But now I think maybe I just got good scores by doing the trick described above.

Anyway, last night I played Ripoff. That's a weird little game right there. Unlimited lives! In 1979! Took Id Software about 20 more years to rediscover that concept.

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:My first experience with Defender was the Atari 2600 version. It's much, much easier than the arcade version. Overall they did a pretty good job with Defender on the 2600, though -- a lot of games for that system have only a passing resemblance to what they were based on. That one came out pretty well.

Defender II/Stargate for the 2600 is much, much more faithful, however.

Bruce

When I was really young, I used to love 'riddle of the sphynx' for the Atari 2600. You walked around washing or kissing people's feet or something and avoided snakes and what not. To me, there seemed to be something more to it beneath the surface, and it was pretty much that game that showed me how great it is to fool the player into thinking there's more, something that is extremely applicable to IF.

I'm sure this game would not be very exciting right now, though.

Raiders of the Lost Ark for the 2600 blew my brother and I away as well. I daresay that's as close as one can come to making a "real" adventure game for the 2600. My cousin somehow figured out how to mostly solve it, and he came over when we were little and showed us what needed to be done to win it. Don't get me wrong, you really needed telepathy to read the designer's mind, but once you developed that it kind of made sense in its own moon-logicked way.