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Activision Anthology Adds Homebrew Games, Classics Lauded
Thanks to GameSpot for their review of Activision Anthology for the GameBoy Advance, as the compilation of Atari 2600 titles such as Pitfall! and River Raid goes portable, following a previously released PlayStation 2 version. The creators of the compilation "recruited Bradford W. Mott, the creator of the personal computer Stella Atari emulator, to write the underlying code" for the anthology, and, as IGN Pocket points out, "there are also several homebrew 2600 games included in this pack", including Skeleton+ and Climber 5. There's a lengthy thread on the compilation over at AtariAge, and elsewhere, Slate has passionate words to impart about classic games and how "restrictions... inspire creativity", and Yahoo/Reuters has similarly nostalgic musings about the recent retro revival.
The older games had better graphics. Hold on a sec, don't reach for that troll button just yet!
What I mean is that a lot of the games (not by choice) were easier to look at. Too many of the more recent games have gone "muddy low-contrast black and brown" making things rather hard to see. The worst I would say is Doom for the N-64: all dark brown and black with a few flashes of red and green here and there. Now, while it wasn't realistic, there was no annoying and pointless urge to aim a flashlight at the screen when you played old Atari-2600 "Adventure" or "Breakout"
Not all modern games are this way, and the "cel-animation style" trend is a refreshing step toward clarity, and recent "Final Fantasy" games appear to be stepping out of the Dark Ages, achieving leading-edge "realism" without the darkness and fuzziness.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
The fact that they hired the author of Stella intrigues me. If they made a SNES anthology for Nintendo's next system (hey, could happen), would they hire, say, the ZSNES developers to help code the emulator for it? It seems that emulators are becoming a stepping stone to getting into the video game business.