Tag Archives: Far East
The Tuesday Interview – Bob Smith of Oriental Empires
Bob Smith pays GrogHeads a visit~
Lloyd Sabin (and Boggit!), 3 January 2017
You clearly have a long, proud history in historical PC gaming, which younger readers may not know about. Games like ‘Arnhem,’ ‘Desert Rats,’ and ‘Operation Vulcan’ are remembered very fondly. What is your favorite game of yours from that era and why?
Of the wargames, probably Desert Rats, because I like big sweeping games. Of all the games I did in my first stint as an independent developer, my favorite is probably Armada 2525, because I had so much fun playing it with my friends (who usually used to beat me).
What were some of the difficulties you faced in the 1980s when producing those early games?
The machines were very limited, you had to think about every byte of RAM. I remember being up at 3am trying to find 3 bytes of memory to finish Desert Rats, with a bike coming at 7 to take the master tape to the duplicators. The development environments were very limited too. I used to write everything out on paper, because the editors were so bad, and once your program got too big to fit into RAM with the assembler, it could take as much as an hour to make a new version.
Tuesday Screenshot – Shogun 2
Lloyd Sabin, 16 September, 2014
What game keeps you coming back?
I have yet to win a campaign of Shogun 2, but is there a game out there today that makes losing look more beautiful? If there is, I have not found it yet.
Tuesday Screenshot: From Shogun 2 – Fall of the Samurai
This Tuesday, Shogun 2 strikes fear into the eyes of the enemy.
Click to enlarge
See the look in the eyes of those two soldiers in the center of the shot? Clearly its fear…fear of my mounted troops mowing them down like weeds, like the men on the right side of the image. Maybe they’re also thinking that they may have picked the wrong side in this war. Or maybe they’re thinking of their wives. We’ll never know because shortly after this image was taken, every member of that unit was killed. We talk a lot about not prioritizing graphics, but this screen shot shows how well emotions like fear can be expressed with a good graphics engine.
