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Ancient DOS Games Webshow

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Reply 2740 of 3343, by RadioPoultry

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Wing Commander was more contemporaneous, but here are a couple other games that also have similar art:

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Reply 2741 of 3343, by badmojo

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DonutKing wrote:

I remember my friends and I found it incredibly frustrating!

My mates and I were likewise confused by this game - "is this is?" we asked. Initially I suspected that either we or our machines were inadequate in some way, so convinced was I that games on CD-ROM would be inherently better. It took several such dissapointments for the reality to sink in.

Life? Don't talk to me about life.

Reply 2742 of 3343, by skitters

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I've only played the GOG version of Rebel Assault in DOSBox. I thought the wonky cursor was a deliberate addition to increase difficulty. I thought it was deliberate because of a casual game I'd previously played, where the cursor would wander all over the general vicinity of the target at random, and you had to shoot the millisecond it happened to move over the target. That's what I thought Rebel Assault was doing. It didn't occur to me that the weird movement was a bug associated with improper buffering.

I got a little over halfway through Rebel Assault (assisted by cheats) before giving up on it. A made another attempt a few weeks later, but didn't get any further. Maybe next time I'll try it on a PII and see if it plays any better than in DOSBox.

Reply 2743 of 3343, by Gemini000

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Ancient DOS Games Episode 203 - ZZT is online!

So yeah, some people may be wondering why it took so long to get around to this given how early in ADG's existence I got around to MegaZeux. Well, part of the reason is that I actually didn't discover ZZT until years after its release, so I switched from ZZT to MegaZeux pretty quickly, thus it has little nostalgia for me by comparison. Another part of it was because I was waiting to get Text Mode 2000 out first. :B

But yeah, ZZT was one of the progenitors of the "Game Creation System" concept, even though it was more-or-less simply meant to be a different take on the Kroz formula with a built-in editor. To that end though, it's horribly outdated by comparison to MegaZeux, so the only reason for using it nowadays is for sake of nostalgia, to play the games that were made for it, or to challenge oneself to make a game within its limitations.

--- Kris Asick (Gemini)
--- Pixelmusement Website: www.pixelships.com
--- Ancient DOS Games Webshow: www.pixelships.com/adg

Reply 2744 of 3343, by witchspace

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Gemini000 wrote:

Ancient DOS Games Episode 203 - ZZT is online!

Nice! I loved that game when I was young.
In a way it paled in comparison to more graphical games of the same day and age, but the programmability and interactivity was great. What it did really well is make the player feel like a game developer instead of a gamer 😎
Many games come with mod tools these days and there's whole "steam workshop" communities, it's not that special anymore, but back then it was!

Another part of it was because I was waiting to get Text Mode 2000 out first. :B

Oooh just found your page about that, nice project. I've also always kept my love for text-based games and applications, though these days I mostly mess around with Linux terminal things.

Reply 2745 of 3343, by Gemini000

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Just to let everyone know who doesn't follow my posts on Twitter or Patreon, there's not going to be an ADG episode this weekend due to being sick. I'm on the mend though and should be good to get back to making videos next week. :B

As a result of that, the schedule's gonna be shifted slightly for the next while. ADG videos will be going up on the 2nd through 4th Saturdays of this month, March, and April. Come May, the regular 1st through 3rd Saturdays schedule will resume.

I'll give a heads-up on this in the next ADG episode itself as well.

--- Kris Asick (Gemini)
--- Pixelmusement Website: www.pixelships.com
--- Ancient DOS Games Webshow: www.pixelships.com/adg

Reply 2746 of 3343, by Gemini000

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Ancient DOS Games Episode 204 - Alien Breed is online!

So... this game was incredibly average. So much so I actually found it difficult to make a decent episode because there was so little to talk about. I did find a few key points to talk about, but even still, no major issues, nothing incredibly well done, just a whole lot of average. :B

--- Kris Asick (Gemini)
--- Pixelmusement Website: www.pixelships.com
--- Ancient DOS Games Webshow: www.pixelships.com/adg

Reply 2747 of 3343, by Gemini000

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Ancient DOS Games Episode 205 - Mean 18 is online!

