Atari 800 Ballblazer

[Babania1]

Used to LOVE this game, listening to the music now still gives me goosebumps!!

[CthulhuMessiah]

Was Ball Blaster for the pirates.

[HardWarUK]

There's always this talk of speed, but unless you ran an Atari next to a C64, you would hardly notice any difference. I played this on C64 and it was plenty fast enough for me! :)

[MrAlienAssassin]

It took you an awfully long time to find the start button.

[Adropacrich2]

The thing is, while it's clear the Atari 800 had what is undoubtedly a technically better version than the C64 version, the game is the same. I grew up with the C64 version and it was and still is an excellent game in the same way this version is. The C64 version In terms of performance is slightly less flash but really only in terms of framerate- colours being subjective frankly as is music

The great thing is we all get to play these fantastic systems via their emulation

[SirMaxFrei]

LUCASFILM games - говна не лепит!

[Akira1422]

Ah! That soundtrack!

[HypnoToad72]

There was nobody like Lucasfilm back in the day, that's for sure!

[jrmb242]

Sorry for posting twice (I hate this system). And my reaction was on hoques1432 actually.

[GrounderTheRobot]

Lucasfilm games are good

[IronJackalTw]

Where is those GLORIOUSLY Narrative and Emo Crap in this GAME? George Lucas is few Film Directors (if not THE ONLY Film Director), that gets it when comes to Video Games!! {roll my eyes}

[willc2]

I loved that sound track. And the game speed was just spectacular at the time.

[wrcousert]

The thing that impressed me the most about this game was the speed that it loaded. One click of the drive and the game was running. NO other game I had at the time loaded so fast.

[HHRich]

In my opinion one of the best games written for the Atari. Simple, but exciting. Loved all the background story to go with it..rotosnapping if I recall? - the sudden change of direction when you capture the ball.

[Malfunction0982]

I used love this song when I was a child

[martinkaspar999]

That's right. This was a beta version that leaked out before the final version went on sale. Everybody had a copy. It's said that atari themselves had spread the beta because they were jealous lucasfilm made a game for them better than anything atari had done before..

[fronkenpoop]

Nice game.

There was another version of this for the 8-bit Atari (Ballblaster?)  which didn't have the animated lucasfilm into or head to head pre game display. Music didn't have that random lead, and also there were some subtle game features missing. Maybe lucasfilm realised they were on a winner ?

[martinkaspar999]

@fronkenpoop That's right. This was a beta version that leaked out before the final version went on sale. Everybody had a copy. It's said that atari themselves had spread the beta because they were jealous lucasfilm made a game for them better than anything atari had done before..

[hoques1432]

Awesome game. The original Atari 8bit version just kicks the C64's one's ASS.

Many features used here just fell flat in the version for the commodore which makes this one just so much better. Stuff like the "virtual Anti-Aliasing", the smooth scrolling, all of this just wasn't realized on the C64. And the sound sucks too on the C64 because of Activision's missing SID talent.

But whatever, every playable port of this is fun :D the ZX Spectrum got an OK version, too.

[rmcdev]

@hoques1432

99% of the time, this isn't the case... The C64 Was generally superior in every way.. but this game was DEFINITELY better on the 800XL. I don't know if the C64 was a rushed port, or they just didn't know how to program well for it at the time.

[R6502A]

@rmcdev It was the other way round. Most developers didn't program the Atari well because it wasn't as popular as the c64, so the effort wasn't worth the returns.

[jrmb242]

@rmcdev No, it was not. It was just more successful and thus later primary 8 bit game platform. One thing where it was truly lacking was its pure computational power being 25%-80% behind Atari depending on resolution. Search YouTube for "Atari 8-bit - Project-M" or "atari xl/xe game crownland" to see what Atari can really do when pushed to the limit as C64 was. Those machines were pretty even hardware-wise, each having its strong and weak points.

