Caltrops - Mischief Maker's Maker's Mark





	[quote name="Ice Cream Jonsey"]<center><img src="http://img38.imageshack.us/img38/6227/commanderkeen01.gif"></center> (Sorry for including the wrong screenshot, but I think everyone will get the general idea.) It wasn't my idea for PCs to dominate the market and come out victorious; I wanted a Commodore 64. Each weekend, I'd go to my friend Chris's house. He had a single black and white television, and we'd play C64 games all day. Dad got the PCjr because he felt he could justify the obscene suggested retail price ($699, I believe?) if he thought he could take work home with him. A lot of people made that decision, which is why IBM failing to make the PCjr 100% backwards compatible was an insane decision that hasn't become any less insane over the last 23 years. Individual pieces of the PC/PCjr were superior to what Commodore and Atari offered, sort of. Analog joysticks were ahead of their time. The PCjr also had a port labeled "L" for "Later." I -- okay, it's a pretty small list, and the next wave of computers (the Amiga, the ST, the IIGS) made the nonsense IBM and Microsoft were putting together look pulled from an inferior dystopian timeline. So it was with some guilt that we were the ones to survive. The platform with the shittiest version of everything (well, except for the Spectrum, I guess) had a certain social responsbility to improve. It took years, but I think you can point to a couple things that were critical in the advancement of PC-based video games: - The introduction of the extended graphics adapter - The introduction of the PC to John Carmack Being able to pick 16 colors out of a palette of 64 finally got things rolling. The 16 colors offered in CGA were garish and childish, and Carmack writing a game for the PC that was just as good as... okay, it wasn't as good as Super Mario, but it was as good as Sonic. A lot of people my age point to Wolfenstein 3D or Doom as the games that changed everything for them. I was a freshman and sophomore at SU right when those games were coming out, and I didn't get into them until years later. I did grab the first episode of Commander Keen (#1-KEEN.ARJ) before leaving for school, however, and I was psyched to see such a fluid and fun game for the PC. The episode Goodbye Galaxy! was released a few years later, and it was my favorite. It is a classic example of a bunch of guys at the top of their craft, having done a few revisions. It's also one of the few times in my life I'd anticipated a video game and not be utterly soul-destroyed upon its release. The lesson here is that it really doesn't matter <i>what</i> platform becomes dominant in any console or handheld gaming scenario. Talented software developers will always be more valuable than their hardware equivalents. Somehow this all congeals into the fact that Commander Keen is my seventh favorite non-text indie game of all-time. the dark and gritty...Ice Cream Jonsey![/quote]