Atari Revives Unreleased Arcade Game That Was Too Damn Hard For 1982 Players - S...

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• 1 hidden comment

• Re: Video

  I think I see why this game didn't get produced. It just doesn't look like much fun.
  And I'm old enough to have been playing it, were it released.
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  • Re:

    After watching the video I thought the same thing. I was 14 in 1982 so yeah, I was a regular at the local arcades. This game just doesn't look fun. There's no real incentive to come back and try again.

    • Re:

      I was thinking it might have been the name that was the problem.

      Geez, sounds like a bad sneeze...give it a real, proper name.

  • Re:

    It does look kind of boring all right. This would be coming out the same time as Pole Position, Donkey Kong, Galaga, Dig Dug, Pac Man, Centipede etc. And then you have this thing.

  • Fun

    I think it would have been more fun if there were a two-player dynamic, where one player does the zoomed-out defending, and the other does the zoomed-in defending, on two separate screens. Then, make the defender's guns autofire, shooting a continuous stream of bullets, and make the controller a knob instead of a roller. Better still, make the bullets push the enemies back, and the players have to work together to push the enemies off the screen to destroy them.

    Probably too advanced for 1982, but doable a f

  • Re:

    What's your idea of fun? Some people are in it for pure challenge. I don't find games like Call of Duty fun. One of my friends who does can't stand single player story driven games. I'm not so into arcade style games either, while my wife can play them all day.

    You don't need to guess why it didn't get produced. The answer was in the first line of the summary: play-testers found it too difficult. No mention of boring or unfun.

• • Re:

    It would probably play better with a mouse, but I'm sure we can get an opinion from that one guy in the office with the 20yo trackball.
    
    Or, you can just go online, buy yourself a brand new trackball and try it out the way it was meant to be played. Trackballs are still available, they're just not on the shelves because they're a niche market. I really don't understand why, as I've been using them by preference for over twenty years.

    • Re:

      As someone who tried to get into trackballs for a few years back when they were more popular - the control was both slow and imprecise compared to a mouse. I mean, you could adjust sensitivity get rid of one, but then the other would become terrible. I can take a fairly slow, precise mouse and sweep it across 6-12" of table to still get fast and controlled motion. With a similarly precise track ball I either need to either run my arm across it (usually at an awkward angle), or for a larger ball capable o

  • Re:

    Here's a video of the original on MAME, which shows gameplay a lot better than the trailer for the modern version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

    One thing I notice is that while there *is* largish firing delay, it's much less than for Missile Command, and the aiming is MUCH more forgiving. It appears that there's only a few "aiming regions" on the main screen, and when your missile detonates in one it destroys *everything* in that region, even if they're halfway across the screen.

    Meanwhile in the "close

• Re:

  Hop into any shooter game with them, and have your ass handed to you. I think them damn kids are on the speed....

• Re:

  Go look up somebody doing a 1cc of Battle Garegga. Contrary to popular belief modern gamers are fucking hardcore.

  • Re:

    Battle Garegga was released in 1996 - 26 years ago. Sorry to break it to you, but that's not modern any more.

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  sorry, no. today's gamers at their prime time are lightyears ahead of what we could even imagine to achieve in our time. what has changed is that gaming went massive and tuned for the lowest common denominator, so most games routinely do obscene amount of handholding just to not frustrate any millennial or z snowflake that is a potential source of profit. most, but not all, and there are skill based games that would blow your mind.

• Re:

  There is a big market for highly skilled gamers now. They often stream on Twitch.

  Have a look on Youtube for some Mario ROM hack players, e.g. Grand Poo World 2. Those games are incredibly hard, and people love watching other people play them.

  It really kicked off in the 2000s with the original Kaizo Mario World hack. The third one in the series has only been completed (without cheating) by a handful of players, it's that difficult. It inspired many other hacks, and Nintendo's official Super Mario Maker.

• Re:

  Nah, it's just a dull game which Atari knew would bomb in the arcades so they focused on other titles. And arcade games at the time and pretty much since are all hardcore because people aren't feeding the machine money if it's easy to play the games. Even a game like Dragon's Lair which qualifies as perhaps the first game that was a movie with quicktime events was hardcore.

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• Re:

  As a collector of such machines, I think you hit it on the head, but easy/hard is not binary. If the players think it's too difficult, they'll spend their quarters elsewhere. I thought "Sinistar" was a fantastic concept, but after the first level or two, too hard for little ol' me. So others got my quarters.

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  Yeah, but there are other ways to accomplish that besides making the game excessively frustrating. One of the most obvious ways, is to make the game you get for your quarter run for a fixed amount of time, and the goal is to score as many points as possible in that time. The reason so many games of that era were so difficult, isn't because that was the only way to eat quarters. PC games of that era were often quite difficult as well, e.g., try your hand at Rogue (1980, the game that inspired the roguelik

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  When's Jeff Minter actually going to come up with an original game? Every single one of his games is just an LSD-distorted interpretation of an existing game. IMHO he's one of the most overrated game designers.

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    In fairness, 99% of ALL games are just distorted interpretations of previous games, including virtually all AAA games in at least the last 30 years. Most of them don't even include psychedelic distortions, or much of anything else to add anything new.

• Re:

  The Yak returns.

  Zarjaz!!