[Albert]

Contest Results!

There were many great entries submitted to the Strat-O-Gems Deluxe Label Contest, and it fell on programmer John Payson to choose a single entry from those submitted. After much deliberation, John chose one of Jeff Crouch's designs as the label to grace the shipping version of Strat-O-Gems Deluxe. Jeff's winning label design now appears on all copies of Strat-O-Gems Deluxe sold through the AtariAge Store, including the cover of the manual put together by Tony Morse. You can view Jeff's winning entry here and all of the submissions here. Congratulations to Jeff Crouch and to all the participants who took the time to enter the contest and show off their talents!

Sorry for the delay in posting the results!

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Strat-O-Gems Deluxe is a new Atari 2600 game by John Payson, originally created for the 2005 Minigame Competition that bears similarities to Columns, Jewel Master, and Salu's Acid Drop. In Strat-O-Gems Deluxe, colored gems fall from the top of the screen in groups of three. Any time three or more adjacent gems of the same color line up vertically, horizontally, or diagonally they will disappear. Any gems above them will then fall down; if these create new groups of three or more gems, those too will disappear, leading to chain reactions. Your job is to score as many reactions and chain reactions as possible before the gems reach the foul line. If any gems remain over the foul line after all reactions are complete, the game will end.



AtariAge and John Payson are sponsoring a contest to create original artwork for Strat-O-Gems Deluxe. This label artwork will appear on all copies of Strat-O-Gems Deluxe, which will be available through the AtariAge Store. The winner of the contest will receive a copy of Strat-O-Gems Deluxe in cartridge form, adorned with their winning label design, as well as a $50 gift certificate in the AtariAge Store.

You can learn more about the contest and how to enter by following this link:

Strat-O-Gems Deluxe Label Contest

Good luck!!

[AtariAger]

[liquid_sky]

sounds like one heck of a fun game.. my art is bad but I am going to attempt something

[jferio]

Just got my first entry in. My emulator can't play the game, but I'm willing to try.

[galaxy warrior]

im working on one as i type.

[Nathan Strum]

Strat-O-Gems is an excellent game! I've been hoping to see it on a cart. It's great to see a label contest happening for it, too.

If anyone's interested, I've been posting a series of tutorials on making artwork for game labels in my blog. There are some Photoshop tips in there, some art theory, and hopefully some useful stuff, too. I've just added part 6, and should be getting the final installment posted tonight or tomorrow.

[batari]

jferio, on Sun Nov 20, 2005 6:26 PM, said:

Just got my first entry in. My emulator can't play the game, but I'm willing to try. 

Everyone who is still using one of those old, outdated emulators: Please just download a new one. They are free.

[jferio]

batari, on Sun Nov 20, 2005 8:43 PM, said:

jferio, on Sun Nov 20, 2005 6:26 PM, said:

Just got my first entry in. My emulator can't play the game, but I'm willing to try. 

Everyone who is still using one of those old, outdated emulators: Please just download a new one. They are free.

My machine is such an antique, it won't even try to run a newer emulator.

[snorlaxnut]

Edit:Removed my label. I didn't want my label up anymore. Move on to the next post.

This post has been edited by snorlaxnut: Sun Nov 27, 2005 10:13 PM

[batari]

jferio, on Sun Nov 20, 2005 11:08 PM, said:

batari, on Sun Nov 20, 2005 8:43 PM, said:

jferio, on Sun Nov 20, 2005 6:26 PM, said:

Just got my first entry in. My emulator can't play the game, but I'm willing to try. 

Everyone who is still using one of those old, outdated emulators: Please just download a new one. They are free.

My machine is such an antique, it won't even try to run a newer emulator.

z26 is written mostly in assembly, so even newer versions will run fine on slow Pentium I chips.

[Thomas Jentzsch]

batari, on Mon Nov 21, 2005 8:42 AM, said:

z26 is written mostly in assembly, so even newer versions will run fine on slow Pentium I chips.

Especially the DOS version (1.58) works pretty well even on a 100 Mhz PC.

