In the early 1980s Nintendo came to Atari and offered to let them design and sell the American version of their Famicom console, for the US market. Atari decided it would be a much neater idea, to blow their foot of at the ankle, and told Nintendo “No thank you!”, instead opting to release this.
That there is the Atari 7800 aka Prosystem. Atari’s third console. Its release was delayed by two whole years, so by the time had finally surfaced in 1986, it was already antiquated. While it was backward compatible with most 2600 games, it didn’t have much of a library of it’s own. Most titles for it looked, felt and sounded like poor imitations of better games on other consoles, namely the NES. The reason for it’s poor audio was due to the fact that it shared had the same audio chip as the 2600. This was done to preserve the aforementioned backwards compatibility. The trade off was that it’s games sound nowhere near as nice as it’s contemporaries did.
It featured an oddly shaped two-button joystick. A later revision opted for a gamepad, as seen here.
In addition to some quirky system exclusives, It had a host of very bleak ports of games like Double Dragon, Ikari Warriors, Galaga, to name a few. It wasn’t all bad though. One port in particular that really shows what the 7800 could do, is Commando.
In Commando, you’re charged with making your way through a battlefield, where you kill enemies, dodge bullets and grenades, rescue hostages, and fend off a final wave of defenders, once you reach the gate. It was ported to many systems, and this one in particular is rather nice looking!
The game makes nice use of the 7800’s color palette. It has a very blocky, pixelated look to it, but despite that, there is a lot of detail packed into everything. In addition to looking nice, it plays well too. The controls are very responsive, and the fact that the controller has two buttons, means that you don’t have to hold down Fire for a second to throw a grenade, like you had to on ports like the 2600 and C64. Everything clips along at a nice pace too, and as best I can tell, there isn’t much in the way of screen flicker.
This port seems to have some improvements that I did not notice in other versions of the game. There is a machine gun pick up, which vastly improves your rate of fire, as well as a knife, which does an auto-melee attack, when an enemy soldier gets too close. I might be mistaken, but I don’t think those are in any other port. There are also secret areas. If any can confirm or deny whether those are in other versions of the game, I’d be interested it hearing about it.
In addition to being port that looks good and plays well, it surprisingly sounds good as well! Sculptured Software, who handled this port really knew how to get the most out of the 2600/7800’s meager sound chip.
I spend a good while playing this port, and I dare say that I like it better than I do the one on the more technically impressive NES. Its hard to say whether or not more games like this one would have saved the console. After the video game market crash of ‘83, Atari was in serious trouble. Coupled with the internal problems the company was having due to office politics and infighting. In any case, this is a port of Commando that you should really give try.
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