Issue 21: Jul 2002
Features
- | Foreword
- | Tip of the day
- | Something for Nothing
- | Platariada 2002
- | Atari in the USA 2002
- | Digital Photography Revisited
- | Defender to Chopper Command
- | CAMUS: Cellular Automata MUSic generator
- | Atari 8-bit hard drive interface
- | Mac 'n' Back
| Defender to Chopper Command By Trenton Ray Rock singer Layne Staley, from the band Alice in Chains said it best. Quoting him from a song entitled Over Now, "Yeah, it's over now, but I can see somehow". This is a great description of others' and my first impressions of Atari's Defender. How could Atari ruin something like Defender, you ask? Remember Pac-Man? Atari made some pretty lousy coin-op conversions. The graphics are understandably not arcade-perfect, but the 2600 was capable of a lot more than the primitive Defender graphics. One thing that brought the game down even more was the ungodly amount of flicker. You can't tell from the screen-shot (We can simulate Blink-o-Vision with an animated GIF - Ed), but there was so much flicker in Defender that when you shot, your ship momentarily disappeared. Playing Defender was like blinking really fast and trying to avoid a seizure all in one. Compare the graphics yourself. The graphics were just one difference. The Atari 2600 had a one-button joystick, while Defender was famous for its (at the time) dumbfounding array of controls. Consider the differences between a one-button, eight-directional joystick to a vertical control stick, a thrust and reverse button, a fire button, a hyperspace button, and a smart bomb button. There had to have been some amount of change in the conversion, but the changes used are amazingly detrimental to the game. Take this for example: To fire a smart bomb, you have to fly all the way to the bottom of the screen, and press the fire button. When you are in the midst of heated battle, you don't always have time to fly down to the bottom of the screen and press the fire button. Yet again, this is a totally obnoxious feature. Many upon many people bought Defender, only to let it collect dust. Activision must have known how much potential there was for a good Defender game, but was squandered by Atari's horrible conversion. Bob Whitehead, creator of many Atari classics (including Boxing, Stampede, and Skiing), decided to try to re-do Defender. The only problem was that, well, Atari owned the home rights to Defender. So Bob made a game named Chopper Command. Instead of aliens, you shoot enemy helicopters, and instead of protecing humans, you protect a convoy of cargo trucks. There is even a touch of drift, something Atari's Defender didn't have at all. The only thing missing out of this is the bombs and hyperspace, but how many helicopters do you know that have hyperspace? The UN sure would kill for one of those! With quick, flicker-free gameplay, beautiful graphics, and controls that actually are useable, no Atari fan should be without a copy of Chopper Command. One of the most loved Atari games, spawned from one of the most despised. trenton@myatari.co.uk
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