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Evening Star > Rail Simulator

icabodicabod
edited November 2007 in Games
Over on EuroGamer Oliver Clare has done a "new games journalism" concept review of a new game, Kuju's Rail Simulator. The "concept" part of the review is comparing it to Evening Star. And Evening Star wins on Accessibility. Woo! Loses on everything else, mind.
Post edited by icabod on

Comments

  • neoncherryneoncherry
    edited November 2007
    Yeah, it's great, isn't it? :p

    http://www.worldofspectrum.org/forums/showthread.php?t=18283
  • icabodicabod
    edited November 2007
    Hehe, sorry for the dupe. I only just noticed a link to it on RPS, hence the post. I really should keep a better eye on the forums.
  • neoncherryneoncherry
    edited November 2007
    Well, only one person responded to the other thread, it's nice to know that someone else was pleased to see Spectrum games (and WoS) being given exposure in a mainstream modern game review.
  • WinstonWinston
    edited November 2007
    I loved "Southern Belle". Indeed, I remember purchasing it as an online purchase and download off Micronet! Paying for and downloading software is nothing new, it was available on the Speccy in the 80s :-)

    It's dissappointing to hear that Train Sim doesn't have any variance at all in the scenarios (something that Southern Belle certainly had). There's also a free train sim called Boso View Express (written by someone in Japan) which suffers from the same thing - scenarios are totally fixed. (However, BVE - purely a "cab view" simulator from the driving seat, has some very nice features that other sims for some reason simply don't include - cab sway - which gives a much better impression of movement, since you don't feel like you're a rod welded to the drivers seat).
  • neoncherryneoncherry
    edited November 2007
    Winston wrote: »
    I loved "Southern Belle". Indeed, I remember purchasing it as an online purchase and download off Micronet! Paying for and downloading software is nothing new, it was available on the Speccy in the 80s :-)

    I'd seen this mentioned but never met anyone who used it. Do you remember exactly how it worked? Was it by credit card or phone bill or something?
  • WinstonWinston
    edited November 2007
    The purchase price was added to your regular Prestel/Micronet quarterly bill. Micronet had quite a lot of downloads for the Spectrum, many free - but quite a few full commercial games. They were sent to you in specially encoded pages - it looked a lot like base64 or uuencode encoding, and they were checksummed. The last few frames of the download were priced, like any other Prestel or Micronet page that had a charge associated with it - and from Micronet's point of view were just like any other charged page and went on your quarterly bill. The downloads were often compressed (and the compressed result was what you stored on tape - it decompressed when you loaded it back from tape, to make for faster loading times).

    Inexplicably though, they only sent you the game instructions in the post for the more complex games, rather than having a page or two with the instructions you could download or copy!

    I had good times on Micronet. But then in around 1990 or so, Prestel made huge price increases, and home users canceled their subscriptions en-masse and the service very quickly went from having 20,000+ users to almost none; fortunately by then there was a decent BBS scene.

    Micronet had a lot of things that people think are a new thing brought by the internet - you could have your own "gallery" (analagous to a web page), there were chat rooms which aren't all that dissimiar to phpbb/vbulletin (well, except with less graphics and text!), there were multi-user games like Shades (Shades, incidentally, is still going, although it's not all that populated sadly), you could buy airline travel online etc.
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