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The Making of Dune II

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Re: The Making of Dune II

#4

Post by pontifier »

This was as favorite of mine in highschool. My friends and I would all play this after school.

We found a bug that made the 1 player missions way too easy. The range of the sonic tanks wasn't really a range so much as a path that the waves took for the duration of the sound effect. We found that by turning the speed of the game up, the shots would travel way too far and made them really overpowered.

Re: The Making of Dune II

#5

Post by n3k5 »

> ‘Dune II seems very old and clunky by today’s standards,’ says Joe. ‘The biggest single thing I should have added to it was the ability to drag-select units to allow a player to issue one order simultaneously to multiple units. Even though that seems like a simple feature, it was the key change that made C&C such a leap ahead of Dune II.’

That's what I was concerned about before I played through one of the three campaigns a few years ago — that the UI would seem unbearable after having played a lot of Warcraft 3 and Starcraft 2. I found it actually quite OK after learning the keyboard shortcuts (of the Dos version). What actually ruined it for me and made me not want to play the other campaigns is the poor AI. Easy enemies would have been alright; I'm not that good at RTS games anyway and being able to finish each level on the first try was nice. But the opponents are so exceptionally stupid that it just got boring.

There are a few open source clones of the engine that have online multi-player and some other additional features (such as the standard multi-select). But I'm not aware of one that lets you play the single-player campaigns against a decently fun AI. Waiiit a moment … just found out that I had missed something big: Dune Legacy lets you play the campaigns, not just single-player skirmish, against its improved AIs. I just tried selecting ‘hard’ and (with game speed at maximum) got completely wrecked on the second map. Wonderful!

Dune (the adventureish one), on the other hand, is still a good game in its original form.

Re: The Making of Dune II

#6

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

I've never been much of a gamer.

Dune II was one of the few games I ever really bit into. I played it more than anything else.

Honestly, it was like "Okay. I completed the Gaming Experience. Enjoyed that. What else does life have?"

Re: The Making of Dune II

#7

Post by tetris11 »

WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #6

I've never been much of a gamer. Dune II was one of the few games I ever really bit into. I played it more than anything else. Honestly, it was like "Okay. I completed the Gaming Experience. Enjoyed that. What else does life have?"

Yep. I genuinely think that teenagers play games because nothing else in their life is so rewarding.

I was hooked until I got my first real job, and I guess the thrill of creating something of your own and seeing it produce results was a delayed gratification no game can match.

That being said, I do love a good story, and gaming has really become a creative outlet for visual storytelling. I can recommend Disco Elysium to anyone.

Re: The Making of Dune II

#8

Post by jkinudsjknds »

tosh wrote: post #2

on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/msdos_Dune_2_-_The_Building_of_a... love the game, remember playing the Mega Drive (Genesis) port and falling in love with RTS

Interface here was pretty frustrating but I was impressed with what I saw. It's clearly got a lot of nice little touches that I wouldn't have expected.

It crashed for me after level 1. My dude said there was suspicion that I was a traitor or something and so I needed to answer trivia about unit stats in a super ambiguous open ended text response which I thought was hilarious. Can anyone tell me what happens if you get these questions right / wrong?

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