Rob Zacny

Three Moves Ahead Episode 480: 1999

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Three Moves Ahead 480:

Three Moves Ahead 480


1999
Rob, Rowan, and Sean welcome Jeff Green to discuss what might be the greatest year in gaming. Looking down the release slate for that year, it was obviously stacked with brilliant games like Alpha Centauri, Freespace 2, and Jagged Alliance 2 (to name just a few). But did people know it was special at the time? And did anyone realize how fleeting that moment would prove to be, just before Microsoft entered the console wars and began to bridge the gap between console and PC?

 

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I feel like when you start talking Alpha Centauri and wargames, someone got cut off. You got long pauses and people grunting and answering to the air. It's in 1h30/1h40 something like that. 

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I'm getting dead air too. It does seem like one person's audio has dropped out. E.g. at 1:42:18, Rob stops mid-sentence as though he's been interrupted, there's a brief silence, and then everyone laughs.

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I love it when you guys do these balst from the past programmes. I might have missed you talking about it, but Broodwar would be my favourite strategy game that released in 1999! Absolute classic year overall though.

 

Just to point out Lethis: Path of Progress was the Impressions'alike game that Rob was trying to recall.

 

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I'm always happy when a new 3MA comes out, keep it up guys!

 

I wonder if I am the only one who remembers this era of PC gaming as "the years when Microsoft and EA teamed up to kill PC gaming." A lot of the "genre pushed in odd ways to tech up, and failing in the process" and "genre killed and left in a ditch" sort of thing was, in my mind, quite deliberate. Leading studios were bought, subjected to grotesque surgeries in order to make them fit the new console future, and then summarily executed when the resulting entity was a failure. Mid-sized companies were not allowed to continue making text and sprite heavy games, regardless of their performance, because the big players did not want them to continue to succeed in the old style.

 

For RPG's, in particular, the push for full voice acting by the industry leaders more or less broke the genre. It was not possible for companies of the time to fully voice something like Torment, and publishers would not let anything without voice acting survive. I hated this with a burning passion. I hated, hated, hated voice acting, and 3D graphics, because I always saw them as an unfair imposition upon my favorite studios and genres that was intended only to make them die.  Ultima 9 could never be an Ultima in the old sense because it was fully voiced, and they simply were not going to fully voice the old-style meandering conversations that had always made that game special. There was just so much text, so much back and forth, so many odd paths you could follow in something like Ultima 6, and it was obvious at the time that the genre was impossible with full voice. This is just as true today as it was back then. Games that really try for the old-school depth of conversation - Wasteland 2, Numenara, etc. only use voice in a few places, and that frees them to be what they need to be.

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Not sure why publishers get all of the blame for closing a company, but said company gets zero blame for selling to the publisher in the first place.

Also would need to disagree about the voice acting.  While I enjoyed playing earlier games like Ultima IV where they had some reading, when you get into a Morrowind the text is so large and so generic from npc to npc that the world just feels lifeless.  Would rather have more limited voice acting of an Oblivion or an Arx Fatalis over the huge text count of other games. 

 

 

For 1999 I would have to rank Freespace 2 first. X-Wing Alliance was a good time also, though not as good as Tie Fighter it did still have some great stuff going for it.  Homeworld was also jaw droppingly amazing and HW and FS2 are two gaming experiences I will never forget.  

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Hearing that none of you played Outcast breaks my heart a little. The game broke new ground everywhere pushing boundaries in technology and game play. It didn't always succeed but its one of the most important action adventure games of its time. 

 

It had an symphonic orchestra soundtrack (and a damn good one) to evoke a cinematic experience in an age when game music had only just begun to explore the possibilities of CD:s.

 

The voxels let them build huge lush worlds to explore with the best water I had ever seen. It was open world before anyone knew what open world games could be. 

 

In these huge levels you had rideable mounts. You could place teleport markers(!) to travel instantly between spots at will. You did quests for villagers to build support in a region and that would in turn weaken enemy troops there. Hello ubigame. Causing chaos and destruction would in-game narratively punish you by having weapon vendors raise prices. 

 

They even made an entire web series of cinematic outtakes

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3
7 hours ago, Akalabeth said:

Also would need to disagree about the voice acting.  While I enjoyed playing earlier games like Ultima IV where they had some reading, when you get into a Morrowind the text is so large and so generic from npc to npc that the world just feels lifeless.  Would rather have more limited voice acting of an Oblivion or an Arx Fatalis over the huge text count of other games. 

