A downloadable game

Why did the chicken cross the road? 

To score more points than the other one. This is a port of the Atari 2600 game, done in a day or so while I get geared up for a second pass at Galaga. I think it'll be a nice game to play with my daughter on her TheC64.

It's a testament to the skill of the original programmer David Crane, as what took a day on the C64 with its character graphics, hardware sprites and raster interrupts would doubtless have taken several months on the 2600. I've read and watched a lot about how to program the TIA and I still wouldn't really know where to start!

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The Game

You have 136 seconds to get your chicken across the road as many times as possible. When there are less than 8 seconds left the scores will flash.

There are various levels to play with different amounts and speeds of traffic, and two difficulty settings. On 'easy', being hit by a vehicle will only knock back your chicken a lane and a half. On 'hard', every hit returns your chicken to the start! The difficulty can be set for each player to give an advantage to a child or lesser-skilled player.

I've added a rudimentary AI as this was purely a 2-player game on the 2600. 

There is also a 9th level that isn't in the original game, featuring a maximum number of vehicles and wildly variable speeds.

I admit the sounds aren't great, I used this program to generate random sounds and then tweaked them. https://csdb.dk/release/?id=121491

If anyone can get closer to the frankly excellent horn and engine sounds from the 2600 version please get in touch!

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Pre-game Controls 

(Port 2 = left player, Port 1 = right player)

  • Up/Down - select level number 1-9
  • Left - switch between easy (red) and hard (blue)
  • Right - switch between human or CPU second player (black = CPU)
  • Fire - start game

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In-game Controls

  • Up/Down - move chicken





StatusReleased
Rating
Rated 5.0 out of 5 stars
(1 total ratings)
AuthorArlasoft
GenreAction

Download

Download
freeway.prg 3 kB

Comments

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Nice game! Our German-language review can be found in our recorded livestream starting at 01:03:59. Subscription to our YouTube or Twitch channel is welcome. 🙂

Awesome game! I have loved all your atari 2600 ports so far. Keep up the good work!

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Agreed with 2nd comment. It will be more fun wih second opponent. thanks for the port game.

Yeah, it's really a 2-player game, the AI at least gives someone to practice against...

very good

Funny game. It sure would be great fun against an opponent ;)