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ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 1. Cover Page ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 2. About This Magazine ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ This Electronic Magazine is dedicated to reviewing and giving information about OS/2 entertainment software. ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 2.1. Credits ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ Editor: Alex Bradley World Wide Web version by Gabe Jones //hamton.eng.ua.edu/college/home/ee/ungrad/gjones/www/os2/ogr.html You may distribute this anywhere (please do!) OS/2 is a registered trademark of International Business Machines Corp (IBM). ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 3. From the Editor... ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ Editor's Desk... In this issue, we will be trying to take a look at several games in the OS/2 area. I still am not receiving enough submissions! Please submit articles to me. Because of the number of shareware and freeware games, I will only do large reviews of commercial games. I just don't have enough time to go through every shareware game that is out there. This issue does take a quick look at Card Games for OS/2, HeliRescue, and a few other OS/2 games. We will also be reviewing the most popular shareware game called "Roids" and be talking to its author, Leonard Guy about his plans for the future. Since the first issue, I have received a lot of feedback by interested users. In this issue, we will finally get to have several articles from other OS/2 users on their feelings about my review on GalCiv. ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 4. Letters to the Editor. ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ Reader Feedback... Great information, less zealotry. Hello Alex. I just connected to the home page and after wandering around read the OS/2 Game Review. I must say, I am impressed. Overall it is a well produced piece of journalism. Let me be a little critical, though. Some of the links should be a little better implemented. Often I found myself with only the option of returning to the table of contents from deep within the articles. I have a backup button, but if you are going to include links some places, well ... Consistency, my friend. The articles were also a little zealous. I agree (although I don't know), GalCiv sounds incredible. I also agree (although I don't have my copy yet) that OS/2 is the best operating system available to the average pc user in the world today. However, in the spirit of journalism and so non-users don't see OS/2 users as fanatics, a little more impartiality might be good. The need to disseminate this information is real, but it sometimes sounds like cult chanting with the repetition of the mantras, "Buy these games. Spread the message to the masses." Please take these in the spirit of constructive criticism. That is how they are meant. In all seriousness, I am quite impressed. This is the first e-magazine I have perused that I found informative, interesting and well produced. Congratulations. I just wanted to give you some support for what must be a great deal of effort. Can't wait to get Warped, see the next edition, or see more games written for the best operating system in the world. tbsmth@mailserv.mta.ca (Trevor Smith) ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 5. Rumor Central/2 ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ Rumor Central/2 The million dollar question that seems to be whispered on the net are, how long will GalCiv be tops on the Top 100 most played games and what is Stardock going to do about AIM {Advanced Idea Machine}? Net readers watched as Stardock developed GalCiv into the chart busting game it has become and turned it over to AIM to get out to the world and market it. AIM turned around and gave us a terrible ''manual'' and an ugly box and the online docs that look to have been written by an 8 year old. The question is, what was Stardock <thinking> when they hired AIM to market and publish their game? Even IBM could have marketed better. While AIM clearly leads the race for worst reputation of the gaming community, it would seem that the most controversal game is turning out to be the devil we know: Simcity Classic. Some say it is 'worse than a dog' while others say it isn't 'too bad'. Rumors abound that the OS/2 version of DOOM is better than the Windows version of DOOM but both are "lame" compared to the DOS version reported one unnamed source. Rumors abound that Microsoft is trying to bully stores, hardware manufacturers, and other computer related companies into not supporting OS/2 in any way. What effect this will have on the OS/2 game market is unknown. Has anyone found GalCiv at the store yet? Send your Rumors to OS/2 Game Review!!! ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 6. Top Ten ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ Top Ten Reasons why to buy GalCiv #10 Confuse DOS gamers who think that Galactic Civilizations is Civilization II. #9 Good way to test how stable MMPM/2 is on your system. #8 Too hard to pirate OS/2 software, none of the 'elite' boards have it! #7 Annoy bill gates. #6 Try to play the 'How many misspellings did AIM make on GalCiv's box' game. trip to Hawaii to whoever can find the most! #5 Another chance to kick some snooty Egghead software clerk in the leg! #4 Makes a great Christmas gift for a DOS user. "Got you this great game, oh, by the way, you need the $90 OS for it!" #3 So you can honestly vote on the Top 100 and really annoy DOOM players that some OS/2 game is beating DOOM on the Top 100 list #2 They were sold out of Mine Sweeper #1 Because it's a most excellent game! ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 7. Known Game List ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ Known Game List | | | THE OS/2 GAMES LIST | | | | Native, 32-bit Presentation Manager Games | | For the world's favorite operating system | | | | maintained by Kent Lundberg klund@mit.edu | | | COMMERCIAL OS/2 GAMES Title Publisher Ca Co Price ----- --------- -- -- ---- Blackjack CA Doom/2 Id Software AC MD Galactic Civilizations Stardock/AIM ST M $50 Microlearn Gamepack Microlearn CA SimCity Dux Software SI M 4Q94 SimCity 2000 Dux Software SI 1Q95 OS/2 32-BIT PM SHAREWARE GAMES Title Author Ca Co Fee Filename ----- ------ -- -- ---- -------- Aquanaut Paul Stanley AC M $10 aquanaut.zip Hel Rescue K-Soft AC M $15 helr22 .zip Ribble J.R. Shannon AC M ribble .zip Roids Leonard Guy AC M roids23 .zip Daleks Eric Holtz ST daleks .zip Fodder Ezra Ebner ST $15 fodder .zip Mah Jongg (Eng) ST mah21 .zip Mah Jongg (Ger) ST mah21e .zip MineSweeper ST dmine121.zip MineSweeper ST mine31 .zip PM Robots Kent Lundberg ST $0.19 pmbots12.zip Rollball Stangl Roman ST rollball.zip Tetris ST tetris .zip Trashman CoralSoft ST trsh12 .zip Trickle Down ST trickle .zip Yova ST yova2102.zip Dinkum3 AD dum212 .zip Dungeon AD cdungeon.zip Moria AD os2moria.zip Omega AD omega75 .zip Craps CA craps3 .zip Entertainment Pack CA entrtan4.zip Flip CA flip .zip FM Cards CA fmcrd151.zip Miles Bones Wilson Liaw CA $10 miles2 .zip SeaHaven Towers J. Daniel Kulp CA seahav20.zip Video Poker CA none vpoker .zip PM Checkers BD checkr12.zip Connect Four BD connect4.zip Connect Four BD fourpm .zip Dungeon Chess BD dchess .zip GNU Chess BD gnuchess.zip GNU Chess BD pmchs_r2.zip Go BD go .zip Go BD pmgo12 .zip Greed BD greed .zip NikNak BD niknak11.zip Nim BD nim120 .zip Numbers BD number11.zip Othello BD othell10.zip Sorry BD sorry .zip Tic Tac Toe BD tic11 .zip Hangman PU hngmn120.zip Crossword PU xword .zip Ca = Categories Co = Technology Codes --------------- --------------------- AC Action M Multimedia Sound AD Adventure D Fast Graphics (DIVE) BD Board Game CA Cards/Dice ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 8. GalCiv Rocks the charts! ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ GalCiv ROCKS THE CHARTS! By Alex Bradley Despite the mediocre job the game's publisher, AIM, has done on the game, Stardock's Galactic Civilization zoomed to the top at record speeds. On the Internet Top 100, GalCiv presently reigns supreme, beating games like DOOM2, Myst, Colonization, and other block busters. This has been very controversal on the net. The Top 100 has been considered for over a year now as the heart beat of the gaming industry. Companies from Origin to MicroProse studied the list to see what products were popular and more importantly what products bombed. Bombs like Outpost quickly went up and then dropped down while classics like Civilization have been on the Top 10 for over a year now. An OS/2 game makes it to the top and achieves the coveted NUMBER ONE position and conspiracy theories abound from DOS users that the list is 'fixed' by OS/2 users. Despite the public lobbying in the comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action by the DOOM fans to blast GalCiv out of the first place spot, they have so far been unable to slow down the GalCiv onslaught. Some DOS users ignore the DOOM lobbying which did succeed in knocking Xcom out of the picture late this summer and complain that GalCiv doesn't deserve to be number one because it's an OS/2 game and it can't possibly be selling at well as DOOM. Only AIM and Stardock know the sales but they must be doing pretty well. Part of GalCiv's appeal is probably the quick turn around time users get from the developers. A bug is reported and a fix is quickly released. As of this writing, the 3rd update of the game was recently released, only a couple weeks after the second update. With service like this, one could almost forgive the game's box. GalCiv v1.02. New Features. Faster Play. ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 9. Reader Feedback: Another GalCiv View ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ Another GalCiv View... Written by Steven Barnes on the Internet. <My System> 486DX-33 8 megs ram Sound Blaster Pro Diamond Stealth Pro VLB OS/2 Warp 1024x768x65k colors <My Background> College Student. Love Civilization, Masters of Orion, and Master of Magic I was a beta tester but didn't get the final version until last week. The box did leave something to desire. Hopefully AIM will make the box look a little nicer very soon. The manual enclosed was overly small as well but I knew I was looking forward to play the game inside. I had not played GalCiv since the beta2 days and was very interested in seeing what improvements they had. <The Install> The install is broken up into two portions. The 'SDS Install' program is a nice multithreaded install program that copies whichever version of the game you want to wherever you want. It even lists the drives that have enough space for it on the right and lets you select the drive with the push of a button. I rate the install EXCELLENT. On the dark side, AIM has a install for the docs which puts the game in its own area and is not well integrated into the game. I think having an online manual is a really dumb idea. If they had a good book that came with the game then I would not care if they had a online manual but it just makes AIM look a bit cheap. The install worked perfectly though and I was soon into the game. <First Impressions> WOW! The graphics are quite good for a strategy game. I decided to set up for a huge universe with all the opponents on average. This was last Thursday. Compared to other games on the market though, the graphics are so so. Compared to DOS Civ or Master of Orion they are as good or better but compared to Myst they are not so good. <My game -- 4 days or about 55 hours of near straight playing> I quickly colonized the areas around me until I ran into the other races. The Drengin were quite evil but on the other side of the galaxy, I had chosen that everyone else be a good guy except for the Yor which I made neutral. As I played, I decided to go and be a good guy the entire time. I was quite isolated from the unfriendly players and soon enough, my wildly profitiable trade routes with the Altarnians and the Torians made them want to ally with me. <BUT> After I allied, I learned that they were at war with the Drengin who were quite powerful. The Torians were losing the war, the Altarians were standing on their own but not gaining ground. The Yor were "cool" to me but I had enough trade going with them to make them think twice of going to war with me but they were building up a huge military machine. I think that the Yor were just waiting to see who won the Altarian/Torian - Drengin war and conquer whoever won. With me on their side, I took my fleets of 'Battle Hammers' and aided the dying Torians. The Torians quicly asked for my help in terms of arms and money against the Drengin and I gave them 10 of my best ships which were mostly 'Battle Hammers'. The Drengin begin to lose the war with all 3 of us against them. The Yor, apparently afraid of a new balance of power, joined in on the Drengin side and we had a long war going which had me playing STRAIGHT All day Friday until Saturday night at almost midnight when I went to see the Star Trek movie. Just so you know, I never rebooted my computer and ran into no bugs in the game at all. Straight play here almost 36 hours. GalCiv is definitely a stable and fast game. My swapper hovered at about 12 megs the entire time. Sunday afternoon I came back. The situation was a stalemate, we all had very tough battle ships. The Altarians got 'Excalibur' technology and the war began to turn quickly against the Yor and Drengin. The Drengin were forced to surrender to the Altarians so tht the Altarians annexed a good chunk of the galaxy. The Yor forced the Torians to surrender knocking them out of the war. The Altarians and me were now locked in combat with the Yor which lasted most of the day Sunday. I was losing ground to the Yor very slowly and my Federation was getting restless planets so I lowered taxes but that made me have deficit spending. I started producing more 'Stealth Cruisers' which made quite a difference and I was able to take back a couple of my stars but still a stalemate overall. <But Then!