rolling thread of stuff worth reading on videogames

i.e. I grew up strictly Apple -> NES -> Mac, and then emulators, and I totally missed out on the whole WC thing
I did have a neighbor who was big time into Star Control II and such, so at least I'm not 100% game-vegan

i also never played WC i think it was maybe an age thing? bc i was only in 6 in 1990. but i definitely played return to zork (1993), myst (1993), civilization (1991), and railroad tycoon deluxe (1993) - which were i'm thinking games my parents were probably more okay w/ me playing and also just a tad later than WC.

i never got into Wing Commander cos X-Wing and Tie Fighter were both fun and once DOOM came out i gave up on flight sims completely. i do remember seeing a demo or something and thinking it looked really cool. i bet it was a great influence on George Lucas in how to film the Star Wars prequels.

My pal Andy was way more into X-Wing and Tie Fighter than WC. Everybody with a PC owned and played WC, I think, but they played through it like once and that was that. It may actually have been that it was too easy for my PC gamer buddies to beat, so I barely got to see it. Stuff like SCII and the LucasArts games took longer to beat and came with more replay value. I could also just be hypothesizing right out my butthole here.

The chronology is important. Wing Commander was released a year and a half before Wolf 3D, two years before Star Control II, two and a half before X-Wing, three before DOOM. The engine was state of the art in terms of getting arcade-type gaming at home, with very good graphics, very smart use of sprites to fake a 3D experience (as in Wolf, etc.) and fast action. For reference, look at Flight Simulator 4.0 of the previous year, which is polygonal but er... not so pretty, or Red Baron (also 1990) which is polygonal, smooth and fast but also pretty boring to play and visually dull. The initial flurry of Wing Commander product (first two games, plus several add-ons for both) also took advantage of PC capacity to offer a full storyline and a ton of very good-looking cutscenes (mostly just 'closed-captioned,' no voice, but still).

For a little more context, in terms of canonical gaming history, the other key Christmas-season releases for 1990 were both adventure games: the Secret of Monkey Island and King's Quest V. The latter was, like Wing Commander, a top-of-the-line "time to upgrade the system" kind of title, on ten 3.5" floppies and with so many gloriously rendered VGA backgrounds you might not notice that the gameplay was essentially unchanged since the second in the series, or that the story was a substantial step back from the third and fourth. Monkey Island, less technically ambitious but more lovable, focused on puzzles and writing and it's probably the real essential classic of the year (though fans of CRPGs - the only one of these genres that really only makes sense as a PC game) will point, rightly, to Ultima VI.

Those are the top-tier games you had to gawp at. The overwhelming majority of other stuff on the shelf lagged way behind technically... which was fine, because most people were not going to upgrade to 486 and a SoundBlaster just like that! But in trying to understand how people relate to something like Wing Commander it's probably important to remember that it wasn't just fun but dazzling. We never got the first Wing Commander though - I was ten years old that Christmas, I begged for King's Quest V and got it. My jaw dropped just to behold the opening screen.

Doc Casino OTM really. The Lucas games, Wing Commander and iD were what was up when I was in junior high and high school; we played the ever living shit out of them. I kinda want to talk about this a lot but the memories are hazy, like it was someone else playing those games. it's been over twenty-five years!

WC was sort *gulp* AFTER my time.

My parents had a PC XT and we played STARFLIGHT (1986) which provided the same sense of a massive universe and months-long gameplay that I hear people talk about with WC

otm that wing commander even before its hamill/mcdowell days was a spectacle. (origin also responsible for ultima underworld two years later -- still pre-doom, and the one i really spent a lot of time with. this too was an amazement, a sort of giant goblin-infested terrarium in a box.) the later wing commander games (3 and 4, i mean, not the pretty much forgotten 5 or the one everyone has a soft spot for, privateer) play to me now like standard casualties of the FMV era (you have to watch luke skywalker walk across a room basically any time you click a menu option, like you're playing phantasmagoria) and having the story/dialogue enacted by actual human professionals instead of cartoons tends to throw its ultraderivative goofiness into boring relief. still fun to shoot kilrathi tho, or whomever you're shooting at that point.

