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ugvm03 magazine - Retro Special! 58

Posted by CmdrTaco from the why-the-hell-not dept.
deKay writes "You might be interested in Issue 03 of "ugvm" written by the regulars of uk.games.video.misc magazine. Issue 03 is a 40-page Retro Special, and contains articles on the Fairchild Channel F console, the Supervision, and the Evolution of Text Adventures. There are also 17 pages of reviews of games, and loads more. ugvm is free, and can be downloaded in PDF format." Besides being an interesting subject matter, this is a cool way to write.
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ugvm03 magazine - Retro Special! More

ugvm03 magazine - Retro Special!

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  • Fast direct link to PDF file (Score:3, Informative)

    by ekrout ( 139379 ) on Sunday November 24, 2002 @12:35PM (#4743410) Journal
    http://www.eg.bucknell.edu/~ekrout/ugvm03lo.pdf [bucknell.edu]

  • Nostalgia (Score:2, Interesting)

    by otisaardvark ( 587437 )
    It's an obvious point to make but the games back in the day (text adventures etc) had such great gameplay that you could sit there for hours learning all the foibles tricks... people spent effort on making imaginative games which challenged your mind rather than your reflexes. Oh, for the good old days...
    • I know, nostalgia's not what it used to be :)

    • Re:Nostalgia (Score:5, Funny)

      by Poro ( 14468 ) <turtiain@NOSpAm.iki.fi> on Sunday November 24, 2002 @02:18PM (#4743982) Homepage
      It's an obvious point to make but the games back in the day (text adventures etc) had such great gameplay that you could sit there for hours learning all the foibles tricks..

      You are in a dark cavern. In the south there is a huge two headed troll blocking the exit. The troll says "It costs 10 gold coins to pass". Possible exits are north.

      > give money to troll

      I don't understand.

      > give 10 coins to troll

      I don't understand.

      > give money to troll

      I don't understand.

      > pay troll

      I don't understand.

      > F**K!!! &/#/&#&""!!!!!!!!!!!

      Troll attacks you. He hits you. You are dead. Game over.

      Oh, the nostalgia...

    • You seem to imply that text adventures are dead. They are still very much alive, although commercially they are pretty much dead. You can find a thriving community of Interactive Fiction enthusiasts who write their own games and hold their an annual competition in the newsgroups rec.arts.int-fiction and rec.games.int-fiction. All classic and newer games can be downloaded from http://ifarchive.org.

  • Game Quality (Score:2, Insightful)

    by wray ( 59341 )
    I have always felt, if we could get games that were a combination of the creativeness of those old text based adventure games, and the eye candy of Quake/Doom, you would get one of the funner games ever. I think this rarely happens, but Nintendo did well with DK64, Mario Kart64, and the Super Mario's have always been fun.

    Anyway, my point is, eye candy is the first and most important rule for game makers these days, and it ought to be the other way around. I mean, isn't Jumpman Jr. still fun :)
    • Have you ever played Deus Ex [deusex.com]? A big step towards games like you described.
    • I mean, isn't Jumpman Jr. still fun :)

      No, it isn't. I like being nostalgic about old computer systems as any other geek, but playing those old games on an emulator isn't that cool, really. I'd rather play NFS6 than Turbo Outrun.
    • Anyway, my point is, eye candy is the first and most important rule for game makers these days, and it ought to be the other way around.

      Good, I'm not the only one who thinks this is true, at least for games that are designed to be strategy games (arcade-style games are a whole different class of games).

      When computer graphics started getting better, game quality when downhill. I actually liked playing games that had lousy graphics but an engaging plot and good gameplay. A perfect example of this was Return to Zork. Horribly rendered movies in that game, but I didn't care. I loved playing the game anyway and wished Infocom had stuck to pure text adventure.

      In my view, I can name only two games that I have played that managed to give equal time to eye-candy graphics and game plot and did both extremely well: Myst and Riven. Never seen the feat duplicated. Riven has the extra distinction of being the only non-arcade game that captured my wife's attention and got her hooked on it too. Granted, I have not played many of this genre of games recently (I soured on them when none came up to the standards of Riven), so there may be some that have since come up to those standards, but I don't have the time to play every one of them and find out.

      And if you really want to see nostalgia taken to extremes: I miss the old text adventures so much that I'm in the process of designing a Perl module to allow me to write new ones.

      Yes, I'm living the past. The past was a lot more fun.

      • For Zork purists, RTZ was only so-so. Infocom was really Activision by that point, and most of the original "implementors" were gone.

