My younger self was never really impressed with Rebel Assault. I wouldn't even call it a game. More of a harbinger of CD-based multimedia shit to come.
But as a tech demo and as a proof of concept it was brilliant.
My younger self bought a SoundBlaster for the first Wing Commander and a proper flight stick for X-Wing and a Mitsumi CD drive for DOTT.
CH Flightstick. You needed one. If you couldn't reconfigure your shields, energy levels(to weapon, engines and shields), switch between laser fire modes, didn't know your ion cannon from your concusion missile and couldn't read your radar then you were toast. Although(oh heresy) I still prefer the Wing commander radar display.
In which case Sir might perhaps Rebel Assault? Many distinguished gentlemen with deficient aptitude prefer that offering. It can be controlled by a game pad, no special skills required.
Will only buy if Larry Holland is on board. Will only buy if it has strong single player. Will only buy if you stand no chance without proper flight controls.
The original floppy version of X-Wing included a legendary frustrating mission. You were protecting a couple of freighters in an A-Wing(my least favorite craft) against a couple of waves of TIE Bombers. Who launched and launched and launched torpedoes. It's been 20 years since but I still remember the feeling of accomplishment after I finished that one. Sniped torpedoes ot of the air, hammered out my concussion missiles and went at the bombers with my measly two lasers, full shields to bow and hell rode in after me.
It took me 2 days to get this one right.
The mission got nerfed in the subsequent re-releases.
I hear you, excessively scurvy and horrid pirate man.
But you should warn us. There are two Looms. One is the classic floppy version. And then there is the talkie CD version. The CD version is a bit shorter than the floppy version. All speech was done in CD tracks and I guess they couldn't fit it all on the disk.
Ask me about "Why you really, really need to buy Loom twice"
Totally Games is a nearly unknown name.
Say Lawrence Holland, lest we forget the name of a god amongs flightsim designers. I still have my SWOTL floppies. And a humongous manual. Thanks to Larry Holland I have conclusively won the Battle of Britain a couple of times. Small wonder. We had the best pilots(i.e. me), the best planes(I prefer the FW-190D) and France. Only and idiot could screw that one up:p
X-Wing was done by Lawrence Holland(yes THE Lawrence Holland). I think he founded Totally Games after that. But you are correct, he freelanced for Lucasfilm Games. Wow, Larry Holland. That guy has an aweinspiring resume:
Their finest Hour
SWOTL
Battlehawks
X-Wing
TIE Fighter
Lucasfilm Games made the excellent Secret Weapon of the Luftwaffe. SWOTL as in it's day only matched by the excellent Dynamix combat flightsims that followed. There was literally a decade when Lucasfilm Games could do no wrong. They had Larry Holland(X-Wing, SWOTL, Their Finest Hour), Ron Gilbert(MM), Brian Moriarty, Tim Schafer, Steve Purcell and we all still can hum the music of Michael Land.
Whatever they touched, they mastered. And they did very little Star Wars because that franchise was not yet revitalized by the stupid SFX update in the late Nineties.
In that decade(well end of the 80ies til mid 90ies) Lucasfilm Games only did X-Wing(brilliant), Tie-Fighter(awesome) and Rebel Assault(astounding, but more of a tech demo than a game).
OTOH we got LOOM, Monkey Island, SWOTL, Maniac Mansion(both of them), Their Finest Hour a couple of Indies and a lot more I can't remember. Their last hurrah was Grim Fandango, Sam&Max and Full Throttle. After that it seems like all creative people had left the company and we only got Star Wars games and the odd Monkey Island rehash.
Although I do agree with you in principle all those 1st person Star Wars games you listed were NOT their heyday. In fact, that's when the rot set in and they became an exclusively Star Wars company. That's when all the creativity left the company. That's when they trew in the towel because they couldn't come up with some new IP. And new stuff they did create.
Grim Fandango, Monkey Island, Sam&Max, the Maniac Mansions, Zack McCracken, Loom...
Especially Grim Fandango had stronger writing than any of the Star Wars movies themselves.
By the end of the 90ies if you couldn't come up with a good game mechanic you simply made an FPS. And by the mid 2000s when Lucas Arts couldn't come up with a new IP they simply made Star Wars.
