Crimsonland Interview - Robotron Indie Gaming?

Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to a HomeLan Fed article interviewing the creators of Robotron-inspired PC arcade-action title Crimsonland. This retro-styled shooter started out as a freeware game from the small Finnish developer 10 Tons Entertainment, and was picked up by Reflexive Entertainment after the unofficial help of fellow Finns and Max Payne developers Remedy. As for Crimsonland itself, according to developer Tero Alatalo, "..the game uses features of modern 3D accelerators to draw good old 2D graphics. So you'll need to have a 3D card to run a 2D game, but basically you couldn't get the same smoothness, effects and frame rate with traditional 2D drawing methods."

Re:3d vs old specialized chips

[PainKilleR-CE]

If i recall correctly Total Annihilation did this back in 97? The game was 2d top down, but the data was 3d. It allowed complicated line of sight and other 'neat' things (AA guns blasting your buildings if you didn't give them enough clearance)..

TA did something slightly different. It was a 3d game done entirely on 2d hardware (as opposed to a 2d game done entirely on 3d hardware). TA had polygon-based models and did all of the proper calculations to model the 3d space, but drew everything using 2d graphics instructions. So, even to this day, the game doesn't take advantage of any 3d graphics hardware, but does take full advantage of CPU upgrades and video RAM.