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Garbage Scow Captain, Class 1
Last night, having properly connected a game controller to my computer, I booted up the Atari800MacX emulator and for the first time in ages I played through a whole game of Star Raiders, the Atari 400/800's true killer app and the granddaddy of the modern "space sim" genre.
This video is highretrogamelord playing it on the highest difficulty level (not sure if there are any cheats involved).
Star Raiders was basically a hybrid of the old text-based "Star Trek" game, and a first-person arcade space shooter like Starship 1. It had a bit of strategy to it: the galaxy is a grid of "sectors", and you're trying to wipe out all the enemies while keeping them from destroying your starbases, which they do by surrounding a starbase sector with enemy-occupied sectors on all sides for too long (like an attack in Go, the game that inspired the name Atari). Within a sector, you're chasing down enemies in three dimensions in a mostly smooth first-person perspective view that was just mind-blowing in 1979. You have limited energy and can take systems damage that affects gameplay in various ways; the starbases provide energy and repairs. Travel between sectors is by hyperspace jump, which is expensive and tricky. Your "rank" at the end of the game is computed from a formula that combines several aspects of your performance (the manual actually gave the formula).
I was playing it on Pilot, the lowest difficulty level that isn't baby/God mode (you can take damage, and have to manually fly the hyperspace jumps). Wow, I've gotten really bad at Star Raiders. I never got that good at it, I think because when I was a kid, its immersion was actually anxiety-inducing--a remarkable thing to say about a primitive game for an 8-bit personal computer.
But last night, I think I got the lowest possible joke ranking, even though I completed the game without dying and I think prevented any starbases from being destroyed. (It was a near thing--the *last enemy left in the galaxy* got in a lucky hit that took my shields down, and rather than continue to duke it out as a one-hit-point wonder I ran away to a starbase for servicing before coming back to kill it, and that probably dropped my score.)
I'd forgotten how tricky the "stay on the beam for the hyperspace jump" mini-game is. Mastering that is probably key because if you're not good at it, it doubles the number of expensive hyperspace jumps you have to do.
Seen with modern eyes, the game can get repetitive. But it successfully tugs at your emotions and it's got some interesting emergent strategy that comes out of the interaction of simple features, which is always something I like in a game. (For instance, how do you get to a starbase for repairs if your main engine is broken? The hyperdrive never goes out, so you have to initiate a hyperwarp and interrupt it until you're close enough.)
This video is highretrogamelord playing it on the highest difficulty level (not sure if there are any cheats involved).
Star Raiders was basically a hybrid of the old text-based "Star Trek" game, and a first-person arcade space shooter like Starship 1. It had a bit of strategy to it: the galaxy is a grid of "sectors", and you're trying to wipe out all the enemies while keeping them from destroying your starbases, which they do by surrounding a starbase sector with enemy-occupied sectors on all sides for too long (like an attack in Go, the game that inspired the name Atari). Within a sector, you're chasing down enemies in three dimensions in a mostly smooth first-person perspective view that was just mind-blowing in 1979. You have limited energy and can take systems damage that affects gameplay in various ways; the starbases provide energy and repairs. Travel between sectors is by hyperspace jump, which is expensive and tricky. Your "rank" at the end of the game is computed from a formula that combines several aspects of your performance (the manual actually gave the formula).
I was playing it on Pilot, the lowest difficulty level that isn't baby/God mode (you can take damage, and have to manually fly the hyperspace jumps). Wow, I've gotten really bad at Star Raiders. I never got that good at it, I think because when I was a kid, its immersion was actually anxiety-inducing--a remarkable thing to say about a primitive game for an 8-bit personal computer.
But last night, I think I got the lowest possible joke ranking, even though I completed the game without dying and I think prevented any starbases from being destroyed. (It was a near thing--the *last enemy left in the galaxy* got in a lucky hit that took my shields down, and rather than continue to duke it out as a one-hit-point wonder I ran away to a starbase for servicing before coming back to kill it, and that probably dropped my score.)
I'd forgotten how tricky the "stay on the beam for the hyperspace jump" mini-game is. Mastering that is probably key because if you're not good at it, it doubles the number of expensive hyperspace jumps you have to do.
Seen with modern eyes, the game can get repetitive. But it successfully tugs at your emotions and it's got some interesting emergent strategy that comes out of the interaction of simple features, which is always something I like in a game. (For instance, how do you get to a starbase for repairs if your main engine is broken? The hyperdrive never goes out, so you have to initiate a hyperwarp and interrupt it until you're close enough.)
no subject
WHA....!
Later during a lull, I asked her what she did there. She was a property/facilities manager, not involved in the programming side at all. Still, she had some interesting stories. And we got to tell our side connecting with Atari: our nearest city, just down the mountain, Alamogordo, NM: was a burial site for the E.T.: The Extraterrestrial video game cartridge!
no subject
But they attracted people in part because they were one of the earlier technology firms to have a casual environment in the office--in those days, most programmers still wore a suit and tie to work.
Star Raiders was the solo creation of Doug Neubauer, who had also designed the POKEY chip that handled sound generation, keyboard scanning and paddle controllers for the 400/800. The days of this kind of thing being the creation of one person are long gone, but it's a real tour de force. For a while, it seemed like every video game manufacturer and platform had to do a Star Raiders knockoff. Atari's own port for the 2600 was generally held to be inferior to Activision's Starmaster. I personally kind of like Imagic's Star Voyager, which isn't as deep but simplifies the gameplay to better fit the platform.
Neubauer later did the 2600 game Solaris as a kind of spiritual successor--the gameplay in Solaris isn't exactly the same but in some ways it's even more complicated.
no subject
Enemies won't warp out of a sector while you're in it, but they will do so when you're not, and this happens at regular intervals. Timing is key. Even if you execute your hyperspace jump perfectly, the enemy may have left by the time you get there.
no subject
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCJ4YxEwNkU
Not great, eh? Aside from the strange Yellow Dimension aesthetics, the sluggish frame rate makes it look a bit like the Star Raiders clones we all tried to write in BASIC (yeah, I had my own, every Atari kid with dreams of game development tried that, but of course Star Raiders was written directly in 6502 machine code using every trick in the book).
The Intellivision's "Space Spartans" added speech synthesis, but forewent the "streaming starfield" effect:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUuaxv7Xhko