Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!rphroy!caen!uwm.edu!bionet!agate!agate.berkeley.edu!nj From: nj@magnolia.Berkeley.EDU (Narciso Jaramillo) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.programmer Subject: Re: Lemmings - a tutorial Part IV Message-ID: Date: 29 Mar 91 20:02:43 GMT References: <1991Mar25.050519.29068@mintaka.lcs.mit.edu> <1991Mar26.205540.18279@mintaka.lcs.mit.edu> Sender: usenet@agate.berkeley.edu (USENET Administrator) Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy Organization: Postcarcinogenic Bliss, Inc. Lines: 53 In-Reply-To: mykes@sega0.SF-Bay.ORG's message of 28 Mar 91 07:30:20 GMT rjc@geech.gnu.ai.mit.edu said: > >Games of Adventure and Skill capture my > >attention far more than 'blast-anything-that-moves including those > >blitter objects that take up half the screen and lots of ram, but look > >very pretty' mykes@sega0.SF-Bay.ORG replied: > You don't need an Amiga to play those kind of games. No. On the other hand, I already have an Amiga. Let's take a little trip into a fantasy world. Suppose you're a games player at heart. You just bought this wonderful A500 because it can play a whole bunch of spectacular games. Suppose further that all these games multitasked wonderfully and were completely OS-friendly. Now you've had this machine for awhile, and one day you realize that this thing is a computer, so it can do things like word processing. There are a whole bunch of word processors out there that are amazingly fast, with incredibly swift font rendering, instantaneous spell-checking, artificially intelligent word completion, etc. Unfortunately, they all take over the machine in order to gain their incredible speed. You'd like to switch back to playing games while the word processor is printing something out, but you're SOL. You bitch at the word processor companies about it, but they all say, ``You don't need an Amiga to do word processing. Buy an IBM PC; it doesn't have a multitasking OS, so it's faster.'' So you get pissed and start buying word processors that don't have so many whizzy features but still get the job done. The analogy is flawed, of course, but here's my point: There are lots of people who bought Amigas because they were game machines. On the other hand, there are lots of people who bought Amigas because they could be both game machines and productivity machines. If you have a game that *a priori* can only be targeted to the first set of people because it *absolutely requires* you to take over the machine, fine. However, if you have a game that does not absolutely require you to take over the machine, and it does anyway, you're pissing off the second group unnecessarily. That was the point of the Lemmings posts. You *should* work hard to make it OS-friendly, because you're programming an Amiga. Only when it's absolutely impossible to avoid taking over the machine should you do so. The latter should be reserved for games that need to be whizzy in order to be playable. Those of us who like less whizzy but very playable games shouldn't be left out in the cold. nj