7800 Pro Gamer

@Funkmaster V that was a great interview. Some good insights there and it sounds like the scrolling platforms in Crystal Quest was giving Pacmanplus a headache. I thought it was weird that there was no moving platforms and now it makes sense. I should've known that he was smart enough to want to include them and also smart enough to step away when they weren't working.

@Funkmaster V thanks. I'll give this a listen while I'm at work in the morning and hopefully I'll get a little insight.

Crystal Quest Featuring Bentley Bear is a platforming game similar in feel and style to Adventure Island or Wonder Boy. The Atari 7800 has desperately needed platformers in the vein of Super Mario Bros since 1986, and even with this glaring hole in the library, homebrew developers have been slow to fill it. I don't blame anybody but Atari for the under representation of this genre, but it does feel a little odd that nothing was really released until 2014 to fill the gap. So, does Crystal Quest do more than fill a gap in the 7800 library? Lets dig in and find out! I think the best place to start is with the graphics, and these are fairly impressive for the 7800 Prosystem. The title screen looks fantastic, and most of the level design and backgrounds look pretty good as well. I do find the color choices a little bland later in the game, and I think the 5th world is kind of an odd style choice, but overall the graphics satisfy and excels! Bentley Bear is a nice rotund little hero similar to a plumber we all know and love, and he animates well. All the enemies have a distinctive look and may be familiar to those of use who enjoyed the various releases of Crystal Castles in the past. And the end level bosses are nice and large, and appropriately intimidating to look at! I would've liked some more variety in the end world bosses, but I do like what we get. NOOOO THEIR SLOWLY GOING TO WALK INTO ME! HELP! It's so nice to hear a 7800 game that sounds as good as it looks. This game is filled with classical tunes and they all sound well thanks to the provided Pokey sound chip. I enjoy booting up the first world and hearing the familiar "hello mother...hello father" tune that you may (or may not) be familiar with. Most Prosystem games have a short melody or tune that plays during key moments, or maybe a song or two that plays through out the entire game. But Crystal Quest has many full songs, sound effects, and yes even the familiar jingles from picking up power ups. This game has to be a 10 out of 10 in the sounds department, especially when compared to most other 7800 games not named Ballblazer or Rikki & Vikki! Graphics are nice and varied, and the sound is top notch, so lets find out if Bentley drops the ball in the gameplay department. In short, the answer is no, the game plays pretty good. To get more in depth, this game shares a lot from Adventure Island and not so much with Super Mario Bros. I've had a handful of people describe this game as the 7800s Mario, so I thought I should make this distinction here. You do not have mushroom style power ups or rings to act as a safety net. It's almost always one hit kills through the entire adventure. You can pick up a party hat for a few seconds of invincibility, but that's about the only saving grace you will get. But your not totally defenseless! At the beginning of the game and after you loose a life you can pick up a white crystal for rapid fire shooting against your enemies. Some will die from a single hit, others from multiple. You can later pick up red crystals that are equal to 2 hits, and green crystals that double your current crystal power until your death. Upgrading your crystals help a ton and are a must for defeating the bosses! THIS IS ONE TOUGH WITCH! But before we get to the bosses, lets go over the rest of gameplay. The enemies start out mindlessly walking towards you, or walking towards you and jumping over obstacles. But its not long before some hover out of reach, flying down when directly overhead to catch you off guard, or dart towards you from the edge of the screen. The enemies are done pretty well, with my only complaint being that the floating heads and floating balls can occasionally feel cheap when they float out of nowhere to steal a life. But that doesn't happen too often. The platforming never reaches truly difficult levels, but I'll go over that a little more towards the end. The boss battles are definitely going to rob you of a lot of lives to start, but by the second boss you should learn how to cheese this witch. She still manages to stay difficult by firing projectiles and eventually breaking herself into smaller versions. If it wasn't for the difficult and varied boss battles, I would've said that this game is almost TOO easy! So does this game have flaws at all? Well yes, and there are a few head scratchers for me. As I said before, the later levels start to look a little bland in my opinion and the design of the final world is a let down. Each world also contains an odd level where a few platforms scroll with the background. This caught me off guard at first and feels out of place to me. I'm not sure what the programmer was going for here, but I can't help but to feel he missed the mark. Luckily you'll encounter only 5 or so of these levels out of the 40 levels in the game. My only other complaint is the occasional cheap death from an enemy flying onto the screen out of nowhere. But none of this spoils the experience and can be excused given how good the rest of the experience is. So Crystal Quest featuring Bentley Bear is a great Adventure Island or Wonder Boy style platformer for the Atari 7800 Prosystem. It's not perfect, but it is more than enough to dethrone Scrapyard Dog from the 7800 platformer throne. To be fair, it sat on the throne by default, but Crystal Quest earns its place at the top of the library. If you own your 7800 strictly for the fantastic arcade ports, than this one might not be up your alley. But for the rest of us who love the console and want to see great games released on it, than this is going to be a must own. AtariAge is currently out of stock, but I got word from Albert that he has a Pokey chip alternative tested and ready to go, and a new batch of cartridges should hit the store in a few months. So save your cash and pick this one up as soon as it comes back into the store! CRYSTAL QUEST FEATURING BENTLEY BEAR IS A SOLID GAME! Graphics: 8 out of 10 Four of the Five worlds look great, and only a handful of levels lean towards the bland end of the color spectrum. The animations and characters all look fantastic! Sound: 10 out of 10 When you compare this to the rest of the 7800 library, then I would have to say that only Rikki & Vikki have it topped. Great work! Gameplay: 8 out of 10 Even though it leans a bit on the easy end, there is still good level design, enemies, and challenges here. A few of the levels fall flat for me, but they are far and few. Fun: 9 out of 10 I played through this game twice for this review, and I had a lot of fun both times. I got frustrated maybe once or twice, but I had some discovery moments on my second time through. Value: 7 out of 10 As I said, this one is easy and I beat it all the way through my first time loading it up. But even so, there is some good replay value in discovering everything this game has to offer. Overall:8.5 out of 10 GREAT! I think most of us 7800 kids would've died for a game like this back in the day, and I'm glad it came out. Get your copy as soon as you can!

