CliffHanger

[Enverex]

I just noticed that it doesn't seem to be in CAPS. Do you want me to dump it?
I still have the box and manual etc, probably still have the reciept too. It should be unmodified as I always leave commercial disks write-pretected.

I'm not supprised many people didn't have this game, it was utter shite.

My Amiga has WB installed and everything and even has the CD-Rom drive installed in the tower with the drivers installed, but it isn't connected to anything at the moment, so I will just need to set that back up, should be able to do it all tommorow though.

If you need to e-mail me, use - ben@atomnet.co.uk

[Peanutuk]

Just think, if you don't CAPS it, it may be lost forever.

Think hard about this. Think very hard.

[Enverex]

Originally posted by Peanutuk
Just think, if you don't CAPS it, it may be lost forever.

Think hard about this. Think very hard.

/me runs off and napalms the game and all related items.


Phew, that was a close one. Others may have been submitted to its massive utter shiteness.

[fiath]

It is an accurate license for the film then...

Actually, I have a bit of a different take on bad games.

Firstly, we try to be impartial in the order that games get preserved, (the choice is never NOT to preserve as below, unless we need an alternative disk dumped, etc.) what gets done is done when it is convienient to be.

Secondly, really bad games are almost as important to preserve as great ones. The idea of preserving software is not really (at least, not only) to show what a great period in time that period was, but to document that period of time. If most games produced in a period of time were really terrible, it would be interesting to do some research and find out why. By researching why a bad game is produced, you can (hope to!) stop people from making the same bad choices in the future. As seen from many games produced today, it is clear that not enough retrospective viewing is currently done.

There seems to be an increasing number of game, or game-related historians in academia, pretty much coinciding with the increase game-related (development, etc.) qualifications. If I was a large games company with the means to fund the research, I think I would be very interested to see what, by our history, has proven to be "a good game".

Thirdly, looking at bad games is always good for a laugh.

I'll mail you.

[FromWithin]

Originally posted by fiath
If most games produced in a period of time were really terrible, it would be interesting to do some research and find out why.

I can tell you why Cliffhanger was so bad...we were spread very thinly because we had so many products in development, and we were constantly forced by Sony (then "Sony Imagesoft") to do film tie-ins. Anything that was not for the Mega-CD (development for which was part of Sony's grand plan) got farmed out to external developers, but the deadlines were so ridiculous that it's no surprise that some of them were so bad. I remember walking into the test room and seeing Cliffhanger for the first time. It was a bit of a shocker.

The only good thing about it was that we all got to go and see the film before it was on general release.

[7-Zark-7]

Going O.T. here, but From Within's post, just gave inspiration for it. Did Psygnosis's developers feel a tad fustrated with the expectations placed upon them for their early CD-Rom stuff? I'm sure I have a preview somewhere of a "The One" WIP, of stuff like Microsm(??darn, can't recall spelling of it),& Dracula, amongst other things,which along with the stuff you'd mention with Mega-Cd releases,(like the shambles of Last Action Hero,Cliffhanger etc.), seemed to feed off the early "interactive movie" hoopla that surrounded early CD-Rom stuff.

I mean, all the early platforms were never going to achieve photo-realistic movie footage GFX,which seemed to to be "push" at the time,(ala Wing Commander 3 & 4, Nighttrap etc.). From a creative viewpoint, was it ever thought something more realistic & satisfying like a sequel to,say Leander with large levels, CD music etc. would've been a better prospect?

[FromWithin]

Originally posted by 7-Zark-7
Did Psygnosis's developers feel a tad fustrated with the expectations placed upon them for their early CD-Rom stuff?

