Hi! |
A|A
(n n)
\_/
I've been very busy last weeks. To make things a little
worse, the system is having a strange behaviour, what made me
loose a few EMs (received and to be sent). The result is that
two of my replies were never submitted to the list. So, here are
my thoughts about several subjects of several EMs (some about
4 weeks ago!), sumarized, 'cause I cannot remember them all:
0 - The serious part first, this time: I'm slowing down the
releases for "Yawara". I "feel" a lack of interest in it
and I don't have time to spend. There is only two new
release for it: "Time Curb" (Bach's "Toccata e Fuga" and
voice effects) and "Camelot Warriors" (by the way, it is
at "http://unicorndreams.home.ml.org").
1 - "Final Fantasy VII": someone (I lost the original EM) said I
was criticizing that game without having played it enough.
Well, I have finished the first of the four disks, i.e., one
fourth of the game. I liked very much FF5 (Japanese SFC
version), so I was meant to give FF7 a chance to become
playable... It failed. The damn game sucks to death. 3/4 of
the time I spent with it was lost in boring battle modes. It
is simply stupid to wander in a pre-rendered scenario and
randomly "step on" enemies. "SD Snatcher" presents the other
extreme of the matter: you can see all enemies, even those
behind walls, and they can see you, eliminating any chance
of surprise attacks (the game randomly calculates an
initiative factor to compensate that). A partial solution
is presented in "Metal Gear 2 - Solid Snake", in which the
enemies can see only 60 degrees before their eyes (according
to the manual), though you still can see them (almost)
anywhere. The result is a slow game, but that is surely
worth playing. It would be perfect if you only could see
what is before your character's eyes, but the way it is is
enough to make it more playable than FF7.
2 - Someone said that "Final Fantasy 7" was an adventure. How
could it be? All FF series is of CRPGs. I have played the
preview release of FF8. Good movie, mainly when you summon
Leviathan, but it is still not a good game, and is surely
a CRPG, NOT adventure. The only computer adventure widely
available I know is "Snatcher". Remember that CRPG means
"computer role-playing _GAME_", i.e., you kill enemies,
gather Exp points, levels up and so on. In a computer
adventure, as in any other adventure, the important is the
way you play the role of the character, not how many slimes
you should swat to go to the next level. Yes, of course,
"Snatcher" has a few action scenes, but they are not
important, they are there just to delay the player a little.
By the way, all "Digital Devil Story", "Dragon Quest",
"Dragon Slayer", "Ys", "Legend of Heroes", "Xak",
"Sorcerian", "Breath of Fire", "Zelda", "Seiken Densetsu",
"Mother" and similar series are CRPGs, not one of them is an
adventure. There are a lot of adventures for Apple II, some
for Famicom and a few for MSX ("Snatcher", "Return to Eden"
and some Brazilian softwares). I think one could easily call
FF7 an "interactive movie", whatever it means, but surely
never an adventure, and most surely not enjoyable for
someone that had known and liked FF5.
3 - Someone said "Jet Set Willy" becomes enjoyable when you put
infinite lives to it. Well, if it needs _that_ kind of cheat
to become enjoyable, then there is surely something wrong
with it. Someone also (the same guy?) said there was no
formulae to make a game enjoyable or not. Hey, I never
said there was! He also said a game didn't need anything
I presented to be enjoyable. Well, I presented abseolutely
nothing to make a game enjoyable. What I said is that a game
MUST give options to the player to actually PLAY the game.
"Jet Set Willy" gives only one, "jump", with inertia
simulation and pseudo-gravity, what sucks more than FF7. The
game would be difficult enough without that. And there are
fan clubs for it, I was told. Well, there are Hitler fan
clubs, too, and that doesn't mean he was a good guy. Indeed,
most things that have a fan club are pure trash, like "Doom"
fan clubs, "Spice Girls" fan clubs, serial killers fan clubs
(I'm not kidding, go to the Net and make little search...)
