ASCII Portal In the Works 82
Rock, Paper, Shotgun points out a video showing Portal, redone with ASCII graphics. It's still in development, but appears to be quite far along. Its creator, Cymon, says on his website, "I have Windows XP, so all binaries will by default be for Windows. But I will also be including the source code with the distribution and am doing my best to write it cross-platform compatible, so it should compile in Linux and Mac. I've had successful builds done in Linux." He also talks in detail about his design plans and ideas.
Not ASCII (Score:5, Insightful)
...anyone else remember ZZT? I do.
I don't care how nerdy it is (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Innovative (Score:5, Insightful)
"What people tend to forget is that using ASCII as game graphics, you can do a lot more in-depth gaming without having your game look like crap."
The problem is that some people consider ASCII graphics to look like crap, just by their virtue of being ASCII.
That said, it gives you the power to work on the gameplay etc, and you can later on put actual graphical tiles in, if you wanted. So long as you make the logic "portable" enough, you could even go so far as to put the game into a 3D graphics engine, and it would play the same, but (obviously) be presented in 3D.
Re:Innovative (Score:4, Insightful)
In an indirect way this also showed me that current games aren't just about graphics and innovative gameplay would had been forgotten. Portal could had been done years ago the same way its done here. However it was new kind of game and had good and fitting graphics, so the usual thought that new games aren't innovative doesn't really cut.
I'd argue that there are still innovative games around, but most are derivate crap. In that sense nothing has changed from the good ol' days of 8- and 16-bit. What has changed, however, is that games are now more locked into specific presentation formats: everything has to be 3D, and abstract graphics have just about died out. In some ways, this limits what can be done (some gameplay mechanics depend on 2D or fake-3D presentation). We've lost some of the richness of the early game landscape because of that, I think.
Portal was never about the graphics anyway (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Innovative (Score:2, Insightful)
I think this is just usual bullshit. Yes, in my young age there were *great* games. Settlers 2, Civ2, Megarace 2, Populous, Operation Flashpoint. They were great, but they wouldn't be on today's scale. Age goldens things and so on. However I do still enjoy playing them, because they were so large part of my younghood. If they were new titles and something I wouldn't know, I wouldn't really be impressed by them.
And there are great games that dont rape it for 3D graphics now a days too. Just recent games include World of Goo and Braid. They're fully 2D and contain great gameplay. I also love LittleBigPlanet on PS3, which is 2D like platform but with stunning 3D graphics. The fact it has great graphics doesn't reduce it great gameplay mechanism.
Just because we're used to greater graphics now doesn't mean the gameplay is shit and only great gameplay is in 2D ASCII games we're you have to have good imagination to go with things. Graphics are there to make the immersion; gameplay is there to make it fun. When done correctly, those two *DO* work together.
Re:Speaking of Valve Source games conversions... (Score:2, Insightful)
You're an idiot! Congratulations!
P.S. no link should crash any browser, it's not the link's fault your browser sucks.