Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!apple!well!farren From: farren@well.sf.ca.us (Mike Farren) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.games Subject: Re: FAUG demo of Powermonger by E.A. -- long review Keywords: simply incredible Message-ID: <22184@well.sf.ca.us> Date: 15 Dec 90 21:18:11 GMT References: <1950@unlisys.in-berlin.de> <1990Dec5.110344.6364@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> <1787@seti.inria.fr> <1990Dec10.133123@avahi.inria.fr> <22110@well.sf.ca.us> <9424@mirsa.inria.fr> Lines: 111 buffa@kish.inria.fr (Michel Buffa) writes: >Hard drive compatibility would have been great, but multitasking makes only >bad games when animation speed is essential. I'm getting a bit tired of this, Buffa. What I've said, consistently, is that the MAJORITY of cases do not require disabling multitasking to get full speed. There might be some that do - but even those should NOT nuke the OS. There's NO reason to do so - NONE. Period. Any game which requires a reboot when it's finished is WRONG. Period. >You compare Powermonger and Dpaint. Are you mad?i Well, I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it any more, but I don't think that's what you meant. The only reason I compared the two programs was because DPaint, very sensibly, lets ME make the choice - disk accesses or less memory usage. I like having choices. >And don't forget that in the world thare are 5/6 of Amiga 500 with 512k, >single drive. Which means that there are 1/6 (or over 300,000 machines) which have more. Trashing that number of machines is REALLY DUMB! >HEY MIKE ! What games did you write so that you can give such "good" advices ? >Did you write better games than Populous and Powermonger ? Using only the Rom >code ? You're starting to get VERY obnoxious, here. First - I've NEVER said that you should use "only the ROM code". Use it when it's appropriate, don't use it if it's not. Doesn't mean that you can get away with anything you choose to do, though. Just because Bullfrog (who are Atari ST programmers, by the way) chooses to treat the Amiga like an Atari doesn't make it right. >I'm really fed-up with all these people who talk about programming techniques >and never wrote a GOOD game. Mike, I tried once one of your game in a shop, >and I'm sorry but it was terrible. The animation was slow, slow... Ans so long >to load with a single drive... I can not even remeber the name of this game. I suspect this is a falsehood. I do not have that many games on the market for the Amiga, and all of them I've done live on one floppy, no more. >Tell us what good games you wrote. We'll make a vote, and if it seems for >everybody that they are good games, then we will listen to you. I think you should listen to me because I make sense. >Bullfrog wrote Populous, wrote Powermonger, Flood. They are all good games. Do >you think they never thought about writing the game only using the Rom code, >multitask, and so on... They are good programmers, they are not Dumb people. No, they are Atari ST programmers - all of their games were done on the ST, and ported to the Amiga. They do NOT think about any of those things, because on the ST, you not only don't have to, you CAN'T. >I prefer programmers who give me good sound effects (like in Powermonger) >than programmers who write a bad multitasking OS friendly game with poor >sound effects. And I prefer people who do games with good sound effects AND multitasking- friendly games. >And don't forget, I want to know the games you wrote. I'm going to do that - but not because I have anything to prove to you. Let's start in 1973, when I first got involved in the video game industry. I worked for RAMTEK and ICI, designing video arcade games. Were you even born yet, Buffa? When the video game industry went bust, around 1974, I went on to other areas of the computer industry, including work on some nice computer graphics hardware. I returned to games in 1978, when I began doing freelance work for Automated Simulations, the company which later became Epyx. For two years, I did ALL of their Apple ][ games - one of which, TEMPLE OF APSHAI, stayed in the top ten list for a long, long time. Another of the games I did, CRUSH, CRUMBLE, AND CHOMP, was Jerry Pournelle's fave game for at least a year. (I know, that's faint praise, but what the hell...). In all, I did about twenty games for AS (and Epyx, later). I did some Atari 800 games, as well, with my favorite being GATEWAY TO APSHAI. To the point here, GATEWAY was a dungeon exploration type game, with full scrolling (60Hz!), 128 different levels, and over 80 different monsters (each with their own distinctive behavior), armor, weapons, spells, etc., and which ran on a 16K Atari system. (Read that again - 16K. I don't even want to HEAR any complaints about lack of memory :-). After that, I did a couple of more games, but left the games industry to do freelance work (not games, mostly). I've done five Amiga games, two of which I am not allowed to discuss due to contract problems. The three which I've done which I can discuss are: QUINK - done for CBS Software, an educational game which, frankly, wasn't too hot, both because it's old (the Amiga manuals did not yet exist), and because it isn't very good - the requirement was to make it look just like the IBM version (yuch). CRYSTAL QUEST - a port of the Mac game. Fully animated (60Hz, eh?), with up to 100 objects on-screen simultaneously. You don't get bad speed degradation until more than 40 of 'em are running around. Compare this with the Mac II version, which degrades around the same time, but has a 68020 in it... This game also is hard disk mountable, fully multitasking-friendly, and runs just fine on a 3000 system. STORM ACROSS EUROPE - a port of the SSI strategy game, from the C64. Again, fully multitasking (you can even iconify the damn thing and get back all of your CHIP RAM), hard-drive installable, and, yes, it uses the ROM code exclusively - but then, it's a strategy game which doesn't need to have super speed. -- Mike Farren farren@well.sf.ca.us