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Update Corner!
Racer and Bad Mood revisited.
Introduction, to start with it's a very potted history of gaming, Atari Falcon style..
The Atari Falcon was never really considered as a proper games machine in many quarters. Unlike the contemporary Amiga 1200, which played on its gaming heritage, the Falcon was sold by Atari as a 'Multimedia' system, back when 'Multimedia' was a brand new buzzword, when no-one in the industry had a clue what it was supposed to mean. (We all now know that it became 'Multi-tedia', when PeeCee developers got hold of it a year or so later!)
'Multimedia' at its crudest, means "look, pictures AND sound, together!" Certainly games were intended to be an important part of the Falcon's software catalogue at its launch. Otherwise, the dreaded 'M' word provided nothing but confusion for those Atari fans otherwise keen on this new computer.
There was supposed to be the next generation of adventure games with digitised graphics, with the very early cancelled 'Space Junk'. This certainly looked like the wave of the future, as in the kind of game that you would see a lot of on PC CD-ROM from the mid-nineties on. Then there was the tragically lost in a comedy of idiots 'Legends of Valour' for the Falcon, which was supposed to offer the same graphical quality as the contemporary PeeCee release.
We even had Jeff Minter pitching in with an official Atari release, Llamazap, which got lost for a while by Atari, only re-emerging a long time later.
In spite of these efforts, the availability and initial pricing of the Falcon put many of the machines in the hands of people who were looking for a slower Atari TT, with nicer colours and no interest in gaming whatsoever. The commercial support for gaming was vanishingly small. We had Simarils with their worthy and pretty adventure games, the lost in transit official Atari games, some other small companies like Parx, and that was it.
Of course, where the official support lagged, the enthusiasts, wannabe software publishers, home brewers, bored demo coders and the rest took over. Over the years, we've had a surprising number of hits, some duds to redress the balance, and many many half finished, or almost started projects that ran out of road. We take a moment to commemorate the efforts of the team behind 'Running', the Reservoir Gods, and many more.
But for all the good times that came, there was still the niggling doubt that we'd never really yet seen the very best from the Falcon. Was it ultimately too compromised a design to be able to give the ultimate gaming experience possible? And so this question remained unanswered, until quite recently.
There have been a number of recent developments intended to push the Falcon harder as decent games hardware more recently. We've previously considered the tale of 'Elansar', a decent attempt to create a 'Myst' like world on a Falcon and CD-ROM by Orion. The extremely dynamic Sharp X68000 port of 'Cho Ren Sha' to the Falcon has its own review elsewhere in here. We also had tidings of great joy from two other developers, namely Thadoss of Dune and friends, with his bright and bold console style games, 'Beats of Rage' and 'Racer'. Then there is the master coder, Doug Little, who returned to the fold with a fully realised and optimised port of ID Software's 'Doom' for the Falcon, known as 'Bad Mood'.
But they have not stopped there. We now tell the story of what they did next, namely massive updates for 'Racer' and 'Bad Mood'. Here's where things are at now!
'Racer 2'
Racer, which we first looked at, in our 'Sillyventure Souvenir' one-off publication, has now grown up and become Racer 2, released at SV2014 near the end of 2014, to universal acclaim.
From the original choice of four circuits of Racer, there are now many more tracks available.
There are now twenty four circuits (each circuit has its own graphics and music.) Not all of them are available at the start, they have to be 'unlocked' by completing races. We have up to thirty nine different cars sharing the circuit, with three race modes, namely arcade for a quick go, championship and challenge for something longer. Control options are flexible and the race can be run from joystick, keyboard or a Jagpad.
To finish this new version of the game, Thadoss had lots of help from Templeton, Xerus and Calimero, especially with the graphics.
Some very helpful graphics!
The game ultimately weighs in at around 55 MB, with a Zip download of 20 MB. So it is a big game with lots of ambition. For all that, it is perfectly playable on a non-accelerated Falcon equipped with 4 MB of RAM. The 68030 assembly code is optimised for basic hardware running at only 16 MHz.
There are lots and lots of extras thanks to the extra work from everyone concerned. You get a melt in the mouth intro sequence and a luxurious game menu with lots of selection and splash screens and all. The game graphics are improved even from the good efforts made in the original Racer. The players car certainly looks a lot more realistic. There is a minor niggle with the other cars, which are still a bit two dimensional, but you tend not to worry so much, you're concentrating on your own race! The motion of the track is very naturalistic, not at all flat, with nice gently undulating hills as part of the driving experience. Racer 2 is somehow very relaxing and exciting at the same time.
The look and sound and feel is very professional, going above the levels of presentation that you would expect from a commercial quality release from back then. This is one area where a lot of the homebrew hobbyist or small producer Falcon games, tended to sell themselves a little bit short.
The gameplay is fluid, remarkably keeping up speed and smoothness, not bowing to the pressure to need an accelerator. It runs like something arcade perfect even on a standard Falcon. The driving method and experience is basically unchanged from the original Racer. This means you point the car in a general direction of 'forwards' to overtake other cars, whilst missing them and scenery, hopefully to win, or complete the race at least. There are bonuses to pick up from the track, that provide handy extras for you. There's a lot of road to go, you may well need them!
Here's a little list of them.
