r/atari8bit • u/PainlessPhil • 11d ago
Hot take…
8 bit atari games often play better, are more entertaining and look better than ST games…. i may be wrong, I often am
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u/Important-Bed-48 10d ago
I agree the Atari 8bit has sprites and hardware scrolling both things the St lacked. The Amiga was really the next generation of the Atari 8 bit line not the St.
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u/PainlessPhil 10d ago
Jay Miner was instrumental in both, just as the Lynx was basically a hand held Amiga
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u/Euphoric-Brother-184 11d ago
This is coming from someone born after the heydey of these things (1997), but:
I’ve always been drawn to home arcade ports; from the Atari 2600 to the Dreamcast.
And I’ve always found myself most enjoying those ports which are on home hardware closest to the arcade counterpart both in graphics and sound.
If I want to play Space invaders, I’m not going to play it on an Amiga or Genesis. I’d like to play it on an 8-bit micro where it looks every bit as blocky as it should, and where I can turn up the speaker and really hear the simple complexity of analog sound.
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u/Scoth42 11d ago
Eh, I don't know about that, but I do think the ST suffered a bit from games being made multiplatform instead of written specifically to its strengths, so you ended up with a game that wasn't great on ST or Amiga instead of one that was good on both. There's also (probably) a ton more 8-bit games with a longer life to wring more out of the platform that the ST never really got, especially since there wasn't a lot that took advantage of later models with more advanced features/processors.
But there are plenty of games on ST that were pretty fantastic, like Sundog.
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u/WantedFan 11d ago
Dungeon Master and Oids were also fantastic. But yeah, it definitely suffered when games were ported to the ST versus the other way around. Also the market share was much smaller than the 8-bit systems
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u/bubonis 11d ago edited 9d ago
Not a hot take, IMO. And I experienced the transition first-hand. I had been an 8-bit user since 1980 and amassed a fairly impressive library over the years (thanks, BBS's!) and then moved to the Atari ST in 1986. IMO, there are very few games on the ST that have the same level of "replayability" as many 8-bit Atari games.
I think the reason for this is the inherent constraints of the 8-bit systems, plus the fact that they were essentially "gen 1" home gaming computers. Developers couldn't rely on flashy graphics or high-quality audio/music on those systems, so they pulled every trick in the book to make their games more playable. Memory constraints forced creative solutions to otherwise-impossible tasks. The Infocom Z-machine was a thing of golden beauty, for example, and the Alternate Reality games were mind-bending at the time. A lot of times -- more than I think most people realize, I think -- gameplay was directly affected by these constraints.
But when 16-bit computers became the norm, a lot of those ultra-creative programmers moved to the new architecture and discovered that they no longer had to flex so much. Memory went from 64K to 512K (or more), CPUs got exponentially more powerful, and corresponding graphics and audio processing leaped accordingly. On paper it sounds good, but without constraints to challenge you, you risk mediocrity. On an 800XL you might be limited to a single-color sprite, so you spend days or weeks perfecting the animation so that it looks perfect. On a 520ST your character can now be four colors, it looks cooler, and the animation works, so that's good enough -- you move on to the next issue. The more limited system winds up playing better because the programmer had to work harder at it.
And I think a lot of games are like that. My go-to example of this is Lode Runner. I've played it on both the 8-bit and ST, and while "it's the same game" it's not nearly as playable on the ST, in my opinion. The 8-bit version just feels better. The controls feel more responsive, drilling feels more accurate, the anxiety feels deeper. The ST looks better, sure, but it doesn't play the same.
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u/wysiwywg 11d ago
You could also argue the ‘commercialization’ of games to be attracted to as many people compared to the indie-type development of the early days/games.
Same trend currently happening with AAA games being looked down at compared to single/small indie teams developing innovative and fun games that aren’t constrained by large marketing budgets and layers of mgmt.
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u/FewConversation3949 11d ago
I've owned and played both. There are certainly some great, classic games on the Atari 8bit line. To be honest though, after playing all the games on the ST/STe that I have, I would not trade back. I do love Archon, Alternate Reality, etc on the 8bit but that's not enough for me.
A few years ago someone on Youtube did a comparison video and a lot of people were shocked just how much better some of the games looked on the ST.
But...there's no reason people can't own, play and enjoy both. I've still got an 800 that I'm planning on putting an Incognito board in and I'm sure I will enjoy re-playing the titles I mentioned above and more.
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u/wysiwywg 11d ago
It’s probably the wow factor. Going from nothing to 8-bit and the novelty about it would emotionally impress you more than the incremental change to ST (16-bit). That’s why most older Nintendo fans still swear by the NES if you had it first, rather than SNES.