🚀 go-pugleaf

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bad...@phylo.life.uiuc.edu (Jonathan Badger) wrote:
>khc...@pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu (Oliver Chung) writes:

>>Your "Most major" games developers are less than 10 as far as I
>>have seen.  Origin, Sierra, SH, and couple others are the only
>>ones I have heard with actual products for Win95 in progress. 
>>And of those, I usually hear about only 1 or 2 products are for
>>Win95.

>Well, you pretty much hit them all (well, Maxis should be in there
>too). But aren't most decent games from these companies? And aren't

Not quite.  How "major" is iD before DOOM?  How "major" is 3D
Realms before (or even after) Terminal Velocity?  How "major" is
Origin before U4?  How "major" is Sierra before KQ?

Yet even with their (then) small company size, they released
great games like DOOM, U4, TV, KQ.

Big companies can make big games, but nothing prevent small ones
from making _good_ games.  And then there are many companies like
Microprose which are sticking with DOS.

>the products that are going to "Win95 only" the flagship products of
>these companies? Wing Commander IV and Falcon 4 are pretty much "must
>buy" products if you are fans of space or flight simulators. It would
>be different if all they were doing were producing cheap crud like
>Windows Entertainment Packs that could easily (and wisely) be ignored.

This one I agree, but nothing prevents them to port it to OS/2
(or Mac) later.  IBM games that later appears for Mac or vice
versa are not uncommon.  And more so, they are still doing DOS
games.  DOS is _far_ from dead as a gaming platform.

OTOH, there are companies like SDS which are producing their
flagship product for OS/2 only.  (Just to balance the viewpoint)

What we are seeing now is a diversifying of game platform, I
doubt if we will see a dominant platform by mid/end of 96.  Game
companies may go either way or multi-platform, but the simple
fact game companies are competitors of each other means it's
better for them all to spread among platforms than to rush
headlong to a single platform.

>>If, and by the time, Win95 games become the norm, you will be
>>told to upgrade to NT.

>Yes. But so what? This argument is pretty pointless. It's like saying
>there's no point in buying a Pentium because in two years you'll have
>to buy a Sexium.  At least I know there *will be* an upgrade path from
>Win 95. I'm not convinced that Warp won't be the last version of OS/2
>produced.

This is funny.  With the track record of IBM, which supported
OS/2 since 1.0 all the way to Warp now and Warp PPC soon, plus
the recent pledges of support, you are still not convinced that
OS/2 won't be dropped.

OTOH, with the track record of MS dropping OS/2 1.2, and probably
stop releasing new DOS, and last year even once said they will
stop supporting Win3.1 after shipping Win95, you are convinced
Win95 is the way to go.

Just by understand (partially) what role OS/2 played in IBM's
"solutions" to corporate clients like banks, telephone companies,
etc.  I am firmly convinced that OS/2 will be supported for years
to come.

>>If you know nothing about commercial games for OS/2, say so.  The
>>"one native, 2 planned" are from a _single_ game company (SDS)
>>only.  

>Yes, I'm aware that SDS is the company in question. But are there ANY
>other companies producing commercial OS/2 games? No. So what's your point?

Wrong.  Prognosis (sp?) the makers of Lemmings are doing (done?)
a OS/2 version of Lemmings.  CCS, another game company, is the
one doing Avarice, to be published thru SDS.  Another (small)
game company just did a survey in c.o.os2.games and decided to do
an OS/2 only games.

OS/2 games support is growing, just that it's not visible to in
games groups dominated by DOS users.

Even those companies who are sticking to DOS are getting
concerned about OS/2 compatibility with their games.  e.g.
Terminal Velocity's readme requested OS/2 gamers who got the game
running in OS/2 to tell them how.  (I got TV to run in OS/2 and
send a email to them)

>I'm no fan of Microsoft -- I'm a happy Linux user -- but this doesn't
>change the fact that there just doesn't seem to be a future, at least for
>gamers, in OS/2.

We'll see.

______
Oliver Chung
> My opinions are my own <                      >  Happy Warp user <
PGP Key fingerprint: 3E 86 59 AD 08 35 BE 54 DF 63 B9 F8 F7 8B 10 3B

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