🚀 go-pugleaf

Kevin C. Dorff <men...@hydra.unm.edu> writes:
>I think ANY game if programmed correctly can work well on cd. You
>don't need video clips to make a good cd-rom game, you can load
>the scenario (which shouldn't be very large) from the cd into
>memory, play whopping cd music in the background, have TONS
>of space for killer sound effects and highly detailed sprites,
>very very complex strategy games (like only 600 megs of disk
>space can provide), and maybe toss in speech for a running
>diaglog for all the characters, all this with

It can also be poorly done, with talking effects and huge bitmaps taking
the place of challenging gameplay.  Some adventure games are tedious enough
without having everybody talking at you all the time.  The medium doesn't
make bad games good or good games bad.

>   1. a disc that is cheaper to produce than 15 3.5" disks

Probably even cheaper than that.  I've heard a dollar or two in quantity.

>   3. I heard 4xspin ide's will be about $250 by christmas,
>      making the transfer rate about the same as NORMAL ide-drives
>      currently (with a slowish seek, but thats ok, you don't
>      need fast seek if you do things right).

600 KB/s is still pretty pathetic for a hard drive.  My "slow" IDE drives do
1.2 MB/sec easy (compared to my fast SCSI drives which do 3 MB/s).  Even my
ancient Atari ST did 800 KB/s.  Let me know when 5x is out :-)

>      I also think my cd-rom (2xspin) installs stuff faster than
>      floppy does (faster transfer rate)... I am quite sure than floppy
>      cannot sustain a 300k/second transfer rate.

I think this is a key point.  Not too long ago, many games were played only
on floppy.  Then hard drives became more common-place, and a game that could
be installed on a hard drive was pretty cool.  And you could use a lot more
nifty stuff in the game.  I think that's about where we are now.  A lot of
manufacturers still offer floppy-based games, but it will possibly not be
too long before CD-ROM is the norm.  And hopefully manufacturers will find
something better to do with 600-800MB than speech!

>I don't see why people are bitching so much about cd rom games.
>I personally vowed a couple months ago not to buy any games that
>WEREN'T on cd, unless they were just PHENOMINAL and there was
>no cd rom version coming out ever.

This would be great if the typical CD-ROM version wasn't out two months LATER
and $20 more EXPENSIVE!  You'd never guess that discs were cheaper :-(
-- 
Paul Close	     p...@sgi.com	   ...!{ames, decwrl, uunet}!sgi!pdc

			No fate but what we make