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Who had it in for the ST? - ST Format 41 - Yesterzine 62

It's December 1992 and the ST scene is looking crowded. ST Format even are even moved to ask "Who has it in for the ST?". But there's light on the horizon, Atari have a 32-bit computer and 64-bit console in their pockets and surely those will be a success and won't cause the 2nd Global Video Games Crash in as many decades? Elsewhere, the French do an adventure game and they may have found some kindred American spirits to go into partnership with. Also, Archer Maclean gets annoyed and the fate of the game the Falcon was designed to play. Rees : https://www.youtube.com/ctrlaltrees 2600+ vid : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYURhEuQX7s Thumbnail Atari ST Image : Bill Bertram CC By SA 2.5 Music : Retro Video Game 12th Warrior Composer, all tracks: Bjorn Lynne (PRS) Publisher, all tracks: Lynne Publishing (PRS) Licenced by Shockwave Sound Bonus Fact for Scrolling : As you've probably guessed, all 6 of the machines I implied were fictional are in fact real 8-bit micros, including the Corvette which is Russian. 00:00 Intro 01:56 Ween (Known as The Prophecy in North America) 09:06 The Global Video Game Crash 26:29 Lynx Round Up 36:19 Back Page - Ctrl-Alt-Rees

Dudley of Yesterzine

4 days ago

a Frenchman called wean what could have been and the worst frame rate you've ever seen it's December 1992 and this is yerine there are some machines that get rather forgotten in the popular conversation and by popular conversation I mean on YouTube there's spectrum and c64 everywhere but a lot less CPC and even less of the Lesser known 8bit machines like the Jupiter Ace Epson qx10 and dragon 32 proof being at least 10 % of you have no idea which of those three I made up and it's not just the Obs
cure and or fictional machines that are ignored you can't move on YouTube for videos about the Omega it even gets its own entire month of Omega which we've participated in for the last four years but you search for its great rival the Atari St and you get a lot less and worse on the first page you get lad's Lair a channel that thinks so little of you they'd probably lie to you about whether machines are fictional or not it's time to do our part in fixing that having not ever featured an st Magaz
ine on this show in 61 episodes and having not seen an st game since episode 8 we turned to The Godfather of Atari magazines St format roughly halfway through its run with issue 41 in December 1992 and in doing so we meet two more lesser covered machines as Cloud start to circle the commercial St Market St format review a bunch of games for Ataris stab at the handheld game games Market the links and they're looking forward to the in progress launch of the machine that'll ensure Atari Supremacy o
ver the next half decade the Falcon you probably don't have to watch too many YouTube videos to get a sense of how well that's going to go for them but watch this one at least please I'll even play an st game if you like in fact let's do that right now now let's get this out of the way immediately our main featured game this issue is by cocktail Vision that's right get the jokes out of your system now this is a highbrow show and we would never stoop to such easy humor so anyway dick phone were o
riginally a French developer and publisher of Adventure adjacent games the most famous product of theirs is the Goblins Trilogy which are Adventures based around combining the ability of the three protagonists over a series of single screen scenarios they were created by Muriel Tris a name you should probably have heard more about but who was ovov excitedly called the Roberta Williams of France by one blog once and us on Wikipedia too this is quite the coincidence as Wang telegram was bought out
by Seager in the year after this magazine was published it's not Muriel we're here to talk about though it's ween or as the aforementioned Wikipedia would have it be about this French game made in France by French people and published in most markets by a French company prophecy known in Europe Europe as wean Wikipedia editors complete cocktail heads the lot of them wean does resemble goblins a little though it's again a series of Adventure puzzle scenarios set across a single or in the case of
level one a small number of screens in essence it seems to be a bit of an escape room Vibe as in most cases the target appears to be to find the way out the plot is entirely nonsensical some stuff's gone down and an evil wizard needs killing by you wizard in training wean all of this apparently was prophesized the method of doing this will be to retrieve three grains of sand and put them in a haunted hourglass but they can't just be any grains of sand they have to be M&S sand or at least the on
