Why not show the last race from Decathlon by Activision to see if my forearm muscles cramp up instinctively.
For realism's (and comedy's) sake, they could have shown a pixel ejecting from the five (I think) pixels that form the jet before it explodes into a fireball, then floating down on a tiny parachute and being rescued by a tiny boat.
...but seriously, you didn't even get your score reduced for crashing the plane on landing?
PS1 -> PS2 -> PS3 or Xbox -> 360 feel more iterative because they started after the 3D era had already begun. We haven't had a new dominant paradigm for gaming since then (besides mobile gaming).
I had the game and the manual, but I can’t recall if I ever read the manual. I played the game a ton and was maybe 50/50 at the landings, but just followed the on-screen instructions. I could probably have puzzled out the target numbers, but never did (was it in the manual?). Now you can just google the correct values and nail it every time (paying no attention to the on-screen directions).
[edit] incidentally, my “it’s not actually hard” thing from the NES is the dam level in TMNT. It’s a challenge like the first two times you play it, then never again. It’s just not that hard. I think it’s easier than tons of Mario game levels, for instance.
That's going too far.
Also, we're talking about the 8-bit era: 1) technical limits prevented a lot of in-game exposition that you could do now and 2) before the internet, people had fewer options for reading material. I read every manual for every NES and SNES game I ever had, multiple times. If I was into a game my options were limited to 1) play it, 2) read the manual if I couldn't play it (e.g. if I wasn't at home or not allowed to take over the TV to play).
Your statement applies today; game design back then was different, manuals were not frowned upon and often exciting to read through. They were part of the game.
Following that rule puts a hard cap on the game's depth and complexity at the design level.
It's probably why most games today are pretty shallow.
More generally, it's also why most software grew from tools into Fischer-Price toys over the past two decades.
There was a lord of the rings PC RPG I played around 1990, I believe, where many of the NPC interactions said to refer to page N, paragraph M. They didn't have the space to store all the text in the game.
Isn't that something like Mach 1.8? That's one fast tanker.
But you don't do the refueling at those speeds, heh.
I know there's Tiny Combat Arena from 'Microprose' but its development's taking a while. I'd dearly love to know if there's anything else of that contemporary ilk out there today.
I loved them too. During that era I got to try some kind of flight simulator on a Silicon Graphics. Smoooth shapes, extremely high resolution, must have been lots of tiny triangles, and nice shading. I remember thinking, this is the future, can’t wait to get this in personal computers!
Nah, instead almost two decades of muddy lores textures on lopoly models.
I guess now we are finally there, with raytracing in games. But I would still like to see the nontextured aesthetic make a comeback.
Before then, just approach the bay straight on and if you go slow enough, you'll dock fine even if it's perpendicular. Probably differs with whatever version you're playing though.
You fly to the entry, point towards it, and then rotate until rotation speed and phase match.
But yea, the docking computer was definitely easier =)
Granted, I wasn't good at video games in general. And this one infuriated me, because I loved it. I could easily beat the first level, but then I crashed on carrier landing. This happened for years. I only ever saw the first level of this game.
Then one day, while staying at my elementary afterschool sitter's house, one of the kids there told me he played Top Gun as well. He could land, but wasn't very good at the rest of the game.
A plan was formed.
The next day, I brought the cartridge over, and we settled in. I'd play the level, then hand him the controller at which point he'd plant it on the deck. Rinse and Repeat. Top Gun and Top Gun: The Second Mission didn't have too many levels, (6 maybe?) and I don't think it took us too long to beat. Neither one of us had seen much of the game. But working together, we beat both in a matter of hours.
I still look back on that as one of the few NES games I finished without codes or a Game Genie, just the help of a friend. =D
SUCCESS = 0
TOO_FAR_LEFT = 2MIN_ALTITUDE = 100 MAX_ALTITUDE = 300
MIN_SPEED = 200 MAX_SPEED = 400
MIN_SPEED_200_RANGE = 238 MAX_SPEED_300_RANGE = 338
MAX_HEADING_RIGHT = 8
def landing_skill_check(altitude: int, speed: int, heading: int) -> int: if altitude < MIN_ALTITUDE: return TOO_SLOW_OR_TOO_LOW if altitude >= MAX_ALTITUDE: return TOO_FAST_OR_TOO_HIGH
if speed < MIN_SPEED:
return TOO_SLOW_OR_TOO_LOW
if speed >= MAX_SPEED:
return TOO_FAST_OR_TOO_HIGH
if speed < 300:
if speed < MIN_SPEED_200_RANGE:
return TOO_SLOW_OR_TOO_LOW
else:
if speed >= MAX_SPEED_300_RANGE:
return TOO_FAST_OR_TOO_HIGH
if heading < 0:
return TOO_FAR_LEFT
if heading >= MAX_HEADING_RIGHT:
return TOO_SLOW_OR_TOO_LOW
return SUCCESS
drbig•2h ago