        However, before you launch into making your own parser, you might want to do a little surfing. The 'interactive fiction' community is still alive and writing games in the old-style. I'd recommend taking a look at Inform [inform-fiction.org] to start, but then again, I'm a little biased.

  • I don't really understand why it's so cool to publish a magazine in PDF? Is this a regular treeware mag that they give away online for free? I didn't get that impression from the website (because of the lack of for instance a cover price on the cover inside the PDF.)

    If you want to publish stuff for free and distribute it the easiest way (using the Internet) then great! But why use this oldskool format? Is anyone going to print this out using a colorprinter and then staple it together and read it? Not me. I use the Internet because I like the format this new digital medium makes possible.

    So the mag looks great and I think it's an excellent idea to have a bunch of newsgroup regulars put together a mag, but can't they just put it on a website? Or if they want perhaps put it in XML. That way I can read it on my PDA, apply my personal stylesheets and use handy stuff like hyperlinks(wow!)

    Regardless, they have a new regular reader anyway.
    • Yeah - and if it weren't PDF they wouldn't have tens-hundreds of thousands of /.'ers downloading a 2meg file from their server just to find out they aren't interested in it at all.

      [ah, a .edu - therein lies the "don't care" factor about bandwidth usage]

      • Re:Old format to new format-DjVu (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Here's my little blurb for a format that gets little attention, but would be of great benifit for everyone. It's even open-source.

        DjVu [djvuzone.org]

        DjVu on the web [djvuzone.org]

        Plugins for various browsers [djvuzone.org]

        The size is considerably smaller than PDF with equal or better quality, and can be printed out.

        They do need people to help with the libre version over at Sourceforge.

    • Absolutely!

      Magazines are a tired medium, ans to try to emulate hard copy in a PDF is not necessary.

      Publishing in a totally electronic, unique format would be nice. The way cover CD's on PC magazines do. Use mark-up language, but add nice things like java, PHP and stuff...

  • Like an early outlook virus? (Score:4, Funny)

    by murphj ( 321112 ) on Sunday November 24, 2002 @12:51PM (#4743480) Homepage
    From the article about text adventures, and Don Woods' attempt to contact Will Crowthers:
    To do this, he sent an email to crowther@* - that is, an email to every known sitename on the Internet.
    Think spammers and virus writers wish it were still this easy?

  • Upcoming Amiga + Retro show in Germany (Score:4, Informative)

    by Mike Bouma ( 85252 ) on Sunday November 24, 2002 @01:02PM (#4743533) Homepage
    For Retro fans interested in c64 technology and nostalgia, the upcoming Amiga Messe [think42.com] in Aachen may be of interest.

    Next to Amiga products, Jeri Ellsworth will travel from the US to the show to launch a new c64 compatible clone, called the c-one.

    The c-one [geocities.com] is a MicroATX form factor board, with at its core a (65c816 processor running approximately at 20 MHz) the 65c816 is a 6502 compatible processor with a 24 bit address range extra instructions that access the full memory range are added to the 6502 core.

    Another interesting product which will be sold at the Aachen fair is the new Catweasel MK3 PCI/Flipper board. This PCI board can be used with the c-one, AmigaOne boards, Pegasos boards, Classic Amigas and even ordinary PCs to read just about any disk format using ordinary mainstream diskdrives (including 880kb/1,76 MB Amiga disks and c64 disks!), connect digital c64/Amiga/Atari joysticks, connect Amiga keyboards or even add a real c64 SID soundchip'.

    Here's a picture:
    http://home.t-online.de/home/indcomp/bin/cwmk3.jpg [t-online.de]

    For more information about this Catweasel product look here [jschoenfeld.de].
  • "there is little more to observe than an creaky,wooden cupboard set securely into the east wall and an old dusty kitchenette occupying a larger portion of the littered floor."

    >Look

    Wooden Cupboard
    Dusty Kitchenette
    Obvious Exits: North South West

    *eyes glaze over* Ah.. the good old days of text adventures and muds.. damn you EverQuest for being so.. so.. ah forget it.. I love you Verant :P *shifty eyes* For anyone still interested in mudding please check out this extensive list :)

    http://www.mudconnect.com/

  • Text games? Some of us are still addicted (Score:4, Interesting)

    by OldMiner ( 589872 ) on Sunday November 24, 2002 @01:25PM (#4743643) Journal

    Any self-respecting geek probably knows full well, but worth taking any opportunity to plug the medium. MUDs (Multi User Dungeons) are still alive and well, and MUD Connector [mudconnector.com] lists about 2,000 currently active (as in, running now, have been running within the last two months).

