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Tron 2.0 Game
Conspiracy_Of_Doves writes "Gamespot has an article about the new Tron 2.0 game in the works to accompany the movie. It looks like they are being very true to the original, the new light cycles are even being designed by Syd Mead, the same guy who designed the old ones. You will get to visit locations from the movie, as well as play around inside desktops and PDAs." IGN has another article on the game. Watch out for the gridbugs.
I think the beauty of releasing a game like this now - with the way graphics cards & systems have advanced, you can actually make the in game graphics as good as (if not better than?) the original movie graphics.. should be a lot of fun :)
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
Tron was a cool arcade game, but Discs of Tron was, perhaps, one of the coolest games ever made.
Discs of Tron was basically taken from the movie scene with Tron fighting Sark in the arena with balls of energy. They each stood on discs of energy and the goal was to knock your opponent off.
Some called it 'the frisbee game'.
The arcade game was amazing. First, the controls. On the right (or was it left?) you had a joystick with a trigger button and a thumb button. Trigger throws an energy ball, button goes into blocking mode.
On the left, you had a twisty knob that spun freely and used an optical sensor to detect motion. It could also be pulled up and pushed down. It was used to aim your energy ball throw.
Aiming was incredibly precise. Combining the two, you could do strafing shots unlike anything possible in a FPS -- by spinning the knob in time with moving the joystick, you could set up a set of three energy balls in the air that crossed sark's disc in a gridded fashion.
You could also set up amazing rebound shots off the wall and, in later levels, the ceiling. As well, in later levels the discs would move and, if hit by a blob, disappear.
The whole implementation of the game was freakin' perfect. It was so well done.
There were 1,000 of what was called the 'environmental unit' configuration of the cabinets made.
You literally stood inside the environmental unit. It had six channel surround sound-- stereo front, stereo rear, a center channel near the control deck and a bass channel in the rear of the cabinet that you were leaning against.
Totally immersive, especially for 1985 or so.
The implementation was interesting; two Z80s + a totally custom TTL based video computer to handle the 3D vector style (it wasn't truly vector and not everything was vectorized--- there were filled areas) graphics.
Totally kicked ass.
Just my $.02...
I think it's kind of ironic that when the movie was made, they specifically limited the environments inside the computer to a few basic colors - greys, blues and reds - and to simple geometric stuctures (mostly), to make it a "believable" computer interior. And now with the game coming out trying to mimic the movie, the designers will have to stick to that style, even though it is well within the capability of todays games to present a much richer and more detailed world. So it's like an old, perceived, limitation of the computers that is coming back to haunt them.
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Syd Mead also was responsible for much of the design of Blade Runner, and did some work as an artist on Aliens. He has produced work for a couple of video games too...I think Beneath A Steel Sky and one of the Wing Commanders...
Does anybody else remember the Tron games for Intellivision? They were some of the best ever games for that system.
Tron Deadly Discs was my favourite. It wasn't like the arcade game Discs of Tron, instead you and the enemies ran around a playfield throwing discs at each other. Eventually the Recognizer would come and you'd have to hit it in just the right spot to disable it. It was pretty easy but still lots of fun.
Tron Solar Sailer was the coolest Intellivoice game. It was a pretty weird concept that I can't really describe too well, but it actually had quite a bit to do with the movie.
There was another game, Tron Maze-A-Tron which I didn't think was very good. Basically you just ran around a maze doing stuff.
Of course the arcade games were a lot of fun too but for a youngster with very little money it was a lot nicer to have something to play at home.
Seriously... Tron was a movie that predicted, essentially, the first-person shooter. Wow! Whaddya know? Those predictions came true! Except what it didn't predict was the balance of technological advances that would occur in the process of making computer games. Graphics rendering obviously is much more advanced than they predicted. My desktop computer can render almost photorealistic scenes in real-time, whereas the TRON supercomputer had to render everything as blue-and-white lines.
And a technology that they greatly overestimated was the human-computer interface. The people in TRON are in a true virtual-reality environment, while gamers now (including those who will play this game) are still stuck using WASD and a mouse.
So my question is, what's the point of taking a step backwards in graphics, and failing to take a step forward in HCI? I think it would be more "faithful" to the spirit of TRON to bring the story up-to-date, with modern graphics, and just pretend to have a better interface. For the same reason Sam Raimi (rightly) brought Spider-Man up-to-date with biological web-shooters etc. There's no reason to accentuate the miscalculations of the past in a modern adaptation of an old tale.
-3Suns
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