Karateka, along with everything else Jordan Meschner did following it, starting the Prince of Persia series.
It’s a nice evolution of personal style.
I’ve more or less dropped out of mainstream gaming so have no idea how the more recent Prince of Persia games play, nor if he has any involvement… but anyone who knew the original games should understand that these games did something foundational with movement and interface, helping the player to feel involved in the action.
the last prince of persia Meschner directly worked on was Sands of Time, which is imho well worth playing.
the other 3d Prince of Persias by ubisoft upto two thrones are still good games, but they lost a bit of the 1001 nights feel. The darker parts where there in sands of time, but warrior within goes all in on dark and edgy and just loses a bit of that timeless flair and is very much a mid 2000s game.
can’t talk about ubisofts prince output after two thrones, they never found their way into my collection.
Alright, so here’s my case for Thief, the Looking Glass Studios game.
Thief, on its own, is a great game and basically shares the claim to originating a lot of ideas behind stealth in games along with MGS, which came out the same year.
What many don’t know is how incredibly innovative what they were doing with their engine tech was. In another timeline, id software were mildly successful action game makers while LGS became the industry defining mega success. The Dark Engine refines a lot of ideas present in Ultima Underworld and marries them to tech that was decades ahead of its time.
Thief had, probably, the first ECS in gaming. They also had their own rendering technique using “portals” that was a bit slower than id’s BSP trees but allowed for insane geometry. They also had an incredible system for events called stimulus-response that was doing things like Breath of the Wild’s “chemistry engine” again, decades before it would be rediscovered.
They weren’t just making games, these were really simulations of a limited world with complex interactions. If the rest of the industry had caught onto their good practices, who knows what the landscape would look like today!
My then-girlfriend-now-wife and I went to a temporary video game exhibit at the Museum of the Moving Image. A lot of the mainstays you’d expect were there, particularly from the arcade era, including ground-breaking titles like Dragon’s Lair (which is fascinatingly beautiful and a bad video game at the same time). At one point, one of the signs mentioned moving on from vector graphics, which my wife had no idea what that meant, so I immediately looked around for an Asteroids machine. You don’t really get how one of those games looks unless you’re playing on the genuine article. That’s the kind of thing that probably ought to be in a museum most.
I recently went to Galloping Ghost in Illinois, which is now the world’s largest arcade. It’s got nearly every arcade game you can think of, and they do a good job fixing them up. They have an F-Zero AX machine. I’ve always wanted to play one of those. I went to Galloping Ghost two years in a row, and it was broken both times. Turns out they’re having trouble sourcing the displays. As you go around the place, most machines are working, but even only a year later, more of them had display problems. I imagine even just getting regular old CRTs is going to make this kind of thing way harder as time goes on, and a good CRT does affect how these old games look, because they were designed for them. This is the kind of burden I’d expect a museum to take on.
For me, it has got to be tetris. It is still thriving, even today. Anyone can understand the base concept and play it : it’s simple and enjoyable, anywhen. Plus, it runs on remotely anything.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne