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Archon to be Revived

Posted by Zonk on from the p4wn3d! dept.

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!"

4 of 90 comments (clear)

  1. Re:8 bit propritary code ... hm ... by Godeke · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
  2. While you're waiting for this... by ZipR · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Check out this Quake 3 Archon mod. Pretty cool! http://www.planetquake.com/brazen/arq/images.shtml

  3. Why is this in the Apple section? by John+Harrison · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Also, while Archon is great, somebody needs to do a faithful rendition of MULE.

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    Lasers Controlled Games!
  4. Re:8 bit propritary code ... hm ... by Minna+Kirai · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.