LeeB99
Active member
I have got to tell you, the recently shown conversion of "Star Castle" for the 2600 is REALLY impressive.
I can remember back when I brought home a copy of Pac Man for the 2600, and the reality was SO DISSAPOINTING. It was absolutely horrible and no fun to play. I remember playing Adventure for hours and hours. When I went over to a certain friend's house, he would play Pitfall! a LOT. Asteroids was one of my favorites, although the experience was not an acceptable substitute for the original arcade game. I think that Berzerk was perhaps one of the most "authentic feeling" arcade ports for the system. Space Invaders was decent due to the simplicity of the arcade game, but not a faithful conversion. Yar's Revenge was truly the best "original" game for the 2600, but I think that the issue with bringing Star Castle to the 2600 was NOT in the capabilities of the system. I had always heard that they could not get the rights to the game, so the programmer had to take the concept and what he had done so far and take the game into a different direction. The Vectrex is the only system that I am aware of that ever offered a home port of that game.
I moved on to the Colecovision and an Atari XL computer. The game "Rescue of Fractalus" for the Atari home computers was a marvel for it's time. Some hacker had stolen it off of Lucasart's server and it was distributed out in the wild before the game was finished. Eventually the game was released into the marketplace, but I don't think that it sold well because so many people already had the bootleg copy...
I can remember back when I brought home a copy of Pac Man for the 2600, and the reality was SO DISSAPOINTING. It was absolutely horrible and no fun to play. I remember playing Adventure for hours and hours. When I went over to a certain friend's house, he would play Pitfall! a LOT. Asteroids was one of my favorites, although the experience was not an acceptable substitute for the original arcade game. I think that Berzerk was perhaps one of the most "authentic feeling" arcade ports for the system. Space Invaders was decent due to the simplicity of the arcade game, but not a faithful conversion. Yar's Revenge was truly the best "original" game for the 2600, but I think that the issue with bringing Star Castle to the 2600 was NOT in the capabilities of the system. I had always heard that they could not get the rights to the game, so the programmer had to take the concept and what he had done so far and take the game into a different direction. The Vectrex is the only system that I am aware of that ever offered a home port of that game.
I moved on to the Colecovision and an Atari XL computer. The game "Rescue of Fractalus" for the Atari home computers was a marvel for it's time. Some hacker had stolen it off of Lucasart's server and it was distributed out in the wild before the game was finished. Eventually the game was released into the marketplace, but I don't think that it sold well because so many people already had the bootleg copy...
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) I too was disappointed with Pac-Man (I think my mom got it for me the day it came out, I wanted it so bad). DK was also pretty disappointing. I did think they did a pretty good job with Ms Pac (even though it had different mazes than the arcade, at least it had 4 separate mazes). Pitfall II was a really good game too, with the music and the shear size of the level.