Maxi speed - Where the players maximum speed increases to 400 km/h for 10 seconds.
Hyper speed The players maximum speed increases to 500 km/h for 10 seconds! (Otherwise known as "A fair bit of poo and wee has come flying out mode.")
Eject one - The nearest opponent is shoved to the side of the road.
Eject all - All the visible opponents are cleared to the side of the road.
Flat tyre - The nearest opponent's tyres are flat.
Flat tyres - All the visible opponent's tyres are flat.
Time Freezing 5 - Freezes the countdown for five seconds.
Time freezing 10 - Does the same to the countdown for ten seconds.
Bumping airbag - To bump into a car then ejects it from your path.
Hyper thrust - Maximum speed and automatic pilot driving, aka "Hands off the wheel and relax time."
Bad driver - Inverts the driver's left/right controls for five seconds. Does not (yet) feature "Elderly confused person driving the wrong way down a motorway mode."
Thadoss spent a year after the original racer, to pour his heart and soul into this massively upgraded sequel. I wonder what he may come up with next?!
Rating: - 93% - A genuine 'wow'! moment for Falcon gaming and massive testament to the rewarding hard work of the creators concerned.
'Bad Mood Beta'
We've moved on by some considerable margin from the Doom 0.5 Beta that we enthusiastically pored over in 'Mag' issue 2013. Doug Little and friends have been very busy since that time, not necessarily on this particular project all of that time, but by the end of 2014, a new release, the official and vastly tidied up and somewhat enhanced Beta version of Bad Mood had arrived, to even more cheers.
One heartening discover is realised straightaway on starting up and installing it. Yes it does work on my accelerated Centurbo 2 this time. A special version of the executable .prg file has been provided for accelerated Falcons and other potentially tricky things like Hatari.
Apart from ruthlessly optimising almost every detail of the main game code and changing several aspects to make it more Atari-friendly, several other improvements and enhancements have also been made. There is a list below, we'll say a little more about each of these.
Truecolour lighting & shading - Original 'Doom' relies on 256 colour textures. Doug does helpfully point out that if there are several different ones in a single scene, you technically have Truecolour anyway. But it's nice to have it done properly.
Special shaders created for liquids, invisibility, some types of transparency. You remember watching all those Youtube updates of oozing lava, with mounting excitement. Well they're in the game too.
Mipmap filtering for floor and ceiling textures, support for truecolour texture overloads (using external .bmp files) and truecolour titles and intermissions. Erm, more technical stuff, Doug repurposed the code to use the stronger features of the Falcon, and away from the original code which had a different, more PeeCee or Intel-centric way of working.
Modified occlusion testing for better scene management, modified line-of-sight algorithm for better game performance and modified A.I. for better game performance. All self explanatory, it wasn't just the 3D that was tweaked here.
Extensive use of the DSP as 3D and graphics co-processor. No surprises there. The availability of the 56001 DSP has often transformed the Falcon from an interesting but average computer, to something rather special. Doug is displaying mastery of this rare chip right here!
Custom video resolutions (hardware chunky pixel modes). Of course, the Videl gets a stiff work-out too.
Custom midi replay via Falcon030 codec or external midi sound modules. With optional software midi replay mixed with sfx. Also there are some improved sound effects such as ricochet, chaingun etc. We've got proper ingame music! It's the actual midi music from the original, it's as if we've plunged back through a tattered curtain of time back to 1994. With Doom death matches through serial cables made out of small boys, 56k modems for goal posts!
You'll have to hum the music yourself!
The little extra's such as the bullet pings and ricochets when a bad guy fires, adds atmosphere to an already drop dead gorgeous game.
There is also a proper 3-D aiming cursor option for beasties on different levels. This was not in the original Doom, but is a feature found on later games such as Quake.
The trimmings have not been left neglected. We've got gorgeous title and menu graphics as befits a nearasdammit finished game. This is not just a quick and cheap port, it's the full game. It has been optimised until the circuits in the Falcon squeak, as it is very decently playable even on a bare 16 MHz machine (with 14 MB memory).
One more feature which has made it over from the original game, is the ability to load in and use custom .WAD files. One of the things that kept Doom at the top for so long, was the option to customise the game with user created .WAD files, so wall textures were turned into all sorts of dreams and nightmares, and the original Doom monsters got turned into Daleks and Star Wars characters. Now (within some limits) you can load in these files as well.
Trying to reimpose some degree of conciseness on how I feel about this new release, there have been so many Doom ports on so many different platforms, I'm frankly a bit blase about the whole thing.
Apart from the initially impressive 'Doom' that we would see on a higher end Amiga or Falcon, we've had Doom on just about every flavour of console up to the most recent generations. There's been Doom on smartphones since Nokia Corporation was a lad. There's even been Doom ported to knock-off Chinese games hardware. I'm sure there's a cheap and nasty Doom port embedded in the controller firmware of the next budget priced washing machine as yet to hit the market.
But for all of that, there is something special about what has been done by Doug and friends here with Bad Mood. It's magically recaptured the olden times when Doom was new, exciting and state of the art. An old tired but much beloved game has been reborn anew!
Rating:- 95% - It's Doom, fresh as it was on day zero!
CiH - For Maggie 25th Anniversary, October 2015.