es that can be retrieved at the end of three specific quests which in a useful piece of scheduling will also need to be completed within the next 3 days I want some of whatever they were smoking over in schlong Nokia's office and that's actually the reputation Winkle chat have much like there soon to be owners if you ask anyone about their Adventures then you'll get back chat about bizarre logic leaps in the puzzles and indeed that's what St format's problem with the game is in their actually qu
ite highly scored 79% review the interface though really isn't bad once you figure out a couple of quirks while goblins had the characters moving about the screen this game is firstperson fixed camera and will not directly be seen on it which does have the advantage of removing issues like the positioning ones we had in Shadow of the Comet a couple of months back objects will be on screen and are highlighted when you Mouse over them left click Picks Them Up and uses them right click puts them in
your inventory or if they're not suitable for that return to their original location early on the puzzles I've been doing don't seem that bad I found a copper ball and some tongs I opened a cupboard where there was lard and a knife standard Thursday night equipment all of it popping outside and ignoring the idiots we use the knife to retrieve some reads and pick up the straw in the back room the big key is too big for the padlock but does let us break into the skull where we find sleeping drugs
and some seeds we move the portrait to another hook and behind it we discover kpes a bit of experimentation reveals the rat guarding the stash will eat seeds and so it's pretty obvious you'll want to use the sleeping drugs to to get him which gets us a mold for a key that's presumably the one we'll need for the padlock guarding the exit so how to do that well there's a fireplace in the kitchen and the straw goes in there and then I grind to a halt but it turns out it's not my fault because in a
n instant in the back room I've broken my tongs and have locked myself out of progression in the game bugger this is a problem to me in logical puzzles is one thing but the thing about about illogical puzzles is they can be solved if only sometimes by accident with no indication I've locked myself out of progression I could be stuck here for hours trying literally everything especially once you realize some of the solutions are batshit case in point the thing I have the tongs for which is using
on the broken wooden fence outside to retrieve some wood which we'll be using in the fire in a minute to be fair there's only one more piece of bat shittery in this first sequence but it's an extended one having used the knife to get the reads you need to use it again to turn the read into a flute apparently that's not how flutes or knives work to play it you have to use it on yourself which is tricky when you're not on screen the secret is that the character menu is also an inventory of sorts a
nd you utilize that this is the same with combining items something I initially thought wasn't possible you normally access the inventory with a right click but doing so while holding something cancels the action you can however choose infantry from the menu to combine a slightly needless piece of interface pedantry the flu summons your friendly helper vampire M and this at least makes some sense if you've read the manual he likes fruit and will do you favors for it you started the game with str
awberries and he'll take those and return you jam but crucially also gold we can use to make the key with the padlock specified it must be n will also light the fire for you and our initial assumption several par back was correct use all the stuff together and we've got our key to progress so that's scenario one of 18 done and it's a somewhat cautious thumbs up sto might give other examples of bizarre puzzles and while some of them are mad I'm a lot more worried about this progression gating bec
ause I like the premise here a series of short bite-sized mini Adventures absolutely yes please and the manual points out you can't get a game over except in a very weird circumstance that can only happen in the last scenario but it lies doesn't it I effectively had one just in this quick play I got into what my friends over on the temporal discussion nightmare podcast would describe as losing state where you've already lost but it hasn't actually happened yet but still it's compelling it's got
charm and it actually looks really good SD formats a much the same and admit the art editor got lost in it for 3 days it could well be worth your time espe esally in a world where walkthroughs exist to combat the worst of the bat shittery however the problem exists that knowing a losing state is possible you'd be tempted to rely on it a lot quicker than you otherwise would just in case especially as the solution to Any Given scenario is not going to be longer than a couple of paragraphs if I hav
en't warned you off it already then I'm certainly not going to try any harder it's 79% of the way to a great adventure but to leave the last words to SD format themselves only if your ability to tolerate pain is extremely high you have been warned unwinding the brand history of Atari is complex enough to be a Fool's errand but thankfully most of that happened after this issue and quickly descends to a point where you'd need a satnav system to navigate yourself from the current Atari back to anyt
