Sorry if this is an epic post, I just want to reply to the whole thread at once rather than spam it with multiple posts.
sneth wrote:http://www.rgcd.co.uk/2012/12/kobayashi ... atari.html
It's essentially a Time Pilot clone, which is friggin awesome. I was a Time Pilot ace, so I'm pretty excited for this.
It doesn't push the system to it's limits, but it's colorful and polished.
Hopefully the Reboot team will be able to crank these out with their engine.
It's CD based so you could probably find an ISO, but I try to support these people the best I can. So buy it.
Thanks, sneth, for your thread & kind words! I'm not sure if I know you from another forum under another name or if you only do your Jaguar talk here, either way, I appreciate it
I don't think anyone has imaged and uploaded it yet, but I was actually googling for exactly that when I found this thread.
grimm wrote:Not saying this game cant be fun, or that every homebrew game has to be a Battlesphere or a Pier Solar, but it would be fun to see a complete and original homebrew with ambition to be a little more than just an arcade rip-off.
Well Battlesphere was a commercially produced title and Pier Solar is probably the one of if not the stand-out homebrew title on any system. It had a large team (dozens of people involved) and many man-hours put into it, and now it's becoming an indie game for many other systems.
As for rip-off, that's a bit unfair. If we took Time Pilot, decompiled it, ripped assets and recreated it on Jaguar and called it Time Pilot - that would be a rip off. Of course TP inspired our game, it is a clone, that's not such a bad thing, especially in homebrew circles (look at the 7800 homebrews - many of them are direct copies of games... and the 7800 people like that... we're of a similar opinion but like to do things our own way).
As for us, we're two people, a coder and a gfxer, plus a few testers, who spend a few hours a week (if we're lucky!) doing something we enjoy
We see ourselves just the same as the guys who make new 7800 games and new 2600 games - those are the kinds of games we like and always have. Just because it's the Jaguar and "64-bit powa" doesn't mean you have to make games of a certain type or percieved level technically.
Innovation in the gaming experience, new ideas and fresh thinking - that's not generally the realm of homebrews for 20 year old dead consoles. Look at commercial games and look at indie studios, and look at cutting edge hardware - that's where this kind of stuff can take place - where people will see rewards for such efforts and skills.
grimm wrote:the jaguar is capable of so much more.
What the Jaguar is actually capable of is seen in the finished, completed games that people have on their shelves. Anything else is talk, speculation, tech demos and also the favourite subject of the kinds of guys who weirdly never actually get around to releasing a finished product to prove any of the theories
http://reboot.atari.org/new-reboot/about.html
Read that. We're not Jaguar game makers because we're trying to prove points to anyone or prove what the Jaguar was or could have been. That's best left to those who give a shit
We just know what it was designed to let you do easily - is all the lovely OP sprite handling stuff, probably all the original Atari Panther style stuff before Flair II added the techno
We're all about having fun making stuff and giving it away for free when we can.
grimm wrote:I would consider it, had it been a cartridge release.
Cartridges are best left to the kinds of games that require them - ie larger than 2mb single-load titles and those that benefit from the ROM space. KM:F is a single-load, <2mb binary and runs from memory alone - that's how it was designed so it could be played by anyone with a BJL, Jaguar CD, skunkboard, etc. We won't throw such a game onto a cart just because we can, it makes little sense - the CD medium is the perfect and most cost-effective for this one. What is also does is allow for better music and that's something we'll explore in future releases.
Also, it should be pointed out Kobayashi Maru:Final is actually a slight remix of a game that (like all our other game releases for Jaguar and Falcon) can be freely downloaded and played with a flash device or Jag CD. Buying our games supports our Jaguar activities, everything we have ever made from selling Jaguar games (which isn't exaclty loads!) has all gone directly back into our Jaguar game making... for instance, our SFDX release and small ejagfest releases paid for a JagCD unit for CJ and 500 carts chells for future games... the CD Unit CJ bought in turn lead to us making improvments to the Jagtopia free boot CD and memory track support...
sneth wrote:I think the limitations on carts is price. There has been some huge progress on this front, but it's still not very friendly on the wallet.
That's a big part of it. We have a 4mb flash cart design and have produced prototypes to be sure they work as intended. You're right though, they're not cheap (around 25 euros a piece as long as we purchase sufficient quantity at the price point)... then there's boxes, stickers, manuals, overlays, box inserts... it all adds up quickly. Our first cartridge game will be Rebooteroids:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Dwlr4wHDXE One of the reasons we're going to be producing these CD games over the coming months is to try to raise a little cash to help fund the initial cart release.
3DO Experience wrote:Is it bad that I know the title is a reference to Star Trek?
Not at all
The kobayashi maru was an impossible task, CJ liked the name as there is no way to complete or win our game - you keep shooting as long as you can until you're dead
But you can cheat like Kirk did if you know how
grimm wrote:Actually, id pay the higher price for a cartridge release any day compared to a cd-r release.
Kobayashi Maru:Final is supplied on a glass mastered/metal stamped real CD, not a CD-R. As I said earlier, if the game requires a cart that's fine, if not, CD is far less of a financial risk or burden for all involved... if there were more Jaguar fans and more willing to buy CD games, they could be sold at a much, much lower price point, when you glass master a game you have to take a minimum quantity that is far more than you could ever hope to sell but you have to base your end price on what you will see back in sales... all the kind of stuff we hate to be involved with tbh, that's why we've teamed up with RGCD.co.uk to make this happen
grimm wrote:and the laser unit in that would be difficult if not impossible to replace once the cd-r has worn it out prematurely.
It's actually fairly straight forward to replace a Jaguar CD mech, I've done it twice using LinkoVitch's guide.
...
Again, sorry for the epic tl;dr post