The Atari 2600 games library vs The ZX Spectrum's

[PeteProdge]

It's a bit of a fool's errand to bring up a rival system's games and pit them against the system favoured by almost everybody on the forum. Especially if that rival system is objectively lower in nearly every specification. A bit like putting a seaside donkey into the Grand National. Alright, not as bad as that, because I do admire some of the Atari 2600 games.

Atari 2600 overview

The Atari 2600 has a longevity that beats the Speccy, it began life as the Atari VCS way back in 1977 (reaching Europe in 1978) and you could still buy it brand new from Argos in 1992 for a cool £75. It's part of the 'Second Generation' of games consoles (1976-1992). Yeah, the Speccy ain't a console but if it was, it'd fit there.

Games were produced on cartridge, so on loading times it obviously beats the Speccy but they're certainly not cheaper than a cassette! The majority tended to be just 4K in size, going up to 8K for the better ones. I guess this is where the Speccy has an obvious advantage, you can do more in 16K than 8K, and of course, I could throw in 48K and 128K, but that's rubbing their faces in it.

I've never been a fan of fat chunky pixels (which is why I never became a C64 owner!), which is the obvious visual detraction here. The colour palette can vary from soft pastels to retina-scarring neons. The 2600 sound chip has more range than the 16K/48K BEEP and homebrew programmers can get it to perform almost at AY-chip levels.

A game where the Speccy beats the Atari 2600: Pac Man

Although the Atari 2600 version sold immensely well (come on, it's 1981, not many options for playing Pac Man away from an arcade and this has direct Atari endorsement!) and I shouldn't really be sneering at the primitive videogaming market, the enormous weakness here is the flickering enemy sprites. The flickering is such that many game captures make it look like only two ghosts exist in this version (especially in the YouTube video I include here) when in fact there are four. Plus, Pac Man himself only ever faces left or right, and the landscape orientation means fatter pills and the warp tunnel is at north/south rather than east/west. Aside from that, it does an alright job of mimicking the arcade classic's gameplay. If you can't be arsed firing up an emulator or the real thing, here's a way to play Atari 2600 Pac Man in your browser - arrow keys and SPACE. Apparently this was released unfinished.



ZX Spectrum: Although I really should pit Atarisoft's official licensed Speccy version against it, I'm going for a low blow by choosing Pac-Man Emulator on the 128K Spectrum, which utilises the actual coin-op game data and does a really decent job of getting the Speccy as close as damn it to the real thing. Yeah, I'm being cruel here. This would beat pretty much most official Pac Man games on other systems.



Of course, to be truly even-handed, I should at least bring in a homebrew equivalent for the Atari 2600. Yep, their homebrew community came up with an objectively better improvement - Pac-Man 8K, which, while still in landscape, the visuals are loads better and the flickering is minimised to an acceptable level. Sounds really faithful too. Although the Speccy version I picked still beats it, I think Atari 2600 Pac-Man 8K beats the Atarisoft 1984 Pac Man on the Speccy.

A game where the Atari 2600 beats the Speccy: Yar's Revenge

My favourite game on the 2600, the weird shoot 'em up Yar's Revenge is just absolutely nuts and is rather confusing for a first timer. That flickering shimmering 'river' of garbled graphics gives you the feel that the game has slightly crashed, but no, it's incredibly addictive, even if it feels like you're battling Teletext enemies and squares. To explain it would take up so much time, but you will suss it out in your first five minutes of messing about with it. Javascript emulator to play Yar's Revenge in your browser - arrows and SPACE bar.



There's no official version of Yar's Revenge on the ZX Spectrum, so we'll have to look to the homebrew scene, and it goes under the nudge-nudge-wink-wink name of Ray's Reprisal. It's good, a fan of the original won't be massively disappointed by it, there's a nice thunder of white noise when your enemy is blown up and the shimmering 'safe zone' is more pleasing to your eye. Alas, it does feel a tad slower than the 2600. There are some nice touches in Ray's Reprisal that excels over the original, but overall, I'm going with the Atari 2600 here.



Over to you...

Of course, the above is just my opinion. Can you come up with a couple of games where the Speccy triumphs and also fails against Atari's first post-Pong console? Here's a list of practically every Atari 2600 game ever commercially released.

[RWAC]

There's not many 2600 games that I like, but H.E.R.O is brilliant and it's better than the Spectrum version.

Most games on the system are a bit too simplistic for me.

[Nitrowing]

My cousin had the 2600 when it came out and I remember really enjoying Pifall

[Turtle_Quality]

Games I still go back to on the Atari 2600

4 player Warlords
This and Bomberman are the ultimate multiplayer fun for me

Combat
Tanks with bouncing bombs, the glitchy way they could sometimes hop over walls

Adventure
The duck-like dragons hopping after you, and the bat picking up something and taking it away just when you wanted it

Maze Craze
The graphics are ZX81 standard (ok with colour) but again great multi player fun

Also decent on the VCS - Super Breakout, Asteroids. Millipede, Circus

The Spectrum lacks paddle controllers of course, but if you exclude paddle games, it would be more than capable of a decent Combat, Adventure or Maze Craze

[toot_toot]

The early Activision games on the Spectrum were very hit and miss when compared to the Atari 2600 versions, but they had really nice clam shell packaging.

