[net.games.video] Dragon's Lair

ronnie@mit-eddie.UUCP (Ronnie Schnell) (07/19/83)

Subject: Dragon's lair
Newsgroups: net.games.video, net.video

Yesterday I attended the "Electronic Circus", a collection of 500 games in
an exhibition center here in Massachusetts. It had a few old games as well
as several new ones. One game which I spent some time trying was "Dragon's
Lair", which is the new video disc technology game. For those of you who
have not read about it, it is an adventure type of game which has a video
disc containing all of the possible happenings during the game. You start
out by meeting your character (Dirk) and you must immediately swing moving
him through the dungeon by using his sword and grabing hold of the right
things and moving in the right direction. I can see alot of money in games
like this, but one thing that really bothered me is that it was quite obvious
when a jump was made on the disc that was far away from the current frame.
The screen would blank out for as long as a second. Is this the current 
state of videodisc-computer interface or is this just "old" circuitry?

					-Ronnie
					{
					  ..decvax!genrad!mit-eddie!ronnie
		       (Until Aug 21)---  ..decvax!genrad!wjh12!a:schnell
		       (arpanet)--	  ronnie@mit-mc (mit-ml)

henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (07/19/83)

The problem with long delays for jumps on the videodisc is one that is
fundamental to the technology, not something that the electronics or
computer interface get the blame for.  Current videodiscs simply take
a long time to seek more than a few tracks.  They don't have the blazing-
fast head actuators that computer disk drives have, because there is no
need for such speed in the "ordinary" videodisc application of watching
sequential frames.
-- 
				Henry Spencer
				U of Toronto
				{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry

cjh@ihuxr.UUCP (07/23/83)

When I went to the video game convention at the Ohare Expo. center in
March, they had the Dragon's Lair on display. Several of the bugs in
the program were in the joystick. Move the joystick, any direction
at the right time, and it assumed that you made the correct move.
The video disk player was also broke down more than working. You
won't see many operators buying these until they fix the reliability
problems.

			C. J. Holzwarth
			ihuxr!cjh