2 May
2010
2 May
'10
10:38 p.m.
Jim Leonard wrote:
I love to look at games from the END of a console's life, as they show
some of the true programming wit and magic that comes with being able
to amass console knowledge for 5+ years. For example:
- The God of War series for PS2 show a nearly full framerate with
reflections, water, and (seemingly) detailed geometry
- Because the Genesis was based on a 7.16MHz 68000, some 3-d computer
games were ported over (LHX attack chopper, some Wolf3d clones, etc.)
The Jaguar, even though I just finished dumping on it, had a truly 3-d
textured world engine to be used in an upcoming dragon-fighting
simulator, but sadly the Jag was discontinued before the game was
finished. Name and company escape me but I saw it demonstrated at
CGE2003. World Circuit was another unreleased 3-d driving game until
Telegames republished it, which is probably the best released example
of what the Jag could actually do (gouraud shaded polys and texture
mapping at a decent framerate).
I like to do that for the Atari VCS -- a machine whose graphics chip was
basically designed to make slightly-more-advanced games of Pong
possible, 128 bytes of RAM and a CPU that had to spend 90% of its time
running the display. Yet somehow programmers continued to squeeze
amazingly clever, fun and (sometimes) even good looking games out of the
system after more than a decade. I started hacking on a game for it
awhile back, I should dig it out and do something with it, it's a real
challenge...
- Josh