They created a couple of good Star Wars games. There was X-Wing(which was stupidly brilliant), Tie fighter(which was even better) and the awesome tech demo Rebel Assault(although not much of a game). Speaking of Rebel Assault, they NAILED the rail shooter with that one one hardware that was barely capable to pull it off!
I remember playing Dark Forces for the first time and I remember being utterly unimpressed. It looked great. It had good level design. But it was just more of the same of what everybody else was doing. But like the RTS genre before that, that was what sold. And continues to sell.
In my book Lucas and Disney are a perfect match. And Lucas Arts was dead as a dodo for the last 15 years.
Basic research is a public endeavor. A lot of the basics get done by universities. Sometimes in cooperation with the pharma industry sometimes on government grants sometimes on venture capital sometimes all of those.
The pharma industry does also research on its own but that is about turning the basic concepts discovered in proper research into products. The industry has been calling foul over patent limitations for ages. But they do not have a leg to stand on.
A lot of the so called innovation is turning something from subcutaneous shots into pills. I'm sorry, but that is nothing that takes BEEEELLLIONS to research. It's worthwhile. But it's not the tedious research bit where you painstakingly find out how an illness works and how to counter it. The basic groundwork that sometimes takes decades has already been done.
Pharma innovation is mostly about rounded corners. Whenever you hear the word "innovation" issues by an industry spokes critter ALWAYS think "rounded corners". Those are the guys who put receptionists into lab coats in their commercials.
Problem is this practice is a bit more widespread than just one drug. It's called "evergreening". You take a drug, you make a minute change to it, you tell everybody its fresh&new&patent plx!
India said no to that. They said that Novartis had its run of the full duration of patent protection and that it wouldn't be fooled.
Also Novartis does bill patients thousands of dollars per month for this particular drug. Which is extortionist. A little bit competition is more than just a little bit needed.
The big news is India said no while Europe and the US said yes.
Have you read the sequel by Jules Verne? It takes a Frenchman to untangle the mess an American left. Still haven't got a clue what that was about. Neither had Verne.
(Apart from the obvious escalation of crisis after crisis in a dead-end version of a Bildungsroman)
So does that mean they have given up on strolling over their island pretending to be Arthur Gordon Pym? Good on them. You can't live out your whole life as a fantasy.
That encryption scheme was old news when Gaius Iulius Caesar roamed the earth. If the Germans would have used that one then the people of Bletchley Park could have had an early weekend and time off for the rest of the war. Or they could have searched for the Higgs Boson in their spare time. Or(them being a bit English) for Higgin's Bottom.
Pssst!
Don't continue! That's the Spanish/German version of the Deadly Joke! It might fux0r with the French bits of your brain and then you won't have anything to go with your mayonnaise.
And learning German will fuck with your English. Or as they say in Belgium: Aprender alemán va a arruinar tu Inglés.
Oi gevalt!
Aww. Come on. We will propably blow up out Type 13* planet searching for the Higgs boson.A little arrow to the knee won't make too much of a difference.
Yupp. I wouldn't lett that guy near any Higgs Boson. I mean we may be only living on a type 13 planet and we may be prone to blow ourselves up. But at least let us have the fun ourselves instead of putting an irresponsible Time Lord next to the red button!
Also: I wasn't aware Fermilab was located in Wales. Or is there a particular reason why this was posted in Welsh?
Just tell me how to read the thing. I guess I'm too stupid to figure it out.
The following diary fragment has been found on an abadoned server buried beneath aeons of dorito packings in an unspecified portion of haunted Germany:
Ah! You will need to borrow old and forbidden tomes from Miscatonic Univesity in Arkkham. Once you have done that THEY will make themelves known to you and UNDERSTANDING follows.
Having delved into the depravity of certain RITES THEIR purpose will be made known to you. But at what cost? Ho! The cost! Was the knowledge worth my sanity?
They have come for me!
So we should entrust our future to people who use exactly the same rhetoric to justify blood diamonds, peddling inpenetrable financial constructs, weapons and run-of-the-mill South American dictators.
