It's time for part 2. I finished the last one with a platformer, time to get to the FPS genre.

And when we speak about Falcon FPS's there is one game that comes to mind. That game is Running. Running is a doom clone that has very few to envy from it. Now you will probably thing I am a difficult person but fps' s make me dizzy and turn my stomach upside down, make me want to run straight to the bathroom, you know that short of thing. But either way I had to try Running no matter what. so I loaded the demo version. The frame rate is good (I lasted about 15 minutes. For comparison I am getting the same symptoms after playing CoD for about 45') the graphics very well designed and though AI was missing the game engine seemed great. To quote ST Format (or ST Doormat depending on your view of the magazine ) "most people will ask where you hid the pc". Oh and that comment was 1996. Apart from Running there are a couple more fps' s but I will discuss them on the non commercial part...

Pong and Breakout have been done to death on every platform, how could the Falcon be an exception?

• Ping 2000 / Holland Design
  
• Impulse / Duranik
  
• Teknoball
  
• Multi - briques / PARX
  

Ping 2000 is Pong in space. You play the game with some nice Astronomical space photo background thing, in true color resolution and with a nice set of music. There are a few surprises and additions to the original game (which is there as well) but the basic idea and physics is not changed. Very hard game, I couldn't get long. Enjoyable nevertheless. The rest 3 are Breakout/Arkanoid clones. As usual there are power ups, power downs etc and they generally have nice graphics. I haven't played Multi -Briques and I liked Impulse better than Teknoball. It didn't get much playtime though.

And now I will move to a favourite of mine! It's a great top down view car racer ala Supersprint. It's name is Radical Race .

RR is a beautiful game that was originally released as commercial (now to the public domain) and one can see that a lot of work was put into it. You participate in a race where everything but cheating is allowed. You run with 3 other drivers (there is an option for multiplayer) and you can shoot, grenade, nitro your way to victory. Once the race is ended you can buy ammo, upgrades and repair damages. Of course there is a more pacifistic mode but after being trapped in traffic jam I am not really in the mood for that.

Another racer that was released early on the falcon's life was Moon Speeder and/or Moon Games. The story is rather sketchy about this/these games but I am pretty sure they had a limited commercial life before ending up as freeware. The game is based on SNES - F - zero and you are racing in some sort of space hovercrafts. The landscape is made of fractals and the 3d engine is fast (I suspect heave DSP usage). Downside is that this game is made for RGB and it shows. It doesn't look or play very good in VGA.

A DSP 3d engine must also be used at the next game I will speak of, a game that sold 400 copies. That is Gravon by BI. Gravon is a hovercraft simulator in a world full of flat shaded polygons. There is a very good frame rate and I really like the computers voice. I never managed to play it though since it needs both a joystick and a mouse and I can't remember when was the last time I had both working correctly.

DSP alert for the next game too. Probably the pinnacle of Falcon gaming, this space shooter is said to be a master piece of Falcon coding. It took 3 years to make and by the time it was released people would call it a playstation quality game. IIRC it was made by sceners (I am sure that the demo crew TSCC had involvement in this game). It's name is:

Crown of Creation. I have only tried the demo and I was impressed at what I saw.

I am going to end this with another game that is sitting in my hard disk but I can't play. This game is Painium Disaster, a vertical scrolling shooter with some of the most beautiful graphics I' ve ever seen. I can't play it because it needs a jagpad but for this game I am going to buy one.

Like I said in my previous post, take a look at tof' s site for some screenshots. The site is in French but Google translation works very well. I promise that when this series is concluded I will write a post for Falcon gaming links.