Today’s intro is from the platform game Lionheart, Thalion’s last game for the Amiga. The intro opens up with a long scrolling picture, created by my favourite pixel artist Henk Nieborg. After this part comes the real surprise - the camera moves into a dungeon in pseudo 3D! I wonder if they were reusing any of the code for the impressive first person parts in Ambermoon, which was also released in 1993. Of course, it’s just a bunch of scaled sprites, but still, it’s an unusual effect I think. After our bare-chested hero grabs the armor (do you see any parallels to our previous entry?,) the intro switches to a side-view again and we see the in-game sprite getting onto his dragon friend. The remainder of the story is told in static pictures and text. Apart from the annoying pseudo-fantasy-orchestral music playing in the background, this is one of the most impressive intros that I know of on Amiga. I might be biased as a Nieborg fan, but I still think it holds up pretty well.
I was always an admirer of intros on games in general, and Amiga games in particular. It was very impressive back in the day to see some pseudo-full screen animation in a computer game. You also have to take in account that floppy space was sparse, and not many developers allowed themselves the luxury of having an extensive introduction sequence. Some of the intros I’m going to show may not be very spectacular, but I’m still getting a kick out of watching these attempts at animation. Read the rest of this entry »
Monsieur LeBalon needs to satisfy his greed for money. Help him out by navigating the skies and steal gold coins from the peaceful potatoe people living in the clouds. But beware - they are not too happy about your looting and will do everything to pop poor Monsieur LeBalon!
After browsing a website on the supposed early maps of Antartica, I thought the idea of mapping out the world without any of the high-tech equipment we have today to be pretty fascinating. Most of the maps look ridiculous from our point of view now, but I remembered an article in Zeit Magazin from a long time ago which had German politicians draw up maps of their country. The results were pretty funny. Now I tried to do the same, but up the ante a little bit - draw a world map from memory. I have to say, I used to be good in geography in school, but my memory for where countries are located is pretty spotty at best. There are a lot of embarassing blank spots in Africa, South America, Asia but also Eastern Europe. I don’t even know all the countries there. The result is a pretty Euro-centric map, as was to be expected … By the way, why not create a map yourself and post it in the comments section? You can add an extra challenge if you like and try to locate all the capitals. I decided not to do that because I couldn’t remember how to spell Reijkjavic Reykjavík. Now without further ado, behold! I give you the world according to me:
Money is always short when it comes to spaceflight. While NASA does have a rather large budget in comparison to ESA for example, very little seems to come out of it if you look at the development time of the new Ares rockets which are supposed to take human beings to the moon again. If you consider that it’s already been done before a couple of decades ago, you’d think it could be repeated in a shorter time frame and with less money now since a lot of the basic research has already been done (of course, a lot of know-how has been lost as well.)
I’m not exactly a fan of what modern technology has meant for video games most of the time. With improved hardware capabilities always came graphics that tried to push the boundaries between the virtual and reality, while at the same time not quite getting there yet. Sure, it can work out real nice and a couple of genres really lend themselves quite well to photo-realistic graphics, like sports or racing games. However, I’m not always interested in reproducing what I can find outside on my screen at home. If I’m sitting in front of a games console, I want to be entertained with something unique nobody ever has thought of. Not an easy task of course. But I’m always happy if there is this one game every once in a while that breaks the usual conventions and starts doing something different with the visual potential that is inherent to the medium.
It’s been a long time since I last pixeled something. Well, I finally got off my lazy butt and made this, a kind of by-product of the work I’ve done for my thesis so far. I’m not sure if it’s 100% finished yet, maybe I’ll update the image at some later point in time.
I’m back from London just in time for the first anniversary of the blog. One of the most interesting discoveries for me was a clothing store chain that sells video game t-shirts. How cool is that! I wanted to get a black Arkanoid shirt, but since they were out of stock, I went for a Bomberman motive instead. I usually hate shopping for clothes, but this was really awesome. If they had stores in Germany or Austria as well, I’d be going out on the hunt for clothes more often. HINT HINT!
Oh, I almost forgot: to celebrate the first year, the blog can now be reached via robotriot.org as well.