While your dogmatic assertions have some merit to them unmitigated capitalism is not what civilisation is supposed to be; The betterment of us all and those that come after us. Short term gain and long term goals do not mix very well. NASA has been spanning three generations and counting and none of them were in it for the money.
Your mad ramblings have made very clear that this infomercial is needed to attract those who might have their minds poisoned by the trappings of Get Rich Now and don't see yet that there is more to life than one's own petty existance. You know, the Working For Generations Not Yet Born bit. Not Working To Increase MY Shareholder Value. Mars funnily isn't made of diamonds. Immediate profits are not to be had.
Bureaucracy tends to happen when beancounting occurs. All for the benefit how your tax money is spent and what it does buy you. The answer of course is it buys you nothing. It might buy your great-great-great-grandchildren something if humanity does indeed suffer the misfortune of you procreating.
This is awesome. In the original meaning of the word "awesome".
We are looking in great detail at the landscape of another planet. Give it another couple of decades and this picture will include astronauts high fiving each other. Ray Bradbury would have had a word or two to say about that.
It looks kinda desolate, tho. Makes one appreciate good ole Terra a little bit more. An inhabitable planet? Wot, wif green an all? Awesome! Let's frack it!
... undersea cables are heavily armored, not to protect from divers but for anchors and sharks. Sharks are also the reason they generally use optical pumping now... sharks tend to bite the electrically pumped ones.
That wouldn't deter sharktopus NOR megalodon. Ever since those two became born again they cut our access to vile smut whichever way they can.
Cheeky bastards!
The problem is, only religion does deal with absolute certainties. They do it by the way of dogma(i.e. Don't Think About It! 'Tis So!).
Whereas a lot of science has a lot of uncertainty to it. Especially when we explain the world by models and those models are under constant refinement. We can say a lot of things with reasonable certainty. But that doesn't beat the absolute certainty that's presented by absolute and unthinking dogma.
So this is an argument you can either win or stay honest.
Slashdot Mirror
My younger self was never really impressed with Rebel Assault. I wouldn't even call it a game. More of a harbinger of CD-based multimedia shit to come.
But as a tech demo and as a proof of concept it was brilliant.
My younger self bought a SoundBlaster for the first Wing Commander and a proper flight stick for X-Wing and a Mitsumi CD drive for DOTT.
Have a cappuccino.
CH Flightstick. You needed one. If you couldn't reconfigure your shields, energy levels(to weapon, engines and shields), switch between laser fire modes, didn't know your ion cannon from your concusion missile and couldn't read your radar then you were toast. Although(oh heresy) I still prefer the Wing commander radar display.
In which case Sir might perhaps Rebel Assault? Many distinguished gentlemen with deficient aptitude prefer that offering. It can be controlled by a game pad, no special skills required.
Will only buy if Larry Holland is on board. Will only buy if it has strong single player. Will only buy if you stand no chance without proper flight controls.
The original floppy version of X-Wing included a legendary frustrating mission. You were protecting a couple of freighters in an A-Wing(my least favorite craft) against a couple of waves of TIE Bombers. Who launched and launched and launched torpedoes. It's been 20 years since but I still remember the feeling of accomplishment after I finished that one. Sniped torpedoes ot of the air, hammered out my concussion missiles and went at the bombers with my measly two lasers, full shields to bow and hell rode in after me.
It took me 2 days to get this one right.
The mission got nerfed in the subsequent re-releases.
I hear you, excessively scurvy and horrid pirate man.
But you should warn us. There are two Looms. One is the classic floppy version. And then there is the talkie CD version. The CD version is a bit shorter than the floppy version. All speech was done in CD tracks and I guess they couldn't fit it all on the disk.
Ask me about "Why you really, really need to buy Loom twice"
Totally Games is a nearly unknown name. :p
Say Lawrence Holland, lest we forget the name of a god amongs flightsim designers. I still have my SWOTL floppies. And a humongous manual. Thanks to Larry Holland I have conclusively won the Battle of Britain a couple of times. Small wonder. We had the best pilots(i.e. me), the best planes(I prefer the FW-190D) and France. Only and idiot could screw that one up
X-Wing was done by Lawrence Holland(yes THE Lawrence Holland). I think he founded Totally Games after that. But you are correct, he freelanced for Lucasfilm Games. Wow, Larry Holland. That guy has an aweinspiring resume:
Their finest Hour
SWOTL
Battlehawks
X-Wing
TIE Fighter
They should rename him Ace Holland. What a guy!