[martinkaspar999]

I once tried to imitate the playfield effect on the atari 800. The horizontal movement is done by scrolling every single graphics line by a certain amount (the lower the faster) and the vertical movement is done by switching the light and dark colors while the TV raster image is being drawn on the screen (that was called display list interrupt) The Atari was good at that. That's why its so fast and that's also why the c64 version looks shitty :-)

[martinkaspar999]

several features of the graphics are still outstanding. They tried to soften the big pixels of the ball sprite by interlacing two different shapes of the ball that gives the impression of a higher resolution, and on the green playfield, if you watch closely, they use a kind of anti-aliasing effect, i.e. the horizontal margins between light and dark green changes in shades of green while moving slowly, also adding to a higher virtual resolution. These were revolutionary features at the time.

[Monodi91]

Those were impressive graphics for the system it was

[impala666]

Great game. I skunked the highest level droids easily when I was on.

[omnithrope]

Wow... just, wow. I remember this.

[the1marauder2]

Great game!

[Baldoxxx4000]

wtf is going on???

[gamesDAMNED]

I always loved the loading screen, it was terrific. Ballblazer is actually the second Lucasfilm Games (Lucasarts) game. Rescue on Fractalus was their first.

[icemule1]

This game ruled.

[weirdstuffanimation6]

i had this on the comedor 64 on tape lmao good times

[MustNotRead]

i remember this one used to make my penis errect.

[WileE21]

I LOVED this game!

[Matt1234335]

me to :)

[ajynx]

OH EM GEEE! I loved playing this game!

[petrouchka72]

For reference, this is a tad fast -- I'd guesstimate by ca. 10%. Was this captured from WinPlus? When I've used that emulator I've had to set it to 90% speed to get games and music to run at what felt like the correct speed. Here it's not so noticeable in the game, but the music is definitely faster than it was in 1985!

[thorstenguenther]

This speed difference is due to NTSC vs. PAL speed of the hardware - see e.g. the various "M.U.L.E." title screen videos here on Youtube for another example of this effect.

[NotATube]

The PAL and NTSC machines ran at very similar clock speed.

However, since most games used the VBI for timing and updates, and since PAL only shows 50 fields- and hence VBIs- per second instead of NTSC's 60, that's why most games run slower.

[zaphodb777]

Not a tad fast, just the normal behavior due to playing on an NTSC setup (even in emulation). Alot of games played faster in the USA.

And as far as USA games go, you should try them first in NTSC to get the proper effect. I always found playing in PAL to be "draggy"

[weirdstuffanimation6]

that music brings back memorys

[sebadj7]

de aqui deben haber sacado el sonido para las espadas ajjaja

saludos

[Theobtusellama]

Ow wow...so many memories...i remember playing this game so much when i was about 4...

[keyboardbw]

I'm still confused how these guys at lucasfilm managed to get all this fast 3d split level action out of my simple 800XL. Either they where genious or the other game programmers were crap.

[m1omg]

Or the ANTIC and GTIA were capable of it, they just needed more memory than usual 2D games?

[IvnSoft]

I think this is just a smart way of moving the palette of colors in memory. The ball and players, are just sprites.

I'll have to try to do something alike using that technique :)

[emilygrae]

I played this game wayyyy too much. I remember reading about it when it came out and if I'm remembering correctly, this was one of the first games to be able to show an intro animation while the game was still loading from disk. At the time this was something remarkable.

[ejfex]

great tune!!

[ejfex]

great tune!

[MattTheSpratt]

Damn, that looks amazing for an old console like that. Major kudos to Lucasfilm.

[m1omg]

it is not a console but an 8 bit home computer maybe you are confusing it with atari 2600

[MattTheSpratt]

Or maybe I'm confusing it with the Atari 5200.

The 2600 didn't have this much power.

[emilygrae]

From what I can remember, and wikipedia seems to back me up, the 5200 and the Atari 800 were basically using the same hardware.

[mistapaul]

no they weren't!

[emilygrae]

Yes they were. Internally I mean, obviously. Look up Atari 5200 on wikipedia. The 5200 was heavily based on the 400/800 8bit computers and the internals were nearly identical.

[mistapaul]

7800 no gtia no pokey!

it had 2 sound channels

graphics were poor due to no gtia!!

MAY OF USED THE SAME PROCESSOR, BUT SO DID MANY 8 BITS OF THE DAY!!

