Atari 2600 vs Intellivision - The Ultimate 1970's Console Battle!

[@mattblom3990]

You kind of hit on something I've missed in life since the 00s during your Donkey Kong segment when you mentioned "Friends and Family around the living room playing" (I paraphrase). But yeah, sitting in the same living room playing and watching others play games with a cold soda and doritos or, better yet, local split screen multiplayer, is something we're really missing in these days of new consoles with 1-2 controller slots built for online play.

[@tarstarkusz]

3:40 My biggest problem with DK for the 2600 is the mindless movement of the fireballs and being stuck on each floor on the rivet stage. It's only 4, so I don't know why they went with doing it this way. They also could have limited them to 2 per scanline, but a better AI would have made up for the flickering that would have resulted from having all 4 fireballs on the same scanline.

[@tarstarkusz]

5:00 One of the youtube podcast people had the programmer of 2600 Kong on his show and he categorically denies Coleco made a conscious decision to make games worse on the competing systems. I think it was on Mike's Gaming Gala. He also claimed that making the ROM bigger wouldn't have helped because he simply didn't have time to add anything. A lot of these games had very short development time, we're talking 8 weeks here. It's really nowhere near enough time.

[@mattsmedley.onehandedgamin9029]

I wasn't aware of the intellivision until later in life although well aware of the 2600(still have my original 2600jr). The video games war that went to when I was in school in the 80s here in the UK 🇬🇧, was the Sinclair ZX-SPECCY Vs the commodore 64. Both were/are good machines. To this day I'll argue that the speccy had better graphics, whilst the C64 had better colours & sound. Yet as I only had a black & white TV at that time colours weren't an issue 😀.

[@RobbieStrike]

Thought the intelvision would look much better. But not much

[@tarstarkusz]

Where did you grow up? I never heard of showbiz pizza.

[@tarstarkusz]

1:45 You should have thrown in some footage of either Pac Man 8k or Pac Man 4k modern homebrews. The reason for that is it really isn't fair to have a really bad port not being the result of the hardware. Pac Man wasn't bad because the 2600 couldn't do a better version. Part of it was marketing insisting Pac Man be a 2 player game. This dramatically cuts down on the amount of RAM available. Reason being is that the maze (which dots are eaten and which are not) (plus score, level and other things) for player 1 must be in RAM while player 2 is playing. This is part of the reason the homebrews are so much better. No 2 player option. The programmers eventually won this internal battle at Atari and later games often had only 1 player as an option.