If you'd told me in the past that in 2026 I'd delightedly say "My Atari 2600 arrived!" I would have laughed, but here we are. 😆 Now to track down some more games! (Or get a Unocart+)
Working on my art using Procreate and decided to draw Elster, because why not?
I've become more and more impressed by what programmers got the 2600 to do the more I've learned just how limited a machine it is. One thing I'm really curious about is how they kept track of everything with such a tiny amount of RAM (128 bytes); in Pac-Man, there are IIRC 124 dots plus four power pills that have to be tracked. Even if the programmer had a way to account for them using bits rather than bytes, that's still 16 precious bytes used, plus then the game also needs to keep track of lives, the score, the positions of all the characters, a timer for how long the power pills scare the ghosts when eaten, when the bonus fruit appears... it all adds up. And then the sequels add even more stuff - Jr Pac-Man has multiple maps that are over twice the size of the original!
How on earth did they do it? I'd love a technical rundown if anyone has one.
Spoilers below!
>!Two teenage boys, Daniel and Benedict Durante, are about to sacrifice a girl called Skylar to the Devil - specifically Paimon, the demonic villain from Event Horizon: Dark Descent - when her father intervenes.!<
>!Decades later, the now-adult Daniel is one of the richest men on Earth, and is searching for the wreckage of the Event Horizon, last seen 200 years ago. He, his synthetic wife Annabelle and a team of misfit mercenaries board the lost ship and discover that Justin, one of the crew of the ill-fated rescue ship Lewis & Clark, is still in stasis. The mercs are startled to discover that the mystery cargo they brought with them is actually Skylar, Durante's first wife, who is to be an offering to Paimon so that Durante can obtain immortality.!<
>!The Event Horizon starts to wake up, as does Justin, and Durante orders Annabelle to kill one of the mercs when he threatens to pull the team out. The ship begins to head back towards Neptune to rejoin with its other half in Hell, and another Lewis & Clark survivor, Starck, appears and tells the mercs they'd better get ready to start killing demons.!<
Review
By making this a centuries-later sequel rather than a prequel like Dark Descent, writer Christian Ward gets to make up whatever setting he likes. What he likes is apparently Aliens, as we get synthetics, quirky space soldiers with big guns and a survivor from the original film who's going to show the overconfident tough guys how things are done. This being the first issue it's too early to know where the story's going to go, but I have to admit I didn't expect the final frame to be a battle-scarred >!Starck!< holding a big axe and a bloody demon skull while making a bad-ass quip. So I guess the ending of the movie (where Starck, Cooper and presumably the in-stasis Justin were rescued) was just a dream, huh?
Ward delivers character exposition in blunt bullet-point captions ("Corporal Peter Powell. Australia. 38 years old. In serious debt. Being sued over his social media activity.") rather than through what they say or do. To paraphrase Garth Marenghi, "I know writers who show rather than tell, and they're all cowards!" The only character who makes any impression is Durante, and that's purely because his personality trait of "evil asshole billionaire" has three more words in it than anyone else's.
Rob Carey's art is cleaner and easier on the eye than that in Dark Descent, though his occasionally almost manga-style faces lack its grit. I'm going to assume that contractual requirements rather than any lack of skill are the cause of the absolute zero resemblance between his renderings of the Lewis & Clark's crew and the actors who played them!