Bounstryk

About the game

Two players share a walled pitch, and a single ball bounces around it without ever slowing down. There is a gap in the wall at each end: that is the goal, and the aim is to send the ball through your opponent's. The left player, in blue, defends the left goal; the right player, in orange, defends the right one. The first to reach the target score wins the match.

Both players can run anywhere on the pitch, so you are free to stay home and guard the goal or go forward and meet the ball halfway. Just touching the ball deflects it off whichever side of you it hits. Pressing the button is a strike: for a brief moment the player swings, and a ball touched during that moment shoots away at double speed. Players also collide with each other, and a strike landed in the middle of a collision shoves the other player much further than a simple bump, which is handy for clearing someone out of the way.

When a goal goes in, the pitch flashes in the scorer's color and the ball goes back into play from the player who conceded it. The game's hero is Bounstryker, the author's own mascot, who appears on the title screen and plays both sides of the match.

Playing it here

This is a homebrew game made for the Atari 2600: a new game by independent developers for the 1977 console, not a commercial release. It runs here in Stellerator, an Atari 2600 emulator written in JavaScript. Click Play now and press Space on the title screen to reach the match setup, then press Space again to kick off.

Both players start out human, one on each joystick. To play alone, press F3: that turns the right difficulty switch to A, and the computer takes over the orange player. Press F1 instead if you would rather play on the right side and let the computer have the left. With both switches on A the computer plays against itself. A message at the top of the screen shows the new position each time.

There are no save states on this platform: like on the real console, a match lasts as long as you keep playing, and P pauses it. A gamepad works too.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

Setting up a match. On the setup screen, the number at the top is the score needed to win. Each press of Backspace moves it along 5, 7, 9, 11, 21, 1 and 3; after 3 it goes back to 5 and the goals get wider. There are four goal sizes, from a narrow gap in the middle of each end wall up to the whole end of the pitch, so it takes a few laps to try them all.

Tap, don't hold. The strike only lasts a moment after the button goes down, and keeping it pressed does not extend it. Press it just before the ball arrives, then let go so you are ready for the next one.

Fast balls pile up. Every strike adds another burst of double speed, so two quick strikes in a row send the ball flying for a good while. That is when the narrow goals get dangerous.

Swap sides mid-match. The game checks the difficulty switches all the time, so you can hand a player to the computer, or take one back, without restarting.

Pausing. On a real console the color/B&W switch pauses the match; that switch is not mapped here, so use P.

Credits and licence

Bounstryk was designed and programmed by Egar Garcia in batari Basic. The code is released under the Apache License 2.0, and the images in the project, including the Bounstryker mascot artwork, are under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Both licence texts are linked from this page.