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FastRobPlus

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Posts posted by FastRobPlus

  1. Posted

    Not going to reply to my question? Let me repeat it:

     

     

    So what is your point here? Did I miss the part where he (Tim Schafer) is accused of paying bribes to game journalists?

     

     

     

     

    And hey - I noticed you've tried to sweep my other questions under the rug too:

     

     

    Most games are violent and antisocial? This sounds like yet another assertion without evidence. What's your source for this?

     

     

     

    Who in the games industry is making threats?

     

     

    You seem to be spending the lion's share of your time finding ways to insult me when I think most of us would like you to respond to these reasonable questions.

     

    TIP: When citing external websites avoid saying "Go out and read this whole thing." Rather, state the evidence and put the corroborating link inline or as a footnote, and make sure the link takes you to the place with the relevant information to support your rebuttal. Finally, check to ensure that that source does not simply make assertions of its own without referring verifiable facts

    • Like 3

  2. Posted

    Okay - some progress!!!

     

    Let's start with the first one. Clicked the link, it's some twitter exchange between Tim Schafer (a guy MS had to cut loose as his game Psychonaughts drug on in both time and cost during its developent-days as a Microsoft product...)

    ...and on the other side of the debate... I dunno... some other people? Oh, and the page says #gamergate at the top.

     

    I don't really consider Twitter to be a hub of the gaming community since it's often anonymous exchanges across people with no past history, but I read this one completely through for you JR.

     

    It's an argument about game development costs...

     

    So what is your point here? Did I miss the part where he's accused of paying bribes to game journalists?

  6. Posted

    I was thinking about another thread where someone said that most games are now crass, violent, and anti-social.

     

    It made me think about all the battleships, tanks and aircraft I destroyed playing Air Sea Battle and Combat! as a child.

     

    How many people were in those ships? How many simulated lives did I not just wipe out, but wipe out with a smile on my face? I never want to go back to those dark days...

  7. Posted

    That being said I own two Amiga 500s (well actually one A500 and one A500+) simply for the sake of a complete collection. Both of which are mint and boxed and never get used as there is simply no point these days. Even the lowly A600 in stock format runs circles around them.

     

    I wrote an uber-long pros and cons for each system. One page of pros ad cons for each system, though mostly geared towards veteran retro collectors who are new or new-ish to Amiga. You can find it here.

     

    I mention this because there are a lot of hidden considerations. For example, the capacitor issue on the 600/1200/4000 can bite people who don't know to check. Some factors are regional. Here in the US, the 500 and 2000 and expansions are far more common than elsewhere, and of course the 500 has a new secret weapon - the ACA500 accelerator, which I think is unsightly, but represents a crazy easy way to get into retro Amiga computing with old hardware at a rock bottom price.

    • Like 1

  8. Posted

    Video games have been crass for a really long time. There's been a push against the cute and harmless and toward the violent and anti-social, to the point where most games are that way.

     

    Really? Most games?

     

    This sounds like yet another assertion without evidence. What's your source for this?

    Are you saying that Candy Crush is crass and uncute? It's moved more than 200 million copies across just iOS and Android. That's more than any single game title has sold for Wii/360/X1/PS3 and PS4 combined.

     

    Or were you just referring to AAA console games?

    I wonder, when you think about media, do you only think about blockbuster movies?

     

    And where were you when Adera: The Shifting Sands and Disney Fairies: Hidden Treasures came out? I worked for over a year on these two games as the gameplay and usability researcher, making sure they were as fun and inclusive as possible. Have you even bothered to try the free version in the Win 8 app store? They were both in the top 10 there for most of 2013-14. Adera was first bumped from the top spot by Tap Tiles. Was TapTiles crass and anti-social?

     

    Do you think assertions without evidence are in some way helping your "Video games have been crass for a really long time" problem statement? Is this all you are doing? I can count on my fingers the number of folks here who have rolled up their sleeves and produced games, but the number of people complaining that things were better in the good old days is countless.

     

    There's this paranoid fantasy that she's going to take everyone's toys away, but that's not what she's doing here.

