Was the Atari ST to blame for badly ported games?

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by Howardphilips

Exactly, and French games magazines of the time were not known for their reliability or their professionalism (except Tilt).

Tilt were just a bunch of.... how to say, pirate copies providers ?

The most faithfull was the joystick magazine (1st on the podium with Gen 4 and then Tilt behind).

The information regarding RI is correct, since this is Steve Turner who said it.

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by CCCP alert

Julian Rignall, a games reviewer who was one of the best, put it perfectly in bedrooms to billions. Most reviews were done by people who had no clue about machines running the games technically, any sort of arcade gaming experience, or any kind of expertise in playing them and might as well have been reviewing a dot matrix printer or a mouse.

ZZAP!64 in the era after Rignall and Penn had left was useless. Turbo OutRun on the Amiga should have been given 0% end of discussion, and before you blame the ST that version is also a 0% game if you look at things like Batman or Lotus II on the ST. Any idiot was hired to review games, all it did was force people to pirate. There are only so many piss poor games bought with your wages you could stomach.

Turbo outrun is not exactly bad. It suffers from 16 colors / 512 ST color palette. You can see that graphically, the colors should have been better choosed.

However, i agree that engine wise, Lotus 2 and Batman road engine were top notch. Batman being even better and faster. It even puts shame on Chase HQ, which is a pork of a game.

Regarding piracy, the strongest group was the replicants in France.

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

Turbo outrun is not exactly bad. It suffers from 16 colors / 512 ST color palette. You can see that graphically, the colors should have been better choosed.

Need to be disassembled and go through the same treatment of Outrun STe: MAYBE, just MAYBE, there is a decent driving game below that fluff...

[Total Eclipse]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

The information regarding RI is correct, since this is Steve Turner who said it.

I don't think it's as clear cut as that (Ocean saying no to a third floppy disk). Andrew Braybrook stated in an interview that the issue was due to memory and time constraints, not disk space.

We agreed with the then publisher that we would not be able to do 3 more islands in the same time span, it was already going to be tight on time. Space was getting tight too for the game code. I programmed the secret islands sequence, we had the graphics, but they had to come out to release the space in the half meg machine.

Also on his own blog be makes mention of not including the extra levels because memory was short.

I had some graphics for a cut scene in the 16-bit version almost until the end when we really did get short of space in the 512K base machine, so they reluctantly got removed and that ended any possibility of adding any more bigger islands. There was also another ending sequence that would have been required.

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by Total Eclipse

I don't think it's as clear cut as that (Ocean saying no to a third floppy disk). Andrew Braybrook stated in an interview that the issue was due to memory and time constraints, not disk space.


Also on his own blog be makes mention of not including the extra levels because memory was short.

Here (in french) : http://download.abandonware.org/maga...%20page057.jpg

extract translated from the french text :

"Andrew Braybrook : "Taito gave us 4 floppies with graphics in IFF format, probably created on a PC with deluxe paint II. The other reason why we used STs, is that we had a utility that allowed to convert those images in OCP art studio format. the IFF format is way too slow to decrunch inside a game. All the graphics of the first levels were included, but as we get going, we noticed that some graphics were missing, and in the final islands there was almost nothing."

"Andrew Braybrook : "the only thing i regret, is that i would have loved to add the 3 final islands, but we were not allowed to add a 3rd floppy"
(at this moment, since firebird was sold to Microprose, Taito japan refused to let Microprose have it, so they sold it back to Ocean, and Ocean said no to a 3rd floppy disk for the game).

[Megalomaniac]

Andy Braybrook and Steve Turner seem to have different recollections, but I'll reiterate that the game was signed off as finished for Firebird before the Telecomsoft collapse led to Ocean publishing it - 'the publisher' Steve mentions will have been Firebird, not Ocean. Taito seemingly not giving them all the graphics for the final islands (does he mean 6 and 7 in the main game, or the bonus islands?) must be a factor too.