Haunted
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Posts posted by Haunted
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Hi! I've been messing around with the 1981 Apple II version of Ultima. It has some different game mechanics than the various remakes, but can be pretty buggy at times. The only system to get a port of the game, rather than a remake, was the good old Atari 800. I've read some different statements about this port: bloggingultima believes the A800 version fixed some or all of the bugs, while the Ultima wiki says it was a straight port with all the problems of the original. I was wondering, does anyone here have experience with the A800 Ultima and know the real deal?
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What emulator are you using? Prehistoric Isle 2 (and the rest of the Neo-Geo library) works fine in MAME. It'd probably easiest for you to use MameUI, though make sure you put the Neo-Geo BIOS in the ROM directory.
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Is there any chance of restoring pause functionality in the next release? Of course you can open a menu to get the same effect, but a clean pause can sometimes be nice to have, like when you're taking screenshots.
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No, the colors seem to be normal in the half-dozen games I just tried. The water in River Raid hasn't turned into blood, though that would actually be pretty cool.
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It's always good to see another release of my favorite 2600 emulator (and in a convenient Windows zip file too). When I switched over from 2.2 to 2.3 I noticed a problem, however. All the text in Stella's launcher and in-game tab menu is invisible when the desktop's color depth is set to 24 bits, both when the program's run in windowed mode and in full-screen. Everything's still there and works when you click on it, it just can't be seen. Dropping the color depth down to 16 bits makes everything visible again.
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Ebert couldn't be more wrong. Videogames are inherently superior to film.
Let's take a movie that is undoubtedly considered art... how about Schindler's List? We'll keep all the movie footage, unaltered. Instead of the previews before the movie, however, we'll add a short gameplay section. Maybe you explore the Poland of the '40s, maybe you lead some Jews through a maze while avoiding Nazis, maybe you arrange falling blocks, it doesn't matter. We've now made List into a video game; a video game with 15 minutes of gameplay and a 3-hour long cutscene, but a video game nonetheless.
Have we destroyed the art Schindler's List possessed as a movie? No. If Spielberg had mad List as the video game I described, he would have created a work of art greater than the vast majority of movies. So we clearly see that a video game can be great art.
Why are video games superior to films? Because they can do everything a film can do: use visuals and dialogue to tell a story. And they can include user input, interactivity, and competition, things that movies can never do.
Of course, narrative and gameplay are two separate elements of a videogame. There are games with excellent gameplay and no narrative to speak of, like Ms. Pac-Man, and there are games with an outstanding narrative but mediocre gameplay, like A Mind Forever Voyaging. And then there are game that succeed in both categories, like Metal Gear Solid or Grim Fandango. I'd hold them up against any movie.
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The platformer I'd recommend most is Mega Man & Bass, the final "classic" Mega Man game. Mega Man plays like his old self, while Bass has a new set of abilities.
Mega Man Zero was excellent as well. It's not as difficult as people make it out to be, as long as you level up your attacks and a couple of the most important cyber elves (the ones that double your health and and halve damage).
I didn't want to like Sonic Advance, but ended up having a good time. It's nice for Knuckles to actually be able to punch for once.
Kirby - Nightmare in Dreamland was a nice remake of Kirby's Adventure for the NES. I can't help feel that Kirby Superstar was the peak of the series, though, so other Kirby games seem lacking by comparison.
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There was also a Ms. Pac-Man mini-cabinet released in the '80s, IIRC. It had an LED screen, though, and player 2 was a ghost.
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Were you playing it on the NES? That version's difficulty was greatly reduced from the arcade.
For the GnG trilogy, I like the overall feel of Ghosts the best, but the game's so hard that a lot of the time it isn't much fun to play. The boss fight against the two Satans was one of the toughest I've ever seen; I wasn't able to beat it without using a save state. There're tons of gargoyles too, and you don't have a reliable way to kill them like in the other games.
But Demon's Crest blows all the others away. It had a really dark gothic style, and lots of replayability with the alternate paths and hidden bosses. It's too bad the game did so poorly in the U.S. I heard one week it actually generated negative sales since more people were returning the game than buying it.
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The original Atari distinctive while remaining classy. The Infograms and Hasbro logos look deformed with those flaring lines, and Hasbo also has that cheesy logo. The Atari Games logo isn't bad, but the coloring and font are garish. Original Atari's the winner: distinctive, yet classy.
Now when's the Atari logo swimsuit competition?
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Stella's event mapper doesn't seem to register input from a joystick or POV hat (D-Pad). Click on an event, press "map," and press a direction on the stick or pad; nothing will happen. I don't think it's a controller problem (I tried 2 different controllers) and there are no problems mapping an event to a controller button. Fortunately, up/down/left/right are mapped to the joystick axes by default, and Stella has no difficulty accepting the joystick's input while actually playing a game. It'd be a problem if you favored a more estoric controller setup, though, or if you wanted to use the POV hat.
Also, if you press numlock or capslock while in the event mapper, it will interpret it as a continuous press. So if you map event1 to capslock, then try to map event 2 with capslock still on, it will think the capslock button is being held down and instantly map event2 to capslock as well.
Finally, it would be nice to be able to remap the paddle directions and button to something other than the mouse, so you can play a multi-player game even if you only have one mouse.
Anyway, great work so far. Stella's now my 2600 emu of choice.
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Ultima for Atari 800
in Atari 8-Bit Computers
Posted
Thanks for the info, guys! Whoever put that bit in the wiki must not have known what he was talking about. It also neglected to mention the Apple IIGS version of Ultima I, anyway.
I haven't played Ultima IX... it doesn't exactly have the best reputation, and I guess that's scared me off.
Oh, and cool U3 avatar, Goochman.