     

    Yes. People are saying that sarkesian wants to take video gamer's toys away. And who are these people? You! And the others like you on this very thread. I certainly have never even hinted at this. Like so many things your side says, it's a nonsense statement crafted primarily to troll.

     

     

    It's no threat to anyone, although the humongous overreaction to what she does certainly doesn't make the industry or any of us look any better. C'mon, threats of violence? Harassment? Rape threats? It's just a little out of hand here.

     

    Another baseless accusation with no supporting evidence. Who in the games industry is making threats? Show your evidence!

     

    Or failing that, just use your common sense. The gamer community is well established online with a number of open forums such as these here on Atari Age. Show us the serious threats here on AA.

     

    In fact, show us rape threats here on AA, Digital Press, or any other forum where the primary focus of discussion is around gaming. And show us how the culture of rape on these forums meant that the person was not only not banned, but was embraced by the gamer community.

    • Like 4

  12. Posted

    I'd have to think carefully about whether I agree with you on all your points, but one point I agree on completely is that this whole "Culture of Hating Women" does not actually exist in video gaming. The most you can really say is that men who actively dislike women are very possibly gamers, since in western culture nearly 70% of adults play games.

     

    Sarkesian and the other feminists would be better served by framing the issue as an epidemic among liquid drinkers, since that would even snag the last 30%

  13. Posted

    I know that we're all psychological beings. Years ago in Marketing class, it was revealed in research that purchasers (in this case, Automobiles) of a certain car tended to stare longer at ads, than did prospective purchasers of new cars, those who had yet to make a purchase. That is to say, those who'd already purchased weren't satisfied with their choice alone, based upon the merits of their choice. They still (psychology being what it is, and the fact that we're all crippled by it) needed to stare at the ads longer than potential customers (who hadn't bought a car yet) in order to justify their choices. Psychology is a fascinating subject, and undoubtedly applies to much of what we do, as humans. Just making that observation blows my mind.

     

    I've had those same classes (easy credits!)

    I agree that people want to have a story and make a connection with the big ticket things they purchase. They want to build them into the narrative of their lives. I also admit that I'm still a huge Amiga fanboy, as I think Amiga somehow overwrote the area of my brain that's occupied by religion in many folks.

     

    That said, I stand by what I and a few others said earlier. We got Amigas, often after owning STs, and for various reason found Amiga to already be familiar, even when it shouldn't have been... Finding out later that Amiga shares quirks with the A8 line was a bit of a lightbulb "Ah-ha! So that's why it's familiar!" moment for us.

    • Like 4

  14. Posted

    Men treating women badly is a symptom of a much larger issue. For instance:

     

    • There are groups of people who say mental illness isn't a real health issue, and anyone with an illness such as PTSD is "faking it."
    • The hosts of a popular women's talk show called "The Talk" laughed and made fun of a recent news item about a man whose penis was cut off and blended in a blender by his wife.
    • An NFL player was recently filmed in an elevator punching his fiancée.

     

    While it’s true that all people are equal in the eyes of the law, and all people deserve equal rights, we live in a world containing some objectively, demonstrably worse human beings than ourselves.

     

    This new kind of feminism attempts to shine a light on all the instances where one of these lower quality humans threatens to abuse a woman, and rightly so.

    But they add in a new twist. They tell us that in all cases we created these people by our actions or inactions.

    This is the very same sort of logic used by people that told us that rape and murder were coming from the new-fangled rock-and-roll music.

    This is the same twisted logic as the parent who says: "Oh, you like beer. Well you know who else liked beer? Stalin!!"

     

     

    Let's stop pretending that we as individuals are culpable for the behavior or actions of lower quality people we have never met, just because the person professes to like something that we also like.

    • Like 6

  15. Posted

    Possession of the family name seems to be nine-tenths of succession.

     

    I think there was a story this week involving King Richard III. If I understood it correctly, there are breaks in the legitimacy of his line of descendants, opening questions about whether even the current royal family of England have actual royal blood.

  16. Posted

     

    In the context of your (my) next machine being the successor of what we had previously, that's absolutely true. In my case it would be: KIM-1 -> Apple II -> Amiga -> Apple II -> PC. It was when I failed to be able to do anything with the Amiga that I upgraded back to the Apple II and eventually a PC.