Don't count on people's taste or you will end up eating fast
food and drinking coke. By the way, I H-A-T-E "Doom" and
most "3D Wolfenstein" clones. To me, "Doom" is an offense:
"you `Doom' player", "go play `Doom'" and so on... It's
wonderful that MSX does not have any (well, it has "Episode
4" and "3D Bomberman", but you need some wits to play them,
not more ammo, cheats and blood). Strangely, the polygonal
approaches to "3D Wolfie" made for PlayStation and N64
result better than the former, like "Beltlogger 9", "Golden
Eye" and others (not that I like them, but they are more
playable and enjoyable than non-polygonal 3D games, like
"Doom", "Duke Nuke" and so on). I repeat, the list of games
I like is extremely short.
4 - 3D won't rule, it can't. How many here have played some
3D "Tetris" clone? How many enjoyed it? Well, most people
didn't, too, all around the world. That's why there are so
few of them (I was told there was one for N64, but that
I haven't played). The existing 2D games won't ever be
replaced by 3D versions and _new_ 3D games won't please
everyone. Have someone played "Solar Assault" (Konami's 3D
"Gradius"). It has the same `style' of original "Gradius"
series, it almost feels like "Gradius", but it is undeniable
that it is a 3D space-fighter game, most like all other
space-fighter games ("Star Fox" and so on). It doesn't mean
it is not a good game (it's excellent, indeed), but I still
like to play old "Gradius", as I still like to play "Aleste"
(1, 2 and "Gaiden" for MSX, "Super" for SFC and "Mushya"
for Megadrive), "Pac-Man" (did you know it was originally
called "Puck-Man", written "paku-man" in Japanese and that's
how it became "pac-man"?) and so on, all 2D. It's non-sense
to say that everything here forth will be 3D. If it was so,
Square wouldn't have released FF5 to PlayStation, in the
original 2D, or made "Einhander" with 2D playability. There
are currently no widely available 3D display medium. I
have already worked on a project of 3D screen. It used a
diffractive matrix printed on a large piece of holo-film.
The images were really 3D, not 2D projections like in a
TV set (even using stereo-pairs, like those used by Sega's
Master System or Nintendo's VirtualBoy). But I doubt it will
ever gonna be used to make games, because the eyes, the
receptors of all those images, are 2D! The 3D models are
created by the brain, using the data collected by the eyes,
which accumulates a lot of loss in each convertion stage
(computer 3D model -> display 2D images -> eyes' 2D image
capturing -> brain 3D interpretation). If one likes
"academic" names, currently available games are "perspective
corrected 3D-to-2D projected games", and till one can send
images directly into the brain (yes, I'm radical!), they
will stay so. And even so I don't think perspective games
can win a good 2D shoot'em up...
5 - Assembly lessons: yes, I wrote a series of Assembly lessons
a year or so ago. They went through most Z80/MSX programming
topics (memory, functions, interruption etc.) Maybe I could
translate it to English, if I can gather enough time...
6 - "Hensha Turbo": that key on the panel of some Sanyo, Sony
and Panasonic MSX (including the turbo R) is called "Hensha
Turbo" and it DOES NOT control the system clock, but the
AUTO-SHOOTING speed. "Hensha Turbo" affects only the <Space>
key. BrMSX emulates Hensha Turbo. I don't know if there are
any MSX with clock speed control, but it would be a miracle
if anything could "stay alive" in that machine's memory (of
course, if the system's memory is linked to the CPU's refresh
pins). I don't know how the <Pause> key works, but if it
really holds the system main clock, then the memory will
need a separated refresh device, granted that the Z80 can
"keep itself" without clock (if you remove the clock input
of some "big" CPU, like the i486, the registers will loose
their data, for they also need refresh - not to mention the
cache). I think it would be a "bad idea" to suspend Z80's
clock, but who knows...
... Cyberknight...
P.S.: please, when replying, don't quote the WHOLE sender's message.
Summarize! Things will run faster...
<Over, by now>
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