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To avoid any misinformation, Chris Roberts was the mind behind Wing Commander, not Lord British. The wing commander series was way ahead of its time. I remember begging my parents back in 1990 for an 8 meg upgrade for my Compaq 286 in order to get enough "expanded memory" to play wing commander. It was really the event that got me interested in the nuts and bolts of computers. Back then you had to play around with config.sys and autoexec.bat files in order to play memory intensive dos games. BTW, that 8 meg upgrade cost $700.

Starflight was released in 1986. It featured CGA graphics (EGA later?), diplomacy, 80 star systems, 5 races, simple trade interstellar and planetary navigation and a plot that games today can't touch. Published by Electronic Arts.

Starflight II: Trade Routes of the Cloud Nebula, released in 1989, this was a worthy sequel. It featured more star systems, more sophisticated diplomacy, VGA graphics, moderatly complex trade and additional plot elements. Published by Electronic Arts.

Star Control, published in 1990 was a pretty cool melee game. It offered a few ships you could fly around, develop strategies for and have realtime battles with either against an opponent or an AI. Published by Accolade.

Star Control 2: The Ur-Quan Masters, published in 1992, was what Starflight 3 should have been. It had many elements of the starmap of Starflight, many of the underlying plot elements and game engine of that series with the Star Control melee combat grafted on.

Starflight 3: Mysteries of the Universe, yet unreleased, is an Open project with many of the original Starflight crew, Binary Systems, aiding in consulting or programming.

Here's what I want to know: Is there any official link between the Starflight and Star Control families? Was there swindling involved? Was I deprived of a Starflight 3 I would have paid double for vs. a Star Control? Why oh why? As far as I'm concerned, the Open Starflight 3 will be great, no matter what, but the real Starflight 3 that seemingly "almost was" would have been worthwhile.

Apologies for the long rant it took to get here. Any responses appreciated.

Pardon me, I think I hear the Uhl whispering in my head.

Starflight was released in 1986. It featured CGA graphics (EGA later?), diplomacy, 80 star systems, 5 races, simple trade interstellar and planetary navigation and a plot that games today can't touch. Published by Electronic Arts.

Starflight II: Trade Routes of the Cloud Nebula, released in 1989, this was a worthy sequel. It featured more star systems, more sophisticated diplomacy, VGA graphics, moderatly complex trade and additional plot elements. Published by Electronic Arts.

Star Control, published in 1990 was a pretty cool melee game. It offered a few ships you could fly around, develop strategies for and have realtime battles with either against an opponent or an AI. Published by Accolade.

Star Control 2: The Ur-Quan Masters, published in 1992, was what Starflight 3 should have been. It had many elements of the starmap of Starflight, many of the underlying plot elements and game engine of that series with the Star Control melee combat grafted on.

Starflight 3: Mysteries of the Universe, yet unreleased, is an Open project with many of the original Starflight crew, Binary Systems, aiding in consulting or programming.

Here's what I want to know: Is there any official link between the Starflight and Star Control families? Was there swindling involved? Was I deprived of a Starflight 3 I would have paid double for vs. a Star Control? Why oh why? As far as I'm concerned, the Open Starflight 3 will be great, no matter what, but the real Starflight 3 that seemingly "almost was" would have been worthwhile.

Apologies for the long rant it took to get here. Any responses appreciated.

Pardon me, I think I hear the Uhl whispering in my head.

PC gamers are always looking for the next best thing to enhance their visual experience

That's why, as a gamer, I take drugs. And play Tetripz

Ants the size of a Mack truck. ICFTD can be downloaded for free from Cinemaware, btw (Amiga, PC, Genesis).

1. Get a copy of MS-DOS 6. Yeah yeah, I know. You can substitute another DOS if you know that it'll work with step number
2. Install a reasonable TCP/IP stack impl with PLIP from simtel.net. Setup for this is extremely tricky and, of course, requires a special cable to talk to your 'main squeeze' linux box, but if you do a lot of filetransfer, you might like this. Alternately, grab a terminal emulator (eg. minicom) and put a getty on /dev/ttyS?, and use sz/rz for filetransfer. In all honesty, this is what I do since I lost my carefully custom-crafted .ini for the plip/tcpip stack. (Note: You *could* do everything by floppy, if you haven't, like myself, long since removed that annoying anachronism from your main machine.)
3. Install cygwin. Pare it down to give you a basic unix interface: Bash, the commandline utils (awk/sed are a must for me), vim, and what-have-you.
4. Set your autoexec.bat to launch bash.
5. Set your cygwin vim's .vimrc to always save with unix fileformat. (:set ff=unix, IIRC). This will save you grief when uploading.
6. Copy over your usual .bashrc and associated scripts. Might as well be comfortable in your new home.
7. Voila! It's not linux, but for most of the tasks that you could run on a 4mb 486 you'd be hard-pressed to notice. (How much multitasking are you really going to do in 4mb?) Oh, yeah: You also get to run that copy of Red Baron you have kicking about.

