youki, on Fri Dec 23, 2011 3:01 AM, said:
All first generation of Activision Title that does not exists yet on colecovision!!
I fully agree with that statement, and I'm even going to take it one step further! Here's my contribution to this thread for today: The Activision "Fake Arcade Game" conversions!
In the good ol' Atari days, Activision released games that were original products ("original" as in made in-house and not directly based on existing arcade games of that time period) but many of those games still had a pick-up-and-play arcade vibe to them. Pretty much all of these games could be converted for the ColecoVision, and several of them actually were, like Pitfall, Keystone Kapers, H.E.R.O. and River Raid, just to name a few. But for those that didn't get a commercial conversion, the question is this: Would homebrew conversions offer anything better than the original Atari 2600 games? It's actually a fairly good question, when you stop to think about it.
If I were to do such homebrew conversions, I would go out of my way to graphically reformat the games to look like they're actual arcade game conversions, similar to what Opcode did with arcade ports like Space Invaders and Pac-Man. I would add a proper arcade-like title screen, with a flashing "INSERT COIN" under a beautiful title logo, a high score table, an attract mode, intermissions between levels, cute cartoony graphics (where applicable), everything that the game needs to appear like it's trying to reproduce every detail of the original arcade game... which doesn't actually exist!
And just to push the concept to its limit, the box art would feature a completely fake (but totally real-looking) picture of the arcade cabinet, just like the US boxes of Coleco's early arcade ports.
With all of this in mind, try to envision what these Activision classics would look like, as "fake arcade" conversions:
- Frostbite
- Pressure Cooker
- Chopper Command
- Enduro
- Crackpots
- Megamania
- Oink!
- Plaque Attack
- Seaquest
- Spider Fighter
Mouth-watering, isn't it?