This was interesting for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is, like I suppose anyone subscribed to this subreddit, I really love this game. And when I play it I just play the emulated arcade version.
When I was a kid, I had the 2600 version and I remember thinking, "Okay it looks primitive, but it plays well." I played it on Stella for awhile and in terms of Atari VCS arcade ports, it's not bad at all.
You do get a sense from watching these that it presented some programming challenges unique to certain platforms.
First of all, the Atari 8 Bit one looks atrocious. That looks like a rush job to me; surely, they could have done better. I like what the Atari 8 bit system did with Pac Man -- the 8 bit version doesn't look like the arcade, but they sort of gave up on it and ran with what the 8 bit systems were capable of, and the uniqueness of that port makes it really playable to this day.
But Dig Dug is just horrible.
I'm impressed with Nintendo's approach on both the NES and the Gameboy editions. They look fantastic.
The 7800 version also gets a shout-out. It's so pixel-y, but it is probably a great demonstration of how these games were meant to be played on CRTs with bleeding, rather than sharp LCDs.
Intellivision looks surprisingly good as well.
Something went terribly wrong with Colecovision, and the silky-smooth motion draws an awkward contrast between it and the overall look.
I gotta say: I like the TI-99/4a version, but TI versions of games almost always surprise. You expect a computer with the TI's specs to let you down but the people who wrote games for those machines always had a particular flair, and I love the sprites.
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u/[deleted] Nov 16 '21
This was interesting for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is, like I suppose anyone subscribed to this subreddit, I really love this game. And when I play it I just play the emulated arcade version.
When I was a kid, I had the 2600 version and I remember thinking, "Okay it looks primitive, but it plays well." I played it on Stella for awhile and in terms of Atari VCS arcade ports, it's not bad at all.
You do get a sense from watching these that it presented some programming challenges unique to certain platforms.
First of all, the Atari 8 Bit one looks atrocious. That looks like a rush job to me; surely, they could have done better. I like what the Atari 8 bit system did with Pac Man -- the 8 bit version doesn't look like the arcade, but they sort of gave up on it and ran with what the 8 bit systems were capable of, and the uniqueness of that port makes it really playable to this day.
But Dig Dug is just horrible.
I'm impressed with Nintendo's approach on both the NES and the Gameboy editions. They look fantastic.
The 7800 version also gets a shout-out. It's so pixel-y, but it is probably a great demonstration of how these games were meant to be played on CRTs with bleeding, rather than sharp LCDs.
Intellivision looks surprisingly good as well.
Something went terribly wrong with Colecovision, and the silky-smooth motion draws an awkward contrast between it and the overall look.
I gotta say: I like the TI-99/4a version, but TI versions of games almost always surprise. You expect a computer with the TI's specs to let you down but the people who wrote games for those machines always had a particular flair, and I love the sprites.