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Robotic, but in a pleasant way.

I talk about video games, scifi, old anime, and robots.
Asks and comments welcome!

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cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude
cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

monuments of mars (apogee, 1991) may be one of the first games to ever contain a physics puzzle

p.s.

  1. i have since looked up a video of the solution and it turns out you don't need to do anything more than steal one box and make it to the left side, so it's not nearly as complex as it appears, but it's the last stage in this episode so i wonder if it originally was harder, and then the designer realized most people would never be able to manage it

  2. the color palette here is completely different because i changed it with CHGCOLOR.COM

cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

This game, as well as arctic adventure and pharoah's tomb, are some of the jankiest, most computer-ass games ever to come out for the PC. this is interesting to me for a lot of reasons

cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

feel like i should add a postscript to this: i'm not being snarky, i'm not just L'ing my A O. when I say I like these games, I mean it - they are bad, and broken, and they are also fun partly because they are bad and broken.

had the engine been better, they would have had to design completely different levels to make it a challenge again. as it stands, what they shipped is tuned to the engine's weaknesses, so outside of the absurd ammo softlock I described, they are legitimate, playable games. you can definitely plow through them if you take some time and learn how they work, and the feeling when you complete a level will be a special kind of feeling you haven't gotten from anything else. i can't think of a better compliment for a videogame.

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xinjinmeng
@xinjinmeng

I'm always fascinated when someone plays a retro game and complains that "the jump and run buttons are reversed". There's no ISO standard of what button goes where!

Modern gamers don't often appreciate their own biases. Why should a long fall not kill you? Why should manipulating the joystick or the button have any effect on the jump after you launch yourself — in defiance of all physics and reason?

The original Prince of Persia is one of my favorite games. It's built into the engine that if you're running towards an edge, you can hold the jump button early, and the computer will wait until your avatar is at the last possible pixel before committing to the jump. That might be the first computer-assist in platforming? 🤔 I had started to wonder why modern games don't do that … until I learned that many of them basically let you jump off empty air in the "coyote frames". And that design is now common practice, because "that's what a game is", now. 🙂

P.S. It's Halloween so I'm playing Castlevania NES for the first time, and the jumping ... oh my stars, I'm so spoiled by modern games. 😅

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Janet
@Janet

The jankiness in collission probably stems from low precision in the code handling it. If they even had floats it was single precision. Much rather they relied on fixed point integer physics which has immensely higher errors so some times it rounds to yupp, sometimes it rounds to nah when checking at almost the same distance which results in some judder of things in regards to what the visual cortex tells you about the movements jerk and acceleration but uhm I'm kinda reading the tea leaves over here

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