Tea Leaves

Here are some things I hate about the Grand Theft Auto games, in no particular order.
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Thurston Searfoss and Devoted Fan

Excerpts from an interview with Thurston Searfoss, author of The Lost Admiral Returns. We recently published a comprehensive review of the game.

peterb: “How long was the development cycle for the game?”

Thurston: “It’s been about 4 years, part time. I do a number of other different jobs. So a lot longer than I would have liked. I’m a part time developer, marketer — the whole works, for good or bad — so I have to switch to alternative tasks, and then I get very frustrated at how long it takes to do anything”

What development environment and tools did you use to create the game?

“For tools, the usual C++ environment. A lot of them are actually older, so I’m actually using fastpath for file formats, that kind of stuff. I’m having to use DirectX, of course. I evaluated a couple of 3D engines but rejected them in favor of building a 2D sprite system, where I’d have more control.”
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The wonderful gift of the Atari Anthology (more on that tomorrow) inspired my relatives and I to talk about (and play) some other retro games on various emulators. When I fired up Richard Bannister’s Mugrat, I got the following splash screen…

…complete with animated snowflakes and “Winter Wonderland” playing in the background. Since I don’t think the Colecovision actually had a clock and battery, I can only assume this was Richard’s easter egg, specifically for mugrat. In which case: Thanks, Roger! Joyeux Noël to you, too.

And, since this is an entry about an obsolete 8-bit game console, it feels somehow appropriate to note that this is the 256th article on Tea Leaves. Thanks to everyone who both reads the site and writes for it, for keeping it interesting and fun for this entire year.

As I mentioned earlier I bought Half-Life 2 last week. Here is a short meditation on why the game is perhaps the perfect shooter.
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This week Salon published an especially depressing The Year in Games article, full of various commentators saying obvious and, for the most part, untrue things.

My favorite had to be the “he’s usually smarter than that” Greg Costikyan talking about how there’s “no indie games industry.” I’d be willing to bet that any random game by Ambrosia software has sold more copies, than, say, any Nokia N-Gage game. Would it be accurate, therefore, for me to say “there’s no mobile gaming industry?” Or is the metric for whether an industry exists not whether you book any revenue, but just whether a company is spending money?

The other aspect of the article was how it’s pretty clear that pretty much none of the commentators — except for Costikyan — have ever played any game that wasn’t given to them by some PR flack as a freebie. Halo this, Half-Life that, and their version of being “edgy” was recommending Namco’s Katamari Damacy . And the guy who said the best game of the year was the unplayable — but oh so corporate — Ninja Gaiden made me weep bitter tears of blood.

Stop asking why games aren’t innovative. They are. It’s just that the games you’re choosing to play aren’t innovative.

And if you want to know why that is, just look in the mirror.

Here’s another game that I vividly remember playing, but could not recall the name of. A little research has helped me figure it out, however. (Yes, I’ve updated this article since last night, when I still didn’t know the name and was bemoaning my fate).

AWACS (Click to enlarge)

It was an Apple ][ game. My memory of it was as follows: The game was played on a map of Europe, with the Soviet Union on the east and West Germany and environs on the west. Soviet fighters and bombers would appear on the map, identified by little call signs (”Tu-26″ “Mi-25″ “Su-11″). The planes would begin flying towards their western targets. In response to this, the player’s job was to select an appropriate airbase and dispatch a fighter plane from that base to intercept a given Soviet plane.
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