I know the 5200 commercials use to end on "Keep trying, we are making them as fast as we can" or something similar. It seems they were trying to create more of a demand or get consumers to jump on the purchase by implying scarcity. They might have encountered issues where they couldn't produce enough to satisfy initial projections and wanted to get in front of it. In that case it would make sense that lower than expected sales prevented what could've been a shortages, had the 5200 been a bigger success. I personally don't have a clue what the truth is and would be interested to hear if anybody knows more about 5200 sales and why they mentioned scarcity in supply so much.

The first post to my blog will probably be my review of Bentley Bear's Crystal Quest, after I gussy it up a little and do some editing. But after playing it all the way through for the first time last night, I encountered a weird gameplay element that I haven't heard anybody talk about. In a few levels it looks like the backgrounds scroll and there are some platforms attached to the scrolling background that move away from you as you approach them. Did this feel out of place to anybody else? Can anybody explain what the intent was? I just don't understand why they were added or if anybody else was bothered by them like I was. I would've liked to see moving platforms to add to the challenge of the game. And maybe that was a way to include a sort of moving platform. But I was just wondering if anybody else had thoughts on this or could explain it to me. As always, thanks in advance guys! And regardless of response I should start posting reviews to my Atari I/O blog either tonight or tomorrow. I may have some questions for @Justin and @RickR as I start to post my reviews and interviews.

So it uses the Arduino nano to convert the controller signals into something usable by the 7800? And it's able to interpret the additional buttons separately?

I may be mistaken but the 3600 is the 7800 just under a different name. Justin posted interviews from Steve Golson of GCC who worked on the 7800 and made a point that it was called 3600 until pretty late in the project. I could be wrong it could've been a different number but I know the scope of the project was altered a bit while he worked on it. But I could be mistaken. In hindsight Atari should've jumped on the NES, but there was a crash recently, Atari was bleeding money, and maybe they just didn't trust Nintendo or believe in what they were showing at that point. And I think it's pretty obvious why Jack Tramiel wouldn't jump on it given his history. And warner probably didn't give a shoot because they just wanted out from Atari at the time.

