Steve Crow‘s classic ZX Spectrum game, Starquake, was converted to the Atari 8-bit by Nick Strange for publisher Bubble Bus Software in 1985.
You control a small alien character called BLOB (Bio-Logically Operated Being) and must re-build the core on an alien planet by finding various pieces of it scattered throughout a huge maze of rooms. These pieces are found inside ‘Cheops Pyramids’ which you open by collecting a variety of pickups that give you access to them.
BLOB has a blaster at his disposal and can generate platforms underneath himself to reach higher places, but cannot jump. There are floating platforms found docked in certain places, and if BLOB stands on top of one he can take off and fly around on them. He is restricted to what he can do while on one, though, and must re-dock a platform if he wants to interact with something on the ground.
Starquake is a decent conversion on the Atari but it does lack colour – compared to the original ZX Spectrum version. And, while Starquake is a classic game with a fair few interesting ideas contained within it, it is also an incredibly difficult game to make any headway in. You need to know what the passwords are for the various teleporters (easy enough to find online), and how to keep your energy levels up (by collecting energy power-ups, although these are not that obvious and aren’t nearly as prevalent as they maybe should be). On top of that you also need to keep refilling your blaster energy, and your platform-making energy, which are frustrations that maybe shouldn’t even be in the game.
Enemies re-spawn in rooms that you visit and can be shot with the blaster, but you can never completely stop them appearing. And since BLOB’s blaster energy doesn’t last long, you can easily find yourself defenceless, with no ammunition to shoot anything.
While Starquake is rightly revered among the retro gaming community for being an attractive and playable game, it is one of those games that is almost impossible to complete. Even with cheats activated. I remember buying the original Spectrum version as a youngster and enjoying messing around with it, but getting anywhere near completing it was just a pipe dream. The same applies to the Atari version. Starquake is fun to play casually, but you’ll almost certainly get nowhere if you try to play it with a view to completing it. Which is a shame, really.
More: Starquake on Wikipedia
The King of Grabs 
Love this game and i have really finished atari xl version, many times. But … It is extremelly difficult because of conversion mistakes. 1. atari sprites are broken in this game. Multiplied, flickering and you never know if you can hit them (colission detection also broken). 2. core built using different algorithm and it excludes core fragments and it makes pyramyds useless – forces you to walk almost entire labyrinth because you can’t swap core item in pyramyds – you don’t need them in atari xl version – and items you need can’t be swapped.
It looks like last moment conversions by programmer who never got the game right and rushed it to the marked
Jacek S
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It’s unfortunately a common occurrence with some ports – that they are released unfinished. I’d say that it’s usually the fault of the publisher if a game is released unfinished, as the developers likely want the game to be correct before release, but publishers just want the game on sale and to stop spending money on development. Quite a few publishers don’t care if a game is broken when they release it. It’s interesting to know that this game is badly broken, though, Jacek. It’s a difficult game as it is, but it’s not a game that I’ve come anywhere close to completing, so I didn’t realise it was broken. It’s important that this information is publicly known, though, so thank you for your comment. 🙂
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Funny thing some small mistakes were made at middle point in c64 version 😉 and they were transfered to atari xl (pyramids wer “bit” worse in c64 than in zx) and falling from screen up was working different due to other screen ratio
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I’m guessing that the ZX Spectrum version was maybe the only version that was actually correct and not broken, as it was the original, and Steve Crow (the original designer/coder) I’m sure would not have allowed Bubble Bus to release it broken (because he had a reputation to protect). When it comes to ports, the converting programmers were less invested in the games and were also probably bullied by the publishers to finish quickly and not clean up any bugs. I haven’t played the Atari XL version, but if you’ve completed it then that one may also be okay, with fewer bugs. There were also Atari ST, BBC Micro, MS-DOS, Amstrad CPC, MSX, C64 and Tatung Einstein versions of Starquake. It would be interesting to find out which are bugged and which are not.
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