Certainly. One major problem was that we were doing stuff that nobody had done before. Playing video all seems quite trivial these days, but everything had to be done from scratch, including video compression and playback routines. We also had Silicon Graphics machines churning out graphics for anims that looked impressive, but had to get cut down to 16 colours (each 8x8 pixel block on the Mega-CD could use colours from one of four 16 colour palettes), and we were using rotoscoped animation on Dracula (so there were actors and stuff to deal with). It was quite a long process doing the modelling, conversion, compression etc. and by the time things were working, there wasn't much time to actually do any good games. It all just turned into a mess really. It was far too ambitious. At the time, being able to play video and having so much storage space seemed like a big step to the men in suits, and Myst didn't help things. The expectation seemed to be that graphics in general could be of equal quality to Myst's static rendered screens. There was also the problem that the original Microcosm was on the FM Towns, basically a PC with a good graphics chip, so while the game was boring, it looked quite impressive. The same results were impossible to achieve on the Mega-CD and there was no time (or talent) to redesign the game.

We all knew that we were working on crap, but there was nothing we could do about it (although a bit later on, the rot had set in, morale was at absolute zero, most people were producing shit work without realising it, and no-one would speak up about it (apart from me at one point, but that's another story)) . An important thing to note, though, is that all the R&D we did on these games was the precursor to the Playstation stuff, and was likely one of the major reasons that Sony bought us. There were not many people in world as experienced as us with CD-ROM development or 3D graphics (we had loads of artists doing 3D renders). It wasn't all FMV with sprites over the top. Frankenstein was an arcade adventure (bizarrely with a beat-em-up section), and No Escape (never released) was an adventure where you could explore a whole 3D rendered island that was streamed in off CD as necessary while you were running around it. It was technically very impressive. But even after all that (and because of the rot I mentioned earlier), Wipeout nearly ended up running at about 5 frames per second and was only improved when we were threatened with our jobs. Looking at expectations again, Wipeout was supposed to have about 20 tracks. Reason thankfully prevailed in that case (the amount of time it took to model the landscapes meant that it was cut down to 4 or 5 tracks, can't remember exactly how many).

From a creative viewpoint, was it ever thought something more realistic & satisfying like a sequel to,say Leander with large levels, CD music etc. would've been a better prospect?

Nope. The games were largely irrelevant. It was all about the technology. And don't forget that we were getting orders from the largely clueless Sony Imagesoft in the US, where the Amiga was almost non-existant. I think that they didn't want to see sequels to our own games because our games were, in their eyes, worthless. Obviously, they wouldn't stop us producing them, because it was our core business, and I don't think they had control enough to force us to stop, but all they wanted were film tie-ins and they made some very stupid decisions along the way. They even tried to get rid of the Psygnosis brand at a very early stage. There seemed to be a lot of David Brents over there. The cry of "Interactive Movies" still rings in my ears.

From my point of view, the perception of games by the suits when CD-ROM came in was: Movies are great, CD music is great. We can have both of these in our games now, and obviously game developers know nothing about movies and sound so they must all be shit. Let's hire some big-headed movie people and music studio people who believe that they know everything about the game industry because their cousin once had a Commodore 64. And so we had to deal with managers/producers who were, for want of a better description, complete pricks. They were, shall we say, interesting times.

[whiteb]

Originally posted by FromWithin
We also had Silicon Graphics machines churning out graphics for anims that looked impressive

Killing Game show intro was a head turner
So was Shadow of the beast 2.

Loved those intro's. I still do.

[fiath]

Wow, interesting stuff. Thanks!

[7-Zark-7]

As Fiath said, a great in-depth answer, thank you! Dunno if the Pratchett-esque "interesting times" reference in deliberate but it definitely suits the response none-the-less!!

I forgot about Myth's influence, I can see how the rendered GFX would've changed expectations-a lot of people from the point'n'click graphic adventure era point to it as killing the old Lucasarts/Sierra dominated adventure game,(With Revolution's current effort the first serious attempt since of course with Broken Sword 3).

Let me guess, the first men-in-suit inspired "creative hollywood games director", that suggested b-grade hollywood actors be rotoscoped/ digitised into a game got their heads kicked in?!