I've beaten some of the 7800 games. Bentley Bears crystal quest, super skateboardin', Double Dragon, Ninja Golf in all modes but kamikaze, and Scrapyard Dog. I've been trying to beat some others but either just haven't gotten time to finish them yet or ran into issues. But of all the ones I've tried to beat to this point, I have to say that Water Ski is the most difficult. I've made it to the beginning of the second stage but that's about it. I also give Scrapyard Dog the nod for the hardest game I have beat, and honorable mentions to Possible Mission and Ikari Warriors as hard games I haven't completed yet.

There's something I always liked about the 7800 graphics. It's hard to explain but even as a kid I could see the blocks and segments that a lot of NES games were built out of. The 7800 felt like the characters and environments were actually something drawn rather than put together. I have to admit that I looked forward to the times my parents said we could play the NES together because the games felt more epic, but I enjoyed my time with the 7800 and liked the look of the games. But it's evident from the library, from the atarian magazine of the time, and from first hand accounts of people's experience with Atari and Jack during his reign that it was never a priority or seen it's true potential. I think that's why a lot of us old Atari guys was floored by Rikki & Vikki. Homebrew developers are putting out excellent games all the time and was edging more and more towards the 7800s potential. But Rikki & Vikki was the first time I said yes I knew this could be done. It was the first time I saw something that would've made my 8 year old NES friends jealous.

Thank you @RickR for the kind words and the link to the venture video. Here is the link to the other review of venture I eluded to earlier and somebody who has some great perspectives on other 7800 games for those interested. Vinnie's Venture 7800 Review

To anybody interested in a different opinion, cousin Vinnie vineyard has posted his review of venture over at 7800 forever. He has a different view of the game so make sure you check it out, it may line up with your sensibility more than mine does. And John Hancock has apparently posted a video about venture. I'll try to post links later as I'm still brewing my coffee lol.

@Justin thank you! Luckily the weekend is here so hopefully I can dedicate some time to looking into and setting up a blog. I didn't realize that you could point your own urls, etc to them so I'll do some investigating and hopefully set something up.

