M$.... afraid?

[Steril707]

I have a Wii since january now, and i really feel that the graphics suck. There is simply no excuse for these "cash ins".

 

I love Wario Ware or Wii sports, but those games don't try to look realistic anyway, so thats okay for me.. But this Tiger Woods crapfest just makes my eyes bleeding. I was really looking forward to a nice golf game, and would have bought it in an instant, but i think this game looks worse than Wii Sports Golf in a way.

 

Miyamoto has adressed this, The Factor5 guys talked about it, and me and a lot of other people feel there is really no excuse anymore for Sub GC Graphics on the Wii.

 

I am not a graphics whore, being mostly a retro gamer, but i like games that take their systems they run on to the maximum graphicswise. And i expect this form the Wii...

 

I guess the current crap graphics on the Wii is the reason why Metroids' and Super Mario Galaxys' release got pushed back. I think Nintendo really wants these games to make a difference in the graphics department.

[Paranoid]

So, I've had a strange case of synchronicity going on with an author in Discover magainze for several months running now. His name is Jaron Lanier, and at this point, I'm betting he is a regular on this forum. Oddly enough, I think Jaron is one of "you" and not one of "me". That is, for example, I think he would be the kind of pure scientific thinker with so little regard for *philosophy* that he would dismiss claims of "synchronicity" by simply stating, "Sure, you've had 4 or 5 hot topics running that have dealt with issues that I specifically addressed in my column in Discover, but how many hot topics have you had going that I *haven't* even come near?"More or less, this guy, I've been using examples from his articles to *defend* my claims here, and I'm sure if he were here, he would be one of the guys accusing me of "ridiculious, long-winded, innane" posts.

 

The interesting thing this time, is that our conversation about the potential for a CRASH *or* a Market Inflection Tidal Change in gaming got me thinking that evening, about the Strategic Inflection theory and if gaming is changing, if the Wii indicates a demographic shift, where it is going.

 

Now, bare with me here, because this may be essay length, and it may seem that I am off on a tangent. Let me start by saying you should read Jaron's latest article, where he calls the Wii controller a device ..."that will be remembered as the beginning of a haptic revolution".

 

In thinking about our discussion here, I found myself contemplating that all 3 "current gen" consoles have a certain desire to achieve digital convergence in their core. The PS3 and X360 have a more blatant, consumer oriented, traditional approach toward trying to dominate this digital convergence media appliance market. I think the Wii is trying to sneak in the back door by simply *being* the device that is hooked up to most family TV sets and that gets used in family social situations.

 

Read my full essay, here... In Microsoft Word 2003 format.

 

FutureTech.doc

 

http://www.jaronlanier.com/topicsindevelopment.html

 

http://discovermagazine.com/columns/jarons...n's%20world

Edited April 13, 2007 by Paranoid

[liveinabin]

I know of Jaron Lanier. He was really into VR years back, did a lot of TV on the subject. Cool, nice to see him still being into it all. Gosh yeah, I can imagine him flipping out over the Wiimote, there's a device that breaks through the fourth wall.

[Shannon]

My greatest disappointment with both the Amiga and the Atari ST were that too many titles were EGA ports from the PC.

 

I have never heard nor experienced this myself... Please name those titles that you are talking about. I can not even remember one game being ported from PCs before 1991 (the PCs' "EGA" age).

 

Alot of titles from PC based companies fell in this category. Especially titles from lucas arts, sierra, EA (aka Origin), etc.

 

Examples would be...

 

Monkey island, King's Quest series, Wing Commander series, Ultima Series.

[Paranoid]

Thanks Shannon, I totally missed this post in the deluge of messages in this thread. Yeah. The King's Quest series sticks right out, and I recall Leisure Suit Larry also being the same way. It was completely frustrating. ST games were worse with this than the Amiga, though. Lots of ST games were badly ported IBM EGA titles. They both suffered their fair share, either way.

 

And the worst part of it was the, I guess basic injustice, of having bought a PC expressly designed (at least in part) to enhance games and the software developers were just taking their crappy code from the PC and moving it on over with little or no enhancement. It also meant that often you ended up with the most POPULAR and desirable games being these EGA ports, and the software houses that were publishing games designed for your system were these obscure shops with quirky, weird titles. Which is probably why DEMOS became the major attraction. "Yeah, dude, but can your 286/AT play Purple Haze while a photorealstic cat runs endlessly across the screen?!?"

 

And um, this isn't a slam on those machines. I owned an Amiga 2000 from shortly after the release. 4mb ram and 40mb in two 20mb SCSI drives, Digiview Gold with the color wheel. I also owned a few 520ST and 1040ST systems. I was a MidiMaze pro... They were wonderfully capable and versatile machines, both of them. They just got screwed by the industry.

Edited April 14, 2007 by Paranoid

[Shannon]

What's funny is the sierra games (graphically) were actually better off on the Amiga because you usually got the 16/32 (can't remember) color version. Where I was dissappointed in is the sound. But regardless they were straight ports.

 

I never got into gaming a whole lot on the amiga for some reason, but there were some companys like Psygnosis, Cinemeware who did much better when it came to programming specifically. In fact Defender Of The Crown is THE game that convinced me to get an Amiga.

 

Strategy games faired pretty good as well. Like Empire, Civilization, the many rottk games, Simcity 1 and 2000. A friend of mine at the time was really into Strategy games at the time. So that probably had to do with why I was not real familar with other stuff at the time.

 

Get an emulator though, there really is some cool stuff. Two collections that might help narrow out the junk are the Amiga game base collection and the lemon amiga stuff.