     

     

    For me I think it went:

     

    Compumate SpectraVideo -> TI99/4a/Vic20 -> Atari 1200XL -> C64 -> Northstar Advantage -> Atari 520ST (no f or m!) -> Amiga -> 386 -> Amiga -> Pentium

     

    I did the same thing you did with the Apple II. After using a 386 for a while, I looked back at Amiga and thought "this is crazy, why am using this POS 386 clone?"

     

    I left the A8 for a petty reason, it had no music in Ultima IV... :_(

  18. Posted

    That's entirely not true. Anybody who programmed "down to the metal" - which was anybody worth a shit in those days, would see exactly the similarities in the machine. Same as 2600 went from a kernel display to the ANTIC, the 400/800 went from simple DLIs to copper lists. The list goes on.

    Good callout. Here's the Wikipedia entry on copper lists:

     

    One of the earliest popular systems with true display list was the Atari 8-bit family. The display list (actually called so in Atari terminology) is a series of instructions for ANTIC, the video co-processor used in these machines. This program, stored in the computer's memory and executed by ANTIC in real time, can specify blank lines, any of six text modes and eight graphics modes, which sections of the screen can be horizontally or vertically fine scrolled, and trigger Display List Interrupts (called Raster interrupts or HBI on other systems).

    Another system using a Display List-like feature in hardware is the Amiga, which, not coincidentally, was also designed by some of the same people who made the Atari 8-bits custom hardware. The Amiga hardware was extremely sophisticated, and once directed to produce a display mode, it would do so automatically. However, the computer also included a dedicated co-processor, called "Copper", which ran a simple program ("Copper List") oriented toward the display. The Copper List instructions could direct the Copper to wait for the display to reach a specific position on the screen, and then change the contents of hardware registers. In effect, it was a processor dedicated to servicing Raster interrupts. The Copper was used by Workbench to mix multiple display modes (multiple resolutions and color palettes on the monitor at the same time), and by numerous programs to create rainbow and gradient effects on the screen.

  19. Posted

    I bought a 520ST when it came out, so to me that was the 8-bit's true successor. The 800XL left my desk and went to university with my brother, the 520ST moved onto the newly vacant desk. I was 15 years old, and knew nothing about the corporate goings on. It said Atari on it, It looked like a color Macintosh and I could afford it.

     

    Maybe Jay Miner wasn't involved, but it had a Fuji on it and at that point in my life that is really all I cared about.

     

    -Pete

     

    I think anything that you get after the thing you had before is a "successor". Technically my current dog is the successor to my deceased spitz.

     

    As for DNA/lineage, the A8 was redesigned to have the same industrial design aesthetic as the Atari ST, so there was not only the Fuji logo but also a super strong family resemblance in the plastics.

  20. Posted

    VCS games were faster than Intellivision games.

     

    Amiga games' controls felt more disconnected, buffered, isolated, from the game action than other machines. There was too much activity going on inside the bus and custom chips and all that. Too much latency. Amiga games felt like a stuffy nose compared to the crisp response of an 8-bit machine. Even the b/w original Mac was fast responding.

     

    Sound was a big issue here. Like in Jet and Flight Simulator on the Amiga, the engine sound would play before the simulation was ready. Or it would play after the simulated plane crashed. This felt cheap and disconnected. Whereas in the 8-bit machines graphics and sound were tightly synchronized.

     

    If there was any Atari "DNA" in the Amiga it was surely buried under the kludgey OS.

     

    I don't remember Jet or FS for any system being responsive in any measurable way, so I can't understand the analogy there.

     

    But let's talk about F/A 18 Interceptor. That game launched from within the OS and was system friendly, a feat that Windows would not achieve for another 10 years! That game did have an odd disconnected feeling (you heard the engine noise before you saw the game screen), but in hindsight this was the natural abstraction of a game running peacefully within a multitasking OS. With F/A 18, you could accelerate the system and the game became smoother, just like modern games. This applied to a lot of games that had to be processor, OS version, or resolution agnostic. Games like Wing Commander, MMIII, Fighter Duel Pro, Battlefort, and Kyrandia for example.

