From: bc@Apple.COM (bill coderre)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc,comp.sys.mac.games
Subject: Re: CD-ROM Drives and Spaceship Warlock
Keywords: CD-ROM
Date: 26 Aug 92 17:59:46 GMT
Organization: Apple Computer Inc, Cupertino, CA

WARNING: the following does not contain any factual information about
the game "Spaceship Warlock" or CD-ROM drives. Please don't be
surprised if you find this routine counterflame tedious and dull.

I wrote:
|>I have never used a NEC CD-ROM drive or played Spaceship Warlock.
|>But this weekend a friend told me an amusing bit of trivia which may
|>explicate:
|>Apparently, Spaceship Warlock depends on the intrinsic access speed of
|>the filestore to work correctly. This was determined by copying the
|>related files from the CD-ROM to a local SCSI hard disk. 
|>With the much faster access time of the hard disk, the game became
|>un-winnable since the bad guys moved too fast!
|>Definitely, a call to the game creator is in order to verify all this.

zeke@fasttech.uucp (Bohdan Tashchuk) writes:
|THIS INFORMATION IS WRONG.

|The game is quite winnable from hard disk. I won it using a IIfx and a CDC Wren
|drive. Perhaps a Quadra and a faster disk would make the game unwinnable, but
|I'm skeptical.

|IMO, you shouldn't have posted this misinformation about a game you HAVEN'T
|played. Everyone on the net shouldn't have to "call the game creator" in order
|to learn the truth about "amusing trivia" you got from "a friend".

|When I tried playing using my Apple CD-ROM, I encountered some jerkiness and a
|few delays. So I copied the files over to a partition on my CDC Wren drive,
|following the instructions on the CD. The game runs quite well from hard disk.
|I never encountered anything that ran "too fast". The animation adjusted itself
|to the speed of my machine. Of course, the sound was perfectly understandable
|as well.

|There are a few places when fighting the bad guys that require a little bit of
|manual dexterity and perseverence. But I did get thru them. People on the net
|have already complained about how easy this game was to win. It would be
|absurdly easy if the bad guys moved 5 or 10 times slower in these places, as
|your friend's "amusing bit of trivia" suggests.

|Perhaps because this game is so easy to win, it is called an Interactive Movie
|by Reactor. It is not called a game. The INTENT is that you move along from
|scene to scene without getting hopelessly stumped at any particular point.

|I enjoyed it as such. At my age I am no longer as interested in games as I
|used to be, and liked the fact that I WAS able to get thru it in a reasonable
|amount of time, less than 10 hours of play. The program allows you to save
|your character's state at virtually any point, so it isn't necessary to start
|over every time you get killed.

Now let's see if I can be as brief as possible about this:

1) I made the claim that Spaceship Warlock's animation speed depends
on the speed of the drive ("Apparently, Spaceship Warlock depends on
the intrinsic access speed of the filestore").

You provide vague evidence that this is true ("When I tried playing
using my Apple CD-ROM, I encountered some jerkiness and a few delays.
So I copied the files over to a partition on my CDC Wren drive,
following the instructions on the CD. The game runs quite well from
hard disk").  

Yet you are angry that I am posting "misinformation". What is
misinformative about something that you admit is true?

2) You berate me for posting information which I haven't tested
myself, but you then cheerfully admit that my information might not
always be wrong ("Perhaps a Quadra and a faster disk would make the
game unwinnable"), because you haven't tested it.

3) You berate me for posting incomplete information about what setup 
had problems. Yet, you do not post detailed information about the
setup you used.

4) You complain that I have posted heresay, anecdotal evidence. Well,
gee, I thought I made that very clear at the top of the message. 

5) You make the point that it's not really a game and shouldn't be
called a game, even though you have up until that point, and after
that point, called it a game. Why you bother to do this, I do not
understand. It has nothing to do with my point. I do not make a claim
that Spaceship Warlock is either "good" or "bad," "game" or
"interactive movie." I claimed only that the speed of the drive on
which the files are stored affects the speed of the animation of the
game.

In the future you might wish to think harder before making a posting
like the one you have here, because your posting is internally
contradictory, off the point, and factually incorrect.

I am sorry that the information I posted did not help you, but
apparently it did help other people. Perhaps in the future we should
all send our postings to you for prior approval. After all, if they
are of no interest to you, clearly no one else on the planet wants to
see them.

bill coderre
hardly even worth bothering