hing that resembles this one or the original one but we're getting ahead of ourselves because yes the Atari that made the St is not the Atari that made pong here's the short version in order to launch the famous VCS also known as this number which I've learned not to pronounce after reading the YouTube comments last time I did Atari needed money and to get it founder Nolan Bushnell sold a to Warner in 1976 in the short term it worked after all the VCS was a success for a while but after being re
ceived about as well as a British person on YouTube saying 2600 the 5200 was a commercial failure and multiple mistakes led to such a spectacular implosion that a global video games Crash happened in North America in 1983 torpedoing Warner's share price in the rest of the world of course we didn't notice at all because we've been smart enough to purchase a range of mostly non-fictional 8-bit computers like the video brain the micro expander and the Corvette and indeed even in the US the c64 neve
r went away and the Nez was near immediately a thing that existed even the VCS wasn't killed by it despite causing the console exclusive American localized Global video games Crash the 2600 kept selling and was made until mere months before this issue of St format was published so the definition of a global video game Crash is apparently a blip in the fortunes of one machine causes major restructuring at one company and most of the world doesn't notice write that down in your copy book now the V
CS wasn't so much saved by Atari or Nintendo though since in a desperate attempt to get out Warner split Atari into arcade and home and sold both off the home version and thus the VCS was sold to Jack tramil founder of commodore who had recently left that company under several clouds it's at this point I'm tempted to argue the St is the successor to the 64 instead of the Amiga the point though is having bought only the assets of the home side of Atari Jack renamed his own company traml technolog
y and subtitle readers that's not a typo to Atari so already it's not really the same company this would not be the last time this happened to Atari there's a reason the present surprisingly responsible stewards of the brand are referred to as zombie Atari in these parts while they kept selling those consoles a computer was developed originally Warner Atari had have been cooperating with some company called igga for this purpose and this is where a lot of the complex legals happen that eventuall
y led to Commodore buying Amiga traml Atari going it alone Atari releasing a system designed by the c64 guy Commodore releasing the machine that was supposed to be an Atari and essentially everyone suing everyone the St beat the Amiga to Market in quantity by months and if you count only the wedge shaped home user targeted machines by a full two years you look at the mid to late ' 80s market and there are a lot of times where the St is the only 16bit version of a game just because it had the mac
hines out there by late 1992 this had very much changed the first thing you'll read on the cover is the shape of things to come but the second thing you'll read is who's got it in for the St amidst the background of Publishers starting to abandon the machine they talk to Tom Watson from Renegade Publishers of games from sensible software and the bitmap brothers the problem is apparently not the Machine Sales which he admits have dropped off apparently the problem is ST owners are too picky on th
e St you can't get away with what you can get away with on the Amiga renegade's position is that its retailers being too cautious with stocking the format rather than the potential sales themselves blaming this for a slide from 21 in favor of the Omega to 51 within the last year we have phones ringing with ST owners who go into their local retailers and can't get hold of St games the market is there and people who say it's gone are talking out their we've hit well over five figures on sensible s
occer it's not clear if by well over five figures he means six figures or some amount over 10,000 research though tells me it's the latter given the 51 figure earlier the igga version would hit 200,000 by the end of the next year and was presumed some amount less than that at the end of 19 1992 giving the St version an absolute maximum sell through of just 40,000 copies whatever the reason that doesn't sound like a full-price software supporting Market to me and the SD was already starting to no
t get games next month St format will publish their top 50 games of all time and the winner will be the secret of Monkey Island the sequel is already out but it's not out on St US Gold laughably claim the St wasn't up to the task if the problem is getting games into retailers that's going to be the fault of Distributors like leure soft whose spokes drone again parrots the line that ST owners are more choosy while giving a different ratio of sensy sales to its own publisher they also blame greedy
