Is there a list of games exclusive to the 7800? I know Midnight Mutants is exclusive to the system, but I'm not sure about the rest of the library.
Also, on the note of arcade ports-is there any reason to pick up any of these for the 7800 instead of for another system? Robotron 2084 seems to be getting quite a bit of respect, so I might grab that one.
If I'm remembering right tom is from Europe where the NES sold poorly due to very poor marketing and many of the games released there weren't widely available to all areas so it came across as having few good games. What did sell well there was the Sega Master System, when 90% of the good games were European exclusives it makes sense why it did so well even though the hardware was pretty much crap including the almost unusable D-pad on the controllers and poor quality Light Phasers where you have to compensate for the innacurate sight.Originally Posted by o.pwuaioc
It explains why he's severely biased against Nintendo. As much as I don't like Super Mario World(I haven't kept a single copy in my collection to play) I know it's more than just a simple update of a previous game, there is enough changed that makes it significantly different. Maybe he's confusing it with Super Mario All-Stars but otherwise we all know Super Mario World is a sequel and not just an update. I am getting tired though of seeing the same series just getting a new release all the time with all the Nintendo ones lately, I just don't get excited when hearing about a new one coming out.
As for Ms. Pac Man the 7800 version put in the original cut scenes that were removed from the 2600 version so that's something, but it's still Ms. Pac Man so there's about 10 minutes of fun with it by the time it was released on the 7800. Later the NES Tengen version added several options to add to the fun, but this was released years after the 7800 version. There were several better more complex and detailed games available on other platforms by the time Ms. Pac Man came out on the 7800, few people cared about getting it by that point.
Of course it was a sequel, SMW 4 as it was called, but I like to call it an update, confused people are allowed to do that :-)
Actually, the Japanese hadn't even learned to program 16 bit yet, according to Greg Fischbach of former Activision.
Maybe Miyamoto should have invested in a 16 bit computer way back in the mid 90s, like an ATARI ST or AMIGA to get some programming skills.
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Last edited by tom; 04-28-2012 at 02:10 PM.
It had a few exclusives, and although I had a complete collection, I hated the 7800 and I sold my collection in 2006:
Alien Brigade
Barnyard Blaster
Basketbrawl
Crack'ed
Meltdown
Midnight Mutants
Motor Psycho
Ninja Golf
Planet Smashers
Pole Position II
Scrapyard Dog
Tank Command
Touchdown Football
Water Ski
Last edited by tom; 04-28-2012 at 02:30 PM.
The NES failed but the SNES was quite huge in Europe. I'd amassed approx 200 SNES titles before I traded the lot for the awesome PlayStation back then.
I kept my SNES, and I still love Super Mario World and Mr. Do!.
My parents bought one in 87/88, after I broke the controller port on our 2600. They liked the fact it was backwards compatible but had new games as well, especially since they had a lot of games for the 2600 picked up during the crash clearance sales.
Having only played 2600 up to that point, I thought it was amazing, and played games like Rampage, Asteroids, Galaga, Fight Night, and Choplifter a lot. In late 1988 (I think) we got an NES, and the 7800 fell a bit to the wayside, but we still got new games for it for another year or so before they became scarce. At that point, I started using my allowance money to buy up as many new ones I could from Big Lots as they did their clearance sale. For a while in the 90s we couldn't play it - the power cable had become frayed and broke apart - but my cousin-in-law had a spare power supply for some reason he gave us.
Still one of my favorite game consoles, and I imagine had I gotten some of the later and weirder games in its run, I'd have had an even more positive view of the console.
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The 7800 has a lot of really good arcade ports. Robotron uses two sticks and captures the speed of the arcade version very successfully, and has been mentioned, Ms. Pac-Man was done by the same people who did the arcade version, so it's pretty accurate too.
Centipede, Asteroids, and Joust are all great ports, and the two-player simultaneous modes are badass on all three. Food Fight only came out on 7800, and that's really fun... i would also recommend Ikari Warriors, Commando, and Rampage on 7800 over the NES versions. Ikari and Rampage are closer to the arcade version, and Commando is not only expanded from the arcade concept, but is just head and shoulders superior to that crummy NES port. Dig Dug and Mario Bros. are solid ports, and Donkey Kong and DK jr. are basically the same as the NES version, just with crummier audio.
Hope that gives you a good idea!
Check out the Kleppings!
Make Way For Madness!
"9 is a poor man's 11, and 11 is a Baker's Ten."
