Favorite game?

[+OLD CS1]

2 hours ago, 99V said:

Sorry I don't know how the quote got there. Can't delete it.

When you hover over a quote, a gadget appears over the upper-left.  Click on that, then hit the DEL key.

 

Spoiler

 

[99V]

I see people are avoiding the elephant in the room lol. Come on, beat me up about not liking Parsec, please. Just kidding. The game looked very cool but the game play to me was not great. They could have done so much more but they went very conservative. 

[Tursi]

16 minutes ago, 99V said:

I see people are avoiding the elephant in the room lol. Come on, beat me up about not liking Parsec, please. Just kidding. The game looked very cool but the game play to me was not great. They could have done so much more but they went very conservative. 

Why? I don't like it either, nobody's ever beaten me up for it.

 

[Retrospect]

I've not heard many say they don't like Parsec.  I'm interested now though.  Genuinely, I'm nosey enough to want to know why 😋

Was it because it constantly loops, that it never had an "ending" or is the game genre just not one that you take interest in?  

 

[99V]

18 minutes ago, Tursi said:

Why? I don't like it either, nobody's ever beaten me up for it.

 

It seems to be super popular

[99V]

7 minutes ago, Retrospect said:

I've not heard many say they don't like Parsec.  I'm interested now though.  Genuinely, I'm nosey enough to want to know why 😋

Was it because it constantly loops, that it never had an "ending" or is the game genre just not one that you take interest in?  

 

I was one of the top Defender players in my town. I could play for hours on one quarter. That game was very interesting and fun so in reality I love science fictiony side scrollers. Parsec to me was Defender's younger brother that stayed up in the attic, and no one wanted it around. It was boring AF. Your game is already better than Parsec. They took a lot of time on the graphics and voice but it lacked fast action that required skill. I could play with one finger and half asleep, mostly. Don't get me wrong, it was an achievement but they stopped writing it about halfway through. 

[+mizapf]

Back in the 80s, we played Parsec in turns, with 3 people. Whenever one of us lost a ship, it was the next one's turn.

 

This lasted for some hours. No one could remember when it was the last time that the ship supply showed only 3 ships left. Finally, we chose one of us to crash the ships intentionally so that we limited them to at most 4. This went on ... and on ... and on ... I don't remember how this ended.

 

The problem we saw was that with some basic practice, in higher rounds you could make 10000 points faster than losing a ship, so after round 15 or so, it was not really a challenge anymore. We made the points counter cycle at least once.

 

Interestingly, I was still quite good at Parsec when we had it in our monthly games competition, but mostly when I ran it in the European 50Hz version. I'm much worse with the 60Hz version.

[99V]

Yes, I remember being in that position. They should have done something: make more ships come out, make them do crazy moves, make them go faster, make them shoot faster, make them shoot more, anything.  The game should get harder every round 

[SteveB]

23 hours ago, 99V said:

I never liked Parsec.

If you didn't like Parsec you will most surely not enjoy Extended Parsec. 

[Tursi]

21 hours ago, Retrospect said:

I've not heard many say they don't like Parsec.  I'm interested now though.  Genuinely, I'm nosey enough to want to know why 😋
Was it because it constantly loops, that it never had an "ending" or is the game genre just not one that you take interest in?  

It's just dull. I'm glad they made it and most people find it very impressive, but I'd prefer a continuous shooter to the looping waves. I played it enough, but it was more a case of not having much to choose from.

 

Moon Patrol has better scrolling with parallax, but people only call out Parsec for terrain scrolls. So even that didn't impress me too much.

 

The speech is good though

 

[99V]

1 hour ago, SteveB said:

If you didn't like Parsec you will most surely not enjoy Extended Parsec. 

I must try this when I have my set up. Thanks 

[Asmusr]

50 minutes ago, 99V said:

I must try this when I have my set up. Thanks 

Also take a look at TI Scramble. 

[99V]

Will do

[Retrospect]

thanks , @99V and @Tursi ... I'm interested in diverse opinions of Parsec because there's not really been a diverse opinion before!  I personally love the game, most of that's to do with because it was played every friday night as a kid in the mid 80s and there's nostalgia there ... but no game ever should escape critical opinion , no game is perfect.  I'm actually glad two people have a different opinion of Parsec to most.

 

Whilst making my new game I've thought about how the guys made Parsec and how it came to have some of the things it has ... the long laser beam drawn on the bitmap so they didn't have to use a 5th sprite ... the looping waves so they could get it into 16K  ... that sort of thing.  Yeah they did very well with the speech. 

[Retrospect]

15 minutes ago, Asmusr said:

Also take a look at TI Scramble. 