programmers so you go outside the distribution Network and St format mention mail order companies like the legendary Special Reserve which sheds light on another problem we have a Special Reserve ad at the start of this issue and yes there's a strong range of games available the problem is look at the ones they highlight every single one of them is available on Amiga with developers not taking full advantage of the excellent s most of them would also look better on the Commodore machine I didn'
t mention it just now but wean also has both Amiga and dos versions Special Reserve themselves report the market share falling from 33 to 133% over the year and given they rapidly became the only source for some titles you'd think they would see the smallest fall I grabb the same month in Amiga format to cross reference both an Oma 600 and a 1 MB s will cost you a little under £300 you'll need to venture out from the Special Reserve ads for that though the savior of the St will sell you an Amiga
but not one of Ataris beasts the ad even has game gears over the links about which more later it does allow us to compare the games lineups though St format has Lotus 3 a couple of months after the igga mags reviewed it but after that pickings are somewhat slim with not one but two 73% rated RPGs and a slightly harsh verdict on the entertaining puzzle game Tiny squeaks which SNES owners know as brainies amga format has 130 more pages to play with and they've got Caesar road rash no second prize
and pimble Fantasies as certified bangers 22 full price new releases compared to just six in St format and every single one of those six was also on omiga Indie retailer ruis soft degrees pointing out they've been offered three St games and 10 Amiga games over the last 2 weeks they had already taken the decision to stop stalking the machine it's not all doom and gloom deline had changed their mind on porting flashback to the St and it would be available very soon it wasn't that's awkward still
The Aquatic game starring James Pond is out this very month so that's some oh oh dear to be fair aquatic games was also the last Pond game the A500 saw too logo was finally saved so what future for the St well St format posits that it'll be in the serious side but even then there's challenges CBS claimed to only be able to get hard drive stocks to fulfill half the orders they're getting for them but even so they feel the st's future lies in desktop publishing and music and while the Mac especial
ly would start eating that First Market the St was indeed Peerless in music for a long time rumors suggest that at least one famous name still used uses them as their weapon of choice atari's future of course is supposed to lie elsewhere the start of 1993 Heralds the start of the new generation the 32-bit computer generation this month their sister magazine is going big on commodor Entry the igga 1200 replacing the 68,000 processor with a 68,0 and20 really it's more exciting a difference than it
sounds once again Atari have got there first though the Falcon is already here and it uses a 68030 are you not entertained it gets even better though because in the new section SD format unveils the incredible Falcon 68,0 40 there's also going to be a falcon CD which you would think would be a hard sell in getting software support a then niche market on top of a then niche market but it's okay hey Atari have a plan for that they're going to make it compatible with the CDI that's a PC cased Pro
machine going up against the likes of the omga 4000 which already had a 040 and it's going to cost a grand so let's ignore that and deal with the machines they were expecting the families to buy once again Atari have beaten commodor to market the 1200 technically launches before Christmas but there's only 30,000 of them at £400 so what I'm sure will be its dramatic and long longterm success will have to begin during 1993 if you want to Falcon though silica will ship you a launch model right now
for £500 perhaps reflecting its increased capabilities like half as much RAM and fewer colors I mock for effect as St format points out the next month slightly combatively the Falcon was by no means Toothless having presumably got hold of one of those 30,000 a 1200s Clive Parker non literally breaks it down he points out that the headline colors figure for the a1200 rather hinges on nothing ever moving and ideally you never looking at it they point out the a1200 o2o is underclocked compared to n
ormal spec and wonder why I'll tell you one reason it happens lower clock chips are often just higher clock chips that failed quality testing and are thus cheaper I have no idea if this was true in this case might stdf also offer the excellent DSP chip a proper highdensity disc drive and some genuinely impressive sound capabilities but even Clive accepts that the danger here is atari's marketing department in a revelation that barely qualifies as foreshadowing for more we refer to the guest rant
