Hi Tom.
Your knolidge of the early arcade games is probably better than mine, sinse
the sort of games I grew up playing in the arcades were things like double
dragon, ninja turtles, mortal combat and street fighter 2.
One issue I have noticed though, is when adapting an arcade game, some
developers sacrifice gameplay complexities that differenciate the game from
others for reasons of audio.
Take Liams duckhunt game.
the original duckhunt had objects moving at not only faster speed, but any
angle, and you had to targit not just left and right, but up and down as
well.
because though Liam missed completely the vertical dimention sinse that's
harder to show in audio, the game plays much like space invaders, where as
originally it wouldn't.
Actually I do rather wish Liam had inserted some vertical targiting, even if
this meant altering the nes sfx of the ducks or inserting some extra sound
such as wind to show vertical position, simply because this would've made
the game less like the usual left/right targiting affair.
Pipe is another one.
In the graphical version, it's not just a matter of physically scrolling
through a number of pipes one of which will fit, but actually logically
working out amount of space available vs the pipes you have in a very quick
manner, but once again, this concept was removed from the audio version.
I think that is my real objection to the arcade genre, that sinse the amount
of information possible to show in audio is less than in a graphical game,
games have been simplified down to something of a baseline.
Take something like asteroids.
Yes, it may be possible to show rocks blowing up into smaller rocks and your
spaceship avoiding them in audio, but in no sense could you easily show a
huge screen with your ship in the center with a 360 degree field of fire all
around you and asteroids coming from all angles.
I would be reasonably willing to bet that were a developer to create an
audio asteroids, one of the first design changes they'd make would be to
reduce the game to only a left/right field of fire to save on audio.
Beware the grue!
Dark.
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