They are, but i love the challenge. I never get that high on the list, but not being last is always great.
Have you ever actually tried it? It’s very cathartic. Like shooting down elected pilots in Rebel Galaxy Outlaw.
Well in this case it’s an interesting gameplay element: to be competitive you need to boost past other racers, and to replenish your boost you need to run over pedestrians, and pedestrians are off the track which slows you down, so there’s an interesting challenge of risk vs reward - can you leave the track and replenish your boost without losing your position overall?
I guess pedestrians could be icons or something inoffensive, but there’s a certain satisfaction in hearing the screams as people scatter. We are, of course, talking about tiny pixel people here. I remember a very old ZX Spectrum game called Zzoom, where you were tasked with shooting down enemy aircraft, but you could - entirely optionally - choose to strafe the fleeing pixel people who would fly into the air comically. Same energy.
God yes. Zzoom. I loved that game and spent most of it blasting those little pixel people - which was unfortunate as I think the goal of the game was to rescue them.
I also recall it had awesome bleepy music for the time!
I’m the same but Blood Rally Show is much less about running over people (it’s actually about surviving as one of those people, if things go wrong), and all about the race itself.
Heh, I remember that there was this Mac game called OIDS (https://www.macintoshrepository.org/4172-oids) sometime around 1989, and the object was to take your little ship (fighting the planet’s gravity and other gravity and anti-gravity hazards) down to the surface, land next to the bad guys’ factories and rescue the OIDS of the game’s title to save them from being turned into vending machines. You’d shoot the factory and then land, and the OIDS would come running out and get on your ship, and then you’d fly back up to the mother ship and deliver them, and often come back for more.
Anyway, sometimes though, when you’d filled your quota for a particular planet you could shoot the factories open then shoot the OIDS as they ran around below. There was even a little flame effect on them as they went down. >;-).
It’s an ST game first!
Okay, pedantic me will show himself out.
Ha, I didn’t know that. I always knew the Amiga and ST had some cool games on them but what was their market share compared to Apple II’s, Macs and “IBM-Compatibles” as they were then known?
I’m so glad you pointed this out first. :) Yes, OIDS was spectacular. That, and Dungeon Master, were the two games that convinced us to buy an Atari ST and not an Amiga. Ahem. Later we did buy an Amiga, but for a while there I was a total ST fanboy (“Yes, the Amiga has more colours and better sound, but the ST has a faster processor, so Starglider is much better on the ST, and the only reason those top-down 2D games are really smooth on the Amiga is because it’s cheating because it has that blitter chip that’s…” etc). Oh dear.
They weren’t big in America. Pretty popular in Europe and Australia.
Well durn, I did decently well on today’s challenge, but it told me afterwards I didn’t set a score yet. I’ve had that happen before on the daily challenge.
FTL not only did two wonderful games, but also had an amazing name, one that would have resonated very well with Brian.
OIDS sounds like a Choplifter remake. You could pop the hostages there, too.
As for the joy of running over pedestrians: try driving the same stretch of I405 for roughly 20 years
Some Divinity Original Sin 2. I still have my issues with it but as I understand the systems better my overall impression improves - it’s a shame it’s so bad at explaining its own mechanics.
Also, learning to play AoW:Planetfall finally. Been a fan of this series since it started, but some of the mechanics here are a substantial enough departure that I’m actually playing the tutorial!
It was a mix between Thrust (or Lunar Lander, even) and Choplifter.
It featured a level editor and was really impressive, technically. FTL was great.
A shareware 2.0 version was released in the late 90s or early 2ks, with compatibility with modern Macs. I seem to recall from the readme it was done by one of the original author.
Wait sorry which games are these?
We’re talking about this old late 80’s Atari ST/Mac game called OIDS – I mentioned it above. Here’s some video of gameplay from the Atari ST version, made pretty recently. There were the aforementioned gravity traps/repellers, turrets shooting at you etc.
Oh god I played a game just like this recently:
I was referring to the company’s name (and speefy logo too, displayed at the first second of this video) :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGrRmbnEvnw
WHOOSH!
That level editor kept me playing for years. I’d quickly create these most ridiculous levels with caverns full of turrets and other shit, and try and conquer them. Today it looks like your typical shareware game, but at the time it took the classic Thrust formula and polished it ridiculously. It just had a great feel to it. And the greatest thing were the glowing red lights in all the structures! Oh god, I loved those glowing red lights. No seriously, my 8-bit ZX Spectrum could not even hope to do glowing red lights. These things were important back then, like smooth scrolling on a home computer (a feat not achieved for several years after this).
