Hi Dark, Well, obviously some games are going to be harder to translate in to audio than others. I think bomberman would be possible, and you could be over complicating it some. I haven't thought it totally through as well as you have, but having played the original eons ago I think an audio version could be possible. What I am thinking would be difficult is games where there are no audio equals for the items in the game. For example take a classic game like Mario brothers. I have been doing allot of thinking about it, and honestly some of the things has me baffled how to represent the same things in audio. Take the blocks Mario has to break to get items. How would you represent them, and not sound corny in the process. Then, there are special flowers in Mario that shrink Mario, restore Mario, make Mario Super Mario, and one that gives Mario fire ability, etc... You have to have some auditory way of making the different flowers and items apparent to a blind gamer as they would to a sighted gamer, but not dumb or silly in the process. One way I can imagine it being done is a looping item indicater that says fire flower, fire flower, fire flower, over and over until you take it. That is how Phil did the fruit in Packman and while being different it was a pretty good solution for that interesting problem. However, for a sighted gamer that would be exceedingly annoying.
Dark wrote: > also, there are one or two types of game perspective that it strikes me > would be very difficult to translate into audio. As a thought experiment, > I've been considdering ways to translate various main stream games into > audio, and mostly I can come up with tactics to do it, even in games that > rely heavily on the vertical as well as the horizontal plain such as full > scrolling 2D platformers, with or without use of ladders (nods at Thom and > Monti). > > However, one genre that entirely escapes my efforts are games like Bomberman > or the various boulderdash style games, top down perspective games heavily > reliant on four directional spacial puzles with significant game events > occurring sometimes at great distance from the charactor. I've totally > wracked my brains but other than loading the games down with so many grid > coordinates, different sorts of audio scan and hosts of speak keys to the > point where they became glorified interactive fiction, I can't think of a > way to translate them into audio. > > Of course, i'm only one person, and what I can't figure out somebody else > probably can (in fact in my case, somebody else nearly always can!), but I > think we should remain open to the possibility that certain mainstream games > might not translate into audio. > > Of course, on the other side of the coin, there are Audio games who's > experience is actually highly enhanced by the factt that they Are! audio > games (I'd count dyna man, Esp pinball extreme, Superliam and probably quite > a few other games in this catagory), therefore I deffinately think there's > some mileage in being experimental with audio games and not always just > trying to emulate main stream games (though obviously, translation of > mainstream games into audio is a good thing too). > > sorry for the minor wrant here. > _______________________________________________ Gamers mailing list .. Gamers@audyssey.org To unsubscribe send E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] You can visit http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org to make any subscription changes via the web.