Lucasfilm Games made the excellent Secret Weapon of the Luftwaffe. SWOTL as in it's day only matched by the excellent Dynamix combat flightsims that followed. There was literally a decade when Lucasfilm Games could do no wrong. They had Larry Holland(X-Wing, SWOTL, Their Finest Hour), Ron Gilbert(MM), Brian Moriarty, Tim Schafer, Steve Purcell and we all still can hum the music of Michael Land.
Whatever they touched, they mastered. And they did very little Star Wars because that franchise was not yet revitalized by the stupid SFX update in the late Nineties.
In that decade(well end of the 80ies til mid 90ies) Lucasfilm Games only did X-Wing(brilliant), Tie-Fighter(awesome) and Rebel Assault(astounding, but more of a tech demo than a game).
OTOH we got LOOM, Monkey Island, SWOTL, Maniac Mansion(both of them), Their Finest Hour a couple of Indies and a lot more I can't remember. Their last hurrah was Grim Fandango, Sam&Max and Full Throttle. After that it seems like all creative people had left the company and we only got Star Wars games and the odd Monkey Island rehash.
Obscure Mokey Island 2 reference in an orbiturary for a Star Wars only company.
Thou art cruel, unkind sir!
Loom & Grim Fandango
Although I do agree with you in principle all those 1st person Star Wars games you listed were NOT their heyday. In fact, that's when the rot set in and they became an exclusively Star Wars company. That's when all the creativity left the company. That's when they trew in the towel because they couldn't come up with some new IP. And new stuff they did create.
Grim Fandango, Monkey Island, Sam&Max, the Maniac Mansions, Zack McCracken, Loom...
Especially Grim Fandango had stronger writing than any of the Star Wars movies themselves.
By the end of the 90ies if you couldn't come up with a good game mechanic you simply made an FPS. And by the mid 2000s when Lucas Arts couldn't come up with a new IP they simply made Star Wars.
They created a couple of good Star Wars games. There was X-Wing(which was stupidly brilliant), Tie fighter(which was even better) and the awesome tech demo Rebel Assault(although not much of a game). Speaking of Rebel Assault, they NAILED the rail shooter with that one one hardware that was barely capable to pull it off!
I remember playing Dark Forces for the first time and I remember being utterly unimpressed. It looked great. It had good level design. But it was just more of the same of what everybody else was doing. But like the RTS genre before that, that was what sold. And continues to sell.
In my book Lucas and Disney are a perfect match. And Lucas Arts was dead as a dodo for the last 15 years.
RIP Lucasfilm Games
Basic research is a public endeavor. A lot of the basics get done by universities. Sometimes in cooperation with the pharma industry sometimes on government grants sometimes on venture capital sometimes all of those .
The pharma industry does also research on its own but that is about turning the basic concepts discovered in proper research into products. The industry has been calling foul over patent limitations for ages. But they do not have a leg to stand on.
A lot of the so called innovation is turning something from subcutaneous shots into pills. I'm sorry, but that is nothing that takes BEEEELLLIONS to research. It's worthwhile. But it's not the tedious research bit where you painstakingly find out how an illness works and how to counter it. The basic groundwork that sometimes takes decades has already been done.
Pharma innovation is mostly about rounded corners. Whenever you hear the word "innovation" issues by an industry spokes critter ALWAYS think "rounded corners". Those are the guys who put receptionists into lab coats in their commercials.
Problem is this practice is a bit more widespread than just one drug. It's called "evergreening". You take a drug, you make a minute change to it, you tell everybody its fresh&new&patent plx!
India said no to that. They said that Novartis had its run of the full duration of patent protection and that it wouldn't be fooled.
Also Novartis does bill patients thousands of dollars per month for this particular drug. Which is extortionist. A little bit competition is more than just a little bit needed.
The big news is India said no while Europe and the US said yes.
Have you read the sequel by Jules Verne? It takes a Frenchman to untangle the mess an American left. Still haven't got a clue what that was about. Neither had Verne.
