Well the animation is more extensive than the picture on-line. The ship is moving sideways, contrary to what you would normaly do in Asteroids (at least my stategy is to only rotate and move as little as possible...)
However, with an LCD screen rotating the ship is impossible to animate. Also the ship is never in the center of the "screen" because naturaly that is where the hands are connected.
The animation lasts for about 13 seconds then repeats. You can also select to "freeze" the action, although you do not freeze the moment the "game"is in at that time, but it switches to a predifened set up of the screen. The score is starting with 0 and the ship actualy shoots a couple of asteroids and scores points up to 450 when the ship hits an Asteroid. The number of ships in the bottom stays at thee however and the animation is repeated.
Compared to the picture on the Fossil site there are more differences: there are more Asteroids on screen all the time on the real watch, and the picture it's only one. On the watch it's minimum 2, but most of the time 4/5.
Also some asteroids on the picture are "filled in" (white), on the watch they never are, so more true to the actual game.
In practice, there needs to be pretty good ambient lighting to see the animation. It's hard to see it from an angle. I don't think that's neccesarely a bad thing. Too much jumping and moving gets annoying. Now its fun to look at when you want to. It might have been nice if they had added a backlighting feature though...but would probably eat up too much batteries.
I've got a couple of female friends that I love very much, even though I can't "play" with them (OK, OK, OK I admit, there's one I'd kill for... but we're drifting off.
) but I know what you mean. However, this watch is NOT a game watch. It's a great looking watch, with a great theme, very tastefully implemented in the motion background and packaging.
I can't see how they could have made this watch look this slick and tight, and still be able to do a SERIOUS rendition of Asteroids. Anyone who knows the physics of Asteroids ( a vector game ! ) knows it would be impossible to do a good LCD version. How would you animate the numerous randomly moving Asteroids, that you shoot, then they split up and move in all directions...etc. etc. Let alone, how could you seriously control a game on a watch ? Connect a BYOAC CP to it ? Also ship movement would be very difficult (rotate and accelarate).
However, the Break Out watch could have been done as a real game, using the dial setting wheel as a spinner
Anyway, I love this watch, will wear it on special occasions only, and I've had many compliments about it already, even from people who hadn't seen the animation before at all.
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Topic: Fossil Atari Watches (Read 6178 times)