Infinite Lives
Being a fan of 80's arcade games, 7800 is a beloved system in my house. I only wish they had done some missing arcade ports for it, like Mappy, Crystal Castles, Battlezone, Make Trax, Elevator Action, I-Robot, Bubbles, Sinistar and Bosconian.
I realize Nintendo's exclusivity agreement made some of these impossible on the 7800, but it sure would have been nice to see. I don't think the 7800 was ever pushed to its limits by game developers.
I picked up a 7800 not too long after I found out it was on the market. And once I realized that Nintendo was a terrible company who were screwing over the American market (alleged chip shortages giving them excuses for price gouging, anti-competitive business practices against Sega and Atari, et cetera) I put my NES in the closet and got more into the 7800 (along with a newly acquired Intellivision and an Amiga 1000).
Here's my question for you guys... which game amongst the launch titles would have been a better pack-in game than Pole Position II? I'm thinking Ballblazer, mainly because it shows how much farther the tech had gone from the 2600. Plus it's a really good, fast paced game for one or two players. The problem with that would be that Jack Tramiel was too damn cheap to license it from Lucasfilm Games to make it a pack-in. Rescue on Fractalus! would have been a better choice if it had been completed.
I didn't know the SNES did that well in Europe, I thought the Mega Drive won out like with it's previous SMS system(I guess I was wrong). I really never got into Super Mario World for some reason, since I never got into it I never kept a cart for myself as I didn't want to be stuck with a copy after the battery eventually dies. I'm not really sure why, I have the first 3 Mario games and while they're not my favourite games I do play them occasionally. I wish I could find a copy of Mr. Do! for the SNES, it's one of the harder to find titles for the North American system.
To me Super Mario World is significantly different to the previous titles as it was so large you needed a battery to save your progress, plus it's the first game that introduced Yoshi which added a different gameplay experience. I don't really consider it just a remake of earlier titles as it adds so much, though I get that feeling more with all their current Mario games. That and the modern Zelda games.
I don't think that book you've sourced is reliable, it goes on to say that Sonic the Hedgehog was mediocre and that the only reason it sold well was because there were no other titles to compete with it. It may not have aged that well when compared to it's direct sequels but it was a great game at the time on a technical level not just with it's speed but with introducing momentum-based physics to the platforming genre. It was well made then and still holds up today. Also I don't know what they mean by saying it was produced by an independent developer under contract to Sega, as far as I can tell the developer was created and owned by Sega. Also saying that Super Mario World was a disappointment seems wrong, I'm aware that marketing studies showed kids prefered Sonic the Hedgehog to Super Mario World but it wasn't like it was a failure.
Yeah Megadrive won, but SNES came a very close second.
The book Game Over is very reliable it had input from numerous people of the industry even from Nintendo US and Nintendo Japan.
Last edited by tom; 04-29-2012 at 03:42 AM. Reason: Adding text
Add Super Skateboardin'. Barnyard Blaster came out for the XEGS (as did Food Fight). Basketbrawl came out for Lynx. Scrapyard Dog did, too, but it looks different. Crack'ed is based on an ST game. Ninja Golf was announced for the XEGS but not released. Pole Position II was an arcade game. Touchdown Football was an Imagic computer game.
Super skateboardin was on VCS first?
The Lynx titles came after the 7800 versions?
Skateboardin' and Super Skateboardin' are different.
Yes.
Me too. I had never played food fight before the 7800 and really enjoyed it. So simple yet so much fun. Love it.
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I was a little kid then, but we didn't get an NES until 1988. We had a 2600, and occasionally I used to buy a game for that. In it, if it was an Atari game, I wound up with one of the catalogs that showcased the 7800 games. Like the 5200 games I would see in earlier 2600 game catalogs, as a kid, I really wasn't impressed with the "improved" graphics. Plus there was no way on earth I was going to erase the action figures on my Christmas list for a new Atari system. My impression then was that the 7800, like the 5200, had the same games the 2600 did, and so it was essentially a waste.
When the NES caught fire around '88-89 big time, the 7800 and SMS had been taken off most store shelves. I was fully into the NES, and didn't care one iota for the other systems. All my friends had an NES, why would you buy a different system? You had to be a fool, that's what we thought. In the case of the 7800, we were right. You had to be crazy to like it over the NES or the SMS.
