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This GIF has meme potential… https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1354115019504373760
Sort of like the “Dem Bones” cutscene from Secret of Monkey Island II.
I linked to the original MS-DOS version so the younger folks can see how we used to have to live.
I played the Amiga version originally, which didn’t look quite as good as the VGA version, and didn’t have continuous background music like the PC version did.
I played the Amiga version originally, which didn’t look quite as good as the VGA version, and didn’t have continuous background music like the PC version did.
LucasArts built this really cool music engine for Monkey Island 2 and their later games called iMUSE, that let them fade tracks in and out and transition between songs seamlessly, like a movie. They really used it to good effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMUSE
I’m a huge Amiga computer fan, but it was really good at some types of games and not at others. Graphic adventure games were hit-or-miss in quality, because the artists had to cut everything down from 256 color palettes to 32 color palettes (out of 4096).
At best, you could get 64 colors onscreen at once with extra-half-brite mode, which used six bitplanes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Halfbrite_mode
Or you could try to use HAM mode, but how would you animate the characters on top of it? They’d have to be sprites. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hold-And-Modify
Or you could try to use HAM mode, but how would you animate the characters on top of it? They’d have to be sprites. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hold-And-Modify
I’m pretty sure the Amiga had memory bandwidth limits for chip RAM that made it impractical for LucasArts or Sierra to try to use anything more than 32 color palettes. The Sierra ports were almost unplayable on non-accelerated Amigas because it was C code ported from 16-bit x86.
I think the sad experience playing the Amiga port of King’s Quest V was one thing that pushed me towards the idea that 486 VGA PC’s would be the best gaming systems due to the enhanced graphics, sound, and CPU power.
King’s Quest VI had a proper Amiga port (they outsourced it).
King’s Quest VI had a proper Amiga port (they outsourced it).
Sierra paid Revolution Software in the UK to port all the assets of KQ6 to run on their own Virtual Theatre game engine, which ran great on Amiga, so that’s why that game is more playable on slow Amigas than KQ5 was: https://kingsquest.fandom.com/wiki/King%27s_Quest_VI:_Heir_Today,_Gone_Tomorrow_(Amiga)
I’m not a huge Sierra fan, actually.
I’m not a huge Sierra fan, actually.
Interesting thread about good and bad text/graphic adventures as far as being mean to the player with puzzles that rely on finding individual pixels on the screen or being punished if you don’t do some non-obvious thing much earlier in the game. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19673247
