Re: Pleasantly Surprised By Defender of the Crown (IIgs)

[Mitchell Spector <mitch2gs@hotmail.com>]

"Tempest" <tempest@atariprotos.com> wrote:

>Ever since I put my trusty old Apple IIe away in favor of my IIgs, I've
>been looking for some games to make it worthwhile.  With the Apple II
>compatibility hicups I've had, and the poor quality of the IIgs games
>I've been trying (most seeming like second rate versions of their Amiga
>and ST cousins),

    There were many second (and even third rate) quality IIgs games,
simply because few companies felt it was worth the trouble of writing
anything that specifically took advantage of the machine for such a
small market. You can see the difference in earlier games when the
market was new--take Epyx's Winter Games from 1986, with Epxy's 
Street Sports Soccer from 1988. It clearly shows they just gave up.

    There was a good handful of excellent "true GS" games. Have 
you looked at Zany Golf, The Immortal, Task Force, Rastan, Alien
Mind, Arkanoid I/II, Thexder, Xenocide, Tunnels of Armageddon,
Ancient Land of Ys, Bard's Tale I/II, World/Winter Games, Out of
This World, Cosmocade, Space Fox, DuelTris? To name a few...

>I was just about to banish my IIgs to the basement for
>good when I poped in DoC.  I was amazed at how good this version was,
>not only were the graphics and sound excellent,

    Defender of the Crown had poor music and virtually no sound, even
the Commodore 64 version had a better sounding musical score. If you
really want to see a Cinemaware game exploit the GS's sound, have a
look at Rocket Ranger and Three Stooges (interestingly the latter has
a redone musical score of DotC which sounds much better than the
original game! Here the alternate GS music score): 
http://www.digitalsparkles.com/student_a/TS2GS-Defender.mp3

    DotC IIGS's game play, graphics and sound effects (little there were)
were all top notch, but I couldn't forgive how weak the music was. If
anyone is interested, I recorded clean versions of all the musical scores
from most of Cinemaware's IIgs games in MP3 format. The music score
when you win Rocket Ranger is particularly good! :)
http://www.digitalsparkles.com/student_a/RR2GS-YouWin.mp3

>Other than being hampered by some nasty load times, the IIgs version seems 
>to have it all.  Why couldn't more IIgs games have been like this?

    See above. I think that was always the most frustrating part of being 
an Apple IIGS owner, beyond the fact that so many games ports didn't
happen, those that did often ignored the features of the machine. Far
too many used direct rips of EGA or even C64 graphics and as basic
sound support as you could get.

>The only version I haven't compared the IIgs version to is the Atari ST
>version.  I assume they're pretty similar except in the sound
>department.  Is the IIgs version one of the best out there?

    The Amiga version looks graphically superior (more colors used).
There were some remakes done a few years ago by Cinemaware,
here's some screen shots of one:

http://www.cinemaware.com/dotcremaster_main.asp?sel=screen

Mitchell Spector