91–100 of 146 posts
I never could understand the appeal of later Worms games, Scorched Earth was far superior. It has some minor flaw in it's economy: winning player had so much more money to spend on equipment, that it was very hard for a loser of a round to ever catch up, even with a far superior shooting.
Also all the shooting/dying quotes can be changed, which was very amusing to us 10-year-olds.
This game was such a huge part of my life. It was one of the only games I had for a long time, and I put more hours into it than I could count. I ended up making my own “modern” (winxp) version of it with p2p multiplayer to play with friends (never released it, it was an utter mess), and I’ve made half a dozen other versions over the year to practice different game engines or game dev libraries in various languages.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
At a guess? Most of those early games were made with graphics that would look good if it turns out the guy running it only had an EGA and, therefore, was restricted to a very specific set of 16 colors. It took a while for everyone to upgrade.
SE was released same year as very colorful Lemmings, which were not cold at all, so I don't take this excuse.
There was a similar game for DOS at around the same time called "Tank Wars", except that one was written for VGA 320x200x256 graphics. I wonder how many people remember it. https://dosgames.com/game/tank-wars/
Pet theory: Scorched is just a mod of GORILLA.BAS.
My middle school offered a BASIC class in the early 90s, which was my first experience with programming (besides LOGO in elementary school). In hindsight, the teacher was a complete blessing to us, as he 'let' us modify and play GORILLA.BAS and similar BASIC games during our time in class. We thought we were getting away with playing video games in school, but those experiences were setting the seeds for some of our future careers.
Great memories.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
At a guess? Most of those early games were made with graphics that would look good if it turns out the guy running it only had an EGA and, therefore, was restricted to a very specific set of 16 colors. It took a while for everyone to upgrade.
More than likely it was one dude working by himself and he did not have the tools/ability to make good artwork. A lot of DOS shareware games have that problem. The gameplay might be interesting but the art is merely ok to fairly bad. At that time you may have a copy of turboc/watcomc but not a watcom tablet and a copy of paintshop. Also pixel art is a particular artistic skill most people do not have. So you were red…
AAA games like Lemmings and Wolfenstein 3D were not entirely that way, even if they still used some of the same UI paradigms (think: the hardware detection screen when starting wolf3d, or the action selection in Lemmings)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
At a guess? Most of those early games were made with graphics that would look good if it turns out the guy running it only had an EGA and, therefore, was restricted to a very specific set of 16 colors. It took a while for everyone to upgrade.
SE was released same year as very colorful Lemmings, which were not cold at all, so I don't take this excuse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artillery_game
> Artillery games are two or three-player (usually turn-based) video games involving tanks (or simply cannons) trying to destroy each other. The core mechanics of the gameplay is almost always to aim at the opponent(s) following a ballistic trajectory (in its simplest form, a parabolic curve).
> Artillery games are among the earliest computer games developed; the theme of such games is an extension of the original uses of computer themselves, which were once used to calculate the trajectories of rockets and other related military-based calculations.[citation needed]
> Early precursors to the modern artillery-type games were text-only games that simulated artillery entirely with input data values. One of the earliest known games in the genre is War 3 for two or three players, written in FOCAL Mod V by Mike Forman (date unknown). The game was then ported to TSS/8 BASIC IV by M. E. Lyon Jr. in 1972. Ported again to [...]
Earlier quoted context omitted.
More than likely it was one dude working by himself and he did not have the tools/ability to make good artwork. A lot of DOS shareware games have that problem. The gameplay might be interesting but the art is merely ok to fairly bad. At that time you may have a copy of turboc/watcomc but not a watcom tablet and a copy of paintshop. Also pixel art is a particular artistic skill most people do not have. So you were red…
I would say this is it: inexperienced indie developers taking UI inspiration from the software of the day (various audio trackers / windows 1.0) and then copying each other. AAA games like Lemmings and Wolfenstein 3D were not entirely that way, even if they still used some of the same UI paradigms (think: the hardware detection screen when starting wolf3d, or the action selection in Lemmings)