(by the way i'm pretty sure the original wc2 voice of lt. blair also appears in the ultima underworld intro --

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gW-Eo2Y8PmQ

-- which was a big catch-phrase source itself when i was a kid. TREACHERY AND DOOM! whether thou speak TRUTH... or FALSEHOOD... i CANNOT SAY. DC otm that there is a real lovability to scarce digitized speech that vanishes as games become more openly "cinematic", a grail chris roberts chased harder than anyone and one the medium could probably have done without. btw i saw the wing commander movie four times in the theater, and read the novelization.)

given all this ambition it's unsuprising to read that roberts didn't actually have a lot to do with privateer, a game whose defining positive feature in its genre is really lack of ambition. it came out the same year as david braben's second elite game and would look childish in comparison (tiny galaxy instead of absurdly huge procedural universe; planets and space stations as point-and-click menus instead of physical spaces; sprites instead of polygons) if it didn't work so much better: slicker combat, more coherence, a functional but not intrusive plot. funny that the open-world wing commander seemed like a minor, modest work next to the on-rails wing commanders, once they turned into movies.

now the most evocative part of privateer to me was when you pressed the "rear view" button (num 2, i think?) and got a shot of the interior of your cabin, over your shoulder, with a door leading to the rest of your ship. i dreamed of that door. the most tantalizing promise made by star citizen is the promise that that door will open. (i put what that kotaku article reassures me is a comparatively minuscule amount of money into star citizen, and even the tiny ship i have, which you can't climb into without briefly sticking your head inside a bulkhead like you're the cameraman in mario 64, is along these lines a sort of thrill -- as by the way is what as far as i'm concerned is the coolest thing in the game, which is that you can climb out of your ship wherever you want.)

star control 2, while a stone classic, not really in the same genre as all this stuff -- it had modest 2D sprite graphics even in its definitive, slickest form on the 3DO, a console nobody owned. (fortunately it's this version that's since been ported back to PC, in open source, as the ur-quan masters.) still, again, as wing commander became increasingly cinematic it became increasingly obvious star control 2 was much better-written.

lucasarts games of course a thread of their own. best developer of the 1990s? idk. but an incredible range. they basically owned the graphical adventure genre (every sierra game holds up worse imo) and probably perfected the space shooter one, but they also made dark forces, which had the best level design in a first-person shooter until idk what, if anything.

this stuff for me obv is the core, the heart games -- console knowledge of the time comparatively blank.

i dreamed of that door. the most tantalizing promise made by star citizen is the promise that that door will open.

this is great. so many of these sorts of dreams in early gaming.

The first ever speech I heard coming from a computer was THIS (from a TRS-80, and the game was called "Bug-Out" .. not sure how copyright worked in those days..)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RB-y4qHI7cQ#t=3m33s

utterly thrilling and uncanny

er not Bug-Out - 'MegaBug" - HERE'S the 'we gotcha' i remember: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6-OHckz7hU&7m3s&t=7m3s

ha, xp, that magnifying glass thing's a neat variant on pacman. the way it just obscures medium-range enemies seems terrifying/maddening.

yes.... yes it was

I wholly recognize Dr. Casino's story, we're probably the same age. Kings Quest V was indeed the big one: I was ten or eleven and after much hassling I got my parents to buy a new pc too, mostly because of that game. It felt like a watershed moment for gaming for me and my buddies, the dawning of a new era.

I was throwing away some boxes in the attic recently and found a copy of the manual and the official KQV hint book. That manual was essential because unlike Dr. Casino I copied the game. Remember how it would ask you every now and again for like the tenth word on the sixth page or something as copy protection? Those were the days.

by the way i'm pretty sure the original wc2 voice of lt. blair also appears in the ultima underworld intro

you can also psychically communicate with some big cats in Ultima Underworld II who mention being related to a mighty space warrior race that they hear is doing rather well a few galaxies across. UWII was my Wing Commander (looks wistful)

now the most evocative part of privateer to me was when you pressed the "rear view" button (num 2, i think?) and got a shot of the interior of your cabin, over your shoulder, with a door leading to the rest of your ship. i dreamed of that door. the most tantalizing promise made by star citizen is the promise that that door will open.

