Developer: Telesys
Publisher: Telesys
Release: 1983
Stargunner has everything I have come to expect from a Telesys game minus one important thing. It doesn't have a funny name. Didn't they get the memo? Telesys games are supposed to have silly puns in their titles. The box art isn't funny either. It just looks like a Stargunner. I don't know what order the games were released in, but I know that at the very least Demolition Herby has a later serial number. Perhaps with Stargunner they were just taking a break from funny titles and not abandoning them altogether. At least it gave me something to talk about in the first paragraph. I already mentioned that Stargunner gave me everything I expected. What I meant by that is they simplified a much more famous arcade game so that it could run quicker on the 2600.
In this case their inspiration in the classic Defender. I loved the Atari 2600 version of Defender when I was a kid, and it has such sentimental value to me that I have no idea if it's good or not. I think it gets a mixed response, but it's also not a game that was done so bad that people needed a replacement. Telesys didn't add something missing like they did with Demolition Herby. They just took a very famous game and used it as the inspiration for their much less famous game. It's not purely plagiarism, but it doesn't take very long to see where they got the idea for their game.
Stargunner is a much more stripped-down experience than Defender. While Defender featured an entire city complete with a map, Stargunner only has one screen. The rolling hills at the bottom of the screen give the illusion of size, but if you fly to the edge of the screen, you just pop up back on the other side. The targets on the screen are also more passive. They don't shoot at you and can only attack by colliding. There is a ship at the top of the screen that shoots down at you, so there's plenty of action to deal with. The objects on the screen are a bit abstract so I'm not sure how to describe them. Maybe an onigiri and an enzyme? Well, whatever they are they must be eliminated. So, you shoot one target, it turns into another target, and you keep doing that until you die. It's simple, but it plays well. It has a certain addictiveness to it.
My main problem with Stargunner is the poorly balanced difficulty. On the default easy setting the game can get almost boring. The targets move slow, and the shots coming from above are easy to avoid. Of course, this is the starter difficulty, so it's supposed to be easy. What of the other difficulties? Things get too intense too fast. Even the second option is much too hard. The ships suddenly zip across the screen, and their one goal is to collide with you. I could barely get a shot off without having some kamikaze aliens blow me up. I could easily get 30,000 or more points on the easiest setting, and on any higher difficulty I could barely break 1,000. I just wish there was a difficulty between the two extremes where the ships were more of a threat but not constantly suicidal. It's a shame because if it was well-balanced, it might be a true hidden gem.
When I'm comparing every game ever made, 2600 games have to really be good to break into the green section. Stargunner doesn't rise up to that standard, but it's still alright. It's sad that of the three highest ranked Telesys games, two of them were adaptions of already existing arcade games. I feel like Telesys was a company that wanted to have big ideas and memorable games, but they fell short. It could've been that they ran into the crash just about the moment they started and just had to do whatever they could to survive. I'll probably never know for sure, but they weren't phoning it in either. Stargunner comes in at #115 which is almost halfway up the list. I'm already up to 184, which means I'm getting close to 200. I should play something special for my 200th, but that's a story for another day.
Atari 2600 quality percentage: 9/25 or 36%
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1G01RKJ7-caaal5lgFfGgPfZRGcqWlv4E3E2E615UYKg/edit?usp=sharing
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