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The Game Experience Always searching for the elusive entertainment that captures your emotions and desires, and inspires you to want more. A good game is not only program, coding, interface, action, and reaction. It touches us on deep personal levels, releasing endorfins in our brains to excite and pleasure us during the game play. One can feel the sounds, touch the objects, breath the air. The screen action generates real emotional responses inside us. We become one with the computer, lost in a virtural world for the moment, living a virtural life impossible to duplicate in the real world. The Elite series of games provides this environment. Simple in the early versions, more complex in the latter. Once you have experienced Elite, your games senses are heightened, and you set new standards for what a good game is supposed to be. You become disappointed at the 'kiddy carnage' arcade type games on the Sony Playstation and Nintendo 64. The PC releases are better, as they have a element you can relate to. But all too often they seem to be missing something. Doom, Quake, Terminal Velocity, Star Wars, Renaissance Evil, Myst, Raven, and Tomb Raider all have these emotional elements. But where are the games that have all these elements in one great program? They are not available in today's marketplace. It's the 90s now, with a game costing millions in departmental development, design, production, marketing, and distribution. A bad game now can bankrupt a small company, and drastically effect the reputation, and sales, of a large one. There are still pockets of creativity (try the PC game Killing Cloud by Konami), but they are often missed in the mass of game releases. Companies are scared to take excessive risks, and rightly so to keep a sound business in a highly competitive market. But there was a time when many programmers and game designers, from corporations, to a guy in a garage, were making applications for the ultimate game machine. They were taking risks, trying different approaches, interfaces, object designs, and themes. These great people were putting their heart and emotions above the profit line to see how good a game could get. The result was some of the best games ever designed, many of which are still a quantum leap above anything being released today. The time was ten years ago. The machine was called the Amiga by Commodore Business Machines. Of all the two hundred games I've played on the Amiga, here are two games which stood out as having 'the right stuff' in player interaction. The games were StarGlider II and Damoclese. These games surpass just being good, and effect you in personal emotional levels, which is as good as it gets. StarGlider II was a perfect example of a mission game, with some creative and risky attempts at a new gaming environment. It had 'whales in space', a 3D light panel for controls, and unusual sound effects. The mission was set in a planetary system where the bad guys are assembling a weapon to blow away your home planet (e.g. Star Wars). You fly to different planets, assembling a bomb to use against the weapon. Temperature, and danger, would increase as you flew to hot planets near the sun. You had a limited amount of time to do this before your home was toast. Along the way the bad guys would provide some nice space battles for you to survive. The bomb parts were in underground bases, and you would have to fly through a maze of tunnels (e.g. Quake) to get to them. You would also have to replenish your ship power, and you flew along power lines (just like UFO sightings) to do it. The graphics were smooth, and the virtual flight effect was very realistic. Overall, this game touched your emotions, and added depth to the experience. Many of the engines in this game are present in today's releases. Damoclese was a basic asteroid going to hit the Earth. You had to fly to different planets, assemble a bomb, fly to the asteroid, detonate the bomb, and alter the asteroid's course. It started in space approaching our galaxy. The resolution expanded to show the flybys of the planets, approach to earth, entering the atmosphere, seeing the land masses, cities, more expansion to buildings, roads, and finally landing at a starport. It's not over. You then entered a land vehicle, drove on the streets, stop at a building, get out and enter. Inside the building you would find furniture, objects which you could pickup, buttons you could push, and books you could read. In many ways, this game added to the basic interaction one finds in Frontier Elite II and Frontier First Encounters. It combined the element of open architecture navigation with puzzle solving. It was an awesome experience! Its limitations were a time limit to complete the mission before the asteroid hit the Earth, and no other place to go once you left the system (actually adds to the realism). Other than that, it was a completely open architecture as to how you accomplished the mission. It was released years ago, but would be a top selling title if released today. Why? The hottest movie of the summer, called Armageddon, is about to open. Its about an asteroid hitting the Earth, and a team of pilots to stop it. Capturing the emotional response in the movie was done years ago in this game release. If you are looking to enhance your gaming experience, perhaps it would be better to look back, instead of forward. One never knows when the great game will be released for today's systems, and so often disappointment follows purchase. But you can have the great games now with an Amiga. These computers are still for sale in many places, and a used one is certainly competitive with the today's game machines. They are also a lot cheaper than a full IBM system. Add the internet, and your access to all the great games are complete. Thousands of Amiga fans are still out there, enjoying the greatest games ever made, sharing information and software. Like the fans of Elite, a game which touches you personally will always be around. A little web searching is all that is needed. The unending search for the ultimate game often has many paths one can take. The Amiga, and the never ending support by its users, is one solution to the game experience. George Hooper |