[Matt_B]

Pitfall II in particular is a far better game for the VCS than it was for the Spectrum.

That said, it was pretty much the high watermark for VCS development - latter day homebrew aside - and games didn't really get any bigger and more complex beyond it, where the Spectrum was barely getting started at that point.

You definitely weren't getting the likes of Lords of Midnight, Laser Squad, Elite, Tau Ceti, Quazatron or R-Type on a VCS. The hardware was only really designed for games with a few sprites and a blocky playfield, such as Combat and Pong, and it took some highly inventive coding to get beyond that.

[blucey]

The 2600's graphics are disgusting. So there's that.

A few years back there was a compilation thing on the Xbox 360 called Games Room. I played a lot of 2600 stuff on there and not much of it was good.

The only game I liked when growing up and playing on a friend's 2600 was Combat.

[Juan F. Ramirez]

It's part of the 'Second Generation' of games consoles (1976-1992)

Just a question... which were the 'first generation' ones?

[PeteProdge]

Just a question... which were the 'first generation' ones?

From 1972 onwards:
Magnavox/Philips Odyssey
TV Tennis Electrotennis
Atari Home Pong
Coleco Telstar
Nintendo Color TV-Game

The Magnavox Odyssey is the world's first console (1972). It is truly dreadful, it's only vaguely more advanced than an Etch A Sketch. It displays square dots that you control with knobs (a la Etch A Sketch) and it can't track scores so the players have to manually do that. That said, for it being the very first, of course it's going to be laughably primitive. And, like John Logie Baird's television, while awful, it took a lot of guts and dedication to strike out and be the first. Very easy to mock with the luxury of what we have now. At the time, if you wanted to play video games, you'd have to visit a bar that had Computer Space to put some coins into, or have access to a mainframe to play some simple games.

[catmeows]

I'm big fan of Demon Attack on Atari 2600. I consider it second best fixed shooter right after Galaga.

Also, Thrust on Atari 2600 is very good conversion.

[Pobulous]

River Raid and Demon Attack look better on 2600.

Pole Position looks worse but plays better on Atari.

[Matt_B]

Also, Thrust on Atari 2600 is very good conversion.

It's a great version, but it's a relatively recent homebrew so a little bit unfair to compare to the Spectrum one from 1986.

Some other good homebrew includes:

Galagon - a great version of Galaga.
Halo - from Ed Fries of Xbox fame.
Man Goes Down - yes, the name, but it's a classy endless faller.
Starcastle - an "impossible" port of a game that Howard Warshaw said couldn't be done. (So Warshaw created Yar's Revenge instead back in the day.)

[1024MAK]

The 2600's graphics are disgusting. So there's that.

It doesn’t have any graphics or text modes, AT ALL. There is therefore no video memory. Indeed, it only has 128 bytes of RAM. There are however some single line sprites (five - two for the players, two missiles and a ‘ball’). Anything else and the microprocessor (a cut-down version of a 6502) has to supply pixel information to the video system exactly in sync with the ‘video beam’ while it’s drawing a ‘tv’ line. Maximum horizontal resolution is 160 “pixels”. See here for more detailed information

Mark

[Turtle_Quality]

There was a book "racing the beam " that discusses how Atari programmers overcame the severe limitations of the machine.... before I saw that I thought it had no colour clash, hardware sprites ... much easier than the Spectrum. How wrong I was.

[Gilberto]

Just remembered, back in 1982 or so, when 8 yo, a child flushed my colored pencils down the toilet, and to compensate me, he invited me to his house to play something new.
This, which seems like some cheap plot or script, was the first time I saw a domestic video game (not the small Game&Watch that I already knew perfectly). And the system's brand... I remember it to be Philips, so making a simple research, it should be Videopac G7000 (that is, Odyssey 2).
i remember its crude keyboard and the blocky pixels... and the game that more impressed me was a sort of an air battle WWI style with clouds to hide in. So, in a second thought, it could be Atari in itself or a cheap copy (wich I doubt given the early age)...I don't know, it's been four decades. Anyway, there's a fair distance between each system and its tech. The tech race back in the day was frenzy.
Altough a good comparison would be between montezuma's revenge and Panama Joe

[Journeyman]

There was a book "racing the beam " that discusses how Atari programmers overcame the severe limitations of the machine.... before I saw that I thought it had no colour clash, hardware sprites ... much easier than the Spectrum. How wrong I was.

Yeah, apparently it was INCREDIBLY difficult to program, with everything having to be very critically timed on the display, and as a result the PAL and NTSC versions of games were different and incompatible with each other.

The most infamous piece of 2600 software was, of course, E.T. - a classic example of "everyone loves this film, we can produce any old crap and they'll buy it" - hohoho!