nj@magnolia.Berkeley.EDU (Narciso Jaramillo) (04/03/91)
Followups to comp.sys.amiga.advocacy. In article <1517@tronsbox.xei.com> dfrancis@tronsbox.xei.com (Dennis Heffernan) writes: >I don't personally know a single person who enjoys pure shoot-em-ups. >I can't understand why anyone writes them any more. I haven't seen one in years >that didn't look like every other one ever done. The same goes for climbing >and jumping games- I've played SHADOW OF THE BEAST (on another machine, it won't >run on mine...), and it's nothing but a hyperthyroid DONKEY KONG with an >attitude. Yawn. The dinosaurs died so that the plastic it is encoded on could >exist, and I'm hard-pressed to come up with a reason why. I'm beginning to think the problem is one of misplaced talent. Most of the arguments in favor of hardware hacking are ``Whizzy games sell well, and you have to hack the hardware to write whizzy games.'' I think the real reason is the other way around: Whizzy demos don't sell on their own. If the really talented hardware hackers could sell nifty-fast graphic demos on their own merits as pieces of art, then games designers could hire programmers who were less interested in creating art and more interested in writing playable games. Unfortunately, whizzy demos on the Amiga don't sell; their best hope is to get wide distribution on the bootblock of a pirated program, or to be released on BBSes or by FTP. So all these talented hacker/artists end up working for game companies, and you get games like Shadow of the Beast--people buy it because it's pretty, play it for awhile, then lose interest because it's not actually a good game. This is even more apparent for games like Lemmings or Beast II, where you have a long introductory animation that doesn't do anything but take up space on the disk. It's cute, but only the first time you see it. It does nothing to enhance gameplay. This is probably an indirect reason for rampant games piracy among people who can afford them--let's call them ``white-collar pirates.'' White-collar pirates probably don't feel that if they bought the game, they would actually play it long enough to justify the money they spent. They just want a copy so they can look at the pretty pictures for a few days. nj
peter@sugar.hackercorp.com (Peter da Silva) (04/07/91)
In article <mykes.0704@amiga0.SF-Bay.ORG> mykes@amiga0.SF-Bay.ORG (Mike Schwartz) writes: > I'm sure you realize that the > vast majority of Amiga owners (those who one A500s) just stick in a > game disk and reboot and could care less about the OS. Then why are you flaming about the hard disk? Game machines don't have hard disks. -- Peter da Silva. `-_-' <peter@sugar.hackercorp.com>.