Re: Speaking of old games...

On 4/21/2024 4:41 PM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

On Sat, 20 Apr 2024 22:08:25 +0000, ant@zimage.comANT (Ant) wrote:
 

Mike S. <Mike_S@nowhere.com> wrote:

On Sat, 20 Apr 2024 10:42:28 -0400, Spalls Hurgenson
<spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:

>

My games on CD-ROM are far more numerous. I can't remember which was
the first game I purchased on CD-ROM, but "Kings Quest V" was probably
one of the first.

>

This one is easy for me to remember. It was The 7th Guest. But King's
Quest V is up there for me as well.

>
Those aren't action games. /s

  Oho, it's like that, is it? ;-)
 The thing is, until the mid 90s, most action games were small enough
not to NEED CD-ROMs. "Doom" shipped on three (?) floppy disks and,
installed, needed maybe 10MB disk-space. The games that benefitted the
most were adventure games, since they had the most expansive and
detailed worlds (not to mention the most talkative characters). So
most CD-ROM games were for that genre first.
 Still... first /action/ game for PC that came on CD-ROM?
 Hmmm... I have a CD-ROM for "D/Generation" has a 1991 copyright on
it... but I'm not sure if that's the copyright of the game (which was
also released on floppy) or for the CD-ROM. I remember buying the game
on floppy, so I assume the CD-ROM version came much later.
 "Rebel Assault" from 1993 is a more likely candidate. It was certainly
one of the earliest made-for-CD action games, as opposed to shovelware
dumped onto CD-ROM because the medium was cool. It was such a
disappointing game; pushed by LucasArts as a potential sequel to its
award-winning X-Wing, it turned out to be an extremely simplistic
rail-shooter. Worse, the technology of the time meant that - in order
to get a smooth framerate - the full-screen video was filled with
compression artifacts that made the game really hard to look at. We
forgave it, of course, because CD-ROM and FMV were the new hotness at
the time, but it really was quite a terrible game.
 

That's interesting, I had thought Rebel Assault came a bit earlier than X-Wing. But no, RA was out half a year after X-Wing.
I do think it made more sense as a non-pc game. I think it was mostly developed as a console game, and the DOS version just came out to capture that market as well. It makes more sense as a console game of the time: it has a more simplistic gameplay ready to be played by controller, and the whole game is basically designed to showcase the advanced capabilities of the systems it was supposed to run on (mostly the ill-fated 3DO, but also the Sega CD).
Is it good? No, but it gave me a Star Wars fix when that wasn't so easy to get. I mean it was the 90s before Episode 1, they didn't just throw Star Wars media at you at that point.
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