From: kludge@carson.u.washington.edu (Eric Moon)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.games
Subject: Re: Saw Wing Commander for Amiga in story last week - how is it?
Date: 13 Jan 93 04:11:14 GMT
Article-I.D.: shelley.1j04p2INN572
Distribution: world
Organization: University of Washington, Seattle
NNTP-Posting-Host: carson.u.washington.edu

In article <kkrebs.07cg@amilink.UUCP> amilink!kkrebs@citrus.sac.ca.us (Ken Krebs) writes:
>In article <1irl2eINNhn2@shelley.u.washington.edu> kludge@carson.u.washington.edu (Eric Moon) writes:
>> Hmm I have Ami WC - here's a few true details for you.
>> 
>> 3.  If you have the wing commander demo that's been floating around,
>>     throw it out - it's not really related to the game.
>
>It's related, it just has better graphics in the main parts.  i.e. where
>your commander is talking with you, where the alert animation is shown
>(guys running) and where your ship takes off and when your ship lands.
>They are 32 color pictures that look FABULOUS!  I wish they would have made
>the game a 32 color game with the graphics contained in the demo.

That demo looks utterly unrelated to me.  The scale routines are optimized
differently (you can tell!)  the graphics are different everywhere, it uses
hardware where it should and shows cheezy and extremely hard to see (they
look pretty fake to me) pictures of the ships.  The killer is the commander
gfx - why in the world would Mindscape go to the trouble of nicely porting
them and then LOWER the quality (the graphics aren't bad because of 16 colors,
because the game uses 32!  Sheesh - count em!) remove the blitter routines
which they worked so hard on, drop the predone landing ship affect etc for
a game they expect to sell???  I'd buy that the person who wrote the demo
saw what mindscape was doing, but that demo does not make sense if 'scape
made it!

>> 5.  The program seems very stable so far - it's only crashed once or
>>     twice, and not when I've just completed a mission and want to save...
>
>Never crashed once on my system.  I'm running on an Amiga 3000-25/40.

Yes - it's very stable.  I'm the ultimate crasher tho - I've never met a
program I couldn't crash within the hour :)

>> 6.  There is no control on the navigation screen - you must go through
>>     the nav points in order, not skipping any.
>
>When on the Nav screen, just hit spacebar to cycle between Nav points and
>hit return to accept the current position.

Thanks for the info - it was undocumented.

>> 8.  The back of the box, showing obviously touched up 256 color images,
>>     happily says "...Amiga screens may vary." :)
>
>Of course!  Blah.  It would have been a thousand times better if they had
>made it a 32 color game instead of a dithered 16 color game.

This game is a 32 color game dithered to a spaceship-optimized palette.  I can
count more than 16 colors just by pausing it!

>*********** NewOrderDepecheModeUltravoxViolentFemmesKillingJoke |Amiga 3000|
>*Ken Krebs* SkinnyPuppyLaTourBauhausBookOfLoveModernEnglishB52s |25Mhz/6Meg|
>*********** FishBoneBigCountryJoyDivisonSiouxsie&TheBansheesXTC |Multitask!|
>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>       UUCP: uunet!csusac.ecs.csus.edu!citrus!amilink!kkrebs
>   InterNet: amilink!kkrebs@citrus.sac.ca.us or: kkrebs@citrus.sac.ca.us
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.games