...don't really have anything to say about this one other than what's said in the video, other than that I screwed up the 720x348 resolution marker for the Hercules mode in my initial render of the video as 720x384. Caught it, fixed it and re-rendered before uploading this thing. ;)

--- Kris Asick (Gemini)
--- Pixelmusement Website: www.pixelships.com
--- Ancient DOS Games Webshow: www.pixelships.com/adg

Reply 2748 of 3343, by Gemini000

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Ancient DOS Games Filler #61 - Gemini's Old 3D Animations is online!

This is a special treat for everyone as I recently was looking through my old CDs and ran across the first two I ever burned as part of a Grade 10 technology class I took in high school. I spent a TON of extra time in that room just working on my own stuff and managed to complete a year-long fractal animations project, rendered to a VHS tape, in just half the school year, so I spent the rest of it just mucking around and ultimately settling on 3D animation! ...using EXTREMELY primitive software! (Which our teacher thankfully upgraded the following school year. It went up by like, THREE major versions!)

So, I will admit, none of these animations are particularly impressive, but they all have that sort of retro raytraced charm to them, so if any of you are into that this should be a treat to the eyes! (Mind the sharp edges of the low-res pixels though; I rendered these originally at 320x200!)

--- Kris Asick (Gemini)
--- Pixelmusement Website: www.pixelships.com
--- Ancient DOS Games Webshow: www.pixelships.com/adg

Reply 2749 of 3343, by Gemini000

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Ancient DOS Games Episode 206 - Jill of the Jungle is online!

Really glad this game was finally sent in. It's one of the more difficult games to get a legit copy of and curiously, the only illegit copies I've ever found have all been the v1.0 version. It's also been pretty high on my requests list for some time.

Although ironically, I didn't end up enjoying this one, although I definitely wouldn't call it a "bad" game. So because there was little to say about the game itself, I decided to take the opportunity to elaborate on how I even approach forming opinions and providing information about these old titles in the first place, using Jill as an example as to this process, thus why this episode is almost twice as long as average! :o

--- Kris Asick (Gemini)
--- Pixelmusement Website: www.pixelships.com
--- Ancient DOS Games Webshow: www.pixelships.com/adg

Reply 2750 of 3343, by konc

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Gemini000 wrote:

... I didn't end up enjoying this one, although I definitely wouldn't call it a "bad" game.

You don't end up enjoying a lot of (presented/reviewed) games lately, if I may say 🤣

Reply 2751 of 3343, by switchblade

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Never played Jill of the Jungle growing up, but when I was getting back into DOS gaming through DOSBox, I would see this game as one of those recommended, classic, DOS games. Played it for about a few minutes before just deleting it. I can understand why games like Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, and Doom still remain as good classics even to this day, but I could not understand the appeal of Jill of the Jungle. Even if I could go back in time and play that game as a child, I would still think that it's not a great game overall.

Also, that marketing comparison to Jill's graphics being better than that of SNES graphics was just downright laughable. 🤣 Jill of the Jungle looks like an NES game with more colors. Even then, it still doesn't look all that great despite having more colors on screen at once.

Reply 2752 of 3343, by Gemini000

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konc wrote:
Gemini000 wrote:

... I didn't end up enjoying this one, although I definitely wouldn't call it a "bad" game.

You don't end up enjoying a lot of (presented/reviewed) games lately, if I may say :lol:

Funny thing about that... I'm actually VERY picky when it comes to the games I enjoy. Now that many of the games I'm covering are games I didn't grow up with it's far more likely to be something I either had no interest in or tried in the past and didn't like. :P

--- Kris Asick (Gemini)
--- Pixelmusement Website: www.pixelships.com
--- Ancient DOS Games Webshow: www.pixelships.com/adg

Reply 2753 of 3343, by leileilol

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The best graphics in Jill is Jill herself, and if you like that then you'll also enjoy Inner Worlds. The Jill sprite is the fine line from resembling a master system / trashy amiga game

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Reply 2754 of 3343, by ishadow

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Ok, Jill of the Jungle isn't very good game, but still it's very enjoyable. I've only played shareware episode though, but it was simply good experience. Jill really stand out when compared to other DOS shareware games. Just having 256 color graphics and digitized sound effects was huge improvement. The music is great, sounds effects are average at best, but graphics could be way better. Xargon improved almost every aspect of presentation, but it had somewhat worse gameplay.
The thing is, even if Jill has many flaws it still plays very good. It's way more fun than first Commander Keen trilogy or most Apogee platformers.
It also aged very well. It's very unique, mainly to it's design utilizing PC hardware and it's minor flaws.
I would say that Jill has an 8-bit computer charm with more colors and better graphics. It's not a console or arcade style game, but more like the old ZX Spectrum or C64 platformers.