When I intended on creating my own website, I wanted to do monthly homebrew developer spotlights. And I thought that Clark Otto Jr, FrankoDragon himself was a great place to start. Well the website is deep on the back burner as my career has become more demanding of late, but I'd hate for the content to go to waste. A little background on FrankoDragon, I would say that if the AtariAge developers like Bob (pacmanplus) and others are consider the "AAA" developers of the 7800 today, then Franko is one of the great "B" developers. And I mean that in the best possible way. Remember how there was endless rows of movies at the rental stores, and all the theatre stuff was on the walls displayed with 10 plus copies. But once in a while you would wonder the rows and find a fantastic movie from a director and actors that you never heard of before. Those were B movies, and while they don't have the advertisement or budget of the big films, they can be gritty, real and fantastic despite their low budget status. Well that describes FrankoDragon; producing the games he wants to produce on his own and living the dream. If you haven't played his games then please track them down! And if you like the roms then support him with a purchase or two! But without further delay, here is what I got out of Clark: / Q: How did you get started making homebrew games for the Atari 7800? There was a thread on AtariAge years ago about a former member whom lied about asking for donations because he wanted a Hello Kitty bike for his "daughter". But other members found out what his true colors were. His avatar was TJ Hooker (Shatner) so there were a lot of hilarious posts of Shatner riding a Hello Kitty bike. I thought about making a hack of a sample game with all that sillyness called Shatneroids using 7800Basic, a very brilliant program that makes it easy to code games instead of using confusing assembly language. Q: Which of your games are you most proud of and why? Draker Quest II was one of those games I never thought it would be nominated as third place from an independent homebrew YouTube channel for Best Atari 7800 game of the year. It also used a password system that took some time to make but it worked pretty well. Q: What are the challenges in programming for the 7800? I was never good in algebra or any other kind of complicated mathematics. I still sometimes don't understand what's going on with all those equations. It does take a while to get the gist of something. For instance, I was dumbfounded how bankswitching worked until something clicked and now it's pretty easy to understand. One thing I still need to perfect is how to use the AtariVox module to save and load progress for games such as adventure and RPG's without the need of passwords. So far, it's still trial and error. Q: Do you have any projects that your currently working on that your particularly excited about? I have a few projects I have been working on, including one large project. Some of the other projects have been on the back burner for a while. But I'd like to get them going again when I have the time. Q: I love the humor of your games. It seems like you get a lot of inspiration maybe from life or internet culture. Is that true? or do you get your ideas some other way? I've had someone from AtariAge give me ideas for crazy games such as a fat guy wanting burritos so you have to throw him a burrito while working in a warehouse avoiding all kinds of obstacles. Other games can be attributed to memes such as Fat Axl aka Axl Rose when he complained to Google about deleting all the images of him being fat. Q: How does somebody come up with a game like Roof Pooper? It’s fantastic and so funny, and plays very well, but it feels like something you would joke about creating and maybe it would stop there. What made you want to see it to the end? Roof Pooper was a simpler version of another game titled, Muddy Heights without all the physics of turds falling from a roof. It's a kind of a revenge game. If someone had a bad day, he could play Roof Pooper and poop on all the clueless pedestrians but not the cops. There had to be some skill in the game otherwise it would get boring very quick. Q:if you could make your dream game for the 7800 regardless of if it’s within the consoles limitations or not, what would you make? I've heard about the game, Rikki & Vikki and how it really pushed the Atari 7800 capabilities to something nobody has ever seen before. I would love to make some sort of game that uses the same capabilities as R&V. Okay thanks for the games and thank you for your time. / That ends the interview. I would've then provided reviews and overviews of a few of his games to round out the developer spotlight article. Maybe even a preview if they have a WiP available. But now I can ask all of you: what do you think I should ask a homebrew developer if I were to do this again? Who should be featured? What else could be included in a spotlight article? Oh and a few of my favorite FrankoDragon games are Roof Pooper, Hearty Manslapper, The Adventures of Olli Troll (Gambler was also involved with this one), and Draker Quest 2. They won't be for everybody, but give those games a try. You might be surprised! Thanks for reading guys and thanks Clark Otto for his time.

@Video 61 Forgive my ignorance but would you mind expanding on the nature of your relationship with Jack tramiel? I'm just curious as I've been doing a lot of research on the 7800 and the business of Atari under him.

Thank you @Justin for posting those. I'm still learning how to do things on these forums and a lot of times I'm posting on my breaks at work so I try to get thoughts down quickly.

It was horrible how he treated GCC and it made little sense from a business standpoint. GCC cranked out games and product like nobodies business, and had they been treated right they could have really done a ton for he 7800 in the early years. If you don't have first hand information then Steve Golstons panels and interviews on YouTube have been very enlightening, at least for me.

Fantastic insight @Scott Stilphen thank you! This was exactly what I was looking for initially and I'm sorry to hear their experience was negative and they found the hardware limited.

The biggest take away is that profit and price was king under jack tramiel, and so many interviews of people who knew him or worked with him confirmed this among many other things. He hated to spend money and hated for anybody else to make money. Again, this is according to what I've heard and looked into. In his mind low prices meant more sales meant more profit. What he didn't seem to consider, understand, or care about is that people want quality too. Ideal products to a consumer is low priced and high quality. But when it comes down to it, people would rather spend a little more for quality. And he had the low price in the 2600 Jr. That could've been his power without the price system, his sedan if you will, and the 7800 could've been the companies Cadillac. Learn to drive in the sedan, then get the Cadillac when your older and wiser. They could've promoted get the 2600, power without the price while you learn to game. Then get the 7800 when you know what your doing, and advertise it "BEST power for the price". Then you could've charged a little bit more, but put some of that money back into the product for pokey or Gumby chips, marketing, etc. Of course this is moot now but i just thought I'd throw that out there as a what if scenario. As far as Crossbow goes has anybody used the Sega light phaser with the adapter? That's what my kids and I use and crossbow is one of their favorite 7800 games. And while we do sit closer to the screen than I normally would, that seems to work great!

