Thanks once again for the warm welcome! I will try to keep posting as I do generally like forums more than chat clients / social networking / twitter / telephones / instant messages / text messages / emails as a way of keeping up with people who aren't in the same room... But there's a wealth of interesting stuff to be found here anyway so I'm sure that'll keep me coming back!

@Jester my suggestion is to take the BLUE PILL

This is in relation to the 4p coop / vs dungeony game I'm working on... I'm thinking immediately of Dungeon Master, Demon's Souls and possibly Spy vs Spy as there is a mutiplayer element, despite it not fitting the dungeon bit.

Can you think of any games that have done it well, preferably quite mean ones, what kind of mechanics worked (I love a good pressure plate + arrow because it gives just enough warning), what could work in mutiplayer, tripping devices and so on (in a top-down multi-level dungeon with pits down - pits will no doubt get used a lot...?)

Any thoughts or game suggestions to check out would be most appreciated!

Cheers.

I've been back in touch with Caspar, who did about half the art in the game, recently and my mum found a lot of his old sketches for it. He lives in NY now and runs a design company called [v]ersion industries. But he's from Cambridge where i now live and we see each other over the new years because he comes over to see his family. We were at the same school but a couple of years apart but even so he ended up moving to the same uni in Manchester. We got as far as making a few sprites and locations in DPaint, but then the Amiga was so close to death at that point, I was getting into music instead of games, and had my first PC, Doom came along, I couldn't find any software I liked on the PC back then so it just sort of died off... Sometimes we talk about making another adventure game together at some stage.

Ah you found the room with me and Caspar in it... Amazing!  It's probably so embarrassing now (18 years ago!)

I'm sort of blown away actually, you're the second person I've met since starting making games again in the late 2000's who's actually played it!

So, thankyou so much.

Wonderful thread, thanks for sharing.
 
I have a feeling I may have played one or two of these.  I used to get quite a lot of odd Amiga PD / Licenseware, cos i made an AMOS point'n'click once, so i must have wanted to investigate what others were doing with it...

I can't give you a good answer because I love the writing in the 4th Solid game second only to the 2nd. But it doesn't really have a story, no, besides posing a few cyborg-related questions, which I suppose is something. It's lacking a lot of its depth in that aspect in particular, though, compared the the main series. It's definitely an issue for me, just finding enough of a reason to keep slicing things into 1/16s.

I think the engine / setting shows promise! But somethings's bothering me about the smoothness of the scrolling, I wonder if that's just because I ran it in a browser?

It's something that almost always bothers me with Flash though, even in Air / Projectors with my stuff. So probably nothing to worry about really... Unless there really is something funny going on with the frame timing code?

Also I really like the idea of a 'GTA-like' where you don't have to use combat much, if at all, and if that's what you're going for, I think that's really interesting.

Cheers man!  It's based on the fact, partly, that he's no longer around for me to get clarification on the details of what happened, and sort of pieced together from half-remembered stories which were true, and an actual fiction novel he wrote called STOPCOCK which was semi-autobiograhical but also featured a guy called STOPCOCK who believed the dogs were definitely going to take over the world and could communicate sentiently, and were planning their attack, and it was never entirely clear whether it turned out to be true or not, in the novel, that is.
 
I'm not sure if the manuscript survives any more, actually. I really liked it, though.

I don't think you need it actually, it has a self-installer, it's just that it's in Japanese I think?  IIRC?  I don't actually have a Windows machine to hand right now myself...

I made this for a Ludum Dare last year, but I think only three people that I'm aware of ever played it, partly because of the unfriendliness of the way I packaged it in RPGMaker, but I notice there are quite a few RPGM games on here so maybe you'd be interested in trying it out?  It's about 20 minutes long or so.
 
It's the story of my papa's arrival in Liverpool when he emigrated from Dublin in the 50's, or at least, how I imagine it must definitely have been exactly like...*
 


 



 
Windows

 

*It was supposed to have a theme of a kind, even if it seems a bit silly / offensive.  It was done in 48h, and I would have liked to improve the 'combat' / a few lines of dialogue here and there. /excuses excuses

I am playing MGSR:R which I so far enjoy a lot. It feels like a melee Vanquish, which I loved, it's very Platinum, oil-slick, ludicrous, comic, joyous, challenging, shallow. Sometimes the shallow part bothers me but others the humour and the fact that it's probably better to just look at these titles in the context of being modern arcade games, makes me not really mind.

Wah! Thankyou for the super warm welcome everyone! <3 <3

I really will try to post here when I can, it's quite an amazing collection of minds you guys have!  And it's surprising just how often a random game catches my attention on the web, and it turns out was actually originated over here in some form...

So yeah, thanks again for having me, you guys are wicked!

Hi there!
 
I'm Jasper and I make some games and some music.  I constantly search for old games that I don't end up playing, in the hope that I'll find the one that I do play, with the gut feeling that it must be out there somewhere, and has probably been there for a while if so.
 
Sometimes wish I could still actually play them, other times I'm happy just trying to make them.
 
I did give a lot of my life to Demon's Souls / DS over the last couple of years, so it's not that I'm incapable of it, it's just that I so rarely find the element that gets me to push on?
 
I'm making one at the moment, about a year in, but will probably take at least the same time again.  So I may not have anything to post for a while, although I could dig out some older things, I guess, if anyone was interested? 
 
Anyway, thanks for having me, and thanks for all the good reading over the last few years (have lurked quite a while, now I think about it!)

I really love Antony Crowther's Amiga games (Speccy user, so missed most of his C64 games, although loved Peter Harrap's Monty Mole over what I saw of Crowther's quite different port), and this is the only 16/32bit one I've yet to try. I think it's sad he's just a code jockey these days for games like Battlefield. I do feel he was an underrated designer with a strong voice, and good sense of feel. I like his pixels in Captive too (my favourite of his.)

So I played ROTH and loved it when it came out. Recently been craving it for some reason and then I saw this juicy thread (should probably post in the intro thread after this, longtime lurker, cheers for having me!) I'd always sort of written off Normality, even back then, as being a very trashy, hard-to-appreciate-without-a-90's-aesthetic-preference, the logical conclusion of CDi, Bart Simpson and freakishly rendered graphics or something.

Even though Crowther is just listed as a coder, and not lead, I get the feeling that he must have made a fair contribution - perhaps the original artist who so kindly posted itt can respond to this? From his posts it sounds like it was quite a collaborative environment, anyway!

So! I just wanted to say thankyou for making me take another look at this game, which somehow when I see it now seems to totally fit my current taste. I find the little billboard sprites placed in cabinets etc. so beautifully intriguing (something I loved about ROTH also, the tiny sprite objects everywhere, especially that you can touch them with you mouse, sad that that combination of styles didn't exist for very long post-Doom and pre-Quake. There's just something so appealing about that, I can't explain why...)