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Phosphor Dot Fossils

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Posts posted by Phosphor Dot Fossils


  1. Y'know, I like the cute factor, but what I REALLY miss is the abstraction factor. With an old-school character like Pac-Man, Pooka, Guzzler, Galaxian motherships or what have you, there's room for you to fill in the blanks in your mind as to what these characters really look like, if indeed you wish to fill in those blanks at all. Now it's all spelled out. To some extent, this also spills over and dovetails with my annoyance with "movie-style" gaming, where the game's creators have already mapped out what they want to have happen, and it's up to you to figure out how to make that course of events progress as they had planned. I kinda resent that - it's like Dragon's Lair writ large, a choose-your-own-adventure book with only one way to "win." This is largely why Pikmin caught my eye when it came out. Kids aren't the only ones looking for non-violent games. I work in TV news, I get my share of violence second-hand. I really don't want to live a Bruckheimer movie when I'm off duty. :P

     

    But then, I think I've gone off on this spiel many times. But this very phenomenon is why I'm a RETROgamer, with the emphasis on RETRO.


  2. When the hammer came down at Atari at the beginning of the Tramiel era, two things comes into play here:

     

    1) There was a lot of theft by disgruntled employees. This may have included prototypes (and I'm not necessarily accusing the programmers of doing the thievery) which later found their way into collectors' hands.

     

    2) When the Tramiels took over, they made it clear: the focus was now on personal computers. So some of the programmers, or whoever else may have had the protos, in all likelihood "liberated" works that they felt would never see the light of day.


  3. Well, I'm sure many were near-complete or completed works-in-progress that were delivered just as the industry slumped. When the bottom drops out of the company's stocks, and/or people are being laid off left and right...where's the percentage in going through the expensive motions of manufacturing and marketing a game that there doesn't appear to be a market for? This happened with quite a few games, which is why we've got an interesting gene pool of unreleased but perfectly playable stuff. :D

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