So I really didn't get accustomed to the 7800 until the late 90's via emulators. And my impression was it was a moderately improved 2600. Several years ago, I got one, and collected about 3 dozen games. I do not like the Pro Stick, though the buttons are good, the stick is horrible. I find the console to be quite shabby. Games don't slide into the slot well at all, not like the 2600. The lack of composite output is another downer, although the music/sound is so terrible it really doesn't matter. The sound is just completely putrid, to have a 1970's sound system but for a few Pokey games. The choice and depth of games released was really lousy. Frankly the 5200 had a more diverse offering and it was out for 2 years only. Also, I do not have a light gun for it, but the games via emu are so cheesy I wouldn't want one.
About the only reason I haven't sold it, is that I love many of the homebrew games that have come out recently, particularly from PacManPlus. But it's a system that I was excited to get and collect for, and the aftertaste is not really a good one for me.
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Yeah I hated the sticks and the screen graphics. The games just didn't feel right.
As I said, I did have a complete collection, but 80% I didn't even play.
OK I didn't have a Tank Command, but ....f**k it, I did have it copied on disk.
I was hugely into videogames until around 1983 or 1984. Post-5200, I still paid attention to arcade games, but never had any interest in the SMS or NES and stopped paying attention to home systems for a long time. So I had no idea the 7800 even existed until seeing an index card on a bulletin board at college in 1989. I bought some guy's system, with 9 cartridges for it.
Frankly, I found the 7800 to be a pretty boring system. I did enjoy Xevious on it though.
Well, I did buy an Atari 7800 back in 1988- mainly for Joust.
I'd first heard of it back in the summer of 1984, in Electronic Games Magazine. The pictures of what it could do, and the overall report, was very interesting indeed. Xevious in particular was a new one for the home.
BUT- as we all know, that same year the Tramiels (grrrr!) took over Atari. The 7800 was put on hold.
Now, it has to be said that the stupid idea of dumping the 5200 cannot be blamed on them; that decision had been made before they took over. The Tramiels sort of inherited the 7800.
This was a very confused era in videogaming. The 5200 had been abandoned by Atari after only about 1 1/2 years (an insanely stupid idea). Atarisoft games and prototypes like Galaxian, Pac-Man, Dig Dug, and (of course!) Joust, along with Moon Patrol, all showed that Atari was making superior versions of these games for the 5200's deadliest rival! Coleco, of course, blew it with the ADAM computer.
Enter Nintendo.
Of course, once the NES held 85%+ of the market the Tramiels decided to release the 7800 along with the batch of games meant for 1984. Most of which had already appeared on the 2600 and 5200.
As a 7800 owner back in the day, it always amazed me how the Tramiels ruined every opportunity. Ever time opportunity knocked at their door, they'd call the police to report a trespasser. Every time it started to look like they might- just might- get something right, they'd ruin it. It was the late 1980s- where were the RPGs; even the CV had Lord of the Dungeon (albeit not released)? Where were the side-scroller/level/boss games? The one-on-one fighting games (Karateka didn't make it)? Who were they trying to reach?
So- my views? The 7800 was a nice enough system with weak sound. It had plenty of potential, but so did the Jaguar, the Lynx, and who knows what else. In retrospect, I should have either stuck with the CV, or gotten an NES.
Interesting stuff, here (COMPLETELY unbiased opinion, hehhehheh):
http://griswaldterrastone.deviantart.com/
The 7800 was NOT part of the Atari sale to Tramiels.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>There wasn't a transition, they were completely different companies. Jack Tramiel simply bought the Consumer Division of Atari Inc., not the entire company. He then folded that in to his company, Tramel Technology Ltd., which he then renamed Atari Corporation. Likewise, he bought the Consumer related IP, consumer related facilities (corporate offices and buildings related to Consumer, manufacturing and warehouses related to Consumer) and the distribution network. The people were not part of the deal. Hence they did interviews of all the Consumer Division related people to see who they wanted to keep (and did interviews of some of the people at Coin to try and get them to come to the new company as well). Most were related to daily operations (one of the advanced research that were on the 68000 console project at Atari Inc. was simply hired on to help run Atari Corp.'s mainframe for instance), and the rest chiefly towards retail operations (since he planned on having the company survive in the immediate term on the large backstock of product that came in the purchase) and computer design operations (for what became the ST). Almost everyone from the console development area was not hired over or went away on their own. The issue of why there was a lot of confusion amongst the Atari Inc. employees is because the buyout happened so suddenly and with no normal "transition period" for employees. They came back from the July 4th extended vacations to find out about the purcase. They thought they were working for Jack now and that Jack owned "Atari". Likewise they thought they were being interviewed to see if they'd be fired. They were not. They were being interviewed to see if they would be *hired* to Jack's company. Atari Inc. still existed at that point (in fact it existed on paper for another good year to deal with legal issues), but was being wound down as the coin-op operations were split to another company (Atari Games) and the rest sold off or simply closed down.