On the other hand comparing this game engine to SNES was just stupid. The only advantage VGA had is the amount of memory, that allowed any color for any pixel. Jill doesn't even make us of that. I captured one level screen and it has 50 colors in total. Tiles use 4 colors most of the times and a few of them uses 16! The same limit SNES had. Even sprite have the same limit. Jill also sticks to tiles all the time, and there wasn't a need for that. Since everything is done by software on CPU they could at least use different tile size like 4x4, 8x8, 16x16. Although tiling itself allowed for many optimizations.
The only thing that SNES could have problem with are the particle effects. They don't look nothing spectacular, but they could be problematic on SNES hardware.

Frankenstein for DOS is an example how to make use of VGA features https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hodMp4OtTWk.
This game isn't very good, but it has good graphics engine. Very smooth scrolling, full 256 colors graphics, and tiles that probably use more than 16 colors. There are many sprites, lots of sound effects and speech, since the game is larger than any SNES cartridge.
SNES on the other hand could do a parallax scrolling, and even some transparency effects that were out of reach for PCs without Pentium CPU.

Anyway there aren't many DOS games that make use of VGA hardware scrolling. Only pinball genre use it often, since you just drawn whole table in VGA memory and then just shifted display window.
DOS era PC hardware in general wasn't utilized in full extend. SVGAs had additional functions that allowed for hardware 2D acceleration. Good SVGA + Gravis Ultra Sound with 486 CPU would allow for a Neo Geo level of 2D graphics, but no one ever did that. When Windows 95 came it standardized hardware feature in driver APIs, that allowed for next generation of 2D games like Jazz Jackrabbit 2.

Reply 2755 of 3343, by VileR

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Jill had that annoying, attention-whoring quality of "look at us, id/Apogee are stuck with FM and EGA but we do SB and VGA!!1" -- while they clearly had no idea how to properly use either of those at that point. The game itself had some neat ideas, but variety and level design were both poor; along with the amateur sound and graphics, none of it ended up very memorable. Comparing it to the first Keen trilogy is sort of lame, since the Keen Galaxy games had already come out before Jill and still trounce it in every way.

They went for the same angle with their Kiloblaster game, which became the poster boy for the "Gorgeous 256-color graphics and amazing digital sound effects!" FILE_ID.DIZ marketing approach... and was still exceedingly shitty compared to OverKill (which again only did EGA with FM music, but was created by a clearly more talented bunch).

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Reply 2756 of 3343, by clueless1

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Compared to some other games released in 1992 (Aces of the Pacific, Ultima Underworld to name two), the graphics of Jill weren't all that anyway. Maybe for a shareware game?

The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know.
OPL3 FM vs. Roland MT-32 vs. General MIDI DOS Game Comparison
Let's benchmark our systems with cache disabled
DOS PCI Graphics Card Benchmarks

Reply 2758 of 3343, by Gemini000

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For the record: The reason I don't like Chrono Trigger has NOTHING to do with the quality of the game. Geeze, Chrono Trigger is exceptionally well designed and built. The reason I don't like it is entirely subjective and comes down to two simple things:

1. I'm not a fan of POSITIONAL turn-based combat. It breaks my brain.
2. I'm not a fan of most time-travel stories.

Since that's Chrono Trigger in a nutshell it just doesn't appeal to me despite how good it is, and again, why I despise numerical scores on games. :B

--- Kris Asick (Gemini)
--- Pixelmusement Website: www.pixelships.com
--- Ancient DOS Games Webshow: www.pixelships.com/adg

Reply 2759 of 3343, by Joey_sw

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Gemini000 wrote:

1. I'm not a fan of POSITIONAL turn-based combat. It breaks my brain.
2. I'm not a fan of most time-travel stories.

I for one actually like both of them. Paradoxes & plot-holes are less important than fun-ness of games. But that just me.

Now that you mention it, i do likes (not necessary i good at them) : Chrono Trigger (SNES), Grandia (PC Playsation), Fantasy General (Dos), Trails in the Sky (PSP, PC).
They all employ some permutation of positional turn-based combat.

-fffuuu