Here are some screenshots.

And, it has its own (albeit small) category in the Google Directory.

I can't say I've ever had the pleasure of playing those games. The closest games to those that I've played would probably be Sid Meyer's Colonisation, Gold of the Americas and Wing Commander Privateer. Colonisation isn't really a pirate game (it's similar to Sid Meyer's earlier game, Civilisation), but you can play it like one. Gold of the Americas is similar, but lesser known: your aim is to settle the New World and build up colonies. Privateer is mostly a space combat game based around privateers.

The game had a style that screenshots just can't reproduce fully... the characters were 2D polygonal models, not sprites, and the animation was superb. Cinematic cut scenes were a novelty in 1991, and the cut scenes in OOTW were fantastic.

The game looked like nothing else ever seen in video game world, broke all sorts of storytelling boudaries for video games (remember how it left it to the user to figure out where the cinematics ended and the game began? Totally immersive) and was a blast to play for hours on end. It had action elements, strategy elements, puzzle-solving... and a compelling, minimal storyline.

good game.

Are the most immersive. Think Zelda 64. Think GTA3. These are games with a lot of action and a lot of attention to detail. The designers made it entirely entertaining to do nothing more than explore the landscape all day long. The attention to every detail is there in some of our other favorites, too... Space Quest I-III spring to mind, not to mention the Z-word, Zork. Even the abstract, near-wordless Out of This World -- a game I'd happily spend hours arguing is the most entertaining game of the last twenty years -- had this quality, full of the little details in the periphery that made playing the game such a successful escapist fantasy.

How the hell do you win at tetris?

The best Tetris game that I remember playing was Super Tetris. It had a bunch of extra features compared to classic Tetris, and 10 different levels that you could complete. The best feature was the ability to save/reload the game, so in higher levels I would just reload the game every time I made a bad move, and completed the game this way.
You may be able to find it on some abandonware site, it is lots of fun.

oh, and you had to wait for the '91 remake to get 256 colors. Like you said, not exactly the realism you'd get today

EA has been singing this song for at least 15 years. Why do you think they are called Electronic Arts? When Trip Hawkins founded EA in 1982, it was with artistic aspirations. Their box design and advertising glorified the programmers, and attempted to give them rock star street cred.

It worked, to a large extent. Does anyone else remember the glamour shots of Bill Budge on the packaging for Pinball Construction Set? Does anyone remember the fantasy chess game Archon? Look at this picture of the programmers from 1984.

Electronic Arts used to be a great company. Then they started franchising popular and safe games, and produced the long but dull series of sports games for which they are now famous. EA classics include: Music Construction Set, Articfox, Marble Madness, Ferrari Formula One, the Bard's Tale series, Seven Cities of Gold. Seven Cities of Gold was designed by the amazing Bill Bunten (AKA Danielle Berry), who has a tribute page here.

Here is another EA publicity photo.

Here is a publicity shot for MULE, which EA produced, and should demonstrate their aspirations at the time.

And they weren't the only game company from that era with artistic aspirations: Lucasfilm Games was also in on the act. They produced The Eidolon and Koronis Rift, and Rescue On Fractalus, which, though they would be laugable now, were amazing then, and the packaging (as I recall, I may be mis-remembering) also emphasised the programmers.

ACK! The link got truncated. Corrected link

Yeah, but Microsoft already licensed PacMan, so what's the issue?

Like someone already asked in the forum:

will this tesla coil stop the gdi? this one failed to do that.

Whats a tentacle?

(its a really obsucre reference)

Obscure?

You mean this chink ?? I don't think so.