hah

I wished (and dreamed too, yes) so hard that one day I would pull over some driver in Police Quest and the backdrop houses/restaurants would suddenly be new locations I could walk into. and yes, many other off-the-map dreams and longings of early games. not sure if a function of my age at the time or if genuinely a feature of that era of gaming that even the most rigidly plotted linear games seemed like vast open universes if only you knew how to unlock them; probably 90% just my age but oh well, still a magical feeling to recall.

booming post, dlh.

we didn't have the digitized-speech version of underworld but later, in high school, i heard a few of those lines quoted at me, particularly "TREACHERY AND DOOM!" baron almric's voice is very definitely richard "lord british" garriott - his stiff and banal lines from the Serpent Isle intro cinematic are burned in my brain. "INDEED! PUT IT ON THE TABLE!" that game and The Black Gate were also critical digitized-speech games for me, mainly for the Guardian and the Great Earth Serpent. "AVATAR!"

everyone otm on the wonder of digitised speech - i still have vivid memories of the little speech clips in the spectrum version of robocop and of my stunned amazement when i booted the amiga version of cannon fodder for the first time and heard not just speech but holy shit an entire song with vocals coming from my portable tv's speakers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PiYuq6Ac3a0

do kids still have these revelatory experiences playing games now or has the pace of innovation slowed enough that it's impossible to get as excited about, i dunno, increased draw distances on the ps4 version of watch dogs 2 or whatever?

I think my real "digitized speech" moment wasn't speech at all but the first time I heard the Manic Miner intro music playing and it had these - gasp - polyphonic bits in it. two notes at once! mind blown.

but otoh I cannot see the word Sega without a Pavlovian digitized voice in my head

ha, otm

shortly followed by a distantly echoing 'to be this good takes sega'

important reference work: best computer game sound

a friend had a hardware speech synth for the BBC Micro; was briefly amazing but I don't recall a game using it. aged 8 we would just spell out mildly rude words or our names + " is mega cool dood" at the BASIC prompt (imagine our disbelieving protestations when his elder sister told us that we were all dumb little babies and that isn't even how you spell "dude")

the sound was busted (possibly deliberately disabled by my Dad) on my Speccy and then I went to the PC speaker, so no great audio joys for me until I bought a Soundblaster and played Monkey Island / Speedball II

though now I think about it, even though I had heard much better sound coming out of C64s and Amigas at my friends' houses, I still remember being amazed by the PC beeper's attempts at some of those early soundcard-era games, possibly including those two, possibly the .mod file player I acquired which would cram all 4 channels of Amiga-arranged digitised 8.3kHz sound into one horrible PC speaker squall which was nonetheless impressive to me

also some chatter (mostly from me) on digitized speech treasures here: King's Quest

"INDEED! PUT IT ON THE TABLE!"

lolololol otm

guardian's speech in u7:tbg is an all-time intro. the goofy meta way his face appears on the avatar's pc monitor, interrupting an idyllic game about butterflies (also called ultima vii). your fist banging the side of the monitor to clear it. behind your house lies the circle of stones.

(that last line might actually be from u5 or 6. so evocative tho.)

as i always do when WC comes up, i need to shout out Colony Wars (PS1). it was similarly difficult and felt massive (i never finished it), and i thought it looked amazing. although, the plot didn't have the charm of WC or WC2. maybe it didn't even really have a plot, just a campaign.

i clearly remember being at a friend's house in high school, seeing some fighting game on Dreamcast or PS1 for the first time, and thinking it absolutely looked like the future, like i couldn't believe what i was seeing.

yeah i've got memories of some videogames moments that will probably be some of my most vivid recollections when my life flashes before me on my deathbed :(

the scent of a roast chicken dinner will always remind me a bit of the smell in my house on the sunday night when my 56k modem finally finished downloading the first quake demo and i could play this over and over and over again

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-MLnwaIreY

controlling the real-time-animated t rex on a friend's playstation was staggering

