Smash TV - Atari ST (Full Playthrough & Opinion)

Описание: Growing up I never had the ST version of Smash TV, I had to do with the watered down port for the Master System (there’s a full play through of that on my channel too), and so I didn’t get a true Smash TV experience until I was an adult. This was originally a 1990’s Williams arcade game which improved on the groundwork found on Robotron and seems to borrow the plot of a futuristic violent game show from the popular Arnold Schwarzenegger movie ‘The Running Man’. The game was a smash hit and of course it was later ported to a bunch of platforms such as the Amstrad CPC, Amiga, C64, Mega Drive, Master System, Game Gear, SNES, NES, Spectrum and of course this Atari ST version.

The game is a 1-2 player shooter where you are dumped into an arena and simply have to survive. At the end of every round you are given a choice of doors to leave through so you can choose the easiest path through to the boss and you’ll need to find this out because this title is very unforgiving, you are constantly outnumbered. But thankfully there are plenty of weapon powers ups and your success is based on collecting these and keep moving, particularly for the bosses as the first and last boss cannot killed with your conventional weapon.

Graphically the arenas look good and the only real bit of animation in the backdrops is from the door opening when an enemy enters the killing floor, but ultimately it doesn’t need to be great. It only takes a moment to realise that the arenas are regularly packed with enemy sprites swarming at you. There’s probably around 20 enemies on screen at a time and the action remains fast without any noticeable flickering and they are all animated really nicely. Well that’s not actually true, there is one moment where the game slows down and that’s on the third level boss with the two giant snakes, ironically it actually helps the game play as it makes it easier to dodge the projectiles. The huge bosses also look great on the ST however, the developers did a great job here.

I wish they kept the speech though, who didn’t like it when the presenter said the Robocop line ‘I’d buy that for a dollar’. The ST could handle speech so, I’m guessing that it was down to disk space.

Control wise you have to use the joystick and the simple idea is to just move and shoot and keep running into the limited space in the arena whilst picking up as many weapon power ups as you can. Now you can play this on one joystick, however I would not recommend it as you can’t control the direction of your gun. This is important because a lot of the time you will need to shoot enemies behind you whilst you are running for your life. Thankfully the devs added the ability to play with two joysticks and in this sense it plays like a twin stick shooter with one stick handling the movement and the other handling the shooting. Let me tell you this plays wonderfully and I had no problems with the controls. The only real problem with this in that in order to play multiplayer you will need four joysticks and personally I have never had four ST joysticks.

I’ll be honest, I was very surprised on how well Smash TV has been ported to the Atari ST. Everything you would want has been kept in here, it plays great, looks great and retains the rock hard super addictive game play from the original arcade classic.


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