This episode was delayed a few days thanks to some acting work for Jonah Falcon. The podcast moving forward will be recorded on Wednesdays, partly because videogame releases are on Tuesdays. The guys also discuss the disaster No Man’s Sky has been.
This week’s news includes:
All this and Listener Feedback, too.
Now here is another interesting video game for the Atari 2600, the game Dragon Fire consisted of two game screens, one which you ran across a bridge while fireballs were shot at you, you had to duck or jump over the fireball. This screen was a side-scroller style screen (although it doesn’t actually scroll), at the other end of the bridge was a castle door which you’d enter to get to the next screen.
The second screen was more classic “overhead but not really” screen where you ran around this black screen picking up treasures while a dragon at the bottom shot fire at you from below.
As the game increased in level jumping fireballs became more challenging (on the first screen) as you ran because they would come quicker, more often. The second screen would get very difficult very quickly as the dragon would increase in speed and fireball spitting. You could tell how hard the dragon would be as it would change colors from lighter to darker black as you progress stages.
When you finished collecting all the treasure an exit would pop up in the corner and you had to run to it without being burned by the fireballs, that dragon would turn from left to right nearly instantly too! Then, you’d jump into the exit and be back on the bridge again, but this time it was harder. You could die up to 7 times before the game was over (just to show you how hard it is, they gave you a bunch of lives).
The game was tough, frustrating, hard to replay because you were just so nervous and jittery from the last attempt. Graphics were “okay,” nothing to rave at but it was, after all, the 2600.
You can hear all we had to say about DragonFire for the Atari 2600 on Episode 79 of the TD Gaming Podcast!
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The audio quality is a little bad on this podcast, probably because Scott goes on and on about his fractured butt-hole. However, the episode was recorded on January 1, so there isn’t much news. The gang also challenges Paul to pop in and do an episode sometime.
What news that was discussed includes:
All this and Listener Feedback. The Question of the Week remains, “What game are you looking forward to in 2018?”
The Internet has given us a communication mechanism which allows developers to better understand their audience. You can use community sites to market your content and your brand but you can also use them to better understand your market and bring your strageties and progress to your fans.
Valve Software has taken their latest successful franchise title Team Fortress 2 and followed it up with a website or “blog” which can keep their fans “in the loop.” Teamfortress.com will, no doubt, be the launch pad for much hype, community offerings and up-to-date news about the TF2 game and any updates.
“Now that we’ve settled into regular releases of content, we’ve found ourselves wanting a better way to talk directly to the TF2 community about the state of the game and some of the reasoning behind the choices we’re making. Our hope is that this blog will accomplish that, and give everyone some better insight into our development process as well.” (teamfortress.com)
Now, there is a great chance Valve will use their new launch pad to talk about upcoming games and lead you to demo’s and downloads to the TF2 title; they already link to the valve store to purchase the game. But, blogs bring in users searching for fresh content about the game and give official word to kill any bad rumors.
Call it marketing, call it journalism or developers notes, there is nothing wrong with having one more resource which represents the voice of Valves TF2 development team. Congradulations guys!
I read that Civ 6 will use DX12, so it might help low tier PCs as the low-level API reduces overhead, and it could be coded for async compute to accommodate AMD GCN and Nvidia Pascal GPUs via concurrency to gain more performance:
https://www.techpowerup.com/224112/amd-partners-with-firaxis-on-civilization-vi-development