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Reply With QuoteI can understand not wanting to go into the lonely quiet room of the TN forum, but there's still general gaming.
Yeah, I know this should probably go in the Terra Nova forum, but the only people who've been there in the last two hundred years are:
(a) Me, doing 'research' for this article
(b) ... no, that's it
(ok not quite, but I think more people will see it here)
So yes.
I email-chatted to Dan Schmidt (who seemed to be a very nice chap) about Terra Nova for the lovely people at IncGamers and thencut and paste his replies into an articlewrote about it. Maybe you're interested in that, I don't know! You should be, obviously.
If you are, it's here: http://www.incgamers.com/Features/162/Terraforming
Last edited by Paz; 26th Feb 2009 at 22:20.
I can understand not wanting to go into the lonely quiet room of the TN forum, but there's still general gaming.
Works for me!
Really, Paz?in an attempt to make the player feel as emersed in the action as possible.
Of couse, when you enter Parliament, you will all also be ripped to the teats on fine cocaine...
Good article. As a gamer who only played into this game a bit, about two years ago, one thing I really felt that was missing was multiplayer. Of course that wasn't to be expected back then. But nowadays a single player mode would just be tacked on to this kind of game.
I also felt that the interface was very much inherited from System Shock. The resolution could be set higher than 320x200 though. In the article it sounds like that was the best the game could do. Or Dan Schmidt makes it sound so.
In any case I linked your article in the TN thread over at Strangebedfellows. A 2009 review plus interview of an LGS classic demands my respect. Hat duly removed.
With that said, maybe I will finish TN-Portable one day. I still have parts of it lying around here. It isn't that hard to run.
Last edited by Kolya; 26th Feb 2009 at 17:40.
Hey man, I'm no sub-ed. Fixed now - YOUR COMPLAINTS GET RESULTS!Originally Posted by Fafhrd
Really, Paz?
(Adding 'amusing spelling errors' tag)
Thanks! Extra coverage is always appreciated.
Last edited by Paz; 26th Feb 2009 at 17:46.
Ultima Underworld wasn't the first game ever to feature real time first-person environments. Catacomb Abyss preceeded it by about 5 months. Quite possibly there were others before that one as well. SECONDLY, when the LGS team were writing about passing on the flag of innovation to other developers I don't think they were encouraging anyone to make a sequel, like you're suggesting. In fact, I think they were talking about the exact opposite of that.
Otherwise, good article!
I agree that when they wrote it they wouldn't have been looking for people to interpret their words as 'please make a Terra Nova sequel' - however, it's been thirteen years since TN now, and nine since LGS wrote that message. It doesn't seem too unreasonable to hope that the sentiment could be applied to a modern TN follow-up, IF it proved suitably innovative (and not just a shoddy cash-in which clearly nobody would want!)
It would need jump-jets though.
Powerful, amazing jump-jets.
Nice article and I for one would welcome a modern Terra Nova. It was, well actually still is, a truly great game apart form the rubbish FMV. I haven't played it in a few years but this write up has got me in the mood. Of course whether I can get it working is another matter.
Nice one, Paz. I played the game quite a bit but I don't think I ever finished it.
I played the TN demo back when it came out. Right off of a Computer Gaming World demo CD, most likely. I really liked the demo, but for some reason never bought the game itself. Probably because I was a poor high school kid at the time.
I have managed to get the game now though. I played it a bit a while back. It certainly is rather unique and entertaining. It's really too bad that this kind of mech simulation is so dead now. The variety of games was just so much better back in the '90s. At least for the kind of games I'm into. Or was into, more accurately.
btw, where can i find lesbian vampire porn?
Google Laurel K. Hamilton.
Well, there's also this. Kinda.
Tampon porn would also work.
Paz is a legitimate journalist now, and I've achieved nothing with my life! DAMN YOU PARRISH
I came to Terra Nova when it was already old - after Thief, at least - but still enjoyed it enormously. Even the cheese!
Now that's dialogue."My ears were burning.."
"Hopefully the FIRE will SPREAD!"
And I still have the Sara background music burned into my brain.
I seem to remember PC Gamer UK attributing Terra Nova's commercial failure to it not looking good in screenshots, which.. is possible. You only notice the impressive things like the landscape NOT being a backdrop and the sort-of-3D sprite models when you see them moving. That 3D sprite stuff was a real dead-end technology, wasn't it? I think Magic Carpet had something similar, but that's all that comes to mind.
.....
It was a dead- end technology only if your timemachine is running in reverse. 3D sprites were the precursors of modern 3D models. Once upon a time - chances are your parents hadn't met yet - computers were not that powerful and developers had to pull any number of stunts to produce the illusion of 3D.
Sprites are still in use, though today you call them imposter or billboards in most engines and most are used to display faraway object ie, objects that you generally see only from a limited number of perspectives
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hovertank_3D
well let's not go crazy ...
i'm currently transcribing five million interview quotes about Syndicate so i'll be spamming the hell out of gen-gaming again when that's ready
Syndicate's a fantastic choice for a write-up, actually. Did you manage to get in touch with any ex-Bullfrog people about it? Do linkify us to your article when you're done, we'd love to read it.
thanks!
yeah, I spoke with Sean Cooper (design/programming) - he now does flash games like Boxhead: The Zombie Wars
when it goes up I'll dig up a Syndicate-related thread to bump
If you want to dig real deep, you could say that the Mercenary/Damocles series were the first ever 3D FP games.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hovertank_3D
I remember playing Mercenary on my old Atari 800XL back in '89. It was all vector graphics, but damn if it wasn't 3D and realtime as hell. Or you could go with Damocles, which came out in '90 and used proper flat shaded polygons.
Oh, I know. I was just stating that iD themselves preceded Catacomb 3-D with a 3D game themselves.
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