| Jarrath wrote ... | 2006-06-20 07:27:20 |
| Hey, I have to stick up for the Atari here, I loved playing menace on it. Had hours of fun with it. Still play it on STeem... Granted i never played it on the Amiga so I can't compare but hey Ignorance is bliss as they say... |
| Biscuit wrote ... | 2006-02-09 23:28:36 |
| Yes, well, even a 1mhz processor can do quite a lot when it has some hardware assistance. I believe Mike Dailly did the C64 version. |
| bazfan wrote ... | 2005-12-05 10:51:54 |
| the commodore 64 version was better than this |
| AMaas wrote ... | 2002-11-08 12:16:39 |
| My stepkids loved this game. Recently put it on my Windows computer.
One of them, both adults, played it for hours. And he was less enthusiastic of the two. Their father had an Amiga.They didn't notice the lack of graphics I guess. |
| mefistofele wrote ... | 2002-10-30 10:51:01 |
| I remember being in a computer retailer specialized in ST and Amiga. The owner (a pure Amiga freak) had decided to run Menace on both Amigas and STs in the same time. Everybody in the shop was glued to the AMiga monitors, whereas nobody bothered having a look at the ST. It's true the Amiga version was amazing whereas the ST one sucked. That how I decided to sell my ST to offer me an A500.... |
| Biscuit wrote ... | 2002-04-30 00:34:23 |
| If anyone is interested, I'm going to try disassembling the game and commenting all the code as I remember it being. I tried getting the source from Dave but I don't think he has it any more. |
| Biscuit wrote ... | 2002-03-07 14:50:11 |
| You've gotta remember, both Dave and I were just starting in on programming. As you say, a lot of the ST games at that time had a lousy look. That was way before people figured out all of the little hardware tricks that could be done. If I remember right, yes they did want a version. And it didn't really take all that long to do and we thought, well fuckit. Why not? I only made about 4000 quid off it. Didn't sell very well! |
| Andy Bailey wrote ... | 2002-03-07 10:10:45 |
| Biscut
I've never even played Menace, I just recalled ongoing saga in the letters section of ST Format! There were plenty of other ST games around at the time with worse visuals! I remember reading the response from yourself (sorry Dave) and wondering why you'd bothered with the ST version if you didn't feel the machine was up to it? I assume Psyclapse/Psygnosis were pushing :-)
Lemmings, on the other hand, I played for hours! |
| Biscuit wrote ... | 2002-03-06 23:22:46 |
| Oh and might I add, Wayne and I had quite a few heated discussions on the matter arising from the letter. I don't recall the outcome of the conversations but I remember using some of the techniques he mentioned when working on Lemmings. He is a very talented programmer who did some awesome work. I wonder where he is now? |
| Biscuit wrote ... | 2002-03-06 23:06:02 |
| Well, let's first get your facts right. It was not Dave Jones that lambasted the Atari ST it was me, Brian Watson. I still contend that it's a piece of shit and it always was. I mean, what stupid ass decided to put the video display on a 256 byte boundary? If that one stupid mistake hadn't been made, the scrolling could have been done almost exactly the same way it was on the Amiga.
With 16 colours on screen, what the fuck do you expect? I full exponanza of colour? I don't think so. The thing could barely do 8 colour register changes in a scanline and you could forget any other processing.
If you truely think it was utterly terrible a game, I apologize. It was my first foray in to game programming. I hope with the implementation I achieved with Lemmings would appease this "apparent" disaster.
Biscuit. |
| Andy Bailey wrote ... | 2002-02-22 09:09:56 |
| I remember a user writing to ST format complaining that having seen Menace on the Amiga, they bought the ST version, and found it to be awful. Dave Jones (the programmer) wrote back stating that it was because the ST couldn't scroll very well, and that it wasn't so good for games because it lacked things like copper effects, and if people wanted to play decent games they should buy an Amiga. He finished his rant by claiming that the ST would never be able to do games like Blood Money (his / DMA's next release after Menace) due in part to the limitations he'd mentioned.
The following month, Wayne J Smithson wrote in stating that the ST could produce smooth scrolling with a little coaxing, and that it could do certain copper-like effects. He finished his letter my offhandedly mentioning that he was currently working on an ST conversion of Blood Money for Psygnosis, and that it was vitually identical, the only difference was that the ST was missing one of the parallax scrolling layers.
Dave Jones lost all my respect for that, because in effect he proved he was just a lazy programmer. |
| Matthias Arndt wrote ... | 2002-01-15 09:17:35 |
| ARGGGHH - one of the few bad games from DMA design.
The Amiga version looked so good - why had the ST version look like CGA? A shame because it plays a little bit different to R-Type
although it is a side-scrolling shooter with big bosses. |
