🚀 go-pugleaf

: I just thought I'd reenter this discussion to clear some things up.  
: I was not in any way trying to knock System Shock.  Although I have not 
: tried the real version, I played the demo and it ran pretty decent on my 
: 486/33 SX with 8 Megabytes of ram.  I was simply stating the point that, 
: in general, Origin games need a very fast processor to run them.  
: Although it seems that part of the reason for this is that they are 
: "pushing the limit", I feel that they could make their games run on 
: slower machines.  Is it laziness?  Do they REALLY take the time to try 
: and make their games playable for anyone?  It doesn't seem like it.  I 
: used Doom in comparison with SS because ID has given me every reason to 
: beleive that they do.  I would just like to see some of that from Origin.

I've been playing SShock on my 486sx33, and it runs pretty well!  It's 
not as fast as Doom, but it's not THAT MUCH slower.  And, in return, we 
get real bridges, tilting, crouching, etc.  I have no problem with this.  
When I played Doom the first time, it was on a slow machine, and I 
groaned "Oh, I wish I had a 486" (Doom was what finally got me to 
upgrade).  Sure, it needed the faster processor, but I had no question 
why.  Look at the screens: that processor power is not being wasted!  
SShock was a little slower than Doom, but, as I listed above, I could see 
why.  I didn't feel like this was being wasted either.

I got WC3 working reasonably well on my 33 Mhz box (for those of you 
still struggling: GET A VLB VGA board!  It has made a tremendous 
difference).  Sure, I wish it could run on a slower machine, but, once 
again, I can see where all the muscle it needs is going to!

Games like Ultima 8, however, had me wondering.  It was horribly slow, 
but I didn't see ANYTHING that warranted that.  It looked nice, had nice 
sound effects, and good animation, but I've seen other games with all 
this that ran much faster.  This one had me feeling like the processor 
power was being wasted, and that "Oh, we're just trying to push the 
limits" was a cop-out for not optimizing their code.

BTW, someone else mentioned that SShock was written by Looking Glass and 
not Origin.  That is true, and can make a big difference (my favorite 
Sierra games all seemed to come from Dynamix).