jp-30

Zork had different ways to solve puzzles - one that I sort of recall off the top of my head out is the Loud Room puzzle, where you could type ECHO (changed room acoustics), or wait until after you'd emptied the dam (no more noise from the water rushing nearby) to progress beyond it. Still, maybe infocom text adventures are prior to the time period you're referring to?

This is marginally related to this thread, and may provide a future 'quote of the moment'. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/th...t_id=1000575231 Turning films into good games: Mission impossible? By Paul Hyman When Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment senior vp Jason Hall proclaimed recently that he would penalize developers who made "crap games" for WB IP, at least one game industry honcho smiled. For, according to Scott Miller, CEO of Dallas-based 3D Realms Entertainment, "99.9% of movie and TV licenses don't have the genetic material necessary to become good games. So, even with razor sharp incentives inches behind a publisher's back, it's just not possible to make a compelling video game from a movie license -- with rare exceptions." Etc...

The one piece of "gaming" software I spent more hours on above anything else in my teenage years was an amazing stunt / simulation / movie making thing by Disney called Stunt Island. At its most basic it was a flight simulator, and you had to fly stunt missions to progress - eg. Land on a moving train, fly through a barn, rescue a man on a lighthouse. And while that was amazing fun, the game came into its own as a "stunt creator" & movie maker, where you would set up your own stunts, then fly them, film them, and then make them into standalone movies. The favourite scenario I made was landing a gliding space shuttle on a runway, while 2 fighter jets escort you down and fly off as you touchdown. All this was on the old 386. Anyone else have this game? I've always longed for a sequel. In a sequel's absense 3rd party mods / models / model creators have appeared for the original, which is pretty cool. More info: Stunt Island on Gamespot's 'Unsung Heroes' list Hmmm. Reading the E3 editorial, seems like The Movies may be right up my alley!

Read it and weep (with joy) http://www.lucasforums.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=130949

Heh, yeah. Those YDKJ games rock. Especially when you're S-M-R-T, smart. Though 3 big red game-show style buttons on a single USB port would really rock. I used to play slicks-and-slide with my brother on 386 back in the day, one on numeric keypad, and one on some other left-alpha keys combo.

Tell that to Pac-Man, Frogger, & Mario in Donkey Kong. OK, who can tell me the name of the top down, tabletop cabinet, 4 player (steering wheel on each of the table's 4 sides) racing car arcade game where you bought upgrades for your vehicle etc. Would have been out around 1990, and probably made by SEGA, but no promises on that.

I have no idea about this retro-game Zoom, but didn't want to alter the "oomness" of the recent discussion. Here's some info; http://www.video gamedeals.com/article_info.php?articles_id=160 Anyone familiar with it?

I'm sure I'll be corrected if I'm wrong, but outside of the US / Japan, Nintendo really has no significant reach or brand-name recognition, certainly not to the extent of Playstation and Microsoft.

Quickstart and quickquit. Plenty of games have this sort of feature, and it's great, but those that don't need to have their programmers burn in hell. I'm playing Indiana Jones & the Emperor's Tomb right now, and honestly it's about 6 or 8 clicks / over a minute of stupid animated menu screens before you can start your last saved game. It's ridiculous. There needs to be a "resume last saved game" right there on the launcher. Similarly it's about 4 or so clicks to get back to the desktop at the end of the game. You should be able to hit the quit button, have one "are you sure" confirmation then be dumped to the desktop.

Anyone else have the same problem as me with cell-shaded games? Yes, I know it was all very cool 5 years ago to have cartoonesque 3D figures running around in a 3D environment... But computers are powerful enough now to actually generate a true cartoon style 2D character if that's the style you're trying to replicate. I'm sick of seeing cell-shaded Simpsons, Futurama, Marvel characters etc when there's no reason they can't look exactly like their animated counterparts from the TV shows. I realise it's a big step from Day of the Tentacle & Monkey Island 3 where the characters were properly animated over 2D static backgrounds to having a 2D animated character running around in a (pseudo) 3D world. And I know it's a lot more work to have to render every frame of the character animation in 2D, but come on - we deserve better. Down with cell-shading!