[...] a gifted young hobby programmer learning his way through the SDL

And so ? Have you forgotten how the best game designers started their career ? The ID Software programmers started by coding Commander Keen. And who remember that the authors of Unreal were responsible for z-rated underdogs such as Jill Of The Jungle ? Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if some day, we heard that the author of the LGames has been hired by a commercial game studio. In contrast, few Linux game programmers have been as prolific, and an awful lot of Linux games are horrendous (crappy or stolen graphics, no sound, early releases with no story or levels, bad gameplay, etc.). The LGames have at least the quality you would expect from a good Windows shareware game, while being free (as in beer, I mean) at the same time. Could you name many other influential Linux game designers that lie in the realm of Open Source ? If you take out the library programmers (Sam Lantinga/SDL, Shawn Hargreaves/Allegro, Jorrit Tyberghein/Crystal Space, Brian Paul/Mesa), the programmers of big (or considered so) projects that are heard of frequently (FreeCraft, FreeCiv, FlightGear, WorldForge,...), there is not many people left. So, I *definitely* think that interviewing people that make fun games is a Good Thing. But the questions should (IMHO) be oriented as to help other prospective game programmers make their games fun, too. That would be more productive than a SDL-versus-the-other-game-libraries troll :-)

Oh, well, just my .2 anyway...

• So You Want To Write Your Own MMORPG

• So You Want To Write Your Own MMORPG

• So You Want To Write Your Own MMORPG

• So You Want To Write Your Own MMORPG

• So You Want To Write Your Own MMORPG

I believe you're asking about Worlcraft.

Back in the day, though, I spent so much time with the Pinball Construction Set I grew flippers.

The best thing I could think of was Hypercard for the Macintosh, it allowed games like The Manhole to be created with very little programming. Sure, it needed a significant amount of computer knowledge to create something enteretaining, but it was nothing like programming a game like Quake III in C.

My all-time favorite game construction kit was the Pinball Construction Kit. It came out in 1985, and it allowed for the creation of personalized pinball tables inside the game. The only problem is that the game required to play any pinball table you design.

Try searching google for game creation kit. It came up with a ton of results, and this one looks promising.

I wholeheartedly agree. Unfortunantly, the "general concensus" does not agree with you, as they've never played the game. (Despite it being released several times.)

Heck, even paid game reviewers who are big Star Wars fans haven't played it. I don't even think the famous Gabe has played it, nevermind all the other "kiddies" out there. Alas, even in it's newest re-release, it still doesn't have enough eye candy to draw in the younger generation. They'll just go on with their lives thinking Rogue Leader is the penultimate in Star Wars sims. Bleech.

I wholeheartedly agree. Unfortunantly, the "general concensus" does not agree with you, as they've never played the game. (Despite it being released several times.)

Heck, even paid game reviewers who are big Star Wars fans haven't played it. I don't even think the famous Gabe has played it, nevermind all the other "kiddies" out there. Alas, even in it's newest re-release, it still doesn't have enough eye candy to draw in the younger generation. They'll just go on with their lives thinking Rogue Leader is the penultimate in Star Wars sims. Bleech.

I wholeheartedly agree. Unfortunantly, the "general concensus" does not agree with you, as they've never played the game. (Despite it being released several times.)

Heck, even paid game reviewers who are big Star Wars fans haven't played it. I don't even think the famous Gabe has played it, nevermind all the other "kiddies" out there. Alas, even in it's newest re-release, it still doesn't have enough eye candy to draw in the younger generation. They'll just go on with their lives thinking Rogue Leader is the penultimate in Star Wars sims. Bleech.

wtf are you talking about? Remember when Kings Quest I was 14 5.25 inch floppies?

I'll assume that you're talking about either the updated VGA version of KQ1 or KQ6, which was about 9 3.5' disks. Office's 30 disks is nothing--OS/2 was _sixtysomething_.

But I digress.

Anyone who remembers the early days of CD-ROM games can't really complain about 4 or 5 disc swapping. Remember Sierra's Phantasmagoria? Seven bloody CDs (for a game that was short as hell)! Its sequel wasn't much better--it took up a "mere" six. Wing Commander 4 was also six, as was Gabriel Knight 2.

Yeah, so anyway, my point is that all those games required in-game swapping, whereas this 4.5gb swap bitchfest is merely dealing with installation. My advice to those who deem it necessary to whine:

Suck it up, buttercup-- God didn't give you 80gig drives to sit half-filled with two-year-old MP3s and cheap pr0n couresy of Gnutella.

-Frobozz

wtf are you talking about? Remember when Kings Quest I was 14 5.25 inch floppies?

I'll assume that you're talking about either the updated VGA version of KQ1 or KQ6, which was about 9 3.5' disks. Office's 30 disks is nothing--OS/2 was _sixtysomething_.