    To those unaware (for shame!), MUDs (and variations such as MUCKs, MOOs, and MUSHes) are BBS-era text-based games, the precursors to MMORPGs such as Ultima Online, Everquest, Anarchy Online, and so on. There are some graphical (and freely available) MUDs out there, some listed on MUD Connector, but most are still text based. Generally, MUDs aren't completely original codebases, but derived from an open source basis, such as CircleMUD [circlemud.org] which just finally got out of 3.0 beta and released 3.1.

    I administer a small MUD, passed down to me from two previous big egos, which has been up for somewhere around 1995, give or take a few months of server issues. Unfortunately, I'm too ashamed to post a link.

    • Re:Text games? Some of us are still addicted (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      And for those still playing and writing single-player text adventures, it's still a thriving (albeit not commercially viable) hobby, as the author would have known if he'd gone to all the research trouble of, oh, a Google search.

      I'm pretty sure that the Annual IF Competition was even announced on Slashdot this year.
    • I went to the MUD Connector and found my favorite MUD from college days... ROM (Rivers of Mud). Still very much like I remembered it. Played a few tricks, too...

      > emote has his hands in your pockets. Your purse feels lighter!

      It was a great blast from the past ('93? '94?). But I quickly ended it because I don't want that addiction back. I had the lowest GPA in the dorms that sememster (0.0 gpa) but I managed to survive without even getting on academic probation... and graduating.

      Ahhh... chain smoking, muds, partying. It was fun.
    • Any self-respecting geek probably knows full well, but worth taking any opportunity to plug the medium. MUDs (Multi User Dungeons) are still alive and well

      Not a MUD, but in terms of text based games, I still play Angband [angband.org] on a regular basis, just as I played Moria, Larn, Omega and Hack before it. And no, I don't use any of the new fangled graphic tiles that are available for it now. It was always a great game when it was text only, and I see no reason to change that. A large part of the appeal is the depth of the game. Modern games are too shallow, and too easy to complete. Angband is an immensely detailed and immersive game, and there's nothing in the modern era that compares. Diablo was a blatant ripoff of the game style, but had all of the depth and variety removed, and was *way* too easy.

  • Fairchild! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by gpinzone ( 531794 ) on Sunday November 24, 2002 @01:25PM (#4743645) Homepage Journal
    WOW. That's a blast from the past indeed! The system had giant yellow cartridges and the games were pretty mediocre. I do remember one cool aspect about them were the joysticks. They were designed to not only go up, down, left, and right, but they could also be pulled up and down and be twisted left and right. The biggest problem with the fairchild controllers were that they didn't have a fire button and were not unpluggable from the unit! A later design of the controllers did include a fire button and joystick ports.

    I'd love to get my hands on a working version of those controllers. Maybe they could be used for modern day 3D shooters, etc.
  • Actually, I'm glad they used PDF. It looks a whole lot more professional. The pages are bright and happy. But a UK focus on video consoles probably isn't my thing. But it looks nice, IMHO.
  • Indeed... I'm glad someone else out there is so excited about Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island. To go as far as calling it the best 2D platformer though? Could be, although I think the Metal Slug series give it a run for its money.

  • Game Programmers (Score:3, Interesting)

    by iamdrscience ( 541136 ) on Sunday November 24, 2002 @02:52PM (#4744189) Homepage
    Apparently, there were only like 4 programmers for the Channel F's 26 games. I was talking with my brother about possibly programming for the 2600 and he challenged me to program for the Channel F. Not only would that be a problem because there is very little information about around for the Channel F, but also because at least 2 of the 4 guys that know (or knew) how to program the Channel F are not alive any more.
  • OH god, this was my first console! I was seven. I can't tell you how many times I played #10 - MAZE - CAT AND MOUSE. I had the computer movements memorized and could move through the maze at will. What memories!
  • With being one of the contributors to this issue (With my rushed Top 5) I am amazed how big this magazine has got. Spectacular!

    Anyway, this magazine is 100% free and is not affiliated with any non-electronic magazine. It also it entirely submitted by the readers of the uk.video.games.misc newsgroup.

    An hurrah for free magazines!

  • Channel F Emulator (Score:2, Informative)

    by palazzol ( 613204 )
    In case anyone wants to experience the Fairchild Channel F on their computer, it has been emulated as part of MESS [mess.org]. I know because I worked on that code. :)
  • What? PDF? Moveable type? Newsletter format?

    Oh, I get it...Taco is impressed with the lack of grammatical and spelling errors in the publication. Yes Taco, that is cool.
  • Everything you've learned in school as "obvious" becomes less and less
    obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no
    solids in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of a solid.
    There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no
    straight lines.
    -- R. Buckminster Fuller

    - this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...

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