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From: seah@ee.rochester.edu (David Seah)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple2
Subject: Re: Low Blow from Apple/Rescue Raiders GS
Message-ID: <1990Sep23.194958.21310@ee.rochester.edu>
Date: 23 Sep 90 19:49:58 GMT
References: <2113@nyx.UUCP> <90Sep20.184036edt.57412@ugw.utcs.utoronto.ca> <7083@darkstar.ucsc.edu>
Reply-To: seah@ee.rochester.edu (David Seah)
Organization: University of Rochester Department of Electrical Engineering
Lines: 57

In article <7083@darkstar.ucsc.edu> unknown@ucscb.UCSC.EDU (The Unknown User) writes:
>In article <90Sep20.184036edt.57412@ugw.utcs.utoronto.ca> macausla@newton.ccs.tuns.ca (Robert MacAusland) writes:
>>What was Rescue Raiders anyway?  I don't ever remember seeing the
>>][e version...
>
>	Rescue Raiders is/was probably one of the BEST games ever
>for the // (pre GS) series.. Actually it is one of the best games
>for the // series period, including the GS..  Hopefully Rescue Raiders
>GS (with AppleTalk support and other improvements included in the Mac
>version) will be even better!

Yeppers!  Rescue Raiders was an awesome game!

>	Rescue Raiders used some of the same graphics as Choplifter
>(you HAVE to remember choplifter if you've been in the // world for a 
>while!)...

What do you mean by this?  As far as I remember, there were no graphics
"lifted" from Choplifter, though many of the elements were there.  The
running guys and the helicopter were much different looking.

>[Description of Rescue Raiders Premise, and how great it was]

My absolute favorite part of the whole game was the missiles!  They were
guided, and the enemy would launch swarms of them at you!  It was truly
the test of an excellent pilot when you could fly all the way from 
your base to the enemy base and drop your guys into their bunker...without
getting blown to smithereens by the guided missiles spewing out of the
Main Base every second!  The missiles obeyed the laws of physics, and
would become "dead bombs" when they ran out of fuel...these are the best
missiles I have ever seen in an arcade game!  True "seat-of-the-pants"
flying...not many games have approached this.  At least, I can't think of
one right now.

>	Enough rambling for now.. except one more thing. I feel that the
>people in Rescue Raiders and Choplifter are AMAZING! They seem SO realistic
>yet they're so small and use so few pixels.. Oh yeah.. I think the people in
>Lode Runner are the same too. (the demo for Lode Runner GS too)

Yes, they are.  It's so easy to screw up something like that, but the
animation really brings the feeling of running across...It's an old
animator's trick...small blob-like people are much easier to animate fluidly
than large ones.  Since the people are so small, you don't expect to see
much detail and everything looks just great!  Example: The Waving Goodbye
scene at the end of "The Little Mermaid" has Ariel and Eric up on a boat
sailing into the sunset...they look almost rotoscoped, but they are just
some splats of waving color with no resolvable detail at all...

Dan "Choplifter" Gorlin also did some great animation in AirHeart...it
really kicked!  Did he also do Short Circuit (?), where you are a little
dude running around electronic circuits?  Wait...I think I'm mixing up
the dude who did that and "Dino Eggs" (another excellently-done game).
And how about Jordan Mechner's Prince of Persia!  Truly awe-inspiring!
-- 
Dave Seah |       Omnidyne Systems-M         | INET: seah@ee.rochester.edu  |
          | "User-Friendly Killing Machines" | America Online: AFC DaveS    |
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