But I digress.

Anyone who remembers the early days of CD-ROM games can't really complain about 4 or 5 disc swapping. Remember Sierra's Phantasmagoria? Seven bloody CDs (for a game that was short as hell)! Its sequel wasn't much better--it took up a "mere" six. Wing Commander 4 was also six, as was Gabriel Knight 2.

Yeah, so anyway, my point is that all those games required in-game swapping, whereas this 4.5gb swap bitchfest is merely dealing with installation. My advice to those who deem it necessary to whine:

Suck it up, buttercup-- God didn't give you 80gig drives to sit half-filled with two-year-old MP3s and cheap pr0n couresy of Gnutella.

-Frobozz

wtf are you talking about? Remember when Kings Quest I was 14 5.25 inch floppies?

I'll assume that you're talking about either the updated VGA version of KQ1 or KQ6, which was about 9 3.5' disks. Office's 30 disks is nothing--OS/2 was _sixtysomething_.

But I digress.

Anyone who remembers the early days of CD-ROM games can't really complain about 4 or 5 disc swapping. Remember Sierra's Phantasmagoria? Seven bloody CDs (for a game that was short as hell)! Its sequel wasn't much better--it took up a "mere" six. Wing Commander 4 was also six, as was Gabriel Knight 2.

Yeah, so anyway, my point is that all those games required in-game swapping, whereas this 4.5gb swap bitchfest is merely dealing with installation. My advice to those who deem it necessary to whine:

Suck it up, buttercup-- God didn't give you 80gig drives to sit half-filled with two-year-old MP3s and cheap pr0n couresy of Gnutella.

-Frobozz

wtf are you talking about? Remember when Kings Quest I was 14 5.25 inch floppies?

I'll assume that you're talking about either the updated VGA version of KQ1 or KQ6, which was about 9 3.5' disks. Office's 30 disks is nothing--OS/2 was _sixtysomething_.

But I digress.

Anyone who remembers the early days of CD-ROM games can't really complain about 4 or 5 disc swapping. Remember Sierra's Phantasmagoria? Seven bloody CDs (for a game that was short as hell)! Its sequel wasn't much better--it took up a "mere" six. Wing Commander 4 was also six, as was Gabriel Knight 2.

Yeah, so anyway, my point is that all those games required in-game swapping, whereas this 4.5gb swap bitchfest is merely dealing with installation. My advice to those who deem it necessary to whine:

Suck it up, buttercup-- God didn't give you 80gig drives to sit half-filled with two-year-old MP3s and cheap pr0n couresy of Gnutella.

-Frobozz

Demis Hassabis, who co-created Theme Park and whose company, Elixir Studios, is currently at work on Republic - the Revolution is a strong amateur shogi player. (OK, strong by Western standards.) He won five out of six (even, as opposed to handicapped) games in the British Open Championship the weekend before last and so has qualified to be part of the team to represent the UK in the World Championship later in the year. It's not much of an exaggeration to say Demis is a strong amateur * player - because if he isn't a strong amateur at a game yet, he's proved that he will pick it up frighteningly quickly - though I understand his poker isn't going to be taking him to the World Series in the near future.

Good luck Demis! (...and Stephen and Les...)

The most relaxing PC video game I ever owned was The Game of Harmony by Accolade in 1990. Take a look at a brief review here. The object was to "push" various similar-colored balls into each other. If you moved your "ship" in a calm and controlled manner, you could rack up a very high your score. However, you were directly penalized if you moved around haphazardly.

Forget about "bio-feedback"!!! This is one of the most relaxing and intriguing games I have every played. In fact, I might go buy it from ebay right now . . .

There are other great gaming sites out there that will benefit from this, sites like MobyGames.com, a sort of IMDB for video games and comptuter games. The thing i personally like the best about MobyGames is that all of the information is contributed by gamers, not by paid editors. It's truely a game site by Gamers for Gamers. Because of their nature, I can't imagine that they would ever become some sort of subscription site.

There are other great gaming sites out there that will benefit from this, sites like MobyGames.com, a sort of IMDB for video games and comptuter games. The thing i personally like the best about MobyGames is that all of the information is contributed by gamers, not by paid editors. It's truely a game site by Gamers for Gamers. Because of their nature, I can't imagine that they would ever become some sort of subscription site.

Some early examples from the Apple II:

*Eamon: A text adventuring system in which you were given the tools to create your own adventures.