Wow great discussion. All these years later it would fantastic to see these improvements to games like Karateka (improved controls), Crack'ed (light gun support) and more. So many Atari games and products felt incomplete or rushed to me, at least in my adulthood. As a kid I didn't think of video games as good or bad, because video games were fun and fun is always good. After playing Mat Mania Challenge (for example, and as an adult) I felt like they had the starts of a decent wrestling game, but instead of filling it out with a few characters or modes and tightening up the controls, they just shipped what they had. Or as said before, Crack'ed had interesting backgrounds and a lot of them, but no light gun support. And it desperately needed light gun support because it doesn't play well without it. I wish he quality had been there for the 7800 but so much of it just felt like they pushed it out the door because they either needed money, or maybe they didn't care. If they had the business foresight to have an Atari seal of quality and great quality control, maybe the 7800 would be remembered alongside the NES or SMS, especially here in the states. But if I bring the 7800 up most people don't even want to talk about it because they consider it inferior to the rest. Which is why I started searching out these communities. Love reading all of your thoughts guys!

Thanks @Video 61. That's sort of what I was looking for! We all know that most people don't want to make bad games, but creating retail games is a business and there are contracts where you may have to make a game that your not experienced in, or maybe there's technical difficulties, or deadlines and ship dates that can't be pushed back. These are usually the reasons for bad games and I was wondering if this was ever discussed for Karateka. Again thank you for providing the information that you could remember.

@RickR I agree about the controls. I swear the first time I played (and didn't get knocked out within seconds) I thought I was still doing something wrong. They felt completely unresponsive and broken to me. But the missing in action unreleased 7800 uses essential the same controls, or a variation of them, and I feel that game is decent.

Karateka could've been a great action game for the 7800. It's computer counterpart seems to be a much better and more cinematic experience. Was a reason as to the poor quality for Karateka on the 7800 ever given? I felt it could've been so much more. And although it never released, I cite Missing in Action as proof. It plays a lot like Karateka, especially in combat. And while changing between movement and fighting in MiA happen automatically, the combat feels like a better Karateka to me. Anyway, I feel that it couldn't of been technical limitations as to why Karateka was butchered. And I was just wondering if anybody ever heard anything about the port or it's development. As always thanks guys.

I was too young to really remember what buying 7800 games was like. I just remember them being there lol. But I asked my mom a lot of questions when I was considering opening a website, and she said she ordered our 7800 from sears with a few games. She also said she found some at Bargain City, but for the titles she wanted from Activision (rampage and double dragon) she had to order them direct. I did a little research regarding the US market and there seemed to be a few issues keeping Atari off of store shelves. At least to the extent that Nintendo was. It seemed like ordering from Atari was the way to go, especially for the really late releases like Alien Brigade.