 

This is connected to what they've said about devs worrying about what they could do, not what they should do. They've talked about complexity here, but it's also about size of the map in Heroes game or amount of lore in your typical modern game. IIRC Morrowind had 12 Mb of text on release. It's the same amount of text as in the King James Bible. 1995 RPG Chrono Trigger - praised for its story and characters - is 4 Mb including graphics and music (those ROMs might have some sort of compression but you get the idea). Ultima 7, a humongous RPG, is 20 Mb. In that case voice acting may work as a positive constraint. Pillars of Eternity 1 & 2 are good recent examples. Many people didn't like PoE1 cause it had tons of exposition, visiting a new location means reading walls of text. PoE2 has most of its dialogue voice acted and it's noticeably much better paced.

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On 12/10/2019 at 3:35 AM, BuckleysChance said:

I'm getting dead air too. It does seem like one person's audio has dropped out. E.g. at 1:42:18, Rob stops mid-sentence as though he's been interrupted, there's a brief silence, and then everyone laughs.

Also 1:38:52

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10 hours ago, ilitarist said:

 

This is connected to what they've said about devs worrying about what they could do, not what they should do. They've talked about complexity here, but it's also about size of the map in Heroes game or amount of lore in your typical modern game. IIRC Morrowind had 12 Mb of text on release. It's the same amount of text as in the King James Bible. 1995 RPG Chrono Trigger - praised for its story and characters - is 4 Mb including graphics and music (those ROMs might have some sort of compression but you get the idea). Ultima 7, a humongous RPG, is 20 Mb. In that case voice acting may work as a positive constraint. Pillars of Eternity 1 & 2 are good recent examples. Many people didn't like PoE1 cause it had tons of exposition, visiting a new location means reading walls of text. PoE2 has most of its dialogue voice acted and it's noticeably much better paced.

 

You also gotta wonder how many people are willing to tell you their life story at the drop of a hat.  That's another thing about Ultima IV, you could talk to everyone but most wouldn't have much to say and some even would tell you to buzz off and break off the conversation. There needs to be a balance.  In Morrowind, the NPCs literally felt like computer terminals that would spew out information on a given subject.

 

Though personally I wonder if I simply didn't care to read a lot from games after a certain age.  I remember reading every tech description in Civilization 1 but by the time Civ 2 came around, I had zero interest in reading the tech descriptions.  I don't know if it was the aesthetic, or the content, or just a change.  But well after that I did play games like Baldurs Gate that required some reading but not a huge amount.  Thing about BG1 also is that the city itself felt too big, and it was annoying to move around.  So ultimately the problem for me might just be a sense of my time being wasted, or at least time being spent on activities that aren't worth the investment.

 

 

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Between Jagged Alliance 2, Alpha Centauri, Close Combat 3 (released New Year's Eve 1998, so...) and with shoutouts to X-wing Alliance and Homeworld, I've not only spent more hours playing games from this year than any other, but I could probably give up new games and just continue playing these games for many more years (assuming they continue working on newer OS'. JA2 has been finicky and hates alt-tabbing)

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I wanted to love X-Wing Alliance back in the day, and I think it does get good, but a lot of the campaign was dreadful. Doing all the missions for your family flying around in a newer version of a Correllian Freighter felt like flying around in a bathtub. It gets good once you join the Rebellion, but it was such a slog getting there. Skirmish mode was awesome though and I even played online a few times.

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On 10/16/2019 at 3:22 PM, Roke said:

I wanted to love X-Wing Alliance back in the day, and I think it does get good, but a lot of the campaign was dreadful. Doing all the missions for your family flying around in a newer version of a Correllian Freighter felt like flying around in a bathtub. It gets good once you join the Rebellion, but it was such a slog getting there. Skirmish mode was awesome though and I even played online a few times.


I don't remember the player ship being that bad in XWA.  You just need to switch constantly between manual and auto-targeting. Maybe lacked for variety.  Too bad it never got the sequel that was suggested by the cliff-hangar ending.

Oh and the Death Star Run was a big pain. Remember being stuck on that quite a long time. 

