[Coco] Worst game ever...

[Nick Marentes]

On 24/01/2015 1:41 AM, Bill Loguidice wrote:
> Pooyan is one of my favorite arcade games, and a favorite home port on a
> variety of systems. My only major disappointment with the CoCo version (the
> platform's relative graphic and sound capabilities aside) is that it runs a
> bit slow.

Pooyan was a very good arcade conversion for the CoCo. It made good use 
of the CoCo's limited 4 color mode and had quite a few moving "sprites" 
on the screen. It was released by Datasoft and programmed by James Garon.

It is a bit slow compared to the original arcade but remember that on 
the CoCo3 you can double the clock speed. You can also redefine the 
palette values to change the 4 x PMODE3 colors to more closely match the 
original. I believe there was a patched version of CoCo Pooyan that did 
this.

> The Atari 8-bit version of "Clowns & Balloons" benefited from paddle
> support. It's a shame that the CoCo never had paddle controllers as far as
> I know (I'm not about small runs of them). I would imagine with the
> joysticks being analog that it wouldn't have been that difficult to create
> relatively speaking.
>
> -Bill
>

Clowns and Balloons wasn't a great game but that wasn't a fault of the 
programmer. Steve Bjork actually did a very good job in creating it. C&B 
was another faithful arcade port. The game itself presented quite well 
on the CoCo and it's a great game for younger kids.

I do remember seeing the Radio Shack ads and catalogue inserts that 
pictured C&B with 8 color graphics. I was quite dissapointed to see that 
it was only B/W (4 with NTSC artifacting). Artificially colored at the 
ad agency obviously rather than use a real screenshot. I remember 
feeling at the time that this was false advertising.   :)

Nick