Herbarius

Sorry, "best analysis"? It's just the same old vs. new, hardcore vs. casual, etc. natter as usual.

People are always complaining about that. Also, usually they claim this is some problem of the current generation of games, as opposed to the last (or even further back than that). That is where the "Nostalgia Filter" kicks in. But, especially being in an Atari forum, we should know better. It's not a new phenomenon at all. Look at the 2600 library, and the library of other consoles of that time. How many slight variations of games like Space Invaders, Pac-Man or Missile Command do you see? More than you can count.

If you really love your girlfriend, you should do everything you can to get those ideas out of her head. Provided the story you've given is true, of course.

Or he can scrap them. There might only be a little value in those boards, but they do contain gold and copper and other recyclable materials. Trashing them outright should be the very last resort. It's one device. Not hundreds of them... What is this, the modern version of the gold rush?

Read this!

About the feedback stuff, sometimes people just forget giving feedback, happened to myself, and by the time you realize it, it isn't possible anymore.

Well I do have played the official ports for Atari 8-bit (in Emulator) and on the C64 (for real), never seen any intermissions in Pac-Man, but maybe it's just that you have to get pretty far to see the first intermission in Pac-Man, while in Ms.Pac-Man you see the first intermission quite soon (after the second level IIRC). Yes I've also played a couple of versions on the PC, but I don't know if any of those were official versions

Yes Sir, I'll get to it right away! Wait... Massachusetts, USA? I'm afraid I can't afford coming over right now. :D

You'll propably do something cruel to me when I say that, but "Nintendo Power" is not a game magazine, it's an advertisment brochure.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPInjtSqLwo

Wow, how could anyone have thrown that out...

Are you serious? It's not like anyone forced you to use sprites on the C64. They were there to make things easier to program, and of course to get proper performance for real-time games... E.g. without sprites, if you wanted collision detection, you would have to program it "manually", with sprites you could just let the machine do that dirty work... But by the way, you don't happen to still have some of the games you made on the VIC-20 (or their source-codes on paper?), I would be interested in seeing them. I promise I won't laugh or talk trash about them. I'm genuinely curious as you seem to have some strong but valid opinions on game design and I'd like to see how that translates into what you actually programmed. No matter how unfinished or shoddy it is, the idea is the important thing.

Thank you.

You seem to be quite sure of that, could you please describe what happened in those intermissions? Obviously it can't be the same as in Ms.Pac-Man.

Well I still don't get over your claim the C64 wasn't as fun to program as the VIC-20. The C64 has to be exactly as fun to program as the VIC-20, because you can do everything you can do on the VIC-20, and you do it exactly the same way (well, as long as you stay with the basics, pun intended), PLUS you could do more, like you had a 40-column display, while the VIC-20 had how many columns? 23 if I recall correctly. What an odd number. (Again, pun very much intended). EDIT: Okay, I stand corrected, it's 22 columns, so it's an even number, but not "as even" as 40. (why is it always when I make a post like this it is the one which starts a new page)

Mhh, I guess some kinds of equipment can never be mailed then, because no matter how well you pack it, withstanding a 6 ft drop (which is, if I'm properly informed, the height of a tall person) is out of the question. Or have inertial dampeners been invented yet, last time I checked they weren't. Think about hard-disks... Yes, if they're intended for portable use they're designed to withstand such drops, but I believe for internal drives this isn't the case. Especially if it's legacy hardware.

I don't know where this thread was posted before, and I guess the trolling wouldn't have occured if it hadn't been in the wrong place to begin with. But, well, this is pretty "heavy stuff" for the Classic Computing board, maybe while you're at it you should've moved it all the way to the Programming board?

Oh well, than that documentary about the history of video games I once watched got it wrong. I'm positive they said Ms.Pac-Man was the first game (of the Pac-Man series) to feature intermissions. Obviously I never played it in the Arcades, I was simply born too late for that. But strangely, not a single home-version of Pac-Man I've ever played had intermissions, but every home-version of Ms.Pac-Man seems to have them. Are you thinking of the intro (Pac-Man running from ghosts, then blue ghosts running from Pac-Man), maybe? I'd say that's not an intermission, because you see it before gameplay even starts.

I have to disagree - kinda... While there maybe weren't many Kaboom clones, the Kaboom! gameplay was often included as minigames in other types of games, e.g. Adventure games or educational games (especially those seemed to like it). Then again, wasn't Kaboom! itself a clone of an already existing concept from the arcades? I think it was called "Avalanche"? And weren't there even other clones of that before Kaboom! came out? Like the one where it's eggs that you have to catch? EDIT: Yes, it would seem so, indeed: Avalanche (video game)... 1978, Activision didn't even exist. It even has those "multiple paddles on top of each other to represent your lives" that most later clones don't have. Nah, those were intermissions. Big difference I thought Ms.Pac-Man introduced the intermissions to the franchise?

I'm curious, what exactly do you want to know this for? Calculating shipping costs or something?

Extract them with whatever you have to extract gz files (whatever you have for zip files should take them as well), and then use the dsk images with your Apple II emulator. I'm not really an Apple-II-guy, so I don't know if there may be better choices out there, but I am using AppleWin.

You know their titles but you can't find them? At least "Hard Hat Mack" immediately rings a bell and should be relatively easy to find online. At least I know the C64 version is Well I quickly searched and without much effort found both games for the Apple II online. They're both available at the usual place, but other sites come up as well.

I still can't help but think I'm typing right at one... When I read "IBM PC AT" my mind is just automatically substituting "Modern, normal PC"... Am I the only one?

Well, I don't quite agree on that one. I would put Warcraft next to Dune 2, the "almost, but not yet there" generation of RTSs. It was Command&Conquer who really kickstarted the genre (see how many of the early RTS games were C&C clones), and Warcraft II for the warcraft-style gameplay.

I think I remember that as well... don't know what it was called, though. I even think there were lots of clones/versions/ports of it around, because I seem to remember thinking "Oh, it's one of those games again" on the sight of that kind of game. They pretty much had (pseudo) vector graphics, and were kind of a physics simulation. Build your bridge so it doesn't crumble. I think in the late 90s there was even a remake of that concept, this time with 3D graphics, on the PC.