Star Raiders Atari 2600 Review - The No Swear Gamer Ep 90
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 27 พ.ย. 2024
- / thenosweargamer
/ thenosweargamer
Today's episode covers Star Raiders for the Atari 2600 VCS system. Based on an earlier computer game for the Atari 8 bit computers, Star Raiders clearly rips off Star Wars and Battlestar Galatica. It also came bundled with the Video Touch Pad. But is it any good? Let’s play Star Raiders and find out!
Family friendly, informative and entertaining, Retro Reviews with The No Swear Gamer contains plenty of retro goodness. I’ve reviewed games for the Atari 2600, Atari 7800, Atari Jaguar, NES, Nintendo GameCube, Sega Master System, Sega Genesis (Mega Drive), Sega CD, Sega 32x, Sega Saturn, Sony Playstation 1 as well as covering plug n play systems, retro toys and other cool retro stuff. Check it out and subscribe today!
I had this xmas 1982 (or perhaps it was 1983). Still remember my mother buying me this in Woolworths! Agree completely about the randomness of hitting a target.. but it was a lot of fun still. From a programming perspective its a bit of a marvel considering the VCS hardware. I am wondering if the cartridge had some additional chips in there?
Interesting that the touchpad was never used on any other games.
Back then Atari VCS was owned by all the rich kids (and they seemed to get a new game every month)... so it was a big surprise for me to have gotten one back in 1980/81 as I was hoping for/expecting the LED game AstroWars... no way we could really afford it... still blown away by that fact we got one (even if I only had 1 cart "Combat" for about 18 months)...
What perhaps bothers me in retrospect is how expensive Atari carts were back then. I recall my mother paying 50 pounds which is over 160 pounds in today's money. Probably a weeks wages to her back then. Scandalous really...
The only way I could buy games was to do 2 paper rounds a day including weekends for about 12 months in order to buy Defender and Asteroids which were 40 quid a piece. Sheer madness!! But it had to be done...
Ahh well.. gripes.. Thanks for the memories :)
You're welcome! My family could never afford a 2600 during the heyday, but I did get to find some cheap 2600 games when I bought the 7800.
Thank you for sharing this! I love reading other people's childhood retrogame experiences. Videogames in the early to mid '80s were such a big influence on our lives for so many of us. They're like a common cultural touchstone that those of us who grew up during those years all share.
One thing: there were actually one or two other Atari carts that used the touchpad, but Star Raiders was the big one. The Basic Programming cart used it, and I vaguely recall that there was another, though I could be mistaken.
This is an impressive game for the 2600.
Believe it or not, George Lucas did not create outer space or science fiction. There were actually science fiction stories set in soace before Star Wars! This is one of the best 2600 games ever made. I used to play this with my brother and sister, and we'd each take a different role. It was like Star Trek Bridge Crew decades earlier.
Good review. I just picked up the game for $1 at a retro game store, and the keypad with overlay at Goodwill for $1 (shocked that it had the overlay...). I had it as a kid, but didn't understand it and didn't have the patience to learn it. Your review showed me all of the nuances, and now I enjoy it. I also like how you pointed out that the keypad works with other games.
Thanks for the video. 🙂 Star Wars is not what is being emulated. While there is a little borrowing from Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica, the game is actually a real time, from the cockpit reimagining of the text mode Star Trek game ported to various BASIC dialects. This version includes the galactic map, the enemies moving around attacking starbases, the warping from place to place, long range sensors, a computer, a subspace radio, the damage to various systems, etc. All borrowed from the classic BASIC game.
Dude, enough with the everything was ripping off everything. It was the 70s/80s, and space invaders, aliens, and stuff like that were big at the time.
...says the guy ripping off Deadpool ; )
TRUE!!! This era of gaming was all about getting inspired by what had already been done, and then trying to add new ideas to it. I played three different Star Wars "clones" tonight (Starmaster, Star Raiders, and Star Voyager), and each one of them felt entirely distinct and had something unique to offer. I love the cooperative aspect of Star Raiders and Star Voyager, though Starmaster is probably the most seamless single player experience. This was a truly innovative genre on the 2600, and I wouldn't discourage anyone from picking up any one of these titles.
@@thenosweargamer1449 Hahahaha, so snarky NSG! Snap diddly!!!
