Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!udel!eplrx7!leipold
From: leipold@eplrx7.uucp (Walt Leipold)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.games
Subject: Re: Review: OMEGA/Mac from Origin Systems
Summary: You're kidding, right?
Message-ID: <1990May4.032218.1804@eplrx7.uucp>
Date: 4 May 90 03:22:18 GMT
References: <734@limbo.Intuitive.Com>
Sender: usenet@udel.EDU
Reply-To: leipold@eplrx7.UUCP (Walt Leipold)
Organization: DuPont Engineering Physics Lab
Lines: 87

Taylor@limbo.Intuitive.Com (Dave Taylor) writes:
>[Most of a glowing review of the Mac version of Omega omitted...]
>
>Q:  Is the game fun?
>A:  Something this serious should hardly be considered a game, per se, but 
>for the purposes of this document, yes, it is fun, and it's the kind of game 
>that a group of people could get enthused about and swap tank designs and 
>such, pitting them against each other in various simulated environments.
>
>Q: What does the reviewer think of it?
>A:  (excerpts from a classified review)
>
>"...of the many thinking games I have for my Macintosh, OMEGA is one of
>the finest, allowing my friends and I to compete for best tank design in a
>such a way that we don't have to be all in the same room (with a stack of
>computers) at the same time, but can still have lots of fun anyway."
>
>"...quite playable, with the graphics -- non-Mac and clearly a direct
>translation from MS-DOS -- being very slick.  The amount of effort that 
>has been put into the documentation also makes the CyberTank Engineering
>Notebook quite enjoyable reading."

Ahem...

Quite playable?  *Slick* graphics?  This is some kind of sick joke,
right?  This game was completely unplayable, with absolutely the worst
graphics and user interface I have ever seen.

The cutesy little routine you've got to go through to start each game
(push a button, enter your name, enter your password, sit through a
fake retinal scan, hit Enter to verify the retinal scan, hit Enter to
enter the OSI development building...) is tiresome even the first time
through.  A simple "Open..." dialog to open a cybertank document would
have been sufficient.

The font used throughout Omega is completely unreadable, which I find
inexcusable in a text-based game.  It's about sixteen points high (but
unreadable anyway), so you can't see more than about fourteen lines of
your program at one time, and there's no Font menu for you to pick a
better font.  (In fact, I don't think Origin uses the TextEdit routines
to draw their text, which might explain, but not excuse, the garbage.)

The graphics in the satellite view (basically a bird's-eye view of the
battlefield) are lousy, and zooming in or out is painfully slow.  Also,
the sound effects are embarassingly bad.

The windows are _busy_, with extra-wide 'shaded' borders and gratuitous
screw heads holding the pieces together (really!), so (a) they waste a
lot of precious screen space that would have been better used for
information and (b) the clutter makes it difficult to separate the
informational wheat from the chaff.

Where there are any scroll bars at all, they don't look like Mac scroll
bars -- this would be okay, except that they don't perform as well as
Macintosh scroll bars, either.  They're so unresponsive, it's clear
that the programmers didn't use the Mac's Control Manager.

Worst of all, the game doesn't use Mac menus.  Instead, the Mac version
uses the same home-grown, slow menu code that Origin Systems uses to
impress the yokels in the IBM, Atari, and Commodore versions, which
means it's ugly and laughably clumsy to a Macintosh user.  Not only is
there a heavy horizontal line between each pair of menu items (which
makes the disabled horizontal line separating groups of menu items look
_really_ silly), but each and every menu item has two little *rivets* on
it, for crissake!

I could go on and on, but you probably get the idea.  I personally felt
cheated when I saw how bad Omega was.  For the high price ($49 or so)
they could have had someone competent do the port to the Macintosh.
Omega may have some excellent simulation capabilities buried in it
somewhere, but I found the interface to be so _insulting_, I tossed my
copy in the back of the closet the day after I received it.

DISCLAIMER: I have no connection to Origin Systems, and it's very likely
that I will _never_ have anything to do with them.

>----------------
>						-- Dave Taylor
>Intuitive Systems
>Mountain View, California

-- 
"As long as you've lit one candle,                         Walt Leipold
you're allowed to curse the darkness."       (leipolw%esvax@dupont.com)
--
--
The UUCP Mailer