column of both issues and let's start with the much Mis Legend Archer mlan I'll throw a bone to the depressed Atari owners watching this first though he praises the a1200 calling it technically Fab and claims in console form it would kill all known consoles dead I hope Commodore weren't listening because they launched exactly that machine 9 months later and assuming you are all streaming this now on your Commodore br52 then he was right he laments the st's decline saying sales of his famous lic
ensed snooker title had held up very well on the machine and that the game itself was almost identical on both I suspect he means the later SES and it's relevant he was a machine code programming genius the likes of which we've seen few of but it's a good point a well-driven St gave away little the problem was it usually gave away something and wasn't cheaper the black clouds come next well clearly he's got an a1200 to be able to judge the thing he does not have a falcon claiming to be too busy
he does though talk about being fobbed off at atari's eects stand by people who knew knew very little and by demos consisting of high-res color images something we have just established is the literal single thing the Falcon does worse than the new Miggy and this isn't some consumer show there's no chance the guy on the stand thought he was dealing with a random member of the public or needed to be anything other than a tech expert the European computer trade show was hugely important at the tim
e and attended by the people its name suggests Archer suggested did his new pool game could come to Falcon with proper physics and colors only for Atari to be unable to confirm any of it might be possible he hopes Atari would sort their [ __ ] out and pay money to good developers to get software but if they did clearly the author of drop zone and Jimmy White's whn snooker wasn't important enough to be one of them PA never came to Falcon maybe someone else is if you remember last year we had the
incredible looking Legend of Valor an RPG that Bethesda themselves admit was an inspiration for The Elder Scrolls games this is a 1993 game that's Advanced enough to do ray tracing in some places while it works very well on a standard A500 or indeed s it can use every bit of power you throw at it we're a few months earlier here and Kev bulmer from Dimension Creative Design is working on Legends they've been doing all the graphics to Falcon standards he says legendss on falcon would knock everyon
e sideways and for the time I believe him he even thought it could support VR in his own words it's almost as if it's been designed to play Legends of Valor but we don't know because they don't have one Atari first told them games were out and the Falcon was a business machine then they saw it promised DCd a machine and didn't a developer working on what could be the killer app who is an Atari fan to the extent he owned one of the first 200 STS in the country and a company who was still releasin
g the incredibly complex Legends on St in a world where a simple porting of its best game was not viable can't get a machine and this unfortunately was roughly the way it went the Falcon 04 was never released the Falcon CD was never released the Falcon as a platform was discontinued towards the end of 1993 about the same time Atari quietly stopped fulfilling orders for the St they had gone all in on console with the Jaguar a machine they claimed to be 64 bits but which notably has at its heart t
he same 68,000 from the Atari St allbe it higher clocked and with a lot of help it's not as sexy as the 68,000 of40 though is it you know the ajua didn't work out for Atari though they went all in on it but by the end of 1995 Atari had made only 225,000 Jaguars and they still had 100,000 of them almost all of which ended up with a specialist stock Liquidator if you're in the UK and own a Jaguar there is a very good chance you bought it as New Old Stock around the year 2000s for 30 quid and now y
ou know why traml lari didn't make it that far in 1996 they were effectively taken over in what was dressed up as a with uninteresting hard drive manufacturer jts and it killed them too after a fire cell that involves selling the rights to the Atari name but again crucially not the company to Hasbro in 1998 they were dead by Christmas there is a silver lining though Hasbro left with no machines and in need of good PR to relaunch Atari released all the IP involved into the public domain and using
this new Jaguar cartridge games Flash carts and the excellent 50 compilation mean the machine is alive to this day so wait a single company fails but its name is sold on and continues a machine causes a meltdown but somehow also lives on I know what this is we have a name for this so in future if any American tells you about the global video games Crash you can now tell them about it and about the fate of Atari the jaguar and the Falcon I'm sure that's what they're referring to Atari of course