These things were big because they made money . . . Therefore, they were ripping off the things that made money. But in this case, even when i was a young boy, I could see that they were ripping off specific ship designs.
This was tied with River Raid for my favorite 2600 game when I was a kid!
Nice ! Remember River Raiders well. Mine was Moon Patrol and Jungle Hunt
I heard someone talking on the bus today about fruit and they totally ripped off 12 words from 7 different scenes in Star Wars and rearranged them. Bastards.
Star Master from Activision is similar, and like Star Raiders, as a kid I didn't understand it. But now as an adult, knowing what the letters and colors represent, and that the switches on the console display the map, it is now one of my favorite 2600 titles.
Anyone trashing the 2600 version. We were lucky to even get a port. Think of it as an inferior to the arcade version game like the rest of the 2600 library and you'll be fine. The game plus the video pad can be had on ebay for under $15 these days.
This seems like it was near the end of my Atari buying days. I really liked this one. The keypad added something I thought. Definitely one of the better games from this late period. Atari made some decent stuff like Pitfall II, River Raid, & Keystone Capers near the end.
I have vague memories of playing this on an actual Atari 2600 in the 1980s. Never really knew what I was doing but had brief fun figuring out the basic game mechanics. Thank you for this retro review and explanation of the options and button pad.
By the time I got this, I had already played Star Master and loved it. I assumed that this was going to be an even better version of the same type game, but I was really disappointed in it. I understood how to play it, but I rarely saw any of the enemy ships. They would appear for a split second and then disappear. The display would alternate from saying they were behind me to being ahead of me and out of range several times a second. I just found it frustrating and rarely tried to play it.
Star Raiders on the 5200 was much more playable for me. I could easily see what I was shooting at and had much more fun with it.
The war with the Krylon empire never made any sense anyway. All that fighting over paint?!!
The Box art and the sector grid strongly remind me of Solaris. Also a great game.
Good call on the box art comparison! I can totally see it!
Solaris was written by the original author of the 400/800 Star Raiders, Doug Neubauer. He seemed to see it as a spiritual successor.
Definitely one of my top three favorite games as a kid. It's on the Atari flashbacks for Xbox One but does not play nearly as well.
I played this last when Ferg reviewed it on the 2600 game by game podcast. It occurred to me at that time that the three notes it plays when you start the game are the first three notes of the Close Encounters of the Third Kind theme. Seeing as that is my most favorite movie of all time, I am surprised that I never picked up on that.
I so enjoyed playing this game way back then.
I loved this game so much as a kid! It's hard to say for sure what my all-time favorite Atari game was, but it was probably Star Raiders. I played it so much I had dreams about it.
Nowadays I play Elite Dangerous in VR. We've come SO far!
ripped off Star wars???
ships are different...
no death Star..
just another space game.
Jeff Cossey he's old, everything is Star Wars to him. VHS version.
Gorf stage 3 they look like tie fighters vs the enterprise and stage 4 has boss flagship maybe it's the super star destroy er referance
The Atari 8-bit versions were a bit closer to Star Wars/Star Trek enemy wise, and the enemies were called 'Zylons', so being that this is a close cousin, some of those things made it over to the 2600 version but I'm sure they were changed a bit to avoid any copyright claims.
It actually feels more like Star Trek if you've got a little Wesley Crusher doppelgänger hanging around to man the keypad. I happen to be blessed to have just such a person in the neighborhood, and I enjoy bossing him around and accusing him of sabotaging the mission by intentionally lowering the shields when we're under attack. I also let him keep an eye on the energy and pull up the galactic map when we're in trouble.
This game is bomb.com on the 5200. I found out this evening that it's also really cool on the 2600. I like having an ensign on hand to turn on the shields and targeting computer, and to man the galactic chart and hyperwarp. This makes me feel like the starship captain I've always dreamed of being. Having a friend to help you is a huge plus with this game, and it's just plain fun.
This was one of my first games back when I had a Atari 800 computer. It differs from this game I guess because the computer version had the keyboard so you could change your ships speed. Docks with a space station and had a bigger grid to move around.
This game is what got me interested in computers. Way back then computers were a new thing that opened up a whole new world. Got a Atari ST not long after the 800. But I saw which way the wind was blowing and got a 386/40 computer and the rest is history..
My favorite game.