*Lode Runner: Early platformer that came with a map-editing tool.

* Bill Budge's Pinball Construction Set

* Night Mission Pinball: Had pages and pages of values that you could tweak to customize game play.

Some early examples from the Apple II:

*Eamon: A text adventuring system in which you were given the tools to create your own adventures.

*Lode Runner: Early platformer that came with a map-editing tool.

* Bill Budge's Pinball Construction Set

* Night Mission Pinball: Had pages and pages of values that you could tweak to customize game play.

Or the incredible for its time Adventure Construction Set

Mods have come a long way since then.

'I will club you over the skull with the pipe of Death. It has +7 attack versus Trolls and +6 defence against Moderators.'

Your Pipe of Death is no match for my Hoe of Destruction! =)

Just to play devils advocate, I know of a girl (Extremely hot, like been-in-cosmo-hot) who absolutely loves games like GTA, Tekken, and Quake.

She's rare, but that market is out there (Just look at Ms. Case)

Cool thing about the girl mentioned above, The Gimp caught her interest at a starbucks here and we started talking. UNIX can help you meet girls.

The best game to ever come from LucasArts is SAM and MAX.

I have to disagree. Day of the Tentacle was better in my opinion. Check it out here.

I can't believe they left out Populous, published by Electronic Arts 3 years before Dune II, in 1989. See some screenshots, with bad translation. Gamespot considers it one of the 15 most influential games of all time.

The concept was that you were a God, and you were battling another Diety for control of worlds. Both you and your opponent started out with a few followers, and they would multiply rapidly through making settlements. You could make the settlements produce faster by improving the land around them.

You slowly built up Mana points that you could spend on disasters to inflict on your opponent's settlements and followers. Volcanos, quicksand, earthquakes, just to name a few. The more followers you had, the faster your Mana would accumulate.

It was the first game that I had ever seen that had multiple units to control at once. Instead of having direct control over each unit, you could direct them towards a "Papal Magnet" that you could place anywhere in the game world.

It even had a multiplayer option that you could play over a modem.

It was much closer to today's RTS games than Herzog Zwei!

Truth to tell, America's main contribution to the current console market is EA Sports

EA Sports is based in Vancouver, Canada, in staffed by Canadians and was formerly a Canadian company called Distinctive Software.

GTA3 was developed by DMA Design in Scotland and published by Rockstar games. There's a partial list of credits here. Gran Turismo 3, on the other hand, was published by SCE and I'm pretty sure had an all-Japanese team.

GTA3 is more fun, tho. :)

Ahh, I remember the first time I saw an advertisement in a game - it was the Sprint banner that popped up for a second or so whenever you made a subspace comm connection with another ship or a base in Space Quest V ("Roger Wilco and the Next Mutation", by Sierra On-line).

However, I live in New Zealand, and had no idea what Sprint was, let alone how I could give it any money.

As such, for me at least, that was a pretty pointless ad. It was a novelty to see advertising in a game though...

I think this is what youre looking for. It might be available here.

Forgotten Reals Dual Jewel . has all the old SSI gold box games if you like Pool of Radiance and all those games.

A lot of other old-school RPGs are available from abandonware sites. Anyone have info on how to get a collection of the old Dragonlance SSI games? I think there was a CD collection published but I could never get a hold of it. Also, anyone have info on Cluebooks? I'd love to have a run through some of these games but I dont have the time to figure them out! I'd be willing to trade scans...

dbc

Uplink sounds basically the same as an early 1980s Activision game called Hacker
which appeared on the Commodore 64 and other personal computer of that era. At that time (to the best of my knowledge), Hacker was a kind of revolutionary game. It offered no explanation, either on-screen or in the game documentation, as to what was going on. You were simly presented with a text login prompt when the game started, and had to take it from there.

Bob

How about Avalon Hill's Civilization board game, that Sid Meier drew on when making the original Civ?

Or the many empire type games that came out on various computer platforms before Civ? Civilization only came out in 1991, after all.. there were lots of games on the TRS-80 a decade earlier that had similar themes.. remember Santa Paravia & Fiumaccio? Or Populous? Or Seven Cities of Gold?

I remember a multi-user AppleTalk networked Conquest game that involved the exploration and conquest of a large world that was blacked out until you explored it, back in the mid-to-late 80's.. Conquest or some such thing.

Sid Meier's Civilization was a great, innovative game, but that doesn't mean there were no predecessors that were drawn from.