When I saw that game in action , that's when I was no longer in doubt about the TI's abilities.  Superb shoot em up.  

[99V]

I loved Parsec for the first few days but I'm an arcade game player and it didn't challenge me enough to keep me interested.

 

The fast 99 'Vaders is coming out very soon. In this new sped up game things get harder: 

 

More aliens per round

 

Larger explosions when aliens hit the ground

 

You need to be skillful at killing aliens in the chutes to avoid having them hit the ground because very bad things happen when too many do. 

 

Killing the big boss alien is not easy. 

[+OLD CS1]

On 8/13/2023 at 10:57 AM, 99V said:

I never liked Parsec.

23 hours ago, Tursi said:

I don't like it either

Why do you hate the TI-99/4A?

[99V]

6 minutes ago, OLD CS1 said:

Why do you hate the TI-99/4A?

I hate the TI for so many reasons. But I love it for more reasons. It's a love hate relationship 😁

[99V]

10 minutes ago, 99V said:

I hate the TI for so many reasons. But I love it for more reasons. It's a love hate relationship 😁

That's why my ex wife's nickname is 99

 

 

[Tursi]

9 hours ago, OLD CS1 said:

Why do you hate the TI-99/4A?

Commodore was be...

 

I can't get it out.

 

[99V]

Beastly?

[retrodroid]

22 hours ago, Tursi said:

It's just dull. I'm glad they made it and most people find it very impressive, but I'd prefer a continuous shooter to the looping waves. I played it enough, but it was more a case of not having much to choose from.

 

Moon Patrol has better scrolling with parallax, but people only call out Parsec for terrain scrolls. So even that didn't impress me too much.

 

The speech is good though

 

On 8/13/2023 at 1:08 PM, 99V said:

Don't get me wrong, it was an achievement but they stopped writing it about halfway through. 

Parsec has just an excellent audio and visual presentation. The sounds effects and speech were fantastic. I appreciated the different tactics required for each type of enemy, and the variety of including the asteroid belt and refuelling sequences. It's only downfall is that the difficulty caps too early. I would disagree that they stopped developing it half-way through. Compared to the other offerings on the 99 when it came out, they had already "won" several times over.

 

What other TI games at the time did you prefer?  I'm guessing none.  

 

[retrodroid]

On 8/13/2023 at 5:22 PM, mizapf said:

Back in the 80s, we played Parsec in turns, with 3 people. Whenever one of us lost a ship, it was the next one's turn.

 

This lasted for some hours. No one could remember when it was the last time that the ship supply showed only 3 ships left. Finally, we chose one of us to crash the ships intentionally so that we limited them to at most 4. This went on ... and on ... and on ... I don't remember how this ended.

 

The problem we saw was that with some basic practice, in higher rounds you could make 10000 points faster than losing a ship, so after round 15 or so, it was not really a challenge anymore. We made the points counter cycle at least once.

 

Interestingly, I was still quite good at Parsec when we had it in our monthly games competition, but mostly when I ran it in the European 50Hz version. I'm much worse with the 60Hz version.

Lack of difficulty was actually kind of a hallmark of TI games in that era, if you think about it. It's not that the games were initially "easy", but once you got the hang of the main play mechanic they often lacked ways to increase difficulty much beyond a point.  Part of this comes from the fact that we played the living sn*t out of these games as they were often all we had.  

 

I remember playing a game of TI Invaders for hours, Munchman for a good long time, Parsec, of course. Alpiner until we lost interest. And one point I purchased Hen Pecked, which really lacks a difficulty curve and eventually the game just crashes. Returned it the next day saying it was "defective".  🙃

 

[+mizapf]

For me, TI Invaders had a well predictable hurdle where I used to stumble and eventually fall: This was in those rounds with the pink balls or the blue blinkers.

 

Fun fact: Still today, I experience a weird, faint feeling of hope when I reach 6000 points to get another base (which I don't, of course). This was my hope back in 1982 when I saw that I got a base at 3000.

[99V]

I remember an arcade game call Robotron 2084 by Williams. That game was sick. It got more and more difficult with sometimes a hundred characters running around at the same time. Talk about four sprites in a row, this thing had 25 in a row. That's a game to try to emulate and I don't mean that in a copy kind of way. I mean it should inspire programmers to reach the limits of what's possible. 

 

Super Demon Attack got harder so it was a better game. It can be done. I just think the creators of Parsec didn't think they needed to make the game challenging. They thought we would have fun forever taking a flying tour of a beautiful futuristic world. I mean no ill will to anyone else that highly esteems Parsec as the crown jewel of TI games. To me it was a missed opportunity, and an expensive one at that. 

Edited August 15, 2023 by 99V