[emilygrae]

Um, mistapaul? Can you read numbers? I didn't say a thing about the 7800. I said 5200. The 5200 had gtia, pokey and 4 sound channels. It was very very much the same as the Atari 800 computer. You can use all caps to shout if you like, but you're still wrong about the 5200.

[NotATube]

As emilygrae says, she was discussing the 5200, and not the 7800. They were totally different machines.

The 5200 was internally based around the 400/800/XL computers; if it hadn't been for some minor but pointless changes in the 5200 OS and memory map they would have been compatible.

The 7800 was a different machine altogether.

[gapenisbruzas]

Graphics looked great on the atati version. I am impressed.

[gremmpaltakin]

The Best Atari Game.

[retread01]

Dig that crazy music man!

[JK47Tubing]

Daaaaammmmnnnnnn. This brings back memories. I had this game on the Atari XE. Haven't seen it since I was 10 years old. I use to listen to theme song forever!!! =>

[mnemo70]

Enter "AUTHORS" on the Atari to see the credits of Langston and Levine.

The European version released by Activision didn't have the great animated loader. I still have the box, but someone borrowed the disk 20 years ago and never gave it back. :-(

[johnarthurknight]

My whole guitar sound is based on this.

[klarmer]

I've had that opening tune in my head ever since

[jjnature]

Nice! This was the very first game I saw when we got our brand new Atari 800xl. I had seen the Atari 8bits before but this was our own! Great game too. If you look at the c64 version it is much blockier (worse graphics).

[reebash]

This is my favorite game of all time. I worked with Dave Levine in the late 90's. He was doing the physics on a Baja racing game I was working on. I'm doing a version on the Xbox 360 for the XNA creators club. So I'll post it when I'm done. Check those downloady type places for it.

[monkeycakesoup]

This game rules. I still have my atari 800xl and 1050 drive with happy chip fitted and a mountain of games...long live the atari.

[synbow]

When 'he' scored? Didn't you read the description? 'I get my tail kicked by a level 5 droid cause I'm out of practice.' lol ... yet, I didn't totaly understand the goal of this game ... :S

[rwp80]

THIS

GAME

MADE

NO

SENSE

5/5

[IronJackalTw]

rwp80, they were kind of like football goal post at each ends of the field! The carrier of the ball move slower than the non-carrier, but carrier can shoot the ball into the goal post for points!

The non-carrier can easily catch up to the carrier and try to knock the carrier back. Or, he can knock the ball out of his opponent from his magnetic grip to steal the ball for possession (become the carrier to score points)!

[IronJackalTw]

rwp80, try think of this game like playing a game of American style football on a hovercraft!

BTW, the goal post are always moving from side-to-side in the back, which makes it hard to aim for when one get close enough to it!!

[Gatsurendo]

I have this still at my house its great. I used to have so much fun playing it.

[almo2001]

Great game. PLayed the C64 and 800 versions. This video would be better if the sound were coordinated, and if it were between two humans. :)

[kappappa]

I used to play this on the Atari 7800 all the time. Loved it.

[Lightcycle]

wow this brings back memeories. the version I had didn't have the intro.. and would be set by default 2 players although once I was able to set it to one player.. I don't know how I did it tho.

Nice vid that is cool and I wish someone would make a new vers of this for PC/Mac

It's nice when you can get three points

And I love the music

[timewaster72]

I like the groovy music at the beginning of ballblazer and didn't it feel good when you scored!

[vulcanjedi]

Nice.

There are so very few programs like this that have perfect physics where you would swear you feel the bumping and acceleration. And you break a sweat beating anything above droid level 3, if you can beat it that is :)

Mark

[eekeenoink]

Someone needs to make a networked Atari 8-bit emulator, just for this game.

[horsie111]

Didn't realise the version I used to play was a prototype. I was always disappointed there was no single-player mode - now I know why!

[tschak909]

actually, the BallBlaster prototype DID have a single player mode, keys 1-4 specified difficulty for the top player, keys 5-8 specified difficulty for the right player.. 0 reset everything to 2 player mode. -Thom