Slashdot Mirror
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.
There once was a movie called Tron
with blinkenlights flashin' off/on
Bruce Boxleitner resisted,
Jeff Bridges assisted
Twas the triumph of brains over brawn
The game reviewed looks impressive, but if you can't wait, then try the free Armagetron
for a 3D light cycles game with "moviepacs" for making the players & grid look true to the orig movie. Network play is v.addictive.
(http://armagetron.sourceforge.net/)
j
...and we all know what Disney thinks of the rights of end-users, don't we?
There are countless games out there worthy of your entertainment dollars/pounds/yen. Do the right thing, boycott Disney, and buy one of those other games instead.
If you have to buy this game for nostalgia reasons (hey, I have fond memories of wasting countless childhood hours playing the original Tron arcade machine too) then wait a month or so after the game's release and buy a second-hand copy.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Naturally: "troff"
...Specialist from the Visual Basic department at Microsoft didn't want to respond on the announcement on slashdot.
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.
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.
Ñ'
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.