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Ancient DOS Games Webshow

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Reply 3360 of 3368, by Gemini000

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Ancient DOS Games Episode 331 - Star Hammer is online!

I was fully expecting this game to be super-simple and barely result in much of an episode. Turns out... it was indeed super-simple but I ended up with a surprising amount to say about it despite that, as the notion that this feels like a "2D Wing Commander" isn't wrong... although it doesn't help it was competing with THREE actual Wing Commander titles which were all out on store shelves at the same time... :P

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

Reply 3361 of 3368, by Gemini000

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Ancient DOS Games Pro 30 - Minimum Winning Scores - Commander Keen is online!

I wasn't 100% certain how easy or difficult this process was going to be before I started, but I had a hunch it was at the very least possible to do in a reasonable amount of time. Turns out, because most things in the game don't actually score any points, it was significantly easier than expected to figure all of this out, though not without some bumps along the way, the last level of Episode 2 being the biggest bump chewing up a half hour of my time just on its own due to how janky the middle section of the level is. :P

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

Reply 3362 of 3368, by Gemini000

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Ancient DOS Games Filler #101 - Planet Crafter is online!

I've been getting a lot of play time out of this modern indie title as it's filling a niche which I feel has begun to form... I was born in the early 80s and as such I represent the first generation of gamers who have spent their ENTIRE LIFE playing videos games who are just now entering middle-age. To that end, my tastes in games have shifted considerably in recent years, as I find myself wanting experiences which have a more casual and less hostile feel to them, but are by no means "casual" in the traditional sense of the word when used to describe a game.

In fact, I recently announced a game project I'm developing myself to fill this niche which is still EXTREMELY early in its development, but I take a moment near the end of the video to show the beginnings of its built-in first-person level-editing capabilities! :B

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

Reply 3363 of 3368, by Gemini000

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Ancient DOS Games Episode 332 - Pinball Gold Pack is online!

This was kind of an ordeal; Going through TWENTY pinball tables across five pieces of software bundled into the same package to give a brief overview of everything. I'm actually kinda glad I decided to do it this way instead of reviewing the games individually because it helped to identify common themes between them all and gave me a chance to show what was done well and what wasn't across the entire range of them. :)

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

Reply 3364 of 3368, by Gemini000

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Ancient DOS Games Episode 333 - Quarantine is online!
(Please note that this is a mature-rated video.)

Won't say too much ahead of time as I'm really tired and need to get to bed, but I will say I never thought I'd get a chance to cover this game on the show given that, back when I first looked into what it would take to buy the game back in 2012, the price for a copy was well over $200. Nowadays the prices are... still high but not AS high. :P

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

Reply 3365 of 3368, by DracoNihil

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Gemini000 wrote on 2024-10-05, 03:43:

Ancient DOS Games Episode 333 - Quarantine is online!

DeatSaw tried to play this on real hardware and even that would either move too fast or too slow; I really hated this era of "non-fixed timesteps" in PC games... Makes me really appreciate Doom's constant 35 hz logic in everything, despite that not being 60 FPS.

“I am the dragon without a name…”
― Κυνικός Δράκων

Reply 3366 of 3368, by Gemini000

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DracoNihil wrote on 2024-10-11, 12:09:

Makes me really appreciate Doom's constant 35 hz logic in everything, despite that not being 60 FPS.

The classic 320x200 256-colour VGA video mode runs 70 Hz by default, thus 35 FPS made perfect sense: Two vertical blanks! :)

The irony is that it would take many, many, MANY years for game developers to mostly stop doing that thing where they time their games to arbitrary things which are not consistent between machines. Heck, when I did my filler video showing Oblivion's lowest detail settings even that game, freaking OBLIVION, has timing issues on modern systems! Not nearly as egregious as System Shock 2 (too fast) and MechWarrior 3 (too slow) but I kinda expected better. >_<

Nowadays, timing is usually more appropriately defined in game engines as the actual framerate and a separate "physics" framerate, though depending on the engine you may or may not have the tools readily available to interpolate between the two and thus have to do it manually. :P

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

Reply 3367 of 3368, by Gemini000

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Ancient DOS Games Episode 334 - Happyland Adventures is online!

I kinda had to come up with this one at the last minute since I had completely forgotten to select a game for this Saturday all the way up to the point where I was in the middle of voicing the script for the previous episode, got to the end and was like, "Wait... where did the rest of my script go...? Oh, right, I never wrote it... uh oh..." :P

Though this is one of a handful of Allegro-made titles I wanted to bring up sooner or later, as it was partly responsible for me selecting Allegro as the SDK I would focus on learning to use, plus the game even directly inspired a very specific feature in one of my own games later on! :B

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

Reply 3368 of 3368, by Gemini000

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Ancient DOS Games Pro 31 - Mechanics Investigation - Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? is online!

This started out as a deep dive into the travel mechanics of the game, since I had a sneaking suspicion there might be some patterns to it which could lead to uncovering more about how the game is setting up the various cases it presents you with... but it turned out to be mostly random, though not without some interesting quirks.

As such, I expanded my investigation into the rest of the mechanics and ultimately concluded that... you can theoretically play through this game without reference materials of any kind! :o

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