Hello everyone,

     I'm contemplating a change to my Yars' Revenge clone.  The game mechanics for the Zorlon Cannon are currently hard-coded to the Atari 2600's original mode "6", also known as "Ultimate Yars", with the difficulty switch set to "hard":

1. Yars must eat shield cells and/or touch the Qotile a few times to gain "trons".
2. Arming the Zorlon Cannon (only mechanism for killing the Qotile) consumes 5 trons.
3. Trons are an 8-bit quantity and will overflow / wrap around to zero.
4. Death of Yar resets trons.
5. Tron count is not displayed.
6. The Zorlon Cannon will annihilate on contact with the Qotile's destroy missile(s).
7. A collision with the Zorlon Cannon is fatal to Yar when the ZC is traveling to the right, but after it bounces and heads left, Yar can capture it and collect 4 trons.

This seems natural to me, as I grew up playing Yars on my Atari and I preferred "Ultimate Yars" because I hated how in the other modes that the cannon would activate simply from touching the Qotile.  (This is from memory, I didn't check the docs on Atari Age).

Anyway, the whole mechanism for killing the Qotile is confusing lots of people.  Several of my Beta testers, and anyone at the MGC who tried the game but never played the original.

Now, in my version I plan to have an "Instructions" menu option that will explain all of this (and show pictures of each game element, similar to the "Credits" screen on the MGC multi-cart).

I am contemplating changing how the cannon is armed.  However, I really can't eliminate the cannon, as it is a fundamental part of what makes the game "Yars' Revenge".  I'm looking for feedback on these ideas, or any additional ideas:

1. Change nothing.  Document the behavior in the "Instructions" game mode.
2. Eliminate trons.  Yar can always activate the cannon by simply pushing against the left side of the screen.
3. Eliminate trons, but add "random power-ups" that appear, well, randomly, on the screen.  Yar must fly over and touch the power-up to gain it.  Power-ups could include far more than just a cannon shot:
1. Cannon armed.
2. Freeze time for a few seconds (for the Qotile, his missiles and shield).
3. Yar gains a personal "anti-missile" shield (drawn as red ring around Yar).
4. Ability to fire from inside neutral zone.
5. Super-gun (Yar already has this, use 'Select' button to toggle).  Allows Yar to destroy large chunks of the shield, but still can't kill Qotile.
6. Extra lives (rare powerup, but might become more frequent in later levels).

Part of me wants to keep the game similar enough to the original that it can claim to be a "legit spiritual successor", but part of me wants to change it to be more like a NES or arcade game could be.  The original game fit into 4K of ROM and used nearly all of the 128 bytes of RAM on the Atari 2600.  There just wasn't enough capacity to do much more with it.

I could eliminate the trons and cannon entirely, and replace them with both Yar and the Qotile having health gauges.  The level ends when the Qoitle's health goes to zero.  Yar's simple gun might inflict some very minor damage, but Yar would still need to use some other mechanism to inflict any realistic damage.  Eg, bigger guns the he gets temporarily because they are "drop-shipped" by the Yar's supply line or some other bull-shit that I'll work into the narrative.

But the idea of timing the cannon to kill the moving Qotile seems so fundamentally part of the game that its hard to remove.  But it confuses lots of people... so I'm not sure what to do.

Thoughts?

(outdated screen shots at http://www.nesyar.com...)

I say change nothing but at the same time I would like to try the changes you suggest. Yars revenge was/is my favorite 2600 game.

I say keep it as it is. I was one of the people that tried it at MGC (and had no clue how to play initially) and the game was quite fun once I figured out how to play. If you include clear instructions (maybe even an instruction sheet with screen shots), I think that everything should be fine.

I say, change nothing.

Can't you offer your additional ideas as an option in the title screen? They sound interesting, but I like having the original better.

Either 1) Change nothing/Add Instructions
or 4) program your additional ideas as a seperate "Mode" to be accessed from the title screen, retaining the "classic" atari Mode also.

Maintain the original mode, but offer an updated 'remix' mode specific to your NES version. Seems to be how most modern re-releases work these days.