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCtZIlolG6w

watching the e3 reveal of mgs2 back in 2000 left me totally fucking dumbfounded

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BzmH1NBXCg

Colony Wars was absolutely amazing though no role-playing element or even plot really, just missions of increasing complexity/skill, like many games of that era (Tenchu, Ghost In The Shell, etc)

Space felt so big, so impersonal. And the ships did NOT have the aerodynamics of airplanes or helicopters. There was no lift, downforce etc it was all about thrusting, stopping on a dime, etc. Some of the timed levels were diabolical.

everyone otm on the wonder of digitised speech - i still have vivid memories of the little speech clips in the spectrum version of robocop and of my stunned amazement when i booted the amiga version of cannon fodder for the first time and heard not just speech but holy shit an entire song with vocals coming from my portable tv's speakers

first time speech in a game blew my damn mind was dune 2.

YOU MEAN ALL THESE THINGS TALK WHEN I CLICK ON THEM????????

I don't think I ever got that from speech effects. Or video capture stuff. It wasn't that big a deal to me.

You know what I still remember though? How good the sound chips were on the Dreamcast. My USAF pal had one and the music on that thing sounded great. I remember I had to look it up. It was all Yamaha sample synths. I swear I'm being real with you guys.

I mean if you have the Talking Moose on your Mac LC, you're basically inured to all voices coming from all computers, even today. Destiny's voice cast definitely doesn't have anything on MacinTalk 1.0 and I mean after the DLC that killed Tyrion

apparently wing commander images are my proustian madeleines

new board description plz

i remember DR. SBAITSO, who was a digitized voice AI included with the Sound Blaster driver and suite. still don't think that one's been topped.

i used to play the LucasArts games before we even had a soundcard, so my first memory of Monkey Island 1/2 is with the speaker music, which was still quite glorious

looooooooooove dr. sbaitso, wd be surprised if i havent started a thread or more about it, his wonderfully odd pronunciations and enunciations, the way he'd react if you swore at him, everything.

totally forgot about dr sbaitso! i got way too many hours of fun out of typing unpleasant things at him - sorry doc :(

I WILL GET PARITY ERROR IF YOU CONTINUE SPEAKING IN THIS WAY

http://playdosgamesonline.com/dr-sbaitso.html

i used to play the LucasArts games before we even had a soundcard, so my first memory of Monkey Island 1/2 is with the speaker music, which was still quite glorious

― AdamVania (Adam Bruneau), Friday, September 30, 2016 3:01 PM (eight hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

so true.. I had no idea those games even had speech until I played loom at someone's place who had a sound blaster. mind. blown.

They didn't, originally! CD-ROM versions. Thankfully, the Lucasarts approach of dialogue floating around the character as the mouths warbled and limbs gesticulated was far more expressive anyway. The ironic asides in particular would surely have grated coming from no-budget actors...

secret at least never had speech, i think -- cd-rom version featured VGA graphx, icons instead of text for yr inventory, and iirc pre-recorded music tracks rather than speaker/MIDI. but nobody talked till (the underrated) curse. (2000s "special edition" had speech i assume but i never played this.)

loom tho yeah that had speech in a later version. WELCOME TO THE AGE OF THE GREAT GUILDS. for space tho it was often altered from the orig text. by orson scott card, weirdly.

agree that the captions over the wild gesticulations are a Style and that the games were written for that style.

http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/13/13263008/mafia-3-racism-shooter-opinion

yeah, even the ads for that have been very UH

it's a shame because i do like the concept/setting

really good piece on PLATO gaming

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/10/want-to-see-gamings-past-and-future-dive-into-the-educational-world-of-plato/

i haven't actually read it yet but it makes me v happy to see this
http://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2016/11/hillary-clinton-for-president.html

I enjoyed this review of FF XV - actually got me interested in playing it
http://kotaku.com/final-fantasy-xv-the-kotaku-review-1789400066

is it a mmorpg or no? if no, i may have to try?
i hate this answer tree

it's a classic single player FF, though sounds like the fight system is pretty different from previous FFs (real time, can't control party members)

real time fights you say? welp, there goes christmas.

can't control party members? ok i'm like interested but i've been burnt so many times by FF as of late. i thought FF X was garbage