[Cybergoth]

Hi there!

I think the title GFX look already cool enough for an end label

Greetings,
Manuel

[jferio]

batari, on Mon Nov 21, 2005 12:42 AM, said:

jferio, on Sun Nov 20, 2005 11:08 PM, said:

batari, on Sun Nov 20, 2005 8:43 PM, said:

jferio, on Sun Nov 20, 2005 6:26 PM, said:

Just got my first entry in. My emulator can't play the game, but I'm willing to try. 

Everyone who is still using one of those old, outdated emulators: Please just download a new one. They are free.

My machine is such an antique, it won't even try to run a newer emulator.

z26 is written mostly in assembly, so even newer versions will run fine on slow Pentium I chips.

Not normally a problem, but I'm running on a Mac under OS9, and can't run OSX in order to run Stella 2.

[Nathan Strum]

jferio, on Mon Nov 21, 2005 9:17 AM, said:

Not normally a problem, but I'm running on a Mac under OS9, and can't run OSX in order to run Stella 2.

That's too bad, but I know what you're going through. It took me awhile before I was finally able to afford a new Mac and move up to OS X. It was worth it, although I'm still paying it off.

[pmpddytim]

My first couple.

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This post has been edited by pmpddytim: Mon Nov 21, 2005 11:55 AM

[AtariAger]

That eyeball is freaky!

But cool!

[batari]

jferio, on Mon Nov 21, 2005 11:17 AM, said:

batari, on Mon Nov 21, 2005 12:42 AM, said:

jferio, on Sun Nov 20, 2005 11:08 PM, said:

batari, on Sun Nov 20, 2005 8:43 PM, said:

jferio, on Sun Nov 20, 2005 6:26 PM, said:

Just got my first entry in. My emulator can't play the game, but I'm willing to try. 

Everyone who is still using one of those old, outdated emulators: Please just download a new one. They are free.

My machine is such an antique, it won't even try to run a newer emulator.

z26 is written mostly in assembly, so even newer versions will run fine on slow Pentium I chips.

Not normally a problem, but I'm running on a Mac under OS9, and can't run OSX in order to run Stella 2.

Oh The latest build for OS9 is Stella 1.2, which *might* work. most new stuff seems to require 1.3, however.

[supercat]

jferio, on Sun Nov 20, 2005 6:26 PM, said:

Just got my first entry in. My emulator can't play the game, but I'm willing to try. 

Try some of the early version on http://www.atariage....pic=77817&st=50 the original thread; see if they work better for you.

[jferio]

supercat, on Mon Nov 21, 2005 5:33 PM, said:

jferio, on Sun Nov 20, 2005 6:26 PM, said:

Just got my first entry in. My emulator can't play the game, but I'm willing to try. 

Try some of the early version on http://www.atariage....pic=77817&st=50 the original thread; see if they work better for you.

Yeah, that works. Must be the more advanced stuff in the later ROM.

[galaxy warrior]

heres 2 i submitted

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This post has been edited by galaxy warrior: Tue Nov 22, 2005 1:33 PM

[Chickybaby]

Columns & Jewel Master are 2 ofmy favorite games along with Tetris. I didn't know Acid Drop was similar as well. If I had a computer drawing/art program I'd love to include an entry for the label contest however the only art I usually do is on paper I also have computer problems and can't run an emulator so I can't wait to try it!
Good luck all and this looks really awesome

[galaxy warrior]

heres another .

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[pmpddytim]

Bored tonight so I tried another.

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[jferio]

Since they haven't yet added the first few entries to the contest page, here's mine.

[supercat]

Some interesting entries so far. A few comments:

-1- The font in the title screen is closer to "Britanic Bold" than Peignot (my mistake in the contest page). I definitely prefer "Britanic Bold" to "Chicago"

-2- I am not partial to "Saloon"-style fonts.

-3- I would very much like to have some sort of horizontal striping on the logo, though it doesn't have to be a uniform "50% duty cycle" pattern. Neon is an interesting notion, though some smoothing of the shape of the "A" might be appropriate.