Some say the strength of the 7800s library is in its strong conversions of early arcade classics. Games like Ms Pac Man, Food Fight, and Asteroids we're considered the best ports of their time, and some even prefer them to this day. Others refer to the fantastical and crazy later releases like Ninja Golf, Basketbrawl, or Midnight Mutants being the true highlights of the library. But the truth may live somewhere in the middle, and there you'll find Venture for the 7800. Venture is the latest release from Peter Meyer and Video61, and I believe it to be their best yet. I went back and played the 2600 version as I waited for my game to come in the mail, and I took notes of what I would like to see improvement on. Of course their was graphics and sound, but I also felt that the player was too slow and ill equiped to meet the games challenge. I also wanted to see more variety in gameplay by using additional rooms or modes. But I could understand if adhering exclusively to the arcades visions was the intent. So how did they do? Graphically I feel that they did a fantastic job, with a slight caveat. It may sound silly but the title card and the options menu looks really good! There's something about it that conveys quality to my eyes. After you make your selections your shown what is essentially the interlude screen that plays before and after each map and lost life. Our hero Winky (yes that's his name) and usually a hallway monster run across the bottom of the screen with the treasure both collected and yet to be presented above. This all looks great. And the rooms themselves look great with an improved Winky sprite from the 2600 version, with bow equiped and all. The monsters are varied and easily identifiable. Everything looks great but I want to bring up the map screen. Here the rooms you have yet to enter have clearly marked doorways and are outlined. Rooms you've conquered turn solid, which is nice, and the hallway monsters look good. But Winky is represented with a dot. Simple but effective to me, but I could see some wondering why a smaller smiling face wasn't used here. Again, this is a small nit-pick but I thought I'd mention it. The sound rests solely on the back of the TIA chip and they did well with it. I like all the music and tunes that play. I also like the sound effects but a few have the tendency to play in fast repetition and I'm sure some people wont enjoy that as much. It becomes a little annoying after a while when hearing it play over ad over, but in my opinion it's really not that bad. But repeating sound effects aside, I really appreciate the music. I have to say it feels great to nab a treasure and barely escape a room with that familiar tune playing you out, like you Indiana Jones or something. In my opinion, gameplay is where the biggest improvement over the 2600 version needed to be, and they mostly nailed it. You have 3 difficulty options before you start, and 2 control options of how you shoot. You can either move freely and shoot wherever you happen to be facing, or you can lock the direction your facing by holding down the shoot button and then spin freely when you release the button. Both methods work fine and it should just come down to your preference. I prefer the free move and shoot where you happen to be looking mode myself. You can also choose between arcade mode that includes the 3 maps and 12 rooms I expected, the XL XE challenger mode with 4 maps and 16 rooms, or the exclusive 7800 challenger mode with 5 maps and 20 rooms! I would recommend the 7800 option myself, as there is enough variety that even playing deep into the game and at high level loops it still feels fresh. But the XL XE map is by far my favorite, and the new 7800 map pales in comparison. That's not to say it's bad, but the bar was set very high with the XL XE map. Winky's movement is responsive and shooting works great. Sometimes shooting at angles resulted in situations where I felt I should've got a hit or a bullet was blocked that I didn't think should've been, but never to the point where I felt frustrated or wanted to call bullshit. The gameplay is solid and there is a good challenge in each room, with each having their own identity. In later loops of the game, the maps have more enemies and traps added, and the hazards move quicker. It results in a solid and fair challenge...most of the time. I do have to say that I did get frustrated and have to call bullshit when I enter a room just to have a monster spawn almost on top of me. That I didn't like. It seemed to happen the most in he Vampire room of the new 7800 map, And I didn't like it. But that's really my only gameplay complaint. And it didn't happen all the time. That aside, I feel that you get a lot of game in this package and it plays great! So the 7800 version of Venture made all the improvements I wanted to see from the 2600 version. Graphics and sound? Check. Faster and better gameplay? Check. More maps and rooms to add to the replayability? Check. I see this as an easy recommendation, and Peter and Video61 should be proud of Venture. It retails for 39.99 and I think it's well worth the asking price. Great job guys! Graphics 7/10 Sound 6/10 Gameplay 8/10 Value 9/10 Overall 8/10 Great! Pros Lots of options, excellent gameplay, great music and tunes, lots of variety with 5 maps and 20 rooms! Cons Fast repetition of sound effects can be annoying, occasionally a monster will spawn nearly on top of you in a room Final thought: A fantastic version of Venture for the 7800. If you liked other versions of Venture, arcade games, or action adventure games than this should be in your collection!

It's crazy how different the world of gaming was in Europe. Over here if it wasn't NES it wasn't really known until the genesis (mega drive) started shipping with sonic the hedgehog. I was the only kid with a 7800 in my whole class it seemed. Like you said A Boy and his Blob definitely would've been more fondly remember for the 7800 and I'd be willing to sign any petition or whatever support is being generated to get a port done for our console.