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Wednesday, April 18, 2018

Thundercats - Atari ST [004] PlayThru

Title Screen
A trainer was used for making this capture, because playing this game without one would be crazy. Even with one, I died too many times....

Actually, playing this game WITH a trainer is not much better...





Gameplay
Thundercats, from Elite, is a rare licensed game for the Atari ST when the Thundercats cartoon was still very fresh on weekday afternoon TV, as it was broadcast over the UHF waves in many places in the USA.  Unfortunately, sharing the name with the TV show is about the end of anything this game has in common with the show itself.

Mumm-Ra on the battlefield!
Another title I owned back in the day, I rarely made it further than past the first bonus round, which is pretty much the beginning of Stage 4.

Flying with Mumm-Ra overhead
I thought all these years I was just not too good at this game.  Now, from playing with unlimited lives, I can tell you that I believe the main challenge here is getting through the poor game design. The game is basically setting up scenarios where a player is guaranteed to die; there are even a few spawn zones where a player is insta-killed.
Box Cover

My thoughts?  Pros: Decent graphics, the very limited music is good  Cons: crappy play design, disappointing ending.

Magazine Ad
So, the story behind the intro to this video:  Guru Larry (check out his video linked below) researched the origins of this title.  Elite had the license to make a game, and allegedly had 2 games in the pipeline, but they were not going to be completed in time for the holiday season, so they basically got a game in development, redressed the game art and transformed the game into the released Thundercats game.

Bomb Jack II - C64
The other games?  Beyond the Ice Palace is the game originally slated to be Thundercats, which was also shopped to Capcom, and rejected, to become a sequel to Ghouls and Ghosts.  The third game might have become Bomb Jack II; the music heard in the intro is from the soundtrack of this game on the Commodore 64, but is missing from the other ports that were released.

Capture info -

This gameplay was captured on February 18, 2018.

Game was played on an Atari 1040 STf, TOS 1.4, 1MB, equipped with a CosmosEX from Jookie.
A Best Electronics ST Monitor to VGA cable was used, connected to an OSSC 1.6 (processing the video in Line4x mode), with the output being captured by a Startech USB3HDCAP.

Video was edited with Shotcut.

Check out Guru Larry's The Lost ThunderCats Video Games - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGww6iixTgY

Beyond the Ice Palace - Atari ST

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