Edited April 14, 2007 by Shannon

[Paranoid]

I've got the Amiga emulation set up on my PC (but not my XBox, because I could never figure that out. )

 

For some reason, I can't get into the Commodore emulation as much. There are a few C-64 games that I find occasionally worth checking out via emulation, and hardly any for the Amiga. Great Giana Sisters is about the only Amiga specific title that I have any nostalgia for. Ports of Call is good for an occassional sit down, too.

 

Yeah, you're right... Psygnosis, Cinemeware... both kind of Amiga specific publishers that did a great job. Amiga was their bread and butter, anyhow... before they got recognized on other platforms. Defender of the Crown was a title that got some use around my house, too.

 

EA titles were generally killer. Ferrari F1 was what made me buy the Amiga. And it was killer. FA-18 was a fantastic flight sim for the time, too. Defender of the Crown and the Sim City titles, as you mention. Populous. Ports of Call. Great Giana Sisters was an interesting Super Mario Bros. clone. Barbarian II (the fighting game) was cool. I ended up mostly playing a turn based Mech-battle Shareware game called Titans of Steel on the Amiga. There is that "Rocketball" type game... the first one, was good. There were some other titles... but looking back... none of them really leveraged the potential of the Amiga correctly. The arcade titles for the Amiga generally bit. There were too many euro-style driving games that were poorly done. Too many side scrolling everything blowing up R-Type games. Too many titles gave GURU meditations unless you really nursed them (and emulation still has that problem). I suppose (bringing this back on topic), NINTENDO and their abusive dominance and licensing policies had a negative impact across the industry during this period. You were kind of forced into having a console even though your Amiga was years beyond the NES, because all the great titles were simply locked up on the NES at this point. And by "great"... I mean "popular and desirable". Instead you found yourself playing 3-Stooges on your Amiga... going, "Yup, that looks a LOT like Larry, Curly and Moe... and those are beautiful pies he is throwing".

 

I remember feeling almost insulted when VGA caught on and suddenly there WERE good, innovative, and good looking games coming out on a PC platform. Wing Commander, the original Wolfenstien 3D... sitting there going... "An Amiga *could* have done this, 3 years ago! Bah!" and deciding it was time to buy a 386.

Edited April 14, 2007 by Paranoid

[+-^CrossBow^-]

Speaking of nasty PC EGA ports to the Amiga. Wing Commander is a PERFECT example right there. Wing Commander was THE game that made at least 2 or 3 of my die hard Amiga only friends switch over to the PC realm. And then they didn't regret it when they finally saw the Amiga release of Wing Commander. The Amiga version looked worse and still didn't sound as good as the PC VGA Adlib combo of the time.

 

I'm still shocked at the quality of the Amiga titles and how good most of them were, and then horrifically shocked at the what should have been inferior PC games ported over to the Amigas that looked just like the PC version or in some rare cases..like WC looked worse. No excuse really. I know the Amiga didn't have a full 256color at once on screen palette but I'm pretty sure there were a ton of tricks used to better the color hues to make it look damn near 256 considering what some of the other Amiga games looked like at the time.

[+remowilliams]

The Amiga version looked worse and still didn't sound as good as the PC VGA Adlib combo of the time.

 

I'm still shocked at the quality of the Amiga titles and how good most of them were, and then horrifically shocked at the what should have been inferior PC games ported over to the Amigas that looked just like the PC version or in some rare cases..like WC looked worse.

It's quite simple really, once '386/VGA/Sound Blaster were on the scene PCs easily surpassed the STs and Amigas leaving them in the dust. That's when I jumped ship.

 

What is amazing is that the ST and Amiga were able to hold off the PCs as long as they did, and for (the most part) the price levels they did so at. They were powerful capable machines, but like everything else their day eventually came to an end.

[Shannon]

Boy paranoid. You're bringing back some memories there. I've been working on Amiga xbox configuration files. I really need to pick that back up again. Been kinda slacking. I musta had at least 3 amiga's at one point (500, 1200, and a souped up 2000).

 

Yeah once VGA and 386 were out I pretty much jumped ship over to PC as well and when Glide came along, that was all she wrote.

 

The amiga had a 256 color mode (HAM mode) but it required some pretty weird tricks to get it to work and was better for displaying pictures than moving graphics around on the screen.

[Paranoid]

Heh. Just that day I was driving down the street where our Amiga shop used to be, and it took me back. That was really a great time for computing... things weren't so boilerplated and everyday as they are today. Mom and Pop shops could still make a buck, and there were real choices you could make.

 

Yup. Same here. The 386 with VGA was the death-bell ringing for the Amiga and ST. The worst part of that is that the Amiga and ST could have lasted for awhile longer, had the games EVER taken advantage of the hardware available to them.

[Steril707]

Heh. Just that day I was driving down the street where our Amiga shop used to be, and it took me back. That was really a great time for computing... things weren't so boilerplated and everyday as they are today. Mom and Pop shops could still make a buck, and there were real choices you could make.

 

Yup. Same here. The 386 with VGA was the death-bell ringing for the Amiga and ST. The worst part of that is that the Amiga and ST could have lasted for awhile longer, had the games EVER taken advantage of the hardware available to them.

 

You are with the notable exception of those Sierra games talking about later VGA games, published after 1990. There were tons of games for the Amiga and ST, and a few of them got ported to EGA and CGA on PC. This changed with 256 colors VGA and 286 processors taking the lead in the early nineties, and no real response from Atari or Commodore. The 256 colors mode on the later released AGA chipsets on the Amiga were not as easy to program as the VGA ones, for they used three bitplanes for red, blue and green, instead of putting all the colour information into one byte like on the VGAs...

 

And then the whole company folded in 1994/5, so we will never know if something capable would have come out of this, though i don't think so.

 

 

I don't know if anybody of you had ever programmed on the Amiga, but i can tell you that the games those days and especially at the end of their lifespan really took these machines to the max.