Moon Patrol is a great arcade game, and it’s had some excellent ports over the years. The Atari ST one was quite late, but it certainly nails the visuals.
The gameplay, however, is another matter; there’s something about Atari ST Moon Patrol that just doesn’t quite feel right. Still, if you want a game that looks like Moon Patrol but provides a slightly different challenge to the versions you may be more familiar with, it might be worth a look — it’s not a bad game, after all!
One of the fun things about the modern retro community is its willingness to take on common criticisms of past classics and work on those things to make them better.
Such is the case with Moon Patrol Redux, a project which takes the already pretty good version of Irem’s classic Moon Patrol for Atari 8-bit and enhances it with a better player sprite, a colour palette that’s truer to the arcade original and a few other tweaks here and there. The result is the best version of Moon Patrol you can play on the good ol’ Atari!
I love Moon Patrol, but it’s actually been quite a while since I played it seriously — and I’ve never spent that much time with the arcade original.
Still, all it took to get me interested in playing again was some discussion of the Atari 8-bit version (and its dodgy moon buggy sprite) on the 1200XL Podcast — after that, I was ready with my PayPal account to download the Arcade Archives version on Switch, marking what I suspect is the beginning of a worrying addiction. But oh well.