Used to like playing this. I remember a cool ranking system or something
This one I did own, but found it quite hard until a few years later, but by then the system was getting pretty old and the controllers were rather damaged and imprecise so that added more difficulty so I can't say this really captured my imagination like a lot of the other 2600 titles.
AMAZING that this game had OBVIOUS TIE Fighters, Cylon Basestars and what I thought were just exaggerated Cylon Raiders as enemies ! I just don't get how some games were sued and other not...
Ah, memories. This was an interesting experience when I was young...quite a frustrating one, too, when playing with the classic 2600 controller. One hand to move the joystick, one to hold the controller base/press the button, and then...a third hand for the video touch pad? You really needed a table or some sort of flat surface set up for playing this game, and the back-and-forth could get frantic at times.
You could kill a blinky at long range, but you had to get a lucky hit. On the 5200 (and the 400/800 version, as it was essentially the same game running on pretty much the same hardware) you could fiddle with the joystick and get the enemy ships to jink right into your photon torpedo, but I think you could only do it if your velocity was zero (I never engaged the engines unless I was heading for a starbase or going into hyperspace -- trying to conserve energy). I didn't play the 2600 version much, so I don't know if that trick works on it.
When my dad bought me this game, back in the day, it looked like something special as it came in this extra big box, complete with touchpad and overlay, but I already had Imagic's Star Voyager which I thought was amazing and this didn't look as good to my 9 year old eyes. Still a decent game that actually seems better since it has ships that resemble ones from Star Wars and Galactica - 2 of my favorites. I don't think I ever made the connection at the time because the ships seemed difficult to make out.
Star Master is the best of the space battle simulators for the 2600
Love this game. Loves the keypad. Great memories.
It's a bit easier to understand the choices made here if you've played the classic, brilliant Atari 8-bit computer game it was a port of. Activision's Starmaster probably did a better job of capturing the depth of Star Raiders, with its light strategic element. And Imagic's Star Voyager instead decided to pare down the worldbuilding and concentrate on making the basic combat loop as fun as possible. But one thing this version does do is as good a job it can of reproducing the look and sound of the computer game.
The original Star Raiders was basically a hybrid of the text-based "Star Trek" games that were big on 1970s mainframes, and the first-person space shooters that had appeared in arcades like Atari's Starship 1 and Exidy's Star Fire. Star Trek had the galactic map and damage and resource management; the arcade games provided the combat mode.
The computer game predated the Atari Force comics, so there, you're piloting Star Cruiser 7 of the Atarian Federation' Star Fleet against the Zylon Empire (or so I gather from the manual and the in-game text). Yeah, I'm pretty sure the Star Trek, Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica influence was more than coincidental.
Thank you very much Sir for making and posting!
Currently 75/264 so probably still in the "fun" range. Starmaster by Activision gets a higher rank of 49/264. I got this near when it came out in 1982, but haven't won it on hardest. I'm not a fan of this kind of game, of which there are 2 others, Star Voyager by Imagic and Space Attack by M-Network. I don't remember how many hours I played this, but was recently wondering if I should have gotten something better like Circus Atari, since I ended up getting Clowns a couple year later for my VIC-20. However, I don't remember ever being allowed to return a toy or game for an exchange as a kid, so that wouldn't have been a consideration.
Still, I think I lucked out as I don't remember ever getting a game new, playing it for a couple hours then putting it away and hardly ever coming back to it again (maybe Donkey Kong, Jr. in 1988?). Combat, Surround and Canyon Bomber were probably my least-played games from the 1970s, the first two due to not having other kids over to play in 2-player mode.
One of the problems of having a special controller like this keypad or the steering controllers for Indy 500, is that only the people who buy the game have it, so the incentive is not to make any more games that use it. They could have put either Star Raiders or Indy 500 as a pack-in game in 1982, when they sold 5 million consoles due to Pac-Man, giving people the controllers so they could make more games that use them, but they didn't, so that's that.
I wore this game out when it came out
Hey, can u show what buttons ur pressing? I have no idea how to play, and I can't orient myself in the game and it is a little confusing. My TV is a bit newer so it is a bit weird, thx
MiningNinjaOctopus Maker sure you use the Atari touchpad or similar controller. If you don't have the overlay to show you what buttons do what, you can find the overlay copy here: atariage.com/overlay_page.html?SoftwareLabelID=491 Hope this helps!
ya i have one of those thx, just a little confused what buttons to press
Thanks for this video
This game was going to be called The Last StarFighter which make sence
Definitely a favorite for me.
