Hi Michael, That was an excelant post. I do agree that when a game imitates another game the dev should take care as to make it as well as they can to do many of the things the sighted games do. There are differences though like in Montezuma's Revenge I can not totally clearly remember the exact layouts of all the temples. That doesn't mean though that the game play will be much different in and that in other regards it is the same game. As for Star Trek games I played Final Unity, Borg, and others and those were really cool Star Trek games. I'd love to create one of that quality someday. STFC was just a trial run, an experimental game, nothing more, nothing less.
michael feir wrote: > That would depend on whether the game you're playing is anything like the > ones they are. If a game is merely a Star Wars game due to using sounds from > that franchise but is totally different from anything sighted people are > playing, then you don't really have anything substantial to work with. If > serious effort is made to make storm troopers behave like those in the > movies, or to take into account the physics of ships as described by > whatever central technical information exists to determine all that, then > you have more to talk about meaningfully. Sighted people could play > something like Pong or Topspeed2 or Sonic Invaders and compare it > meaningfully to the games they've played. I don't get a sense of playing an > actual Star Trek game when I play Tom's Final Conflict game. The sounds and > such just aren't enough for me to set aside what I regard as true Star Trek > gamedom. The combat is just too capricious with ships being destroyed > instantaneously. Listening to the shows, combat seems a lot more serebral > than that. There's at least time to take evasive action, try to reinforce > threatened assets, etc. I can wipe out a starbase with one ship's fire power > and that just doesn't strike me as very correct. If you play something like > Star Trek, A Final Unity as I was able to with my father's help way back in > my high school days, that game could honestly be called a Star Trek game. > They had the actual actors from TNG doing the voices. The story and dialogue > were excellent and so were the sound effects. The game play truly put you in > mind of the shows and did honour to the concept of Star Trek. Even the > strictly combat games like Star Fleet Command were done in such a way that > you felt that the gameplay better reflected the kind of thoughts captains > had to make while fighting battles. That kind of consideration is one reason > why people can be so protective of their franchises. They honestly don't > want their vision to be degraded by people who don't have a proper sense of > what it is and a proper respect for it. Nintendo did a masterful job of > quality control using such protective measures and did a lot to revive the > video game industry after the crash in the mid eighties. One of the problems > back then were that everybody was trying to get money from video games and > were making poor immitations of original games. The market was flooded with > inferrior quality games and people were turned off. We're certainly in no > danger of a crash now. If anything, we face the reverse problem where there > aren't enough different titles and genres covered well to pull in more > gamers. I think time and effort from developers will eventually fix that and > is doing that already slowly. > Michael Feir > Creator and former Editor of Audyssey Magazine > 1996-2004 > _______________________________________________ Gamers mailing list .. [email protected] To unsubscribe send E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] You can visit http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org to make any subscription changes via the web.
