From: deadman@garnet.berkeley.edu (Ben Haller)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.games
Subject: Re: Mac games vs PC Games- comparison (again!)
Date: 11 Oct 1992 19:56:36 GMT
Organization: Stick Software
NNTP-Posting-Host: garnet.berkeley.edu
Keywords: reality

In article <1992Oct11.155406.23691@midway.uchicago.edu> jon3@midway.uchicago.edu writes:
>> I guess I disagree to a certain extent.  A lot of what I see in PC games is
>> useless flash.  For some reason, PC games love to have all these splash
>> screens and long, seeming endless start-up animation.  Filler - in my
>> opinion.  If you strip off the splash screens and all that junk, what's
>> left?  A shareware game perhaps?
>
>Shareware!?  Wing Commander, Ultima Underworld, Lucasfilm's upcoming X-Wing
>game, Aces of the Pacific, Ultima LXVII (or whatever it is now).  SHAREWARE?
>It is true that PC games are packaged with a lot of fluff, but there are
>real games underneath, and they are (arguably) superior to anything out
>for the Macintosh.  Wing Commander is an exercise in "endless animation",
>with digitized sound and voices to boot.  Doesn't this MAKE the game?
>I didn't sit there between missions saying "Damn, I wish this irritating
>full-screen animated interlude would get off my screen and stop making
>all that cool music."
  Huh.  I did.  The one and only time I played Wing Commander, my
impression was that it was the most boring, fluffy game I had seen in
years.  I mean, the actual *game* really isn't all that interesting, the
music is gratuitous at best (I always just have my stereo on when I'm
playing games, and the music I have on CD is a hell of a lot better than
the stuff Wing Commander plays, so why bother?), and the "endless
animation" did indeed seem endless to me.  Games should be fast-action,
they shouldn't do all of this animation and crap unless they're adventure
games or something, and Wing Commander didn't feel nearly complex enough to
be called an adventure game...

>Someone else was making fun of Wolfenstein-3D (which is shareware for the 
>PC) because it also had low-resolution graphics.  Did you miss the real-time
>texture-mapping, digitized sound and background music?  Or were you
>paying attention?
Wolf-3D is impressive.  Much better than Wing Commander.  I wish
the Mac could do this.  On the Mac, it would be slow.  On the PC,
it is low-resolution.  Each platform has its drawbacks...
  What I wonder is: do people really care if the animation is full-screen?
It would be easy to write a version of Wolf-3D that ran in a dinky little
window (200x150 or something).  It would be small, but it would be the same
resolution as the PC version.  Would people dislike this?  What do you
think?

>I fully believe that better games are possible on the Macintosh, but that
>developers are not yet spending the time necessary to create them.  This
>IS NOT because they are lazy, it is because standards for Macintosh games
>are still very different from their PC counterparts.
  Well, if better means more fluffy like Wing Commander, I'm quite
happy with Mac games as they are.  I admit there is a lot of room for
improvement, but I would hardly hold up PC games as the goal to strive
for...

>We WILL see more and more games being written for the Macintosh which
>meet or exceed the quality of games on the PC.  This will happen because,
>as we all know, the Macintosh is fundamentally a better machine.
>We have a better engineered CPU, a superior graphics standard, built-in
>digitized sound and a native windowing system.
  As if any of this matters.  The graphics standard is really crippling for
games, as you conceded yourself, the built-in digitized sound is nice but
it sure is buggy and it sure does slow things down a lot, the windowing
system is completely irrelevant to games...and the better CPU only matters
a little - I'd rather write 68000 assembly than Intel assembly, but this
hardly makes the difference between good games and bad games.
  If games get better on the Mac, it will be because the market for them
grows, because Apple pushes harder for developers to make them, or because
there are people who are committed to making them regardless of the amount
of money they make.  It will not be because the Mac is a superior platform
in any significant way.  That is why you have better applications on the
Mac.  It has very little to do with games.

>The fact is that right now almost all of the cutting-edge games work is
>being done on PCs.  I saw some incredible stuff at CES, and very little
>of it was on Macs.
  Given this, I hardly see the reason for your above assertion that the Mac
will win out in the end.  Why should it?

-Ben Haller (deadman@garnet.berkeley.edu)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.games