81–90 of 146 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would say lot of DOS programs and games were just using cold temperature colors, so it has specific 80/90s cold feel, I think later they started to get warmer and warmer.
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.
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 reduced to poking data into some terrible shareware editor with an awful color palate . I made my own spacewar style game at one point. I was reduced to putting bytes into a file to get the gradients right on the hulls of the ship. Oh and each gradient is stealing a color from my limited palate of 240 colors (16 were reserved, for whatever reason at the time). You want higher res you are now talking VGA. But the trade off was resolution for color. So you could have 640x480 but only 16 colors. Or you could have 320x240 but 256 but a blocky mess. This was when a VGA card might have 1MB of memory total (usually less, unless you paid for something fancy). Throw in page flipping (which you really really want) and you are out of room on the card.
Scorched Earth was more about how many crazy weapons you could make and throw at each other with fun generated effects.
We can now look back at the whole catalog and see what was really good at the time. With collections like eXoDOS. You will find a good 95% of the games are very poor if compared to what you can get today. If you bought something like this on steam today you would be thinking what is up with this junk. Back in the 90s though it was a fun bit of software.
Elden Ring gets pretty close, but that’s a solo experience more akin to the kind of influence Ocarina of Time had than Doom, I guess.
Maybe I’m just old and cynical.
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.
Worms had superior graphics, superior UI, funnier weapons, funnier gameplay with cute worms and no economy from what I remember, so players were equal.
I didn't have a lot of friends, haha.
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/
I remember that one, but back in those days i played the crap out of Tunneler. https://dosgames.com/game/tunneler
Loved Scorched Earth. Had this fun bug/feature related to the weapons market. Between rounds you used your earnings to buy more weapons for the next round. There was an option to make it a "free market" which meant that the prices would get jacked on the weapons that you bought most often. But - and I didn't know this at the time - the price of an item was represented as a signed int so if you jacked the price high e…
One of my favorite games of all time, begin (a text based Star Trek game) has a similar bug where you could warp in the negative direction at infinite speed. I still remember the commands: w 90 -100, f a t. (warp 90 degrees at warp -100, fire all torpedoes!). Assuming the enemy was 270 degrees from you —- you’d fly the ship backwards at them! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begin_(video_game)