| Home | Editorial | Maggie 25th | Demos | Games | Serious Stuff | Travel Reports | Multimedia | Humour |
Flawed Gems Revisited.
'Of Lasers and Men' on the Falcon
Back in the early days, the oddly titled 'Of Lasers and Men' (or 'Des Lasers et des Hommes') turned up without warning in one of my deliveries of fun and interesting 'Warez' type disks. The game was made by a gentleman called Arnaud Linz. And it was the first attempt that I saw, which seriously attempted a first person perspective shooter on the Falcon. It was shareware and liking what I saw, I did register. This gained me access to subsequent more developed versions, culminating in the final release 2.0.
Arnaud stated that Lasers and Men was influenced by a combination of 'Wolfenstein' and a Laser Quest style gaming session. The floor textures were not initially planned, but were added later on when 'Doom' was released.
Firstly we look at the Pre-Preview. This is not flawed. Unpolished perhaps, an early work in progress, but not flawed. You get a nice playable little intro to the Lasers and Men concept. You need to look past the ripped Wolfenstein graphics perhaps. It is quite playable even on a stock Falcon, adequate when running the 320 x 200 executable, but more responsive with the 320 x 100 mode. This offers a useable semi-textured world, with the walls done, but not the ceiling and floors. However a degree of depth cueing and darkening corridors in the far distance adds greatly to the in-game atmosphere.
Even now, in 2015, it's still a neat little game to fire up in a spare ten minutes. The difficulty level is pitched about right. You can complete it with a bit of care and luck, but this is not guaranteed!
If you're playing on an accelerated machine (reference for this article is a CT2 Falcon @ 50 MHz), then the pre-preview gets to be very responsive. Perhaps even a tad too fast with 320 x 100, as the game logic and actions of the computer players are also speeded up. I'll return to this issue later.
So we come to the main game. This culminated in the final version 2.0. It was still recognisably 'Lasers and Men' as depicted in the pre-preview. But we also got a number of changes.
An oak-panelled dining room?
The in-game graphics, textures and player/opponents alike had been reworked. What you got could be described still as 'coder graphics' to some extent. I recall Arnaud had problems with getting a final version of these (no artist!). The number and variety of the levels are greatly improved, even from earlier preview versions, with up to twenty-one available for the registered version.
Level four gets a special mention from me for the 'melee' mode, where dozens of computer players all pile into each other in a big central space. You as the player are almost a bystander! I guess this is an effort to recreate the Laser Quest experience on a computer. I've never seen anything like this on any other Falcon game, or really anywhere else on the 16/32 bit generation. The idea that you are part of a larger and mostly computer AI controlled team is intriguing for something this old.
The difficulty setting is a tad more onerous than on the pre-preview. A lot of the levels have the weaker friendly brown team heavily outnumbered, then they are killed off with seemingly little impact on the hostile blue force. There is a nasty bug (or "feature") with the occasional super-hard to kill fast shooting enemy, who takes most of your shield off you! Arnaud claimed not to be aware of this during development. I think this was a genuine bug. This reveals itself even more on accelerated hardware. (For comparison, a normal bad guy takes about ten shots or so to kill.) Fortunately, your Star-Trek classic phaser-sounding ammunition supply seems to be infinite.
It is possible to partially regenerate your shield in this game from objects that are power-ups. It may even recover slowly on its own as an imperfect memory recalls? So you have to be very very careful how you go around the level. With the depth-shading retained, exploration is a genuinely tense experience. Also an overhead view scanner tells you the approximate positions of the respective forces, which tend to be mostly blue dots, reinforcing the hopelessness of your situation!
To sum it up, perhaps 'Lasers and Men' was a tad overambitious. Especially when Arnaud opted for full floor and ceiling texturing, with all the other stuff such as depth-cueing, many enemies potentially on screen and some sort of game AI. The reason for doing this of course, between the pre-preview and final version, Doom on the PeeCee had arrived.
The screen updating and fluidity is bearable in 320 x 100 on a stock Falcon, but it is chugging horribly with lots of frame skip if you are going for 320 x 200! This game definitely needed acceleration!
In this day and age, it is feasible for people to do this. My Centurbo 2 was happily compatible, My CT60 declined to have anything to do with this. Other '030 based boosters should work with this game too. With the CT2, there is a decent speed-up even with 320 x 200 mode. Still not 50 FPS smooth, but better than the nightmare of the stock setting. The 320 x 100 mode is really playable. The only issue that arises is that the enemy players benefit from the extra CPU and DSP cycles too, and seem to gain in power and strength to some extent.
Look out, a bad guy!
Speculating idly, perhaps an ideal outcome would have been for Arnaud to have left the game semi-textured to keep the frame rate reasonable. (Perhaps even go for minimal texturing but retain the depth cueing, so like a slightly graphics heavier Sub-Station analogue for the Falcon?) Also some work would be needed on the game logic to make the bad guys a bit less unbeatable or even to remove the random bad guy with super powers.
The source code is open source and available on Atari-forum. Some suggestions for improvement without a massive re-write could include the following.
Making the bad guys easier to kill or offer more lethality for your gun, or shield regeneration to be quicker for the player. Alternatively, you could make the other friendly team players a bit tougher. Arnaud did get back in touch a while ago. He stated that he used coding practices to make 'Lasers and Men' the opposite of those he teaches and uses professionally today. Back in the day, it was suggested there was going to be a recoded from scratch sequel, but nothing more came of this.
The final version 2.0 was reviewed in Maggie 17 in March 1995. What did we think of it, twenty years ago(!)
In Maggie, the flawed nature was clear, even back then. The main shortcoming was that the game ran out of breath when the action hotted up. It scored a reasonable 75% overall, but dropped to 65% with the playability. That would have indicated some serious issues, with the generous producer friendly scoring we were using at the time. As the summing up comment succinctly stated "The author has, perhaps wisely, called it a day for this particular game, and may be coding a sequel, starting from scratch with new DSP routines etc."
So does our reassessment reveal a flawed gem, or a bag of poo? 'Of Lasers and Men' is still a worthwhile add-on to your collection, especially with an accelerated Falcon (but not an 060!). It is reasonably playable, rewards persistence and offers a different experience of FPS games to anything else available back then, or possibly even now?
Flawed Gem rating:- 75% - Rising to 85% with accelerated hardware.
CiH for Maggie, Feb/March 2015.