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ASCII Portal In the Works
Rock, Paper, Shotgun points out a video showing Portal, redone with ASCII graphics. It's still in development, but appears to be quite far along. Its creator, Cymon, says on his website, "I have Windows XP, so all binaries will by default be for Windows. But I will also be including the source code with the distribution and am doing my best to write it cross-platform compatible, so it should compile in Linux and Mac. I've had successful builds done in Linux." He also talks in detail about his design plans and ideas.
I hate to be the pedantic one to point this out, but this isn't ASCII. It might even be pushing it to call it ANSI, but it's certainly a closer classification. Looks more like CP 437 than anything else.
...anyone else remember ZZT? I do.
That is one of those coolest things i've seen in a while. I used to love programming stuff with basic graphics on the apple 2's, so this really takes me back. I'm not sure if the apple II's would have the horsepower to pull of the "spins" though ;)
"What people tend to forget is that using ASCII as game graphics, you can do a lot more in-depth gaming without having your game look like crap."
The problem is that some people consider ASCII graphics to look like crap, just by their virtue of being ASCII.
That said, it gives you the power to work on the gameplay etc, and you can later on put actual graphical tiles in, if you wanted. So long as you make the logic "portable" enough, you could even go so far as to put the game into a 3D graphics engine, and it would play the same, but (obviously) be presented in 3D.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
In an indirect way this also showed me that current games aren't just about graphics and innovative gameplay would had been forgotten. Portal could had been done years ago the same way its done here. However it was new kind of game and had good and fitting graphics, so the usual thought that new games aren't innovative doesn't really cut.
I'd argue that there are still innovative games around, but most are derivate crap. In that sense nothing has changed from the good ol' days of 8- and 16-bit. What has changed, however, is that games are now more locked into specific presentation formats: everything has to be 3D, and abstract graphics have just about died out. In some ways, this limits what can be done (some gameplay mechanics depend on 2D or fake-3D presentation). We've lost some of the richness of the early game landscape because of that, I think.