My first home system (second, if you count the Video Wizard, which played Pong and its variants), was the Atari 400 (followed thereafter by the Atari 800XL). First of all, home monitors and television are always a landscape view as opposed to portrait, so right there is the first obstacle programmers had to overcome. But this didn't bother me in the case of the Galaxian cartridge. The wide screen allowed more movement for my spaceship, so much so that I would jack the difficulty up to Level 9, increasing the ferocity of the enemy hordes, and dodge the rainfall of enemy fire, often with the goal of destroying the enemies as the landed on missile without even launching them.
Clearly I played this game too much, but I found another wrinkle of gameplay that was not available in the arcade version, creating additional value to the home user.
And if anyone remembers this game, they will recall that the enemies would fly some pretty haphazard patterns as the levels got deeper.
My first home system (second, if you count the Video Wizard, which played Pong and its variants), was the Atari 400 (followed thereafter by the Atari 800XL). First of all, home monitors and television are always a landscape view as opposed to portrait, so right there is the first obstacle programmers had to overcome. But this didn't bother me in the case of the Galaxian cartridge. The wide screen allowed more movement for my spaceship, so much so that I would jack the difficulty up to Level 9, increasing the ferocity of the enemy hordes, and dodge the rainfall of enemy fire, often with the goal of destroying the enemies as the landed on missile without even launching them.
Clearly I played this game too much, but I found another wrinkle of gameplay that was not available in the arcade version, creating additional value to the home user.
And if anyone remembers this game, they will recall that the enemies would fly some pretty haphazard patterns as the levels got deeper.