(Apart from the obvious escalation of crisis after crisis in a dead-end version of a Bildungsroman)
So does that mean they have given up on strolling over their island pretending to be Arthur Gordon Pym? Good on them. You can't live out your whole life as a fantasy.
That encryption scheme was old news when Gaius Iulius Caesar roamed the earth. If the Germans would have used that one then the people of Bletchley Park could have had an early weekend and time off for the rest of the war. Or they could have searched for the Higgs Boson in their spare time. Or(them being a bit English) for Higgin's Bottom.
Respect my authorataaah!
Pssst!
Don't continue! That's the Spanish/German version of the Deadly Joke! It might fux0r with the French bits of your brain and then you won't have anything to go with your mayonnaise.
And learning German will fuck with your English. Or as they say in Belgium: Aprender alemán va a arruinar tu Inglés.
Oi gevalt!
your lips move but I can't hear what you say
Aww. Come on. We will propably blow up out Type 13* planet searching for the Higgs boson .A little arrow to the knee won't make too much of a difference.
*obscure Lexx reference
Yupp. I wouldn't lett that guy near any Higgs Boson. I mean we may be only living on a type 13 planet and we may be prone to blow ourselves up. But at least let us have the fun ourselves instead of putting an irresponsible Time Lord next to the red button!
Also: I wasn't aware Fermilab was located in Wales. Or is there a particular reason why this was posted in Welsh?
Just tell me how to read the thing. I guess I'm too stupid to figure it out.
The following diary fragment has been found on an abadoned server buried beneath aeons of dorito packings in an unspecified portion of haunted Germany:
Ah! You will need to borrow old and forbidden tomes from Miscatonic Univesity in Arkkham. Once you have done that THEY will make themelves known to you and UNDERSTANDING follows.
Having delved into the depravity of certain RITES THEIR purpose will be made known to you. But at what cost? Ho! The cost! Was the knowledge worth my sanity?
They have come for me!
Iä Slahdot Editor! Samzenpus ftaghn!
So we should entrust our future to people who use exactly the same rhetoric to justify blood diamonds, peddling inpenetrable financial constructs, weapons and run-of-the-mill South American dictators.
While your dogmatic assertions have some merit to them unmitigated capitalism is not what civilisation is supposed to be; The betterment of us all and those that come after us. Short term gain and long term goals do not mix very well. NASA has been spanning three generations and counting and none of them were in it for the money.
Your mad ramblings have made very clear that this infomercial is needed to attract those who might have their minds poisoned by the trappings of Get Rich Now and don't see yet that there is more to life than one's own petty existance. You know, the Working For Generations Not Yet Born bit. Not Working To Increase MY Shareholder Value. Mars funnily isn't made of diamonds. Immediate profits are not to be had.
Bureaucracy tends to happen when beancounting occurs. All for the benefit how your tax money is spent and what it does buy you. The answer of course is it buys you nothing. It might buy your great-great-great-grandchildren something if humanity does indeed suffer the misfortune of you procreating.
This is awesome. In the original meaning of the word "awesome".
We are looking in great detail at the landscape of another planet. Give it another couple of decades and this picture will include astronauts high fiving each other. Ray Bradbury would have had a word or two to say about that.
It looks kinda desolate, tho. Makes one appreciate good ole Terra a little bit more. An inhabitable planet? Wot, wif green an all? Awesome! Let's frack it!
... undersea cables are heavily armored, not to protect from divers but for anchors and sharks. Sharks are also the reason they generally use optical pumping now ... sharks tend to bite the electrically pumped ones.
That wouldn't deter sharktopus NOR megalodon. Ever since those two became born again they cut our access to vile smut whichever way they can.
Cheeky bastards!
The problem is, only religion does deal with absolute certainties. They do it by the way of dogma(i.e. Don't Think About It! 'Tis So!).
Whereas a lot of science has a lot of uncertainty to it. Especially when we explain the world by models and those models are under constant refinement. We can say a lot of things with reasonable certainty. But that doesn't beat the absolute certainty that's presented by absolute and unthinking dogma.
So this is an argument you can either win or stay honest.