Any love for the Bally Astrocade

[majinbuu]

Hiya

I was just playing around with the MESS emulator and started playing some Astrocade games. For a system of its age, it had some pretty good games. Wizard of Wor I thought was especially well done.

Are there any good resources on the net for this machine? I am very interested in learning about it.

[k8track]

www.ballyalley.com

There you go!

(I'm a huge Incredible Wizard fan myself. And I love the controllers!)

[sidnotcrazy]

(I'm a huge Incredible Wizard fan myself. And I love the controllers!)

Yeah, me too! Plus Incredible Wizard for the Bally is such a better Wizard of Wor game than the official Atari 2600 version of Wor.

[majinbuu]

Wizard of Wor on the 2600 can't hold a candle to the Bally version. The graphics are terrible with tons of flicker and the sound is worse too. Don't get me wrong, I love the atari 2600 and play it almost daily, but it doesn't compare.

How did the Bally lose to Atari???

[fcw3]

I'm a big fan of those controllers as well.

FRED

[majinbuu]

Isn't that the way with any technology. I think there is a mathematical expression for it: Price > Marketing > Quality.

It just sucks that potentially great systems get left in the dust. Even the PC-Engine fits that description. A great system which I have never even seen in Australia.

[y-bot]

http://www.riffraffgames.com/cgi-bin/aboutriff/ballywar.cgi

[Steve W]

I finally managed to snag myself a working boxed Astrocade this year, and I'm pretty impressed. It's got better graphics than the Intellivision, interesting controllers, and it was end-user programmable. It's a shame that they didn't put a whole lot of effort into marketing the thing. I don't recall hearing anything about the machine back in the day. I didn't even know it existed until reading about it during the early days of the internet.

I don't have Incredible Wizard. That looks to be the only one I'm really looking for. I've got about a dozen games, and there's a few in the console's library that look pretty sweet, but it's the Incredible Wizard that I most want. But I never think about hunting one down until a thread like this one pops up.

[8bitgamer]

I'm a fan of the system as well. Galaxian, Artillery Duel, and Ms. Candyman (if you can find it) are recommended. (For descriptions/reviews of every game for the system, plus a system bio, I could cite a certain resource, but I would never be so crass :)).

Classic Home Video Games 1972-1984 (http://www.amazon.com/Classic-Home-Video-Games-1972-1984/dp/0786432268/ref=sr_1_1/102-4833994-2708962?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1180844138&sr=8-1)

[icbrkr]

The Astrocade is great, albeit flakey (I've already lost one to overheating). Muncher/Pac-Man for it is quite dead on and very amazing for a system made in 1978.