had one more Hardware iron in the machine fire their portable games machine the links thankfully not launched under its originally planned name of the handy game after it turned out that was already trademarked by your mom we've just spent 15 minutes attempting to make sense of the complex relationship of Hardware between Commodore and Atari and I'm only going to make things worse you see the links was originally developed at games publisher epics by RJ maau and Dave needle two of the four Chief
designers of the Amiga epic originally contracted Atari to help with production and marketing then their financial problems left Atari with the whole deal the best side effect being that Atari had to buy Amigas to develop games for the thing despite all this it beat the game gear to Market was cheaper than sega's machine and had better battery life but neither were ultimately able to do much about the all conquering monochromatic Game Boy and this issue of STD format happens much like apparentl
y every other machine they ever sold right towards the end of atari's official support for the machine nonetheless St format have as many as six games to review this issue and I want to focus on two of them hard driving and Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure I choose these for two reasons one they're the two lowest scorers and we haven't done that for a while on this show but two both these games have abs absolutely excellent versions on the Game Boy The Game Boy should not be able to do hard dr
iving but it got the expanded version race driving and it's a minor miracle the secret is it's by Argonaut soon to be known for the super FX chip and Star Fox race driving is no kidding my favorite home conversion of the entire series and works better on Game Boy than it has even the tiniest right to I genuinely play it over the mid way arcade Treasures emulated arcade versions I've not played the links version but this should be an open goal for a machine with much more power and a color screen
booting it up does not endear you immediately I imagine that in court this would legally be determined music but that's the biggest recommendation I can give it then you get into the game and immediately feel rather nostalgic for the music I see where the mark for this game came from immediately the frame rate is designed to allow ample time to admire the art the Collision detection is enthusiastic but the real problem is the cause of that crash it's fantastically over sensitive you can see a D
Si style ball on the dash of how much I'm turning and copying DSi for digital driving games is never a bad idea but it's so very easy to overate that it's actually harder starting from scratch on a curve than just taking the curve and in game one I failed to even get it into the dip trying again quickly to avoid the music doesn't improve the situation much I slow down to give myself any chance of taking the curve and an enemy car drives straight through me without warning the replay being especi
ally damning whatever they've tried to do with the control just isn't working once I get up some speed I figure out some of it the game game is very tail happy the back is always trying to pass the front but with the controls being this slow and not so much unresponsive as lagged then there's no feedback that would allow you to cope with that and the road's resolution is so low that you can count pixels at any kind of distance the stunt track is the famous One in HD especially the loop and that'
s a problem not least because of the enemy cars apparently guarding the line you need to take into it the 40 mph Corner before the loop cannot be taken at 40 and I perform what can only be described as some sort of mating dance in front of the loop itself when I finally get restarted straight it's so close to the inversion there's no hope of building up speed on a second attempt I don't even see where I went off the loop or how I'd prevent it you do have to slightly turn right to get around it b
ut slightly turn right is not in this game's wheelhouse and neither is Collision detection because I'm very clearly on my own side of the road when this car hits me it's off top topic but I feel the need to show you that game boy version firstly the initial enemy cars bug are off so you can choose your course in peace secondly it's running at a frame rate that qualifies as animation thirdly you can somehow see better into the distance in four Shades of Gray than on the links I demonstrate how to
do the loop easily on my first go back not least because with less lagged controls the feedback the game is giving you can actually be reacted to you can see this on the speed course where I fly around a lap with ease yes this is an unfair comparison it's the might of argonut against what appears to be one bloke with the lyns version the irony is that hard Drivin and the linkx bter by tengen a company set up by the split arcade side of Atari to allow them to release home games where they didn't
