Stumbling through the 3D Realms Anthology - 1987-1992

[davidn]

Wow, do I really care about this journal so little now that I haven't posted a single one of the video series I've been doing over the last few weeks? Here are the first three parts - they're basically my attempt to substitute for my obsolete dream of becoming a games programme presenter on television.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X60j-TWn414&hd=1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMOSgepPNDY&hd=1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQsIhIoIur0&hd=1

Comments

[davidn]

Oh dear god, I'd forgotten about Dominik Diamond - I suppose that's pretty much who I am here, but without the sheer aggression of constant innuendo.

There's definitely a feeling that comes with the limitations of these graphics (and the capability of the engines made to run on the computers of the time) that can't easily be replicated now :)

I know I had the shareware episodes of Dark Ages, Secret Agent and Duke Nukem - I think it was just whatever got distributed on magazine coverdisks at the time. My dad borrowed the registered disks of Commander Keen 1 from someone at his work, and it was the best thing to ever happen, finally getting to see the worlds beyond the confines of the shareware episode of something :) I remember having Monster Bash as well, but it was a cut-down version of even the first episode because at the time, a full 1MB was seen as a bit much for a game coverdisk!

How... disastrous, exactly, can a flirtation with Macs go? :X

[kjorteo]

[davidn]

Oh, great Saint Pigeonation himself :X

[kjorteo]

 

[lupineangel.livejournal.com]

Well, this was back before Macs really worked properly. You needed much more command line knowledge than anyone in our family had; sure, it had a CD-ROM drive and could do fancy things (I remember playing with a voice-recording application and learning how to set the system alert sounds to clips of me saying dumb stuff), but none of the software that you actually wanted to use worked because it was for Windows, none of the Mac software worked beyond the basics because you needed to know the ins and outs of how to set it up, occasionally it would do stupid things like crash because one program somewhere was set to colour-mode when the OS was running in black-and-white mode (for some reason), and then you'd get that lovely helpful error message with the icon that looked like a bomb, which is great for calming people down and encouraging them to think problems through rationally.

I remember Darwin's Dilemma being a fun little puzzle game, though. Though even that would occasionally generate unwinnable levels through the curse of the RNGenie.

D.F.