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ASCII Portal In the Works

Posted by Soulskill on from the we-do-what-we-must-because-we-can dept.

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.

1 of 82 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Innovative by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    Dwarf Fortress is fucking retarded. A text based game that requires Windows or OSX, 512 MB of RAM, and an OpenGL video card. No Linux and no mobile device support (especially not with those ridiculous RAM requirements). What's the point? They should have stuck with regular 3D if they're going to make a non-portable resource hog.

    The real target for these type of games should be portable low resource machines (phones, netbooks, etc).

    The ASCII Portal is kinda interesting but I would have done it in JavaME using a similar 2D type view and smooth scrolling (not this jerky ASCII shit). This would make it available for anything from a workstation to your phone. I hate Java but it's on everything these days.

    Actually, now that I think about it, this ASCII Portal is very close to the game N+. N+ suffers from far too difficult gameplay though. It relies too heavily on precise timing and crazy physical contortions. Portal is more fun.