 

On 10/14/2019 at 6:17 PM, chanman said:

Between Jagged Alliance 2, Alpha Centauri, Close Combat 3 (released New Year's Eve 1998, so...) and with shoutouts to X-wing Alliance and Homeworld, I've not only spent more hours playing games from this year than any other, but I could probably give up new games and just continue playing these games for many more years (assuming they continue working on newer OS'. JA2 has been finicky and hates alt-tabbing)

 

Does JA2 start any differently than the first one?  I tried to get into JA1 a couple of times but going into battle with nothing but pistols and running out of ammunition was not exhilarating.

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On 10/17/2019 at 10:04 PM, Akalabeth said:


I don't remember the player ship being that bad in XWA.  You just need to switch constantly between manual and auto-targeting. Maybe lacked for variety.  Too bad it never got the sequel that was suggested by the cliff-hangar ending.

Oh and the Death Star Run was a big pain. Remember being stuck on that quite a long time. 

There was just something about the flight dynamics of the ships in XWA that made them feel a bit more lightweight; a bit less tight than in TIE Fighter or X-Wing. I don't recall playing X-wing vs. TIE Fighter, so maybe the change happened around then.

 

Quote

Does JA2 start any differently than the first one?  I tried to get into JA1 a couple of times but going into battle with nothing but pistols and running out of ammunition was not exhilarating.

Yes and no. If you hire all cheap mercs and play on easy, your experience will definitely be similar.

1) In JA2, high-level mercs no longer require you to have a proven history before working with you, so you can start off with some high level mercs

2) The optimal strategy is to hire at least a couple high-level mercs at the beginning for 1 day (possible even on the highest difficulty level) so that you can get their gear (Gus Tarballs with his G41 or anyone with a Mini-14 will give you a huge range and firepower advantage over pistols and SMGs)

3) If you play on higher difficulty levels, the enemy weapons will get better faster, letting you salvage better weapons and ammo sooner and in greater quantities

4) Using melee to disable enemies and steal their weapons is not only viable but often important in the early game. Ambushing a lone enemy or two behind a blind corner or inside a building works best.

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6 hours ago, chanman said:

There was just something about the flight dynamics of the ships in XWA that made them feel a bit more lightweight; a bit less tight than in TIE Fighter or X-Wing. I don't recall playing X-wing vs. TIE Fighter, so maybe the change happened around then.

 

Nah, I played the crap out of X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter and it was especially good about differentiating light and heavy craft. X-Wing Alliance was the inflection point.

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You guys misremembered what Brian Reynolds said about SMAC. He wanted to use Dune-style dialogue, but it was drier than he remembered, so he used Pirates of Penzance instead. :)

 

Fun episode. I think there was a fourth person whose dialogue was accidentally silenced during editing a few times during the middle of the episode.

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16 hours ago, cornchip said:

You guys misremembered what Brian Reynolds said about SMAC. He wanted to use Dune-style dialogue, but it was drier than he remembered, so he used Pirates of Penzance instead. :)

 

Fun episode. I think there was a fourth person whose dialogue was accidentally silenced during editing a few times during the middle of the episode.

 Episode 134! :D

 

I think Reynolds was looking for inspiration for insults and didn't find much from Dune except for "Destroying you would be a service to humanity!" and he instead listened to the full and unabridged Les Miserables. That was also the point where Troy immediately declared his love for Brian :D

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The year wasn’t that bad for wargames.

 

True, SSI and Interactive Magic didn’t have great wargame releases : Close Combat IV and Panzer General 3D were pretty average, and ‘North vs South’ was a poor adaptation of the ‘Great Battles of History’ engine to the civil war. But since they published respectively the excellent 4X Imperialism II and the brilliant RTS Seven Kingdoms II, they are forgiven !

 

Meanwhile, Talonsoft had a strong lineup with East Front II, Battlegrounds : Chickamauga, The Operational Art of War II, Battle of Britain and Bombing the Reich. The last two games are very niche, but they are great if you can get used to the interface and if you enjoy micromanaging a air bombing campaign.

 

I’m especially fond of East Front II : it corrected many flaws of the original East Front (1997) and had  stronger AI, better random campaigns, two excellent linked campaigns, faster movement of units (the original game was horribly slow) and a lot of minor improvements. It’s still a great tactical WW2 wargame despite the clunky interface.

 

The Panzer Campaign series from HPS also made its debut with Smolensk 41.

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