     

    This would have been a major jolt to gamers used to the OS-disabling nature of earlier games, but Amiga twitch and arcade style games used old school techniques to bypass the OS and bang the hardware directly and were as responsive as anything that had come before.

     

    What you perceive as a weakness was also a huge and never before seen strength.

    • Like 1

  21. Posted

    I appreciate your nostalgia, but one could say that every game since the 2600 is just "on steroids." My point was that the A8 and the Amiga had no "look and feel" that was effectively comparable. When PCs became fast enough to accurately emulate Atari8s (say, Pentium 4) then the pendulum swung the other way, although "merely" in emulation.

     

     

    I don't disagree with much of what you said, but I do on the point you made above.

     

     

    You can tell the difference between Atari VCS, INTV and Odyssey games in a number of ways. The games were made in a way that played to the strengths of each system. For example, many VCS games had graphics that were cruder but employed color that made the other systems look pastel by comparison. That can be said for the A8 as well. While the C64 looked more pastel and sharp, the A8 employed zones of cycling color, often splitting the screen and displaying different graphic modes on the same monitor. The Amiga sacrificed sharpness for color too (check out the HAM artifacting in Mindwalker) often splitting the screen and displaying different graphic modes on the same monitor. But seemingly no other systems did this. It struck me as odd how similar just these 3 systems (and no others) were, until I learned later that they were all touched by the same person.

     

    Sort of like Nebulon said earlier. You can like a band at face value and not quite place why - something about the mixing or sound or cadence that isn't common but reminds you of an earlier band you loved. If you later find out the band shares a producer and lyricist with that earlier band you love, then suddenly the pieces fit.

  22. Posted

    One of the maddening things about the Amiga was the way they raised the price of the Amiga 2000 (technically, it had been on a very long "introductory price" that C= let expire) but the increase hit right as the Video Toaster was really taking off. And to compound this mistake, the Amiga 3000 they phased in to replace the A2K couldn't fit the Toaster!

     

    I agree with many here that there may not have been a winning series of moves in the long haul, but there were also some genuine missteps in the mix too.

  23. Posted

    "What's a "true" successor?" There is no definition. There never will be." Really? So if I record an album with label A and then a second album with label B, the second album is not the successor to the first one? Would I expect people to say, "Hey, that newer album sure has a similar feel, vocals, instrumentation, and arrangement to this other one, but one can't possibly be the successor to the other because the first is EMI and the second is on the Sony label."

     

     

    I made this same analogy on another ST/Amiga thread a few years back, but with cars instead of musicians.

     

    There are people out there who love Chevy but don't trust Toyota, Suzuki, or Daewoo.

    Yet it's possible for this Chevy lover to buy a Chevy Prism, trade it in for A Chevy Cruze, and then an shiny new Chevy Spark without realizing they have never owned a Chevy-produced vehicle.

     

    Ironically, they may have felt like traitors had they traded in the Chevy Prism for a Toyota Corolla, but without even knowing it, they'd have simply been buying an updated version of the car they always loved.

    • Like 1

  24. Posted

    I recall quite clearly asking my colleagues, fellow students, laser lab co-workers, everyday people in McDonalds, and the father of the ugly girl that wanted to date me; if they knew of or had an Amiga or knew anyone that did. The answer was "no", across the board. But they themselves had various levels of PC's from the 8086 up through the 486.. With the 386 being the most numerous. This PC was often accompanied by a Vic-20, C64, or Apple II in the same room. Surprisingly absent was the 400/800.

     

    I know at least ONE PERSON at MacDs used an Amiga. I got a 500 in a boxed lot of stuff a few years back and it had a bunch of employee handbook stuff on the drive. All sorts of stuff about how long your lunch break can be and what constitutes "one sandwich, one beverage, and one side." It was all done in Pen Pal, an old home WP/DTP package. I know I shouldn't be peeking at other people's files, but it was such a fascinating glimpse into franchise store management circa 1993.

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