own the rights to the Atari name you'd almost think they were trying to sabotage the x or something this time let's start with the Game Boy Bill and Ted's Excellent Game Boy Adventure is correctly named it's an excellent single screen 2D platform puzzle game it's a simple premise collect all the stuff the exit appears you leave through it it's generous with lives and passwords and I am totally ass at it but especially these days with save states you can try again instantly to figure out a new i
dea it's quick it's inventive these devs absolutely played manic Miner before they worked on this for such a big film license it's a surprisingly obscure gem in the game boy's extensive library and this exact idea would be even better on a console with a bit of color the links is no question absolutely up to it there's no danger of me being proved wrong on that specific score because that's not the game The Links got instead it's this curiosity set after the initial two movies it's a completely
different game from the Game Boy one and comes from Hardware creators epics so should have every chance it doesn't really the basic gameplay Loop isn't dissimilar you're here to collect all the items in in this case the musical notes and then exit the level in your way are a bunch of useless NPCs and the worst video game AI since that Spectrum version of Pac-Man last month it's also really slow even with all this footage being with me holding down the Run button it has good ideas you pick up mus
ical instruments which have various effects sometimes even in previous levels and you'll need to travel time period to time period to complete this one all of this is made clear in one of my favorite M manuals ever or rather this poster pretending to be a manual it's all the game needs and it's a shame games can't be bothered to do even this much these days St format a smidge harsh on this one there's a nice enough Adventure here but it's literally a case of finding items then trying them on peo
ple something that's surprisingly difficult even with a guide and the AI that seeks towards you means blocked passengers can entirely stop you progressing without deliberately dying it's not the hard drivve in Port but it's still not one you'd Rush to play I Feel we're being needlessly down on the links itself here neither of these games are its fault especially Bill and Ted so let me make up for that by showing you what it could really do this is blue Lightning also from Hardware developers epi
cs it is essentially Glock or after burner for the links and it's a links exclusive and launch title it gets 80% more from St format than Bill and Ted does and it deserves it it's a stuning little title that absolutely matches anything The Game Gear could be doing and even expands a little on the premise across nine missions while initially it's all planes later you end up with slightly more complex missions with ground targets as well but more to the point look at the speed of the thing the con
trols the graphics it's a proper demonstration of The Perennial problem of Atari machines being underused the Jaguar got screwed by crappy amig and St ports being sold for 50 Quid everyone seemed to half fast the links the s's abilities were rarely utilized and the Falcon just entirely ignored you can call Atari anything but apparently no matter what the Incarnation of Atari no matter what the hardware involved they absolutely screw up the management of it culminating in the rump of Atari being
used to flog crypto and casinos at the end of the last decade we may finally be through it though the current zombie Atari engaged with the community they now own the famous Atari age forum they bought digital Eclipse makers of quality retro compilations forever and used them to produce the fabulous love letter that is the utterly essential Atari 50 release and they've parlayed this into the very interesting Atari 2600 plus an emulation box sure but a quality one that can use the original periph
erals and runs original carts for both the 2600 and 7800 it's a lovely little machine and the joystick that comes with it will happily work the other way too on an original VCS they're now working on an Atari 800 replica where Unfortunately they partnered with some famous copyright trolls and forgot computers need working keyboards so they're not perfect but it's the first time in two decades the name Atari will solicit anything but giggling or sad shakes of the head and we can all celebrate tha
t on the back page interested in that 2600 plus HP over to control out Reese where he's taken advant AG of his God tiari collection to test it with a bunch of real carts and controllers if you're wondering if it works with something he has almost certainly tested it with that something and we'll show you what happened and come back next month I say next month thanks to travel scheduling I'm writing this on the 25th of January the end of March seems like some kind of scary Herby dragons nightmare
land but we'll be there and maybe you should be too it'll take your mind off the invasion of the space less as I'm expecting week before that don't have [Music] nightmares

