Tankgirl Posted January 26, 2001 Share Posted January 26, 2001 Jesus, I just found out that they won't have any available until the end of February. Is there any place that they sell them in the stores? I understand that there isn't...oh well maybe I'll get Risk 2 instead. But I'll prolly get it later. P.S. How come they don't make those strategy games for the Mac, like Road to Moscow? --- "Snowpants are sexy!" http://www.geocities.com/wildhippychik/whp.htm Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Slapdragon Posted January 26, 2001 Share Posted January 26, 2001 Originally posted by Tankgirl: Jesus, I just found out that they won't have any available until the end of February. Is there any place that they sell them in the stores? I understand that there isn't...oh well maybe I'll get Risk 2 instead. But I'll prolly get it later. P.S. How come they don't make those strategy games for the Mac, like Road to Moscow? --- "Snowpants are sexy!" http://www.geocities.com/wildhippychik/whp.htm According to Dataquest, there are four big reasons for not porting games to the Macintosh: 1) Macintosh users are much more picky about reliability, support, user interface, and value for money spent than PC users. This is because the Mac audience is made of people who often use their computer for visual creation, and they often bought Mac because of these main selling points: higher reliability, lower cost of operations, more "finished" UI and user experience. To cater to this market (such as BTS does) recquire a level of attention to detail that many game creators shy away from, even though developing for the Mac is between 1/2 to 1/5th the cost of developing for the PC (due to the much longer debug timed required for making software work with PC code). 2) Many game makers do not know how to market to the Mac market, made different for the above reasons, and thus when they do try they fail, by advertising in PC magazines, and other silly market strategies that just don't work. 3) The PC coding market is often wedded to a complex set of closed API called Direct-X which while making PC programming easier, is at odds in general with open standards and often is set up specifically to make porting to Mac, Linnux, etc as difficult as possible (the old Byte Magazine has a wonderful article on this, as does the Register more recently). A game can use Open GL or other standards to get around this, but at the risk of a sudden change in Windows which will throw the entire system out of wack, while Direct-X and the so called "hidden APIs" (hidden in the sense that Microsoft does not document them in order to keep an advantage for itself in coding new software, but often not hidden well enough to keep people from using them) will always (err, well, most always) work with Windows. 4) As a smaller market, the Mac looks less attractive on paper, and indeed more money can be made on the PC side. In addition, even the crappiest game can be assured someone is going to buy it on the PC side, there are just so many buyers out their, but on the Mac side, with a big word of mouth sales method being needed, a crap game will fail to sell even 200 copies, screwing the makers. I should note, BTS's success with CM proves that money can be made with Macs, it just recquires that extra attention to detail. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mensch Posted January 26, 2001 Share Posted January 26, 2001 Amen Slapdragon! ------------ www.derkessel.com Home of „Die Sturmgruppe“; Scenario Design Group for Combat Mission. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Papa Smurf Posted January 26, 2001 Share Posted January 26, 2001 Tankgirl - can you prove that "Snowpants are sexy" - too many arguments have been started on this board by people making unsubstantiated statements... Neil ------------------ I don't sing. I don't dance. I ain't blue. Anything else you need to know? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Terence Posted January 26, 2001 Share Posted January 26, 2001 Originally posted by Papa Smurf: Tankgirl - can you prove that "Snowpants are sexy" yes. and be aware that anecdotal evidence is not acceptable. Your response must cite the Brinell Hardness Number for each pant in question and explain the relationship to a precise scientific definition of sexiness. Simply saying "I feel snowpants are sexy" or "It seems to me that snowpants, properly displayed, are very attractive" is not acceptable. Don't even try to suggest anything like: "My snowpants took out a King Tiger at 200 meters. This feels wrong. BTS do somefink!!!" ha ha ha! [This message has been edited by Terence (edited 01-26-2001).] Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BeWary Posted January 26, 2001 Share Posted January 26, 2001 Ha, sold out until the end of February, eh? Perhaps "The Best Game that No One Played" award wasn't such a bad thing after all... ------------------ "Liberty or Death?" Make it "Victory or Pretty Damned Badly Wounded", and I'm yours. - a prospective recruit during the American Revolution. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mr. Clark Posted January 26, 2001 Share Posted January 26, 2001 I'm wondering if it has something to do with updating the retail to v. 1.1? (I'm pretty sure I recently read that Snowpants can in fact deflect a Bazooka round if you are standing at a 47.5 degree angle to the Bazooka team. This only applies to Axis snowpants however! Allied snowpants have been shown to explode if hit by a loosely packed snowball, and are sometimes jokingly refered to as the Kleenex snowpants by the British... If you do a SEARCH for "BTS, possible incorrect modeling of Axis Snowpants" I'm sure you will find more information! Hope that helps!) [This message has been edited by Mr. Clark (edited 01-26-2001).] Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Robert Mayer Posted January 26, 2001 Share Posted January 26, 2001 Road to Moscow is at last report rather dead, as the developer BDG hasn't been able to 1) get the game to work, or 2) convince anyone to publish it (probably related to (1) above. The last build of it I played with was interesting but far from being ready for late-nite reruns, much less prime time. As for why game developers don't do Mac games, there are lots of reasons, and Snapdragon alludes to several. I think, though, that Occam's Razor is all that's necessar: there are far, far less Macs than PCs. That alone makes all the difference. And DirectX is hardly a closed API, at least not in the way the PC community defines closed. It's actually the reason 3D games run on a huge variety of video cards. Glide, 3dfx's graphics API, was closed, in that it only worked on 3dfx hardware. DirectX works on any hardware that supports its features, and as there are no licensing fees or bizarre proprietary thingamabobs with it, that means every video card available for the PC. Hardly a closed system. As for Mac owners expecting more reliability and better quality, perhaps so. When I owned Macs (from around 1987 to 1997) I found about as much crappy software on my Apple box as I found on the DOS/Windows boxes I had. And the myth of fixed Mac hardware specs vs. the ever shifting PC standard is just that, a myth, as anyone who has had to futz with all those extensions or sprockets and the like on Macs, not to mention the different bells and whistles on this Mac and that Mac, will attest. I have the highest regard for Macs, but they're irrelevant in my business (which is computer games): they simply are too small a market segment to matter much. I am thrilled that BTS supports the Mac, and hope they continue to do so, of course. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Mikey D Posted January 26, 2001 Share Posted January 26, 2001 BTS must be giggly with glee at having gone through another batch of the game. They keep on saying "...and this next order should last us for a LONG TIME" the bam, they're all sold again! I'm waiting to see that 180 page manual listed on the bestseller list in my bookstore! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Slapdragon Posted January 26, 2001 Share Posted January 26, 2001 Originally posted by Robert Mayer: Road to Moscow is at last report rather dead, as the developer BDG hasn't been able to 1) get the game to work, or 2) convince anyone to publish it (probably related to (1) above. The last build of it I played with was interesting but far from being ready for late-nite reruns, much less prime time. As for why game developers don't do Mac games, there are lots of reasons, and Snapdragon alludes to several. I think, though, that Occam's Razor is all that's necessar: there are far, far less Macs than PCs. That alone makes all the difference. And DirectX is hardly a closed API, at least not in the way the PC community defines closed. It's actually the reason 3D games run on a huge variety of video cards. Glide, 3dfx's graphics API, was closed, in that it only worked on 3dfx hardware. DirectX works on any hardware that supports its features, and as there are no licensing fees or bizarre proprietary thingamabobs with it, that means every video card available for the PC. Hardly a closed system. As for Mac owners expecting more reliability and better quality, perhaps so. When I owned Macs (from around 1987 to 1997) I found about as much crappy software on my Apple box as I found on the DOS/Windows boxes I had. And the myth of fixed Mac hardware specs vs. the ever shifting PC standard is just that, a myth, as anyone who has had to futz with all those extensions or sprockets and the like on Macs, not to mention the different bells and whistles on this Mac and that Mac, will attest. I have the highest regard for Macs, but they're irrelevant in my business (which is computer games): they simply are too small a market segment to matter much. I am thrilled that BTS supports the Mac, and hope they continue to do so, of course. From 1984 to 1996 the Mac market was quite different. Without