In the case of The Simpsons and Futurama, the characters have already been drawn from pretty much every conceivable angle for the TV shows, and are no doubt already digitised for the rendering of the show. You can't tell me that Fry image from the Futurama game up there couldn't be done better with utilising frames of the actual character from the TV series. It looks bloody awful as a cell-shaded polygon based character. I do concede that camera issues are a major consideration of 2D characters inhabiting a 3D world, and that today's PCs may still be too slow to make alternatives to cell-shading impractical. Buy I relish the day when a proper cartoon character makes it to an interactive action game and it looks indistinguishable from the TV cartoon character it is supposed to represent.

Futurama the show does use cell shading (well) for the 3D environments and the spaceships etc. Not exactly. I want animated sprites, as seen in Dragon's Lair & Space Ace, and even in Monkey Island 3 in games that want a cartoon look, rather than the (over)use of 3D polygon based characters with cell-shading to simulate a 2D character such as Homer Simpson.

Ahh my mistake. Pick the game out of the three I mentioned that I've not only not completed, but only just really started playing. Point still stands though.

I like the idea of multiple endings. For certain games with moral choices, if I play the game one way, say slaughtering everyone I see, then there's no way the final outcome should be predetermined and no different to if I'd played by only killing those I need to kill. Jedi Knight, Blade Runner & Deus Ex are 3 that spring to mind where gameplay style do, and should, lead to different endings. If you don't want to go through the hassle of replaying a game to see a different ending, then just cheat or download a savegame.

No, but no I feel scared. I'm in istanbul still, dicking around having just smashed a hole in a wall with a giant head on a crane.

1. Indiana Jones & The Emperor's Tomb 2. Knights of the Old Republic 3. Kick Off (amiga emulator) 4. Dark Forces (original DOS version) mostly to help with my contribution to the DF mod for Jedi Academy. In the last 3 months I've also had a cursory glance at Longest Journey and The Dig, but of which I bought at a pawn shop for a $2.00 each. I put them aside for some phase in my life when I have more spare time.

I'm sure you can find a full version of the original game on a naughty website if you look hard enough. So, why the hell did Lemmings jump the shark and go 3D? Why? WHYYYYYYYYYYYYY?

I bet when the plans for a sequel were tabled, they wished they'd called the original Y.

Well those photos were used on "andy kaufman's" own website to prove he was alive. The press release mentioned both ABC news and Earnst & Young, and both those companies have now been retracted from the correspondence as "mistakes" (and of course no record of an interview exists on ABCnews.com). Nothing's impossible, of course, but there is absolutely no credible evidence that Kaufman is alive, and until there is some, I will continue to assume he died 20 years ago.

So I see. You don't notice while they're cached either. A good, simple, free image host is http://www.photobucket.com

So, anyway... how about that STUNT ISLAND, huh?

The hoax is a lovely tribute to the spirit of Kaufman. http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/hoaxes/kaufman.asp

Well, kind of, except more flight-sim based - though you could make cars & motorbikes & trains perform stunts too, by a simple scripting language that kept their altitude at zero. The real fun was in camera placement, flybuys, tracking, panning etc, then splicing it all together in the film room.

Yeah, it's a DOS program, so I don't know how it'll go in XP or whatever you're running, but DOSBOX can probably assist if there are issues. I might grab a copy myself & relive some memories.

I couldn't get that PC version of Kick Off working under dosbox, so I think I will try Amiga Emulation and Kick Off this weekend. Well, it wasn't a "soccer simulator", but it was a hell of a lot of pure gameplay fun, especially in 2 player mode. If we got stuck in Monkey Island, we'd just put on Kick Off* "for one or 2 games" as stress relief. Then, 3 or 4 hours later... * Or, sometimes Speedball 2