Xebec's Demise

Wow, I really like the look of this one! The dark shading makes it look like a far higher quality image than it actually is, especially when looking at it with a bright white background on my PC. 🏆

Thank you for the info on legal Atari OS ROMs. I noticed the download link for Xformer 2000 has been dead since 2018, so PC Xformer Classic 3.8 might be next to go. Here's an archive that will hopefully last forever: PC Xformer Classic 3.8 Atari 8-bit emulator for MS-DOS PCXF380.ZIP (570K) with Atari OS ROMs.

I just joined an Alternate Reality yesterday after having not visited for a very long time. Right off the bat, I ended up excitedly getting a potion off an imp I barely managed to kill with my bare hands. The imp nearly killed me, taking me down to within 1 or 2 hit points of ending my life. I looked at the potion and it was black, I tasted it and it was bitter, I sipped it and it seemed safe. I felt I would take a risk, so I drank it without further study. I ended up drinking a potion of delusion, so now I'm being deceived of all my stats and they keep rapidly changing, going up and down and all over the place. As you can see in the picture, I was delusional, feeling like I had 161 hit points while on level 0. What other game does that, showing you the wrong stats for your character because you're delusional? I don't think I've come across another. I'm waiting outside the healer now because I know I only have 1 or 2 hit points until my death, but Alternate Reality is trying to convince me I have 161 hit points, I'm seriously delusional about my health. 😁

@phaeron, yes I believe you may be right for the original hardware. I was just hoping that maybe Altirra had a setting to auto swap disks or check all drives with images loaded. Maybe that's more complicated to code than I'm thinking. I've been using Atari800Win and a little utility called AR Wrapper to auto swap drives in the past.

@Rafael1138 I'm happy to see you got help from @Wrathchild and @_The Doctor__ so quickly! I was online and randomly checking here for something else when I noticed your questions just now. I wasn't even following my own topic! I just experienced a similar issue yesterday, trying Altirra emulator for the first time with Alternate Reality. Alternate Reality can cause issues and confusion due to how unusual it is, it's not your fault at all, it's just a fairly complex and unusual game that stores information about your character in other places besides just the character disk. Actually, I doubt any other Atari games secretly store information about your character on the actual game disks in addition to a character disk? So, I ran into a very similar issue myself using Altirra to Play Alternate Reality for the first time. By default the drives are set to Virtual Read/Write or VRW, probably so people will read and write to a virtual disk without unintentionally modifying their original disk images. However, this won't work with Alternate Reality past the first time you play, unless you make sure to save your virtual disk image of Disk 1 Side 2 and either change the drive setting to Read/Write or R/W when using the save or continue saving the virtual disk each time you play, making sure you use that most recent virtual save for playing your character going forward. 🤦‍♂️

I just tried out Altirra for the first time with Alternate Reality: The City and it doesn't appear to recognize disks in multiple drives automatically? I have to continually swap the four different disks to D1? Or is there a setting that will automate detecting and using all drives with disks in them? I tried searching the help file and a bit of searching that resulted in me here with people talking about using command lines to automate things, but I was just wondering if there a simple setting I'm missing that results in Altirra checking and using all drives that have disk images in them?

@Albert I was just reading the Wikipedia article on Alternate Reality and I happened to check the first reference link because I wanted to see the exact date that Alternate Reality was released. The reference didn't have the exact date, but to my surprise, our Atariage Alternate Reality: The City competition was mentioned and linked in an article from gamedeveloper.com: The History of Computer Role-Playing Games Part 2: The Golden Age (1985-1993). "In 1985, a Datasoft published Philip Price's Alternate Reality: The City, the first of a planned series of five games based on the same premise: aliens abducting the character and transporting him to different "realities." Even though only two of the games were ever published (the second part, The Dungeon, appeared in 1987), the series maintains a cult status, particularly among fans of Atari 8-bit computers (where it originated). Atari Age even hosts a competition for the game that is still going strong! The games feature first-person perspective and nice graphics, and are in many ways much ahead of their time. Both The City and The Dungeon are located on Medieval worlds, so most of the standard fantasy conventions still apply (mages, dwarves, etc.) However, Alternate Reality is more realistic than most CRPGs of its era--the avatar gets thirsty, hungry, and tired. The only way to address these problems (and get better equipment) is to raise capital. Thankfully, players can store their money and earn interest at banks, though the really profitable investment plans are risky. Even the treasures weren't always good; many items were cursed and had dire consequences for unwary players. And, as if all this isn't enough--it often rains, which apparently brings out the truly dangerous denizens of Xebec's Demise. Frustrated (or evil) players are free to prey upon the innocent. In any case, the high degree of realism and complexity makes Alternate Reality one of the most challenging of all CRPGs. Downloads and emulator information is available here." https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/the-history-of-computer-role-playing-games-part-2-the-golden-age-1985-1993- That's pretty cool! I only found out by chance 16 years later. 😁 @eobet's website is also linked to for downloads and information.