Comments

@amniote69

Jeff Minter of Llamasoft wrote some cracking games for the ST. I remember Defender 2 , which bundled ports of Williams' Defender and Stargate plus Mr Minter's psychedelic maelstrom "Defender 2".

@jon-paulfilkins7820

Atari Falcon, I remember a guy who used to go to UK Science Fiction Conventions with a Falcon hooked up to a hard drive collection entries for a "real" Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. If you are a Terry Pratchett fan, he was the guy who inspired Hodgesaargh because he had a day job story he once rolled out in a bar.

@ctrlaltrees

The Coktel puns are simply splendid. Never come across The Prophecy before but seems pretty brutal! Also spot on with the Video Game Crash stuff from our perspective as well as the Atari history - even the more tongue-in-cheek bits 😉 The Lynx was such an underrated console. Also big thanks for the shoutout! Your cheque is in the post. 😁

@craigcharlesworth1538

The 2600 wasn't the only machine caught up in the video game crash, in fact due to a big install base it rode out the storm fairly well. The Colecovision and Intellivision were bigger casualties; in fact despite all that Barbie and He-Man money the Intellivision haemorrhaged so much cash it almost took Mattel down with it. But yeah, the point you make about the crash being largely a US thing with Japanese and European gamers barely noticing a ripple is true. I was barely out of nappies at the time and only just starting to play videogames but I certainly don't remember any period when there was a lack of videogames or hardware in the shops to buy.

@martinh4982

Thanks for the Bill & Ted GB recommendation. Been rocking the old school handheld emulation scene lately, always looking for tips.

@ItsCrapContent

There is something very very spectrumy about the ST that i like

@ChknHugga

The ST was my favourite computer of the era. Amiga users were always self-righteous

@WhatHoSnorkers

Lovely stuff.Atari ST looked OK round my mate's but his brother had an Amiga as well...

@TimberwolfK

My cousin had an ST - always seemed a nice machine and was decently good at the 3D stuff (at least, I found Geoff Crammond's Formula One Grand Prix perfectly playable) but I guess there wasn't enough to differentiate it, unless you had a studio full of MIDI devices. And then not giving any of your developers the magic saviour machine is one of those spectacular own goals the makers of the 68k-based machines seemed to love scoring in the mid-'90s.

@charlieatari9238

The STE was my fav growing up, especially for music composition.

@davidmylchreest3306

For Lynx owners feeling bad about their Hard Drivin' port, may I suggest playing the C64 version?

@IntoTheVerticalBlank

Great job! I lived through this. Atari having no idea what to do with their better machines , stopping to focus on games and then going belly up.

@RetroBytesUK

Can't believe any liked Forth enough for the Jupiter Ace to be real.

@ErraticPT

Had a 2600, 400, 800, 130XE, 520 STM (no, I don't mean STFM) and finally a 520 STE. So you could say I'm Atari to the core. Still got both ST and 2 HDD for them, although they haven't been powered on for years.

@TheBasementChannel

This reminds me I need to get my Mega working

@RetroSegaDev

Love the ST due to associated nostalgia :) I'd probably have liked the Amiga more if I'd had more exposure to it.

@shadowinthevoid

I would say i'd like to try playing some ST games but unfortunatly i've played plenty on the Amiga thanks to lazy ports.

@GigerPunk

0:25 Dragon 32? At last some PROPER computing! Oh. Oh well, I'm sure a deep dive into Dragon User will be along next month (once you've got Snorkers to type in the games they review), or the month after that at the VERY latest. Any month now anyway, I'm certain of it.

@WojciechPietrzok

Atari ST was a great machine for its time, so many good memories of it! Unfortunately the death of the system was long and painful, with less, and less games published every month. Or a monstrosities such as Street Fighter 2 port, that may lacked the animated backgrounds, but had both frames per second (nonetheless it was one of my favorite games). And before the Falcon disappointment, Atari already disappointed their users with MEGA STE and TT machines.

@hdestotallyunoriginalgamin3555

Heh! He said the thing! EDIT: Multiple things.