The Atari ST was a home computer in vogue during the late 80s and early 90s, just before Windows killed off all non-fruit based competition to the PC computer. The Atari was slightly older than its main rival the Amiga, and as such died out just before it did. The two systems were very close in popularity back in their day however, with Amiga having the slight advantage games-wise while the Atari did slightly better with the non-games market of early paint tools and music synthesizer programs. That isn't to say it didn't have some great games also.
Somewhat nostalgic update, this. What follows are three of my favorite games from this system - the first I ever played way back when I had an age in the single digits - and an explanation for why and how they stand the test of time:
Elite - Space Sim - Elite is probably one of the best space sim games of all time, as they perfected the simulated, first-person space-faring formula the very first time anything like it had been tried. You were a trader, carrying goods from planets who didn't need them to planets that sorely did, making tidy profits from your ventures and using them to upgrade your ship for easier travels. Of course, it wasn't all plain sailing: pirates constantly tailed you to steal whatever supplies you had, and you needed to defend yourself on every occasion. If the pirates weren't bad enough, seeing the gigantic hexagon-shaped ships of the insectoid alien race known as the Thargoids baring down on you was reason enough to get the hell out of there ASAP with your ship intact. As you became more experienced, the dangers increased and more frequently did you encounter the worse space has to offer.
The greatest part of Elite was the choice of how your reputation would proceed: You could become the strongest, most reliable trader in the galaxy, fighting off whole bands of pirates and fearing nothing the cosmos could throw at you. Or you could become a despicable smuggler or pirate, taking dubious bounties onboard (such as slaves or firearms) and destroying friendly traders for their supplies (which you could pick up with a handy cargo scoop upgrade). You could find the space police on your trail at any given opportunity.
Best of all, if the galaxy you were in got a little too hairy, you could buy a Galaxy Jump and skip over to the next one. My absolute favorite instance of this game is when you were performing a standard hyperspace jump to get close to the next planet on your trading route, and accidentally find yourself in non-space: complete blackness as far as the eye can see. You had to fly around sheer nothingness while your hyperdrive repaired itself, with no-one for company besides other trapped spaceships. And since the only other spaceships with hyperdrive technology were the Thargoids, you ended up seeing quite a lot of incredibly pissed-off, incredibly hungry Thargoids around the place... scary stuff.
If this game sounds very familiar to you, it's probably because you've played one of the many deviations of this classic game, or maybe its sequel Frontier. Frontier, while being a lot more varied and deep, lost the simple effectiveness of the original, instead becoming a very complex game, and therefore somewhat alienating for the average player. But then there are lots of people who prefer it to the original, so it's up to the player I guess.
Space Crusade - Squad-Based Strategy - Space Crusade remains one of my all-time favorites. A precursor to all the Warhammer 40k games that inundate the market today, Space Crusade was a simplistic, Hero-Quest type game that allowed you to control a squad of five marines and their commander as they boarded derelicts to achieve mission objectives that varied from Search and Destroy to Search and Rescue. The gameplay was turn-based, allowing each player (you could have up to 3 human players playing at once) to move all their units and attack (if they were going to) before handing it over to the computer for its turn. As soon as the primary mission objective was fulfilled (and the optional secondary objective), the players had to escape back to their pods and clear the derelict.
The missions were the best part of this game, being as varied as the simple derelict maps could allow. Simple missions (or at least simple on paper) included killing the Dreadnaught (not an easy task) and got steadily more complex, such as killing a whole Chaos Marine sect (who were equal in power to your marines), opening the ship to the vacuum of space and getting the hell out of there before the entire derelict got depressurized (which was a gradual turn-based blackness issuing from wherever you purged the hull by a certain amount of squares per turn), securing a scientist's disembodied brain and securing an antidote to a space disease (and killing off the other players so you didn't have to share it). Each mission success got your commander closer to a promotion in rank, and the overall game goal was to make sure the commander survived each mission without failing them (as failing a mission means the commander goes back to the derelict alone to kill himself honorably) so that your commander could become the highest rank available.
A game based on Hero-Quest itself was also available, but I always preferred Space Crusade. Despite generally preferring Fantasy over Sci-Fi, SC was better all around.
Wizball - Shooter - Finally, we come to a game most may recognise from other systems or the arcade. Wizball was, in essence, a side-scrolling shooter similar to Defender or R-Type, but it skewed the genre so wildly that it was by all rights its own genre. You controlled a green floating ball called Wizball, a vessel for a certain powerful wizard to traverse space with. Your mission was to collect paint from special enemies and paint the various levels of the world red, green or blue (or a mix of thereof). As you colored the worlds, bizarre enemies from all over tried to stop you and you needed to shoot them down.
This game was an early user of the power-up system: killing all of one wave of enemies allowed you to pick a power-up icon, and collecting these icons got you stronger and stronger upgrades. The first two upgrades were for mobility, as prior to collecting them you were just a bouncing ball with barely any control. After that were the usual shield and triple-direction bullet upgrades. There was also the Cat: a flying satellite that followed the Wizball and was a requirement needed to collect the much-desired paint.
The game was so bizarre that further explanation would be sort of fruitless, but it was such an interesting twist on an otherwise standard arcade genre with rules that had been so rigorously established prior to this game that I couldn't help but like it. Genre-benders such as these continue to be my strongest influence when I come up with game ideas.
It also had a sequel, Wizkid, who took the "Breakout" (otherwise known as "bat and ball") genre and twisted it in much the same way. Wizkid got a little too surreal at times however, and it was sometimes impossible to get past a level without a guide of some kind. I recommend trying both games just to take in the bizarreness, though they're both very playable as well.
I may do another ST review post at some point, since we've only hit the tip of the iceburg. There are far more classics such as the early RPGs of that period (such as Dungeon Master, among others) that need exposure.
