Dear IMG: I was really impressed with your article about Minotaur and I’m buying it right now. However I wonder why Bart Farkas didn’t mention BOLO in his article:
“Minotaur fills a small void in the gaming market by supplying a rare multi-player experience. Only Spectre and Maze Wars can be included in this genre.”
Bolo, written by Stuart Cheshire, is the best computer game I have ever played and it has a loyal following of fans. The game combines arcade style action, wargame strategy and real life diplomacy with alliances and deceit. Lots of people are designing their own maps for BOLO and writing plug-in code to let the computer operate tanks as well. Perhaps the problem is that the game is shareware and it doesn’t fit in your commercial line-up? Erik Cassel - San Francisco
- You are absolutely right about BOLO being a great game. IMG has not reviewed BOLO thus far, as it is still technically still a beta version. Rest assured, we will review BOLO eventually, and maintain our commitment to shareware and freeware authors. If you’ve been reading the Disk Edition of IMG regularly, you know that we review at least one shareware game per month. —JB
More on X-Wing
Dear IMG: I’m with Presage Software Development. We do a lot of Mac entertainment titles, among other stuff. We developed Prince of Persia, Lemmings, Might & Magic III, and have a bunch more Mac titles on the way.
Ed Kilham, coauthor of X-Wing, is a good friend of many of us here at Presage. Ironically Ed designed and programmed a game for the Macintosh before doing X-Wing, titled RoboSport and published by Maxis. Ed and ourselves (Presage) sat down together to discuss the possiblity of X-Wing for the Mac shortly before its release for the PC. All of us here love X-Wing, wasted a lot of hours on it, and being the Mac bigots that we are were anxious to do a Mac version.
Well, as you are aware a Mac version is not being developed, and there are good reasons for it. X-Wing is a highly technical product. It runs slow on a 40-MHz 386. A Mac version would require at least a IIci class machine, and that would still only run acceptably in a 320x200 window, hardly a reasonable way to do a Mac product. The core graphics routines in X-Wing are completely PC-specific, and scary to look at. They patch themselves in various ways to achieve good performance. Developing this code for the Mac would require starting from scratch, making quite a large investment in the technology. Then consider the larger screen size of the Mac - remember that the 640 x 400 screen size is four times the amount of memory of the 320x200 PC screen. So you immediately take a huge performance hit. Then remember that the X-Wing routines are already highly optimized, and that the game runs slow on a fast PC.
I know, you’re asking, “But how come HellCats can do it? So why can’t LucasArts do it?” Well, they could with enough time to develop the technology, but that’s expensive. So it comes down to LucasArts looking at the cost of development versus the return on a Mac product, and they don’t consider it worthwhile. Perhaps if the publisher were someone different, they would consider it worthwhile. Mac fanatic that I am, and X-Wing fanatic that I am, I still think LucasArts made a reasonable choice. Instead of being upset with LucasArts, I’d like to thank them for the quality Mac games like Indy 4 that they have published, and wait until there are enough PowerPC Macs out there before proposing a port of X-Wing or whatever the latest simulator is at the time. Jake Hoelter - Presage Software Development
Looking For Writers?
Dear IMG: Are you still looking for contributors? If so, I would be interested in writing articles and/or reviews for your excellent magazine. Robin Knight via Fax
- Although we have a mighty big staff that handles reviews, we always welcome articles, hint & tips, strategy & tactics columns, interviews, special reports, etc. If you are interested in writing non-review type articles, please contact us through one of our addresses on page 2 of the magazine. —TD
Infocom Games, They’re Great!
Dear IMG: Thank you, Thank you, Thank you, for Richard Rouse’s review of the Lost Treasures of Infocom. They are indeed some of the best games out there for the Macintosh. These games are especially good for Powerbook users, as they don’t make any noise, and the fact that you are in black and white doesn’t subtract from the game. Jason Butler via AOL
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