icemann on 29/10/2019 at 15:35
Quote Posted by Starker
This is because in the olden times you had big companies like... *checks notes* *blinks* ...EA who supported developers and creativity and saw their work as art, rather than a product. These days most of the publishers are after the bottom line and nothing else.
Well if you look at the companies original motives, which sprang from their reason for starting the company. Atari was awful to employees. Not allowing them to put their name anywhere in the games they made, treating games dev as like a production line in a factory etc. That eventually caused Trip Hawkin's and others to lead a mass exodus from Atari to go and create EA. For a good while EA was great to employees, but then somewhere in the 90s, EA began to be progressively more like the Atari of old, Trip left EA to head up the 3DO project and everything went to shit both for Atari and the 3DO.
demagogue on 30/10/2019 at 04:18
That reminds me of my favorite easter egg ever where the author of Adventure on the Atari 2600 put his name into the game because Atari wouldn't. I didn't find the easter egg at the time, but I definitely knew there was something in that room because it blinked even when there weren't AI or other objects around.
Speaking of obsessive games, I still play that game on my phone on long commutes. Something really pure about it. And I guess while we're on the topic, Bard's Tale 2 (the other old school game I already mentioned really getting into) also defined peak "good EA" for me.
Anarchic Fox on 20/11/2019 at 20:37
Quote Posted by demagogue
- Deadly Rooms of Death, also lots of fan levels.
Whoa! A fellow DRoD fan! I think this is one of the few series that
merits long-term commitment. I am particularly impressed by its designers' guiding philosophy of puzzle creation, which centers around the concept of a "lynchpin" -- a puzzle should seem intractable until the player makes one key insight, at which point it becomes easy.
I still hope to one day finish all the Smitemaster's Selections, but damn do those get hard.