Yes. Playing this back in the day, with a stereo, larger TV, etc... delivered a pretty serious impact. There was nothing else like it.
IMHO, that game sold a lot of Atari computers. Was written by the guy who designed the sound chip, and it was kind of a side project that turned out great enough to showcase the computers.
The particle calculations are not well optimized. While this is seen as a bug, and there is an effort to make the game run faster, many players appreciate the slowdown in battle. There is a feel associated with that which adds a lot to the overall impression of the game. It's oddly gratifying to feel it slow down as the enemy and their shots explode...
Yeah, that's how I feel about it. Somewhere, I read some comments by the author on all of that. He just did fairly straight up, simple, cheater type 3D on the 6502. Those slowdowns were an artifact of all that.
They add a lot to the game, though the author didn't intend for it to go that way.
Funny, for that time period, there are a lot of "effects" that were resource limits, or bugs that ended up making for a better experience. Little things, like getting an extra color to work with were a very big deal.
We have come so damn far...
This did cause me to pull my old 400 out of the closet. It has this cartridge in it. Turned it on, and it plays fine. My HDTV is a bit cranky about it all though.
Did it simulate a proper 3D world, with your ship and the other objects all occupying space (and therefore requiring vector calculations everywhere), or did it cheat by keeping minimal position information and just fiddling the display to make it look like you're moving? From the way the enemy ships move it feels like it's cheating, but the starfield and the starbases all look pretty good.
When I watched the video of Star Raiders, my first thought was "hey, that looks like Solaris!", a game I grew up playing on a friend's Atari 2600. Turns out it was also by Neubauer, just a few years later. Cinematic is definitely the right word — it easily felt as epic and expansive as a good NES game, which is pretty astounding considering the limitations of the 2600.
