I think for techincally-good-but-crap I'd have to agree with whoever said I, Of The Mask. It was all very clever and impressive but there's not much game there at all. In its own way it was a precursor to Microcosm on the Amiga CD32 which I gather had the same flaws.
Gah! It's not technically impressive! It's not even got a 3D engine in it! Again I must state that I, Of the Mask uses stored frames of animation to "Simulate" 3D.
If I'd never played the bbc 'b' version I might agree with you because I also hated the atart ST and amiga versions...only the bbc b version of elite was any good IMO.
Gah! It's not technically impressive! It's not even got a 3D engine in it! Again I must state that I, Of the Mask uses stored frames of animation to "Simulate" 3D.
It's doing something a bit more fancy than just dumping out stored frames. You could only fit about ten of them in the Spectrum's RAM without compression, and there are vastly many more than that in the game. Rather, what it does is store pre-calculated versions of each frame and renders them on the fly. Getting this happening at arcade-like speed was a major achievement for the time.
The likes of 3D Starstrike II, Driller and The Sentinel all do things by a very similar method; it's just that those games are far better designed to exploit the capabilities of their graphical engines than I of the Mask which just uses it as pretty window dressing for an essentially 2D maze collect 'em up.
I don't know if it was technically brilliant though. The windowing system was fairly neat, as were the 3D shooty bits, but while they may have been nice in 1985, there's bigger and better out there!
I Of The Mask. It's like Gyron, but even more so; a very simplistic maze game dressed up in spiffy 3D graphics that are almost utterly irrelevant to the gameplay.
Oh you beat me to it! Where WAS the game in that? Looked great though! I saw that head come flying up to the screen and bought it!
Never tried Final Fight, I always thought that looked really true to the original (will have a go when I next get the chance).
It's the slowest game in the whole world. I think Psion Chess on level 8 moves faster than Final Fight.
I managed to break a joystick from pushing it too hard playing Final Fight due to my impatience of its slowness.
I have Final Fight CD now though, so that's ok :) (Prefer the chip music to the arrange though, which makes me a fool)
Lemmings (speccy version) Technically amazing they shoe horned it onto the speccy, but it was so cut down in ever respect it was unplayable. That plus the multiload was a real killer.
Lemmings (speccy version) Technically amazing they shoe horned it onto the speccy, but it was so cut down in ever respect it was unplayable. That plus the multiload was a real killer.
I dunno, I thought it was pretty good. The fire button had auto repeat, so you could paint a whole line of lems with the same function in seconds if needs be. You couldn't do that on the Amiga. Then again, I never played it very far in.
SAS Operation Thunderflash.....looks like it should be great, but is nearly impossible to progress more than a couple of screens into (unless I'm just crap)
SAS Operation Thunderflash.....looks like it should be great, but is nearly impossible to progress more than a couple of screens into (unless I'm just crap)
You're not crap, it's officially an unplayable pile of shit :D
Exolon. Looks lovely, brilliant use of colour and nice explosions and all that but YAAWWWN.
Dark Sceptre. If only the gameplay could cash the cheques the graphics were writing.
I agree with both of these. Raffaele Cecco was obviously a great programmer but would have benefitted from having a games designer working alongside him. Stormlord was the same, nice smooth big graphics and overall effects but very little gameplay.
I agree with Gyron and I Of The Mask. When I saw a game get a really high review score in Crash and it had an innovative look, I was always suspicious. It seems that the 90-92% games were better than the 94-97% ones because they played well without being so "spectacular". Driller, anyone?
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It's a bit annoying in places, but it's actually not that bad.
Loved both of those games!
Gah! It's not technically impressive! It's not even got a 3D engine in it! Again I must state that I, Of the Mask uses stored frames of animation to "Simulate" 3D.
Are you insane??? It is a FANTASTIC game!
Of course, Oolite is _superb_.
It's doing something a bit more fancy than just dumping out stored frames. You could only fit about ten of them in the Spectrum's RAM without compression, and there are vastly many more than that in the game. Rather, what it does is store pre-calculated versions of each frame and renders them on the fly. Getting this happening at arcade-like speed was a major achievement for the time.
The likes of 3D Starstrike II, Driller and The Sentinel all do things by a very similar method; it's just that those games are far better designed to exploit the capabilities of their graphical engines than I of the Mask which just uses it as pretty window dressing for an essentially 2D maze collect 'em up.
I like Zoids :)
I don't know if it was technically brilliant though. The windowing system was fairly neat, as were the 3D shooty bits, but while they may have been nice in 1985, there's bigger and better out there!
Not as good as the first, but a crap-load better than the third!! :smile:
On the Atari ST and Amiga maybe but the spectrum version........crikey!
It's all about personal opinions of course!
Oh you beat me to it! Where WAS the game in that? Looked great though! I saw that head come flying up to the screen and bought it!
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I managed to break a joystick from pushing it too hard playing Final Fight due to my impatience of its slowness.
I have Final Fight CD now though, so that's ok :) (Prefer the chip music to the arrange though, which makes me a fool)
I dunno, I thought it was pretty good. The fire button had auto repeat, so you could paint a whole line of lems with the same function in seconds if needs be. You couldn't do that on the Amiga. Then again, I never played it very far in.
You're not crap, it's officially an unplayable pile of shit :D
It was smooth & polished, but picking up big letters/numbers in space left me a little cold.
T
Dark Sceptre. If only the gameplay could cash the cheques the graphics were writing.
I agree with both of these. Raffaele Cecco was obviously a great programmer but would have benefitted from having a games designer working alongside him. Stormlord was the same, nice smooth big graphics and overall effects but very little gameplay.
Cybernoid was class.
I agree with Gyron and I Of The Mask. When I saw a game get a really high review score in Crash and it had an innovative look, I was always suspicious. It seems that the 90-92% games were better than the 94-97% ones because they played well without being so "spectacular". Driller, anyone?
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