Have any of you asked Philip Price for an interview? He basically reverse engineered the Atari 800, teaching himself how to code and developed an amazing 3D game in 1985 called Alternate Reality, he then went on to code for the B2 stealth bomber. Here's an old interview: https://dadgum.com/halcyon/BOOK/PRICE.HTM

@eobet, even though it's sad news, thank you for the update. It's sad to hear that Gary Gilbertson passed away, but his music will live on and continue to be appreciated and enjoyed by thousands of people, potentially forever. I'm sure his music featured in Alternate Reality alone has captivated and entertained hundreds of thousands of people around the world and will continue to do so. His music was a big part of what immersed me within an Alternate Reality dream world as a kid and I still appreciate and enjoy it today as an adult, so do my kids now. It's also sad to hear that Philip Price may have put AR firmly in his rear view mirror, I suppose that means no more responses here? I should've spoken up years ago when I was thinking about creating a running list of Atariage questions for a Philip Price interview as a reply here. I was hoping that maybe if I got it started and kept an updated list of all the questions asked here for an interview in one place, Philip Price might agree to do a final professional interview for Antic's @Savetz, @rkindig, @playermissile, @Ripdubski or any other professional Atari oriented interviewer here that was interested. Given a month or two, I'm sure Atariage members could come up with an excellent list of interesting questions that haven't been asked before to choose from and prepare for the interview. There's actually probably a bunch of questions that have already been asked that would be worthwhile going over again in a professional interview too. I would love to hear the complete story of everything from Philip Price, including his career after coding games in a nice modern long format interview too, that would be awesome. Did you ever archive Gary's music somewhere?

False, in The Dungeon you escape the virtual reality, breaking into an alien computer control room. There are many obvious clues too, like the very title of the game itself, "Alternate Reality." If you were merely abducted by aliens that's not an alternate reality, that's the same reality. You don't roll stats for your current existence nor do you need to be 'connected' to your current existence. You're truly very unfamiliar with Alternate Reality, much like the others attempting to unfairly criticize the game recently, like @zzip and @NorbertP. It's odd that this topic has been here nearly two decades with very little unfounded criticism of the game and suddenly a group of you who are clearly ignorant about the game all show up at once to unfairly criticize it.

