Quote:
Originally Posted by Photon
If it's a game, you want it to be fun to play. That's down to the game idea, but the audiovisuals are part of the reward and replayability too.
Now the technical stuff is not as important for games, but if it hurts playability it's sometimes a reason to not play or to upgrade.
Now AGA+Fastmem is a pretty sweet platform, it could improve over stock AGA quite a bit. It's not difficult to bless an A1200 with a bit of Fastmem. <3
I think OCS 1MB and AGA+Fastmem are pretty sweet release platforms like AGA/030/CD32. AGA/060 is legit but not all can have it as we know.
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I agree. Most game genres are quite achievable on an A500 or A1200 (perhaps with bit of FastRAM and a hard drive) if you don't set your sights too high. Playability is more important than looks, but audiovisuals as a 'reward' are also important. That's what's missing in many otherwise competent games IMO. Too many games start out looking great and then lose it as the artists and level designers run out of inspiration.
The technical prowess of the machine is almost irrelevant. A good artist can do amazing things with 32 or even 16 colors. Having too much can actually make the artists lazy. Here's an example I found while researching for another thread:- in King's Quest V, Sierra 'upgraded' from 16 color EGA to 256 color VGA graphics. To make the job easier they drew the backgrounds on paper and scanned the images. This looked pretty poor on VGA, bad on Amiga OCS, and awful on EGA. However it looks like they 'touched up' the EGA graphics to compensate, but left the Amiga graphics in their poorly digitized state. No wonder it suffered in comparison to the PC! (compare the castle scene below to eg.
Defender of the Crown to see what a difference well drawn computer art can make).
The older EGA Sierra adventure games had nicely drawn computer art, which achieved an effective resolution and meaning beyond what scanned images can provide because every pixel counted. After a while you get used to the characters having bright red skin etc., and with the addition of a few atmospheric sound effects the game comes alive. I am playing the The Colenel's Bequest on the Amiga again, and the gaudy low res EGA graphics don't disturb me at all.