Back to the Future: Part 2 - Atari ST (Let's Play & Opinion)

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Published on July 3, 2017 8:00:56 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IArtn9ajy4

Game:

Back to the Future (1985)

Category:

Let's Play

Duration: 14:26

176 views

2

Back to the Future Part 2 is another movie licenced game based off of the classic time travelling comedy from the 80’s, a personal favourite trilogy of mine. There were various versions of this game for the Amiga, Amstrad CPC, C64, DOS, ZX Spectrum, the Sega Master System and finally this Atari ST version developed by Mirrorsoft and published by Image Works in 1990.

The game is a one player experience that follows the movie fairly well. Level 1 sees you on your hoverboard trying to avoid Griff and his gang. Level 2 is sort of an overhead stealth puzzle game where Marty is trying to sneak around his future self’s home trying not to get caught in order to rescue Jennifer. Level 3 sees you in an alternate 1985 where it is presented as a 2D action game, think of it like Bad Dudes VS Dragon Ninja, just no-where near as good. You basically have to punch and kick everybody out of the way, however a lot of the time the enemies will simply walk off on their own accord. Level 4 is the enchantment under the sea dance, which doesn’t actually happen to this Marty in the movie, even though the scene is there. It’s basically one of those sliding puzzles, which I personally love. The last level goes back to the hoverboarding with Marty trying to get back the Sports Almanac from Biff in 1985. Overall it’s a good variety and at least it looks like the developers have tried to follow the film with levels that actually fit.

Graphically the game is drawn very well with the characters and the backdrops looking very similar to the one’s that appear in the classic films. It animates well and there’s some big sprites that appear on the screen. The one downside to this is that the game slows down a lot, in fact virtually every time a big car appears then the game starts crawling until it disappears off again. It also contains some good music with the ST’s music chip doing good work here on the Back to the Future theme. From a visual presentation point of view it is a good game, unfortunately there are a few other problems which set it back.

For one the controls are really stiff and horrible on the side scrolling beat em up sections and most notably the two hoverboarding stages, which consider that this is the start and end of the game it is a problem. I’m constantly having to fight the controls and for some reason the punch doesn’t work half the time and it’s often just easier to avoid the enemies if you can. The other difficulty comes from the game logic. Every time you get hit you lose energy, pretty standard stuff, but you also lose energy anyway just from moving about. So if the game decides to not drop the orange P’s which refill your energy, and these seem to drop at random, then you will almost certainly die. It’s often just complete luck if you make it through a section and if you do die, you are sent back to the previous checkpoint rather than continuing on. Unfortunately this means that this version of the game is somewhat difficult to make it past the first level. In fact I have been playing this for a while now and I’ve got close to the end, but I’ve never been able to beat the first stage and looking at other people playing this on Youtube I’ve not seen anybody get any further without cheating.

So it’s a rather difficult game to recommend, it the developers did a bit of tweaking and eased up on the first level – maybe if they just stopped the hoverboard slowly draining energy, then it would be better.

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Atari ST: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLx4xxIIv8AfzF1WNCk2yjFs9SNEZUf6o3
Sega Mega Drive: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLx4xxIIv8AfzY6iR6W6cRsFRt7zUlgHIE
Sega Master System: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLx4xxIIv8AfySbjh71hXweL28cqu-DbR5
Windows PC: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLx4xxIIv8AfxkkqPP6dWcSarH94BPrbvr

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