Re: Why No MULE For The Apple II?

[heuser.marcus@freenet.de]

On Feb 19, 11:46 pm, Stephane Racle <sra...@nospam.com> wrote:
>
> I suspect it's wrong... I've never heard of or seen M.U.L.E. for
> anything other than the C-64 and Atari 8-bit. Of course, I could be
> wrong... or an unofficial port may exist?

Exactly my thoughts. I'm also pretty sure that *if* a port would exist
that it would be present in "common Apple gaming lore" as the game
is one of the best multiplayer economical simulations.

Here's my theory why no port exists: The game features quite a bit of
"frantic" competition when the bidding starts. This is done via
joysticks
on the Atari and C64, both of which have at least two identical
digital
joystick ports (the ATARI 400 & 800 actually have four and all can be
used with the game).

On the one hand I don't think that analog joysticks would work well
in this kind of situation (though the game could be adapted for it,
naturally) and on the other hand the multiplayer aspect for obvious
reasons wouldn't be the same (one person using a joystick, the
other using the keyboard?).

Well, you could play the game alone and have some fun, but it is so
much *more* fun with at least two players.

There are certainly other multiplayer games for the Apple but which
are turn based and which do rely on equally fair read input devices?
(I know that's written horribly, but I guess you understand what I
mean).

As I said that's what I'm thinking and maybe I'm totally wrong, but
the next product of Ozark Softscape (also distributed by EA), the
solo-player game "The Seven Cities of Gold", was indeed ported
from the Atari to the Apple - it had no multiplayer joystick action...

bye
Marcus