Alien Breed 2 & Tower Assault

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by Anakirob

Then I must also be completely and utterly stupid, as my assessment of the game would probably be around the same level as the AP review. In my personal scale a score below 50% (or 5/10 as I would use) means I did not have any fun playing it, and that would be an accurate evaluation from my perspective.

Anything I might have to say about the game itself has been pretty well covered in that review also. And it was not just the radiation rooms that made this game suck, it was just one of many gameplay issues.

One thing that one must remember when it comes to criticism is personal taste. Is a person stupid just because they have an opinion which differs from yours? If that's so then your opinion differs from mine, so that must make you stupid too. (I'm not calling you an idiot, I'm saying that the AP review is NOT stupid, but a perfectly valid opinion).

There was back in the day a fight between an Amiga french magazine about what they did to the team 17 titles (it was Amiga Dream if i remember well).

The point was that each time AP had to review a Team 17 title, they just slashed it off.

To me this is not a matter of taste, or opinion, that's just destroying a product just because it is Team 17.

Tower Assault was a triple A title, a huge game, with lots of features.

Tower Assault can be accused of having some bad quirks here and there, but the radiation room is not one of them.

The real defaults of TA are the bugs of the program like the one making the game crashing in one explosive level, and one level not leading to the right level once you have exit.

That's the real wrong and bad points somebody can point about TA.

But no, better to point out things completely useless like the radiation room or any other feature inside the game.

I think that the radiation room is a great idea, because it forces the player to unplug his fingers out of its ass to find and get what he needs, and then exit the most quickly the zone.

When back in the day the testers were testing games, there was 2 range of them : those who were giving their personal opinion or taste about a game, and those who were explaining what the game was like, his strengths, his weakness, and what could appeal about it.

The first range just mislead people when buying a game. Because the tester's taste are not everyone else tastes.

Testing a game means giving explanations and exposing what the game is, the do's and don't, etc, etc.

Tower Assault is a huge game with lots of excellent features, an excellent amiga game, but with bugs ruining the game pleasure in some parts.

That's not my opinion, that's what the game is really technically speaking.

[Anakirob]

So Amiga Power engaged on a campaign to denigrate Team 17 did they? Team 17 themselves accused Amiga Power of this, but the evidence suggests otherwise. If a game was good it got a good rating regardless of the publisher.

The following are a list of Team 17 games which scored over 80% in Amiga Power, a number of these reviews by the infamous Stuart Campbell himself (the very man Martyn Brown personally accused of having some kind of vendetta toward Team 17)

Alien Breed: 82%
Alien Breed '92 SE & Qwak: 83%
Alien Breed 3D: 91%
Alien Breed II: The Horror Continues: 81%
Alien Breed Special Edition 92: 83%
Arcade Pool: 91% (although it did get reviewed the previous issue and recieve 60%, AP reported that computer AI was improved for the final release)
Assassin: 89%
Project-X (Revised Edition): 86%
Qwak: 88%
Super Stardust: 89%
Ultimate Body Blows: 86%

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by Anakirob

So Amiga Power engaged on a campaign to denigrate Team 17 did they? Team 17 themselves accused Amiga Power of this, but the evidence suggests otherwise. If a game was good it got a good rating regardless of the publisher.

The following are a list of Team 17 games which scored over 80% in Amiga Power, a number of these reviews by the infamous Stuart Campbell himself (the very man Martyn Brown personally accused of having some kind of vendetta toward Team 17)

Alien Breed: 82%
Alien Breed '92 SE & Qwak: 83%
Alien Breed 3D: 91%
Alien Breed II: The Horror Continues: 81%
Alien Breed Special Edition 92: 83%
Arcade Pool: 91% (although it did get reviewed the previous issue and recieve 60%, AP reported that computer AI was improved for the final release)
Assassin: 89%
Project-X (Revised Edition): 86%
Qwak: 88%
Super Stardust: 89%
Ultimate Body Blows: 86%

We had (i was not the only one having an argument with Campbell here on EAB).

This guy was for example bashing the game Rick Dangerous games over the Kid Gloves series.

He was basically talking of 'unfair traps' in those games. Rick series are not about the unfair traps, but about beautiful graphics, very cool sounds and musics, and also fun !

Rick game is an hability game, you need to correctly coordinate yourself to pass the traps, which are all perfectly timed and prepared.

Campbell was just saying it's crap due to the traps.

But look, most video games of the golden era were for a lot of them very difficult and some even had almost impossible to pass zones.

Rick Dangerous series can be finished if you know how to dodge the traps.

But Campbell stayed on its position, by saying Kid gloves games were better than Rick Dangerous, which was of course complete bullshit.

Kid gloves series were made on and for Atari ST computers, with crap playability (they can not measure to Rick's), and crap graphics.....

Back to Amiga Power, they just were dishonest to point out the radiation zones when the biggest problem on TA were the game program bugs !

They just never pointed that out. It would have forced Team 17 to make Boberg correct the mistakes, but it never happened.

You see the point ? Imagine my happiness and also my horror when i have finally noticed that TA that i bought in original in 1994 had at least 2 nasty game bugs, and NO amiga magazine talked about it.

[camdflage]

I've not been able to get any of the Alien Breed series to load on my Gotek. I'm running an A500 with memory expansion. Help! I really want to try these adf's out, but they always seem to stall on disc 2.