What games are you playing currently?

[BigFoot]

I just beat Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus.

[Random_Spock]

I'm in the middle of playing Golden Sun: Dark Dawn. It's a pretty good game so far .

[Lor'Vela]

Jadzia wrote:

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Yes, we had one of these.

I remember Gauntlet as an arcade game. One time when I went on holiday in the early 90s, there was an arcade room where we stayed, and this was the one machine that all of the kids would gather around.

If you enjoy Gauntlet, try 'Atic Atac'. It's a lot more fun.

I never really got into Atic Atac, despite it being rated as one of the Spectrum's finest. Out of my collection, Head Over Heels is probably the best rated. Brilliant isometric game.

Anyways, I attempted to play a massively underrated game yesterday called Sacrifice, created by Shiny about 10 or so years ago. Unfortunately, the latest Nvidia cards/drivers cause a severe lag and tearing effect. I can only hope a future driver release can fix that.

Hopefully, Civ 5 is due to arrive for me tomorrow, so I'll be playing that the next few days.

[Lor'Vela]

Oops, sorry for the accidental double post.

[Jadzia]

Loaded Sleigh wrote:

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I never really got into Atic Atac, despite it being rated as one of the Spectrum's finest. Out of my collection, Head Over Heels is probably the best rated. Brilliant isometric game.

I have a some good memories of those old games, and I enjoyed the feel of the 8-bit era over what we have today. It felt cheerful and carefree somehow, which is a feeling that PC's have never given me.

The 8/16-bit era is also on par with my own game programming abilities. A number of those old games I would like to remake and adapt the original gameplay. A couple of them I have, but I often lack the motivation to finish games.

A Gauntlet style game is one of those on my want to make list.

[Lor'Vela]

I grew up on the 8/16-bit era, so it's like nostalgia for me everytime I play them.

Weren't games of that era mostly written in assembly? I could never get my head around mnemonics. I guess I'm too used to OO languages.

Well, if you do make a Gauntlet remake, I'd love to check it out. All the best if you decide to.

[Jadzia]

Loaded Sleigh wrote:

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Weren't games of that era mostly written in assembly? I could never get my head around mnemonics. I guess I'm too used to OO languages.

8-bit games were mostly made in either assembly or interpreted basic, but the latter were not good. With assembler, you can control your resources better than a compiler can, and you can use opcodes that a compiler would not consider using. When you have just 16k of memory (7k of which was the screen buffer), you needed every bit you could save, and sometimes it was that tight!

Programmers nowadays don't appreciate how skilled the 8-bit programmers were to make the machines do what they did. Who now could write a graphical chess program that fits into 1kb of memory, and complete with a cpu opponent?

In the 16-bit era, memory was abundant with >512k, so C compilers tended to be used to write the bulk of games, with assembler code injected wherever efficiency was required.

Basic was also used to write some commercial games, but tended to produce lower quality end results.

[Scotty]

I am a very lazy gamer. Only just bought Dirt2 and am also halfway Vanquish (which I love). Technically I am also playing Batman Arkham Asylum, but haven't played it in months. I think that constitutes as giving up.

[ichab]

Batman: Arkham Asylum

[Jadzia]

Loaded Sleigh wrote:

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Well, if you do make a Gauntlet remake, I'd love to check it out. All the best if you decide to.

I decided to make a start on it. I've drawn some background tiles and a little program to draw a screen image from them.

If anybody here wants to help by drawing some sprites, then you may volunteer, and I'll give details.

[Jax]

Started "Halo Reach" on splitscreen co-op yesterday and had a few nice moments, one in particular I was in a wraith (I think its called) and a bigger enemy tank was causing a problem my firepower seem lacking so I teased him by going past him near the edge of a cliff he came at em full speed and I just moved out of the way and he went off the cliff

got to love a dumb and eager AI enemy.

So far seems a fun game though the story could be more engaging.

[Chemahkuu]

Riven, and still trying to get realMyst to work on Vista *headdesk*

[Mokona]

Hi all! I'm currently playing Star Wars: The Force Unleashed on my Wii Console, as well as Wii music

[Joel_Kirk]

Playing Resident Evil: Code Veronica....

...Battle Mode!...

Pretty awesome.

[John Clark]

Downloaded a game to try - 40 Stories.

It's a puzzle game where the objective is to escape an office building. Looks interesting, but I'll know more once I've started it.