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[TooMuchSpareTime]

Lamarr Is Going Home is my first complete "running and jumping" game, and is a kind of demake of Half Life 2's environments and characters, but the gameplay is taken directly from

, an Atari-2600 game.

The story takes place concurrently to Gordon Freeman's adventure from A Red Letter Day up until he and Alyx teleport out of Nova Prospekt, but who cares about them, right? This game's about Dr Kleiner's headcrab, Lamarr. (Gordon and the G-man both make cameos.)

Also this was an excuse for me to try making some pixel art again for the first time in like 10 years.  Enjoy!

[Renton]

Looks nice. Will play now.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

yes, looks very good, but if you think the atari 2600 was capable of running a game like this you probably didn't own one

[TooMuchSpareTime]

That is true. I did make quite a number of "tech upgrades" in this, but this is how awesome I seem to remember the Atari-2600 being. 

Well, except the colour palette. That was terrible. But LIGH is what BIGH wanted to be. XD

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

ah. the main things are that it uses too many colors at once to have been on it, and the pixels are too small (the resolution was a lot smaller, it didn't use individual pixels but instead blocks of pixels). e.g. the best looking game on the atari 2600 tended to look like this (note that this screenshot has a similar gradient sunset-like bg and similarly green hills and water, coincidentally):

[Zaratustra]

you're forgetting all the CRT artifacts such as scanlines, color blur and trailoff

[TooMuchSpareTime]

The only "bugs" I put in were the uneven ground thing that I would always see on the right part of the screens, and the linear (not parabolic) jumping. At one point, I stretched the whole game to make the pixels not square, but for some reason that made the Actionscript stop working (even though I used relative stuff (_parent.) rather than absolute (_root.) for all my variables), so I had to scrap that. :\

You may also notice that the sprites don't actually move in the correct units to line up with the background pixels.

I didn't want to put in scanlines and colour bleeding though. ;_; Think of it more as a tribute than a simulation. :]
But I probably will try to do a more "true to life", "warts & all" Atari game at some stage.

[Noyb]

The pixel art is fantastic. Beat it on my second try.

A few times it wasn't clear where the walkable areas were, like the car in Ravenholm, or everything in the level where you need to let the razor-thing light the way. In general, the randomness of the flying enemies was really annoying, leading to some arbitrary difficulty spikes.

I'm not sure if a game over is necessary in this game. Feels like the draw is seeing each new location more than the gameplay. On the other hand, the feeling of making trial runs before the final "must succeed" try is interesting.

Passwords seem like an annoying way to not make a save/load than a throwback to old cartridges.

[DarkSoul520]

Nice work!
Wonderful concept and beautifully implemented.
I always figured Lamarr would make it back somehow.

Some of those levels are damn hard.

[Eclipse]

cool graphics but the gameplay is really "meh"... you totally got the clunkyness of some old atari games if it was the scope, but the game isn't actually that fun.
The concept is lovely

[Anthony Flack]

The thing I always found so bizarre about the 2600 was, it had barely enough memory to rub two pixels together, yet it had this huge colour palette. The 2600 couldn't do much more than make stripes with them, but any 8-bit computer artist would have killed for that palette.

[Dustin Gunn]

Man, why'd you make the gameplay like that? Pixel-perfect jumps in succession that are also randomly impossible due to floaty things isn't a good time.