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Archon to be Revived
Phoenix-IT writes "How many of you remember the classic strategy game Archon? Curve Software is remaking the original game for DirectX with support for network play. Distribution details are undetermined. There are long term plans to port to Macintosh and UNIX environments, but no details at the moment. The game is not open source because it contains some of the original 8-bit code, which was donated to the project, but a public beta might be on the way!"
I had the same thought.. the board cycle and the character attributes are really quite straightforward to understand, and I'm sure *somebody* could draw new pictures for the handful of pieces, weapons and "terrain" such as it was. I loved Archon, but it was basically a chessboard with a sprite on sprite battle on each capture attempt.
Sig under construction since 1998.
Check out this Quake 3 Archon mod. Pretty cool! http://www.planetquake.com/brazen/arq/images.shtml
I believe that currently, in the US at least, game rules have been deemed not copyrightable by the courts. At least, I believe that's what someone said as to why the Freeciv project is legal. Game art and the implimentation of the rules is copyrightable.
Also, while Archon is great, somebody needs to do a faithful rendition of MULE.
Lasers Controlled Games!
That leaves core game logic, which is probably copyrighted.
Right on the front page, they brag: "Improved computer AI". That's a change. And once you make one change to the gameplay experience (aside from just prettier graphics and sound), there is no reason to keep on with the old code.
The only possible explanation to keep the original code in there is if it produced very subtle effects that old-time players could remember with instinctive muscle-memory.
That explanation just doesn't stand up to scrutiny: the game logic of Archon is hardly any more complex than that of Tetris. It would certainly be less work to re-implement it from the basic design than to deal with creating an 8-bit execution environment on a 32-bit PC.
Archon is one of the main reasons why I still have my old Atari 800XL hooked up and working.
If that doesn't qualify me to carry a geek license, nothing does....
I just hope they don't over-engineer it. It was the simplicity which made the game addictive. Ah, how I loved that unicorn...
Insert witty comment *here*. I'm fresh out of wit...
Getting other people to play that game was a Kodak moment - the realization that the series has been driven into the ground after they saw the wonders of the first two games.