Hi Dark,
Yeah, I do see your point. A lot of the arcade games we have were
simplified for practical reasons. With Montezuma's Revenge, for
example, I did simplify things for very practical reasons. The one big
one being its hard to actually convey certain information through an
audio only medium.
For instance, the skulls. In my version the skulls only moved left
right, and you had to jump over them. There were certainly that kind
of skull in the original, but I totally left out the bouncing skulls.
I.E. the ones that were bouncing up and down. Those were trickier
because you had to run underneath them without them landing on you and
killing you instantly. I could never figure out a logical way to tell
you when a skull was up in the air and when it would be safe to run
under it before it landed. Yeah, yeah, people will say use pitch
changes etc, but then the skulls sounded really weird and the speed
was so fast even with pitch changes you couldn't keep up. Trust me, I
tried it and I could never figure out a way to identify how and when
to run under a bouncing skull so left it out.
I think that other games lack features of the original mainstream
concepts for similar reasons. Its difficult, if not impossible, to
convey everything to a blind user through audio. Therefore we end up
with a sort of half-way game that is maybe 80% like the original idea,
but lacks a few advanced or more complex game play elements here and
there.
However, as far as Asteroids goes I don't think that type of game
would have to be converted to a 2d platformer at all. If anything else
now that I have Genesis 3D and Philip has BGT it should be relatively
easy to create a 3d Asteroids game with asteroids in true 3d space.
I.E. AAsteroids above and below the player as well as left, right, and
behind you. Now, that would be something worth playing. As an arcade
game it could get pretty advanced in navigation, math, and Physics and
might double as a type of flight simulator as well as an arcade game.
Cheers!
On 5/20/11, dark <d...@xgam.org> wrote:
Hi Tom.
Your knolidge of the early arcade games is probably better than mine,
sinse
the sort of games I grew up playing in the arcades were things like
double
dragon, ninja turtles, mortal combat and street fighter 2.
One issue I have noticed though, is when adapting an arcade game, some
developers sacrifice gameplay complexities that differenciate the game
from
others for reasons of audio.
Take Liams duckhunt game.
the original duckhunt had objects moving at not only faster speed, but
any
angle, and you had to targit not just left and right, but up and down as
well.
because though Liam missed completely the vertical dimention sinse that's
harder to show in audio, the game plays much like space invaders, where
as
originally it wouldn't.
Actually I do rather wish Liam had inserted some vertical targiting, even
if
this meant altering the nes sfx of the ducks or inserting some extra
sound
such as wind to show vertical position, simply because this would've made
the game less like the usual left/right targiting affair.
Pipe is another one.
In the graphical version, it's not just a matter of physically scrolling
through a number of pipes one of which will fit, but actually logically
working out amount of space available vs the pipes you have in a very
quick
manner, but once again, this concept was removed from the audio version.
I think that is my real objection to the arcade genre, that sinse the
amount
of information possible to show in audio is less than in a graphical
game,
games have been simplified down to something of a baseline.
Take something like asteroids.
Yes, it may be possible to show rocks blowing up into smaller rocks and
your
spaceship avoiding them in audio, but in no sense could you easily show a
huge screen with your ship in the center with a 360 degree field of fire
all
around you and asteroids coming from all angles.
I would be reasonably willing to bet that were a developer to create an
audio asteroids, one of the first design changes they'd make would be to
reduce the game to only a left/right field of fire to save on audio.
Beware the grue!
Dark.
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