joe@dayton.UUCP (Joseph P. Larson) (12/28/88)
Okay. After a full Christmas weekend of playing AutoDuel every chance I
got, it's time to Tell The Net what I think. Hmm. I wonder if the Net
cares.
Anyways -- AutoDuel was written by "Lord British and Chuckles". Hmph. It's
based very strongly on the tabletop game "Car Wars" by Steve Jackson games.
The concept: It's 2030, and the world is in shambles. The energy crunch
led to a food crunch and the Food Riots back in 2012 or so. Now the country
is broken up, and bandits roam the highways. Auto dueling -- smash-up
derbys, but the cars carry guns (and lasers and flame throwers and mine
droppers and missles and ...) -- is the latest rage.
So guess what you do. Yep, you shoot 'em up with the best of 'em. You
start with $2000 on a Friday morning. Stop in the truck stop, buy body
armor for $250, and head off to the Arena for a bout on Amateur Night.
They give you a car and 5 opponents, and if you gun 'em all down, they give
give you $1500 (but keep the car). As you gain more money (from more
Amateur Nights), you can clone yourself (in case you die) or buy your own
car.
You can also accept courier jobs for the AADA (American Auto Dueling Assoc.),
which involve transporting something on the dangerous highways to another
town. If you like, you can then run to Joe's bar and sell the same
courier job-load to some seedy character, but this won't do your reputation
a lot of good.
Okay -- the hard points:
Multitasks: No.
Copy Protected: Yes. Maurader wouldn't copy it for me. It also writes to
the disk with some frequency, so I suspect this is going to leave me with
hardaches at some point in the not-too-distant future.
Uses memory wisely: No. It goes to disk much more than I'd like, probably
loading map info and such. Wish games would learn to check for extra
memory and at LEAST toss things into ram: when they can.
Crashes: Not yet, and I have several hours of play. But make sure you don't
have any I/O errors on the disk. (These are recoverable if you reinsert
the disk and tell it to try again.)
Port Quality: The machine doesn't appear to make as much use of the Amiga as
one might like -- the graphics are good, but not stunning. All-in-all,
it's fairly well done.
A few bad points -- several items listed in the documentation don't work.
For instance, when you're on the road (between towns), a ctrl-L is supposed
to give you a map. It doesn't. (Neither do ctrl-any-letter or any-letter or
shift-any-letter.) Also, you're supposed to be able to tell it you're
using 2 disks (for saving your characters and cars) - this doesn't work.
If you play car wars, you'll be a little disappointed. No personal weapons.
(You can't roll the window down and toss a grenade at a passing pedestrian.)
In fact, no pedestrians, unless you're dumb enough to get out of your car in
the middle of a duel. You also can't steer in reverse, which is a pain at
times.
However, you can salvage stuff off dead cars (if you have mechanics skill
and the computer decides this car has something to salvage). The action is
fast (although I wish you could tell what kind of weapons you opponents
were using). The user-input is reasonable. (You can steer with the mouse,
which works great.) You can't aim your guns without pointing the car,
though. (In car wars, you can hit someone at an angle rather than being
directly in front/side/back/whatever.) No turreted weapons (and thus no
top armor).
So -- is it a good game?
Well, like I said: I spent every available moment (between my wife yelling
at me to get off the computer and do something) playing over the weekend.
You decide if I like it. -Joe
--
When you fall on your head do you land on your feet?
UUCP: rutgers!dayton!joe (Feed my Dayton Hudson Department Store Company
ATT : (612) 375-3537 picture Joe Larson/MIS 1060
(standard disclaimer...) collection) 700 on the Mall Mpls, Mn. 55402griff@intelob.intel.com (Richard Griffith) (01/04/89)
In article <6337@dayton.UUCP> joe@dayton.UUCP (Joseph P. Larson) writes: > >Okay. After a full Christmas weekend of playing AutoDuel every chance I >got, it's time to Tell The Net what I think. Hmm. I wonder if the Net >cares. > >Anyways -- AutoDuel was written by "Lord British and Chuckles". Hmph. It's >based very strongly on the tabletop game "Car Wars" by Steve Jackson games. > [ description deleted ] >Okay -- the hard points: > >Multitasks: No. bleah! >Copy Protected: Yes. Maurader wouldn't copy it for me. It also writes to > the disk with some frequency, so I suspect this is going to leave me with > hardaches at some point in the not-too-distant future. >Uses memory wisely: No. It goes to disk much more than I'd like, probably > loading map info and such. Wish games would learn to check for extra > memory and at LEAST toss things into ram: when they can. >Crashes: Not yet, and I have several hours of play. But make sure you don't > have any I/O errors on the disk. (These are recoverable if you reinsert > the disk and tell it to try again.) but requires a re-boot to get rid of it... >Port Quality: The machine doesn't appear to make as much use of the Amiga as > one might like -- the graphics are good, but not stunning. All-in-all, > it's fairly well done. not bad, considering that all they did was recompile their Apple II game on an Amiga. Yep, absolutely NO difference between the Apple II version and the Amiga version. Same crude graphics (yes, it's hires, but still barely more than stick-figures...), no sound to speak of (after all, the Apple only beeps) and as you have already pointed out - insufficent testing, and useof, available memory. As far as I can tell, there is no discernable difference between the Amiga version and the Apple II version. A Great game for the Apple, but barely passable on Amy... [ more bad stuff.... ] >So -- is it a good game? > >Well, like I said: I spent every available moment (between my wife yelling >at me to get off the computer and do something) playing over the weekend. >You decide if I like it. -Joe >-- > When you fall on your head do you land on your feet? >UUCP: rutgers!dayton!joe (Feed my Dayton Hudson Department Store Company >ATT : (612) 375-3537 picture Joe Larson/MIS 1060 >(standard disclaimer...) collection) 700 on the Mall Mpls, Mn. 55402 BTW - I played it for the better part of a day at a friends place, good thing I didn't buy it.... You're right about the difficulty in copying it... - griff ************************************************************************ * Richard E. Griffith * Cyrus Hammerhand * * "griff" * Household of the Golden Wolf * * BiiN, Hillsboro Ore. * Dragons' Mist * * (When are we getting * An Tir * * Our own Usenet node?) * * **************************************************************************