Farewell, Episode 3

[BinnZ]

I also read this, yesterday. It is a bit sad that it only will be available on VR. But I can see them doing this. They have their own hardware, and see and hope for a new growing market.
However, VR is not my thing. But I must admit, that for a short moment I thought, in case I had money to waste, it would be cool to try it with Alyx. The preview I watched looks nice. Weird how these hands are sort of floating. Heh, next gen gaming puts you in the centre of a room, in a massive chair, with plenty of room all around you. Or standing up right. Not my thing. I want to sit back, look at something. I honestly don't need VR to be able to get sucked into the experience. That happened to me on my dads 486 super VGA 15" when I was playing Wolvenstein and Doom. And Comanche, for those who remember that game. Good old times.
It looks all better now, and will continue to look better, but the really good experiences will be as scarce as they were back then.

[Art Blade]

Comanche as in Comanche vs Werewolf? Voxel graphics? Those I do remember. As well as Castle Wolfenstein and Doom. All of them were very addictive

[BinnZ]

Don't think so.... this is the comanche I'm talking about.... however, the video shows super fast gameplay. I only remember it in a lot slower pace. But that may have just been me



This vid shows more of the same game (Comanche Maximum Overkill). I realise I was a lot slower than most players, but there were heat seeking rockets, (stingers) that would destroy anything, man it was so cool. Anyway, the graphics is just exactly what you got... so raw... yet enough to get the basic feeling of what was going on... and so damn addictive

[BinnZ]

The guy playing in this second video must have used a trainer of some sorts, because I always had to be super careful with my rockets not to waste them.... I remember flying around knowing I had to take down several more tanks without stingers, so I had to carefully approach them using other load with the risk of being destroyed.... MAN those were the days

[Art Blade]

yeah, just looking at the thumbnails already tells me that it is the same Comanche I was thinking about.

[fragger]

I used to love some of those old simulators I never played any chopper ones, but I was a big fan of an old Microprose title, F15 Strike Eagle, and another one called F16 Fighting Falcon (don't recall the publisher).

Some of the later flight sims kind of got TOO realistic. Some years later I tried to get into Jane's F15, but I didn't enjoy it as much as the old Microprose one. There was a bit too much of a learning curve and it took away from the fun, I thought. Every single knob, button and switch in the fully-authentic cockpit worked and mastering full sim mode would just about qualify you to fly the real thing, and it seemed almost as stressful. Especially trying to land the darned thing, which I never did manage to pull off with any kind of aplomb. I'd always overshoot, undershoot, run off the runway, or just plain crash.

I'd still love to see a new version of the old Red Baron or something of that nature. A good, twisty, turny, seat-of-the-pants WW1 dogfighter with no radars, no missiles, and no early-warning systems except for the old Mk. I Eyeball. And no bailing out - you go down with the ship, as they did in those days. I'd even consider getting an old wicker chair and putting a big desk fan in front of my face for immersion value

[Art Blade]

 

yeah, those times when a proper flight joystick with a separate throttle stick was in fashion. I experienced the same like games going a bit too far down sim lane. I remember I had one that had kind of all 102 keys triple-bound, WAY too much to memorise quickly and the end of that game for me was already at the start. Literally. I couldn't even bloody take off. The reason for that I still remember.. it had two jet engines and they needed to be started up separately and manually. I kept choking them or perhaps blowing out half the gear through them but I never took off. Almost as if they put me in a real jet fighter.. I was at a loss. That's it, then, isn't it.

[BinnZ]

Indeed, haha

I remember this comanche game was quite easy to use. You had to use the function keys for a variety of weapon handling, but appart from that it was steering, throttling and shooting. What made me like it so much was the 'realistic world' you flew through. Incredible to say now, with these MASSIVE pixels that gave the impression of mountains (kind of reminds me of minecraft now, lol) and rivers

[Art Blade]

yes, games and particularly their graphics have evolved massively. Now when we say something looks old, and it's only like a few years old, we should look back a bit more and then at the game again and realise, whoa, that would have blown our minds back then.

From my personal experience, coming from stuff like Sinclair ZX81 (as in 1981) and then playing on the Commodore C64 in the mid-1980s, that already was gaming heaven. 16 colours, 64kb ram, part of which was used for something like today's bios. Then the Amiga series.. then the 286 and 386 and the Pentium.. I've come a long way, following the game and hardware development

[fragger]

That was pretty much my computer history too Art, but without the Sinclair. My first machine was a Commodore 64, followed by an Amiga 500 (the 500K internal memory of which I boosted to a whopping whole megabyte with an external 500K plug-in memory module the size of a pencil case).

Good times - for those days

[Art Blade]

haha, I actually skipped the amiga and never owned a sinclair but still, I used to borrow the sinclair from a friend and visit another to play on his amiga I also skipped the 286 but played on it when visiting the same guy who used to have the sinclair

In other words, I started with owning a C64 and jumped straight to the 386 as my next computer. From then on, I followed through and bought virtually everything that marked the next leap in gaming hardware.

[fragger]

I kind of miss the old Amiga. I used to have a terrific form of the BASIC programming language which was specially created for Amigas (AMOS Basic). It was a complete BASIC with a full suite of commands, but it also had heaps of additional ones to allow you to access the Amiga's sound and graphics capabilities, which were actually (at the time) of a higher quality than PC-based equivalents due to the Amiga's unique architecture, which consisted of multiple and separate processors for graphics, sound and input all working in parallel, in addition to the CPU. It took the PC industry a number of years to catch up with the addition of sounds cards and GPUs (early PCs like the 286s and the like had to cram all their graphics through the CPU, whereas the parallel-processing of graphics in the Amigas resulted in silky-smooth animation). The Amigas were also designed to take full advantage of the PAL system (Europe and Oceania), which was superior to the NTSC standard (USA) and allowed more pixels to be displayed (vertically) and used scan-line interleaving which also helped to smooth out animation frames. That has all changed now of course with the phasing out of analog signals and CRT monitors.

I even wrote a few simple games for the Amiga using AMOS. I've never been able to find an equivalent type of BASIC for PCs, which I'd like to have because I would like to create some simple BASIC programs for my own use.

The Amigas were quite remarkable machines for their day. The shame of it all is that they would have made the ideal home computers had they enjoyed the necessary support, but in the end they couldn't compete with the exploding "clone" industry and ultimately fell by the wayside.

I know that like me Art, you're a Babylon 5 fan. I don't know if you knew, but ALL the CG graphics in that series were created on an Amiga-based system. The CG effects in the later seasons of the show still hold up extremely well today, which was a pretty impressive feat for the early-to-mid 90s when CGI was still in its infancy.

[Art Blade]

I didn't know that, mate That is really impressive.

[LowPolyOWG]

With the Half Life Alyx mod tools released, modders are already modding the game. Here, someone replaced the VR controls with a traditional 1st person shooter control scheme.

[Art Blade]

this definitely looks better than watching someone playing it in VR