I liked your post because you finally answered me and provided some information on your attempt at an open-ended game. So, I'm glad to see you weren't just entirely making that up as a way to try to bolster your criticisms of Alternate Reality. I feel like this shouldn't have to be said, but since you're continuing to grasp at fairly flimsy assumptions to criticize Alternate Realty maybe it does. The way to figure out the genre of any game is simply ask yourself what the primary challenge or activity of a game is. In the case of a survival game, it's simply surviving. So, if you take a game like Ultima IV, it's clearly not a survival game even though it does have minor elements of survival games, like "stats to maintain," as most games do. Whereas, if you take a game like Alternate Reality: The City the primary challenge and activity is clearly surviving all of it's deeply survival focused game systems, like hunger, thirst, disease, tiredness, poisons, delusions, inebriation, curses and extreme threats to your resources and life around every corner of the city. At this point, you're playing very fast and loose with your definitions and terms to imprecisely and generically claim all RPGs with stats to maintain are "survival" games, even when I specifically defined for you many of the unique and complex survival focused game systems that set Alternate Reality: The City apart from other RPGs and truly make it a game deeply focused on survival. If you wanted to get even more careless with your terms and definitions you might claim that all games where you have to avoid death and try to survive are "survival" games, even Pac-Man. Again, what obviously defines a game as a survival game is a depth and focus on survival systems over and above all else. Alternate Reality: The City has an absolute focus on intricate and deep survival systems, like no other game before nor after it for quite some time and I detailed many of them for you. As for the intent of the City, it was absolutely specifically designed for survival and development of your character and Philip Price has said so. A survival game doesn't have to have the word "survival" on the box for it to be a survival game, that should be obvious too. The box literally states that the goal of The City is to "improve yourself physically, mentally, morally, and financially," in other words, that means your overall goal for The City is simply learning to survive and developing your character, that's it. The ultimate goal of returning to Earth or seeking revenge on your abductors is also clearly stated as the goal for the entire series, not The City. You just directly provided information contradicting your claims, apparently without realizing it. But, if you insist on seeing the word "survive" regarding The City somewhere in order to believe, here's the word directly from the developer himself, Philip Price: "So I wanted both an initial shock and survive part(aka The City) in what was meant to feel like an alive world" - Philip Price Regarding game systems, yes, you can fall into a trap of adding unnecessary stats and features, overcomplicating things, especially if those features don't support the main challenge or objective for your game. However, this is not the case with Alternate Reality: The City, all of the complex survival systems specifically and masterfully focus on the objective of The City, which is survival, making it extremely challenging and fun to try to survive. See, the only problem here in this discussion is that you're continually failing to acknowledge or recognize that the objective or goal of The City actually is survival, so to you all the complex survival systems appear overcomplicated and pointless. That's a failure on your part, not the game's. If you truly do "love a good survival game," then you should finally recognize The City for what it is and play it as the survival game it was designed to be and stop bemoaning that there's no quests or story for you to complete, you're trying to fit a square peg into a round hole with numerous unfounded assumptions. Since you prefer to have goals set for you, I challenge you to create a character with the goal of simply surviving without any cheats or backups and enter it into our competition here: Atari Age Alternate Reality: The City Competition If you love survival games, it's about time you finally play Alternate Reality: The City as one.

I really liked Ultima IV too and I like most RPG games in general, but you probably wouldn't be surprised to hear that my favorite by far of the Ultima series is Ultima Online. Ultima Online took everything to the next level and therefore became one of my favorite games of all time. And that is the same way I felt about Alternate Reality: The City when I first played it too. Like many people, I had played most of the popular RPGs including Ultima IV before I had ever even heard of Alternate Reality. So, when I first played Alternate Reality I was blown away that this hidden gem of a game was out there and I'd never even heard of it before. The City truly took RPGs to the next level too, not only with graphics, sound and music, but all kinds of incredibly realistic gameplay features I'd never seen before in any other RPGs. It's certainly a largely overlooked and ignored masterpiece of RPG history. I truly don't understand why there are so many haters of Alternate Reality either, I suppose it's mostly due to bias, ignorance, inexperience or resentment of one form or another.

@Wilheim @Wrathchild I think I just witnessed the end results of your amazing work on this project and thought you would enjoying seeing too. Alternate Reality The Dungeon - Atari 8-bit home computers - Unboxing and first time playing Where do you have these complete boxed games for sale? Has anybody made any progress on The City?

Isn't the main theme of both Alternate Reality and The Matrix that you discover your mind has been involuntarily placed within a virtual reality? Did you not see this post here and the article I linked to quoting Philip Price?

You certainly could not "easily" play Ultima or any other RPG as a survival game if you cannot play Alternate Reality: The City as one. That's a fairly extreme and absurd self-contradiction you're trying to make. The City was particularly and specifically designed as a survival game and hub for developing your character and other RPGs were not. If you find The City gameplay "lackluster" as a survival game when it was specifically designed with very advanced survival type features that no other games of the time ever had, some not even seen in many survival games even to this day, such as blood alcohol levels, disease incubation times, neural and blood poisoning, intoxication and physical loss of control of your character, delusion resulting in a false sense of ability with misrepresented stats, progressive thirst, hunger, tiredness and sleep quality, which all affect your stats and performance, body temperature affected by clothing, real-time weather, time of day and seasons, use-based skill development, haggling and reputation with npcs, npc operating times, variable npc inventories and pricing, interest rates and bank failures, very realistic irreversible alignment based upon your actions, surprise, noticeability and dapper stats affecting encounters and how npcs react to you based upon your skills and physical appearance within the game world and even a speed stat which physically determines how fast you can actually move within the game world. Either you're just entirely ignorant of all the game's advanced survival features, or you're just plainly dishonest to suggest that any old RPG game, not even intended to be a survival game, could just as "easily" be a survival game as Alternate Reality. I'm leaning towards dishonest since you conveniently failed to answer one of the most interesting questions I had for you. What was your open-ended game called and where can we see some of your work from the game?