> I made a galactic achievement which I forget its name but it makes all my planets improve one geological scale which increased my productivity greatly. The Altarians gave me Excalibur technology in exhange for hyper computers and I was able to start blowing away the Yor who according to my spies were researching 'TERROR STARS'. I did not have the resources to build terror stars but I quickly began conquering parts of the Yor as the Altarians helped me out. <The Yor strike back> The Yor were definitely finished as a military force until suddenly I heard a phaser sound. I checked my spies and they reported that the Yor had achieved Terror Star technology!!!!!!!!!!!!!! A terror star is a weapon that stops the fusion reaction of a star which destroys the entire star system. If you see the new Star Trek movie, you will see the result of what woudl happen. The Yor had a couple terror stars destroying Altarian planets. THey had another one coming to my territory but my sensor probes detected it and I was able to send in a small fleet to destroy it but the Altarians were not so lucky because their forces were mostly in Yor territory. <I'm the hero of this game!> But I managed to keep striking the Yor until they surrendered! The Altarians and me were the only ones left and the game ended since we were allied together in a new United galaxy! WHAT A AWESOME GAME!!!! <Stability> I didn't run into a single bug except that I had to make sure I didn't go to details view of planets when they cmae up at the beginning of the turn. But I didn't have any weird stuff happen the entire time I played and I played it for a long time straight. <My opinion> What I really like about this game is how feature rich it is. The game concept is fairly simple, conquer or unite the galaxy. The depth in which it goes is staggering. I can learn about other civ cultures, histories, wars, trade, you name it. There are statistics and graphs for everything and the AI is just incredible. It thinks like a human being and it is so fast. The graphics are good in general, there are a couple places that could be improved graphically and I would like to have even more diplomatic options. If you haven't bought GalCiv yet then WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR????? Steven Barnes ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 10. Review: Roids ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ Review of Roids! Since we are only doing formal reviews of commercial games, I will be reviewing the new commercial version of Roids that comes with Stardock's OS/2 Essentials application suite (which is due to be released within days of this writing). Roids for OS/2 was probably the first released game (in shareware) to take good advantage of OS/2's MMPM/2. Its first version came out in early 1994 and was well received by the OS/2 community. It did lack MMPM/2 support at that time but the second version came soon after which did have MMPM/2 support. Background: Roids is a action game similar to the classic game of Asteroids except that in Roids, the play field is immense. You have a small radar to keep track of the various objects in your sector. You must clear each sector of debris to enter the next sector. Your ship has a couple of powers to aid you in this. First of course is your laser cannons which blast away the asteroids and other obstacles in a given sector. Your second ally will be your shields. When you use this, be careful because you no longer can turn and move. As you go up the levels, you the action will get tougher. At first, you only have to contend with asteroids but as the sectors go by, you will have to deal with little red enemies that will shoot at your ship along with yellow enemies that will split into smaller pieces, littering the galaxy with more and more debris. Puting things in persepctive: Roids is a fun game for relieving stress at lunch hour and is a very high quality product. In my OS/2 experience so far, Roids is second to GalCiv in game quality as far as games go for OS/2. But the gap is wide which should be expected. GalCiv was a commercial product from day 1 made by a company, Roids comes from a shareware background made by one author in his spare time. Roids is an extremely fun and addictive game but does grow tiring after a little while of playing it. Overall: Without a doubt, Roids is the best action game for OS/2 that is currently available. DOOM/2 will likely change this but for now, in the action category, nothing comes close to matching Roids MMPM/2 usage and fast paced action. The game does have some performance problems once you get a lot of debris going in the galaxy. Where you can get Roids: The shareware version of Roids can be found on most OS/2 specific BBSes or FTP sites. It is currently at version 2.3. It costs $10 to register it which will allow you to get past an annoying nag screen. The commercial version of Roids is part Stardock's new 'OS/2 Essentials' application suite which also includes several other products such as a Screen Saver, File Manager, and a number of other programs which has a suggested retail price of $24.95 for the retail package and $19.95 for the OEM package. ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 10.1. Interview with Leonard Guy ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ Interview with the creator of Roids, Leonard Guy We managed to get an exclusive interview with the creator of Roids, Leonard Guy. We asked him about his gaming experiences and his future plans. #1 What made you decide to make "Roids" I've always been a big fan of arcade games, and when I installed OS/2 in the summer of '93 I was disappointed to find that there were very few native OS/2 arcade games available. I had written a DOS-based Asteroids game a few years ago as a project for my high school CS class, and I had a desire to learn OS/2 PM programming. I thought that porting the DOS game to OS/2 would be a great way to learn the ins and outs of PM programming, while at the same time alleviating some of the need for OS/2 arcade games. #2 Why OS/2 for Roids? I wrote Roids more as an excercise in 32-bit programming than as a commercial venture - I hoped that more lucrative projects would come after Roids. That's why I chose OS/2. If I'd wanted to make money, I'd probably have done it for Windows. #3 What were some of the challenges in making roids? The biggest challenges I've had have been performance and sound. I'd had no experience with serious code optimization before I wrote Roids, and therefore v1.0 was much slower than it should have been - for example it used floating-point math, didn't have any lookup tables for the sine, cosine or random functions (it calculated them on-the-fly) and had a very inefficient collision detection algorithm. As the game became more complex performance became a bigger and bigger issue, and I had to learn how to improve the efficiency of the code. Adding MMPM Sound was also a challenge . . . when I wrote v2.1b the OS/2 Sound Blaster drivers were in a terrible state, and I spent many hours trying to figure out why the sound effects would crash my computer or cause such terrible performance. After a few weeks I was thoroughly depressed and though that Roids was hopelessly slow, OS/2 was a terrible platform for games, and I was a very bad programmer. Linden deCarmo from IBM had been helping me with the MMPM programming and when I asked him why Roids performance was so terrible he was incredulous. He said that Roids' performance was excellent on his system, which was equipped with an IBM sound card. It later turned out that all the performance and stability problems were caused by the Sound Blaster driver, not Roids. No wonder I couldn't figure it out. #4 Could you give some background on yourself ( your hobbies, where you're from) Well, until very recently computer programming was my main hobby, now it's my job <G>. I've always been interested in art, music and computers, so it was only natural that I would end up writing computer games. I'm currently a junior (?) at UC Berkeley, and I hope to get a degree in CS, provided that they let me into the department (my GPA is pretty low). #5 How is Roids doing as a shareware product? Terribly. I've had fewer than a hundred registrations, so Roids hasn't even paid for the investment I've made in OS/2 programming reference books, compilers and hardware, let alone labor. #6 What are your future plans with Roids? Well . . . Roids is finished. 2.3 is the last version. The concept is not dead, however. I think I've taken this particular implementation as far as it can go, as any of the changes I'd like to make will fundamentally alter the game to the point where it would no longer be Roids. It would be something different. #7 If you were to make a new game for OS/2, would you go the shareware route or would you try to get an established OS/2 software company to work with you? It depends on the game, but I'd definitely lean toward the 'commercial' market. #8 What is your favorite feature of OS/2? I really like the neat-o sound the shredder makes. The standard stuff: preemptive multitasking, 32-bit graphics, all that. It sure beats Windows. My LEAST favorite feature is MMPM's inability to get MIDI input. I'd love an OS/2 MIDI sequencer, but if you can't get MIDI input, it's a bit hard to do anything meaningful. #11 I heard on the newsgroups that Roids was shown at comdex by SDS {Stardock}, could you give info on that? I haven't heard much of that myself, but Brad Wardell {Stardock} said it was fairly popular and stole some attention from GalCiv, so I guess it went pretty well. ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 11. Sneak Preview: Shipyards for GalCiv! ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ Stardock's add on for GalCiv: Shipyards coming soon! I did manage to catch up with Brad Wardell, the main OS/2 guy at Stardock (SDS) and asked him what was happening with Shipyards. He explains: "Our original intent was to see GalCiv out in August and have Shipyards come out in late October and our development schedule was actually on time! We pretty much finished Shipyards by October 10 and were getting ready to release it when our publisher, Advanced Idea Machines, informed us that there were going to be some delays in shipping GalCiv due to the box. We also discovered that GalCiv had some nasty swapping problems when starting with the Warp Gamma (GalCiv had swapping problems in its beta but we had taken care of those problems by this point). So we pulled GalCiv back off tape and began working closely with IBM to figure out what the problem was. The shipping version of GalCiv ended up being v1,01a though some people were allowed to download v1.0. Now that GalCiv's out, we are fairly anxious to let users have access to Shipyards but Shipyards does change GalCiv's gameplay rather significantly. GalCiv's shipbuilding is like Empire or Civilization. When you add Shipyards, the shipbuilding becomes like Masters of Orion. You now design your own ships, decide what weapons and such are going to be on your ship and the game DOES save what specific weapons you have. So here you have an add on that changes a couple basic game play issues becuase now you and the computer players are building unique sets of ships and you are allowed to trade ship designs (or steal them). So the problem is really a marketing one. When do you release a product that significantly alters a part of the game? Since GalCiv didn't come out until November, we wanted to hold back on it and let users play GalCiv for awhile before we release Shipyards. You don't HAVE to use the features of Shipyards. We have put in a check box that will disable the computer AI's ship design ability so that you can play a game both ways however. We're looking to release it in early 1995 (depending on some unresolved issues with AIMS). We will also be releasing the GalCiv SDK which will allow users to make their own modules for GalCiv." As Brad said, Shipyards does let you have a new way of playing GalCiv but you aren't forced to use it if you don't want. Many users, including myself, think it is a superior way of doing things over both Civilization and Masters of Orion. You can decide which way you want to play the game and even change the way you play midway through the game. I played with a 'gamma' copy of Shipyards and was quite impressed by the graphics and the fact that the aliens made some pretty awesome ships. It was not long until I saw a Borg-like ship running around destroying my fleets. It looks to be an impressive addition to GalCiv when it comes available. Shipyards will cost $14.95 and is only available from Stardock Systems. Stardock Systems can be reached at 313-782-2248 and their fax number is 313-782-9868. They also sell Galactic Civilizations for $59.95. ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 12. Next Month! ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ Next Month in OS/2 Game Review! I hope to have the scoop on Stardock's newest games in progress, Shipyards which was originally expected in October but was delayed so that GalCiv could be on the market for awhile before add ons. I will try to snag the scoop on the rumored GalCiv SDK that will let other people make their own add ons to GalCiv. Also, according to net rumor, Stardock is working on Entrepreneur, a brand new full fledged OS/2 game due in 1995. Finally, I hope to get an interview with Brad Wardell, the architect of Galactic Civilizations on his experiences and plans for the future. I didn't get to some of the things I wanted to get to in this issue such as some of the shareware games. Just not enough time to do all of that. Next month! Also, more on the DOOM wars! Card Games for OS/2 HeliRescue for OS/2 Plus looks at other OS/2 games like Aquanaut and hopefully a review of Simcity Classic for OS/2. No promises. I need lots of help with this magazine. Going to college, working 2 jobs and having some kind of life makes it hard to put out one of these each month. Send articles or feedback to: Alex.Bradley@f347.n109.z1.fidonet.org