🚀 go-pugleaf

" Steve Young" <su2...@eclipse.co.uk> wrote:

>>You should shop around more. There are loads of interesting non-arcade
>>games for PC. Back in the eighties 95% of games available for any
>>machine (Sinclair Spectrum, Commodore 64, Apple 2...) were simple
>>action games. If you had weeded them out, you would have left only
>>with the few Infocom and Origin games you guys only remember today.
>
>
>You must have had a very limited selection where you lived. You have only
>got to look at the old 8bit libraries and see the tons of ex commercial non
>arcade stuff to know this isn't true. Or perhaps all these titles appeared
>by magic from the fairies.

Go check the Apple II, Sinclair Spectrum and C64 game ftp archives.
There are much much more action games there than adventure or rpg
games. The reason you _think_ there were more adventure/rpg games is
because you have forgotten those hundreds/thousands of simple action
games for those systems.

>>>Machines are 100's times more powerfull now plus the
>>>storage space of CD'S. I doubt if the games are 100's of times better
>>>though. I wonder why.
>>
>>Using the same logic, a car costing 500 times more than a second hand
>>VW Bug should be 500 times better than that VW Bug. Hardly so.
>
>This is hardly a comparision is it. Cars values are to do with alot more
>than how powerful it is.

It is as useless comparison as yours was. Everyone knows a game is not
necessarily 500 times "better" if it is running on a machine with 500
times more power. I don't know what made you think so. But I agree
that games running on more powerful machines are indeed better, even
though you can't measure it so directly as you tried.

>>The power of a gaming system does not linearly correlate to the
>>"betterness" of its games. But when I look at the games available
>>today, I would have "killed" to have such games on 1983 home
>>computers. Be it I-War, Betrayal at Krondor, Final Fantasy 7, Flying
>>Corps, F1RS, Fantasy General, Close Combat 2, Last Express etc. etc.
>
>
>Wouldn't we all. But can you honestly say any of these games above stretched
>the limitations of the technolgy available for them like games like Elite
>and Lords of Midnight. I don't think so. If technology stopped today, within

It is much much easier to "stretch the limits" when the machines are
so limited to begin with. Someone who made games for Sinclair ZX-81
probably thought Amiga programmers were very sloppy with all that
extra power available for them. So would you like to play PC games on
386 systems only so that the game developers could "stretch the
limits" of 386 machines?

>a few years games would be 4-5 better than they are now. Why? Because
>technology doesn't gets stretched nowadays because sloppy programmers know
>they have more and more power to use, whereas before they would have had to
>get around the limitations of the machines.

Ok, so you say PC programmers are sloppy.

Since you are such an expert in game programming, tell me, 
if they were indeed stretching the limits of, say, my
P233MMX/64MB/Voodoo1 machine, how much faster would a game like 
Quake 2, Unreal, F1RS or Longbow 2 run on them without any loss of
detail? 1% faster? 10% faster? 50% faster? 1000% faster?

After you have answered that, next question: what part of e.g. the
Quake 2 or Unreal code would you improve to gain that extra speed by
"stretching the limits", and in what way?

>>Oh by the way, none of those games above are arcade games.
>
>Yes, but hardly any off them were released recently. Is there a reason for
>this, or is there such a shortage of top class games of these types that you
>have to go back a bit to think of them.

Oh come on. I-War hasn't even been released in US yet (it will have a
name Independence War), and all those games are relatively new
compared to those 1980-1988 games you are talking about all the time.

Since you say I should only mention game that were released last week,
how come you are allowed to talk about games which were released over
one whole decade (the eighties)? Where's the logic in that?

Tell me, which great classic games were released in October of 1984?
Since you are restricting that I should talk about games released only
last month or so, you are allowed to talk about October/84 games only.
Ok?

>>As for today, I can think of such titles like Grand Prix Legends,
>>Longbow 2, I-War, Close Combat 2 etc. The realism in these games would
>>care most people away (no simple arcade action), yet these games were
>>(or are about to) released after all.
>
>Oh yes, the real time strategy nonsense that most of these games claim to
>be. Most are as realistic as Pacman.

They are much more realistic than anything available for your precious
Sinclair Spectrum.

>If you're going to have real time, then
>have real time, but don't insult our intelligence with this simulated stuff
>like Close Combat and the idiotic Age of Empires, where you play through
>thousands of years in about an hour. Very real.

Did I mention Age of Empires somewhere? Goes to show you have never
played Close Combat 2, if you really think it is played through
"thousands of years". Also it seems you haven't fully grasped the idea
of strategy war games. The idea is not that everything runs in
realtime _all the time_.

You may go back to play your Jet Set Willy, a prime example of those
"great" old games. To each his own.


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