{"id":814,"date":"2010-06-20T15:24:52","date_gmt":"2010-06-20T20:24:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/archives\/814"},"modified":"2016-11-15T17:28:30","modified_gmt":"2016-11-16T01:28:30","slug":"1997-a-new-beginning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/archives\/814","title":{"rendered":"1997: A New Beginning"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Egypt 1156 B.C.<\/em> has proved unplayable.  For one thing, lines of dialogue frequently cut out prematurely &#8212; something that I&#8217;ve seen happen on other Cryo\/Dreamcatcher games.  The standard solution for sound problems is to turn off DirectX hardware acceleration, but that didn&#8217;t help here.  Suspecting that the system speed was the problem, I also used Turbo to turn it down to 1%.  This seemed to help somewhat, but there were still a lot of skipped lines.<\/p>\n<p>I could probably work around sound problems in dialogue if necessary, by turning voice off and subtitles on, but that&#8217;s just the start of the problems.  Opening a piece of papyrus in my inventory, I found there was no way to close it. Certain controls would blur it a little, as if it were going out of focus as part of a going-away animation, but it didn&#8217;t go away.  Possibly relatedly, when I tell it to exit the game, it sits there playing music and doing nothing until I press Esc.  I recall that other games by the same company behave similarly, except that instead of an empty screen, they display the credits.  So it looks like there&#8217;s some sort of graphics glitch here.<\/p>\n<p>Someday, I&#8217;m going to put together a bunch of obsolete hardware and install Windows 98 on it for all these recalcitrant late-1990s games.  If I were smart, I would have done this already, in preparation for this stage of the chronological run-through.  As it is, I wanted to play an adventure game for 1997 in the hope that I could finish it in a single week, and instead, I&#8217;ve spent a full week exhausting my supply of them without getting started.<\/p>\n<p>For my next attempt, I&#8217;ve chosen <em>Evolution: The Game of Intelligent Life<\/em>, an educational strategy game sponsored by the Discovery Channel and designed by none other than indie game icon Greg Costikyan.  After a couple of false starts &#8212; running <em>Egypt<\/em> seems to make my system forget how DirectX works until reboot &#8212; it installs and runs successfully.  That&#8217;s as far as I&#8217;ve gotten, and I probably won&#8217;t be getting any gaming in tonight, but we&#8217;ll see how it goes.  It seems to be designed more or less in the general mold of <em>Civilization<\/em>, which gives me hope that I can get in a complete session over the next few days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Egypt 1156 B.C. has proved unplayable. For one thing, lines of dialogue frequently cut out prematurely &#8212; something that I&#8217;ve seen happen on other Cryo\/Dreamcatcher games. The standard solution for sound problems is to turn off DirectX hardware acceleration, but that didn&#8217;t help here. Suspecting that the system speed was the problem, I also used [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,19],"tags":[385,386,68],"class_list":["post-814","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adventure","category-strategy","tag-egypt-1156-b-c-tomb-of-the-pharaoh","tag-evolution-the-game-of-intelligent-life","tag-problems-running-games"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/814","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=814"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/814\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4553,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/814\/revisions\/4553"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}