4 ms·
Origin made a ton of great games. "We make worlds" was their motto and I feel they lived up to that lofty ambition. One game I remember fondly that would appea
by jbattle 7y ago
Origin made a ton of great games. "We make worlds" was their motto and I feel they lived up to that lofty ambition.
One game I remember fondly that would appeal to this crowd was called Omega. There was some light but well-done chrome that you were an employee of some gigantic defense contractor writing AI for drone tanks. You'd design the chassis of your tank with parts that you unlocked by playing the game. Then you'd write the AI for your tank using a simple BASIC-like language. The game shipped with a hefty programming reference book.
Finally once you'd designed your tank you'd put it into an arena to test against other tanks. Early matches were 1:1 but you could build tanks that operated as a team (there were ways for the tanks to send messages to each other).
The game was a blast. My best tanks were stupid simple (back into a corner and rapidly scan the quarter of the arena where the enemy might appear). I feel like the game taught me a lot and was really fun to play. The only downside was all the loading times, swapping disks on my C64. But that was how games were back then
https://www.mobygames.com/game/omega_ https://www.mobygames.com/game/omega_
- RHSeeger 7y ago> One game I remember fondly that would appeal to this crowd was called Omega. I believe I still have that game, in it's box with it's instruction manual, somewhere in a closet. It was fantastic.
- Osiris 7y agoI played this game as a kid and usually ended up writing key bindings so I could directly control the tank. But, it was so fun to experiment with different strategies. Thanks for reminding me of the name of the game because I loved it and could never remember what it was called.
- jghn 7y agoWhen I was a kid my friend and I played a lot. We'd bring our favorite AI programs over to each other's house to compete with the other's favorite AI. One day I stumbled across how to set up keybindings, neither of us knew that it was a thing. I kept it to myself and invited him over, challenging him to try extra hard on his AI. He loaded it up, and I proceeded to annihilate his tank with my human controlled version. The look on his face was priceless and sticks with me to this day.
- jhbadger 7y agoThere was an earlier version of this game known as "RobotWar", originally on the PLATO mainframe system in the 1970s and ported to the Apple ][ in 1981. Not that Omega wasn't a nice update of the idea, but it wasn't entirely original. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RobotWar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RobotWar
- achillean 7y agoI would recommend checking out EXAPUNKS for a similar type of game that's available on modern systems: https://store.steampowered.com/app/716490/EXAPUNKS/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/716490/EXAPUNKS/
- MrZongle2 7y agoYes! Omega! I had it for the Amiga 500 and also remember it fondly.