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Intelligentleman

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Posts posted by Intelligentleman

  12. Posted

    8 minutes ago, Kai_Magazine said:

    There are 2 main reasons for that:

     

    First, back in 79-83, cartridge ROM chips were very expensive, so most games were 8 or 16kb in size.

    Today this is no longer an issue and the games can be 100 or 200kb big, so with all that extra space we can add more variety and make them more similar to games from 1986.

     

    Second, today we use coding techniques that are way more advanced than those back in 79-83, simply because noone invented them yet.

    Wow. That makes sense though. I remember back in the SNES and N64 days, gamers liked it when games came on larger carts because it was usually an indication that there was some cool stuff going on graphically. 

     

    Regarding the coding techniques, are you saying that we can do better BASIC coding today than back then?

  13. Posted · Edited by Intelligentleman

    3 minutes ago, BiffMan said:

    By contrast, I spend all of my time at lowest altitude where the plane is the fastest. Way easier for me to dodge missiles and I'd rather live longer than get in a few extra hits per screen. 

     

    I do zoom up/down on the rail/road to hit trucks & trains so I don't have to veer off course, but later on that gets pretty unreliable as a tactic when the missiles are coming really fast.

    Yeah on my high score run, I started noticing that I'd have missiles coming at me from various simultaneous altitudes, making it really tough to dive / climb without hitting one of them.

     

    I'll have to experiment with your approach next time!

    • Like 1

  15. Posted

    18 hours ago, mr_me said:

    Yeah, the intellivision has one background layer so every pixel there is used for object-background collision detection.  That's how it is in Utopia but it doesn't have to be.  You could add a y position condition and have objects move through the numbers at the bottom.  Or you can use tables and software and skip the hardware collision detection with the background.

     

    That also means when the background scrolls, the text scrolls with it.  So games with background scrolling like auto racing, space hawk, football, soccer, skiing, mazeatron, space spartans don't show any stats while the background is scrolling.  Bumpnjump is an exception as they did some clever background animation to keep some characters stationary.  But that involved extra code.

    I kinda like how Space Hawk gives you a score screen when you reach certain thresholds.

  17. Posted

    My main strategy is to spend most of my time at max altitude, only dropping down to dodge the occasional missiles. Until the train tracks! Then I dive up and down repeatedly while bombing the ever loving bejeezus out of the tracks. Each segment is worth 100 points, I think. Then when you get to the part with the train engines you need to make a point to hit them because they're a pretty high value target. You end up with a lower point to hit ratio this way, but I always go by the end total score anyway.

    • Haha 1
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