When Jack finally settled with Warner and GCC over the 7800 development payment, he had to completely start up a new game division, which is where Mike Katz came in. He started up the 7800 again that October '85 and finally released the cost reduced 2600 (which was originally supposed to be the stopgap last model of the 2600 under Atari Inc.) He was against the XEGS being released when Jack pushed for it in '87, but not for any of the reasons you claim. It was because he didn't consider it to have any "hot" launch titles, which was true. <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
.
Last edited by tom; 05-02-2012 at 03:35 PM.
The 7800 existed before they took over. Everyone knows that "Atari" became "Home Atari" and "Atari Games."
This was something the 7800 had to deal with that the 2600 and 5200 didn't: before, it was reasonable to assume that any Atari arcade game would appear on an Atari system, since it was all one big company. Tempest, for example (we could hope...). But after mid-1984, although they both had "Atari" in their names, they were independent, and Atari Games could thumb its nose at "Other Atari." Too bad, this arcade game goes to Nintendo. Neeyeh.
But after the Tramiel take-over, we all wondered what was going to happen to that "ultra-cool 7800 with the Maria chip that lets it move anything in any numbers around." We knew, after a time, that either it was NEVER going to see the light of day and would either end up in a landfill somewhere or in a near-forgotten box with other prototypes and unreleased products, or the Tramiels would release it. That's exactly what happened; we did not know back then that Nintendo had approached Atari earlier with a deal for the NES.
(Had it happened, the NES would likely have been a system that nobody here ever heard of...)
Sure enough, the Tramiels had the 7800. If Atari had NOT created it and had instead stuck with the 5200, the Tramiels would not have created the 7800. They wanted some quick money, and the 7800 existed, so- they released it. Why do you think the instructions were so cheap, as were the boxes and cartridges at first? To save money. Compare the whole 5200 Centipede package to the 7800's...or even the 7800 vs. 2600 versions!
Long ago I read up on why Tramiel did so well with Commodore, but completely blew it with Atari. It had something to do with the differences between the two companies in large part, and they could not handle Atari the way they did Commodore.
I was there as the Tramiels ruined any chances with the 7800. I had to watch in awe as the system I bought with the once-great Atari name on it became a joke. I actually felt sorry for the thing!
To all 7800 homebrewers- more power to you.
Interesting stuff, here (COMPLETELY unbiased opinion, hehhehheh):
http://griswaldterrastone.deviantart.com/
Kind of close to my own experience. Other than occasional Atari A8 gaming, I quit home system gaming after 5200 was abandoned, and I missed the NES/Master System/7800. But I remember around 1986 or 1987 seeing 7800 in Kmart , and I'd kind of marvel that they were still selling Asteroids, yet the '3d' look of the asteroids was admittedly pretty awesome. But I didn't have time, money , or desire to buy one.
But I didn't actually play 7800 or Master System until sometime in the past couple of years when I bought them used. I've since picked up what I could find and some Pac-Man Plus homebrews which really breathe life into 7800. I like Master System more to be honest, and I use 7800 for 2600games, homebrews, and Xevious & Food Fight. I do not like the 7800 controller; I greatly prefer the 5200 stick (sue me!). The 7800 has nice visuals, and I appreciate greatly the backwards compatibility of 2600 games, but I cannot accept the crappy 2600 sound of many games. Donkey Kong 7800 makes me cringe, especially after hearing Atari 8-bit computer Pokey Donkey Kong sounds which are fantastic. Why Atari, why didn't you just put a Pokey in that system??
Of course the 7800 existed already with Atari Inc (Neither Atari Inc.nor Atari Corp. created the 7800, that was GCC, man you gotta read up about your Atari history), BUT WHEN WARNER SOLD ATARI INC TO JACK TRAMIEL, THE 7800 WAS NOT INCLUDED IN THE SALE.
The 7800 packaging was cheap? Of course, Jack had to save money wherever he could. Maybe you have no idea how much money was owed.
Jack Tamiel did very well with Atari Corp, considering the amount of monies owed. The Atari XE was a great success, so was the Atari ST.
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