Had this game butcould only plat few times before I got killed.Still got in attic but haven't played since mid 80s,
I never figured out how to play the game. Just flew around in warp speed...pretending I was maverick because it was the 80s!!
Didn’t the Atari Force get killed off? There was an end from what I remember
Do you need the video touch pad to play?
Yes
+CAT GARCIA - You need something besides the joystick. You can also use one of the original keyboard controllers as they were designed for just this sort of thing. Unfortunately, Atari quickly phased them out and almost nobody had them, so when Star Raiders came along, they had to package the controller with it to make sure people could play it. You can also use the Kid's Controller, although obviously the overlay won't fit.
Or you can use the Keyboard Controller like the one used in both “Basic Programming” and “Brain Games”, and it still works with this game.
So, I can't play this game without the touch pad? I got the game cartridge, but it didn't come with the box, manual or game pad. Maybe I'll find that stuff elsewhere for not too much.
Its pretty common to find loose
@@masterscambaiters3121 Thanks, I'll keep an eye out for it.
@@enfieldjohn101 I actually might have a spare video touch pad (with no overlay)
It was an early proto type that would have been the last star fighter.
Cookie monster munch works with the star raiders controller pad but idk if the cookie monster controller pad works with star raiders found that out by accident when I just bought cookie monster munch without it idk about either on 7800
It should. They were all based on the original Atari keyboard controllers. Originally the system included (or they were available for it) two keyboard controllers, which were like flat versions of the video touch pad. The idea was that they would be used for input on games requiring more options, like Codebreaker (really just Mastermind) and such. I guess they weren't that popular and Atari quickly phased them out.
When games like Star Raiders came out, Atari realized that they needed more inputs, so they revived the keyboard controller, but since they were so rare, they decided to ship a custom version with the game.
@@lurkerrekrul yeah I was trying to tell a customer i was a costumer too but knew it worked in the store told them that the star raiders controller worked with cookie monster munch but they just walked away again this was before internet was mainsteam and pay phone not cell phone era think it was lack of communication s back in those days ty on update
This game is tied to the movie the last star fighter do your home work they did not rip off no one
No the game came out before that movie ever did.Star Raiders was one of the first games made for the Atari 8 bit computers. A lot of other space games that came out around that time were definitely inspired by Star Wars. I wouldn't say " ripoff" though. Those ships definitely came from SWtar Wars, Battlestar Galactica and one looks a lot like the Klingon cruisers from Star Trek to boot. When Atari made the sequel Star Raiders 2, they were definitely trying to tie THAT into The Last Starfighter. In fact, it exists under that name. There was an actual sequel called Star Raiders 2, and the guy who worked on that released the ROM for the 8 bits some years back. Never tried it, but there was a YT vid about it.
I hope this works with the joystick alone
+CultOfWeirdness Sorry, but you won't get very far without the touchpad.
ah, darn it.
Remember what happened in “James & Mike Monday’s” episode where Mike was trying “Star Raiders” and he doesn’t know how to control this game. It gives you instant death if he doesn’t have the video touch pad or a keyboard controller.
Went to goldbergs in glasgow for this probs early 80s
great game for a very limited console
Definitely a cool game
i see this game in pawn shops all the time. The keypad and overlay are NEVER avaiable.
i also have never heard of anybody playing it getting a better ranking at the end of cook.
doesnt really look like star wars
LOL... hey millennial guy “star” existed long before “Star Wars”. Actually the real inspiration for this was Star Trek - and the start trek games already being played for years on mainframes.... thus the shields and photons.... certainly Star Wars and battlestar galactica elements might have influenced ship design though!
I remember playing this game as a little boy and it scared the crap out of me and gave me nightmares. Even right when I seen this review in my recommendations but before clicking on it, I could hear the bombs going off and then the screen flashing and making all that noise then that infamous Do Do Do. I absolutely hated this game as a kid. Nothing honestly scared me as a kid and as an adult, I am pretty stress free and never afraid of anything. Watching this review again though OMG. This is still a scary game. I can't be the only one.
Sorry, but I think you're the only one.
Star Master is better.