serious GUI competition in the consumer space it attracted anyone who needed a true GUI but did not have the NeXT bucks. Because of this and arrogance of position the Mac rested on its laurels, and indeed things like Gamesprokets and the like were no better than Direct-X as an API, and lots of crap made it to market (but we should always remember Myst was developed on the Mac using old Hypercard as its engine). With the release of Win 95 the Mac was the more reliable (look up back articles by Byte magazine) of the two, and cheaper of the two to produce for. Direct-X helped Windows out of this (although the hidden APIs pissed a lot of people off). So findings today are not really going to match the past. Apple had a lot of arrogance that cost them. BTW-- CM sells 1 in 4 games to Mac Users. Still, Mr. Mayer is correct in one respect: the market is small enough that they get avoided. I suspect though that much of this is a mistake since the highest quality games (Duke Nukem and Quake in the twitch and fire group as an example) do make it to Mac very profitably, and several hand in hand launches (generally possible because the Mac is cheaper to develop on) have also done well. What happens is that companies look at the dollars, see that the Mac market will never make more than a quarter of their profits at best (as in BTS's case) and just follow the path of least resistance, leaving good money on the table. After all Panzer General for Mac made good money, and the number of Macs in consumer hands had not changed as a precentage of consumer computers for 4 years, made a bit better by studies which say Mac users computers have a longer life expentancy in both corporate and consumer use, leading to a larger number of older machines in service (a Mac made in 1995 can still play CM, just with a sluggish redraw on larger battles). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Henri Posted January 26, 2001 Share Posted January 26, 2001 Originally posted by Slapdragon: BTW-- CM sells 1 in 4 games to Mac Users. Considering that there are more than 10 times fewer Macs than PCs, if a game sells one in 4 to Mac users, and considering that porting a game is much cheaper than producing it from scratch, it doesn't take a Ph. D. in economics to figure out that producing a game for the Mac in addition to the PC can make more money per game sold than is made for the PC. Maybe some of those game companies need to taake a course in economics. This assumes, of course, that not too many people do like me and have both a Mac and a PC... Henri Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Capt Canuck Posted January 26, 2001 Share Posted January 26, 2001 Do you mean Cm is out of stock???!!!!??? Sniff sniff,...Oh no, I haven't ordered my copy yet! I'm going to go cry in the corner, wake me up in a thousand years,..... David But, if it isn't CM that's out of stock, I'll be okay! David! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Slapdragon Posted January 26, 2001 Share Posted January 26, 2001 Originally posted by Henri: I read an article that called it money on the table, but not everyone is leaving it there. CM is an example that makes a quarter of its dollars from Mac, and the Mac development (so says Steve and Charles) was far less work and resulted in far fewer bug fixes that the PC version. SPSS recently released a new version of that stats software pack for Mac after several years ago vowing never to make another Mac application, they are making an "undisclosed" but hefty profit on the application. The major shooters all have Mac versions that at their worst sell at 10 percent the rate of PC version, and that despite usually much smaller ad budgets ( or no budget at all). That said, the Mac development does require multitalented application programmers that have not just shake and baked a Windows programming course, plus if they screw with the UI and force to many odd clicks then the Mac users, not a very tolerant bunch, freak. Scares a lot of programmers I know. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Robert Mayer Posted January 26, 2001 Share Posted January 26, 2001 Oh, I agree that companies aren't being terribly smart about game development and publshing, and that includes the decision whether or not to do Mac versions. Companies doing games too often ignore sure, small profits in the pursuit of very speculative larger profits. I agree that they'd be smarter in many cases to do Mac versions, but hell, they'd be smarter to do more focused niche games for the PC as well, and take sure small gains instead of risking everything on long-shot get rich quick schemes. From what I hear from dealing with developers--and as a game journalist/editor, that's pretty much what I do for a living, deal with game developers and publishers--developing for any additional platform beyond the primary one you're focusing on adds exponentially to the work load, no matter how clean and simple the task should in theory be. Companies like BTS, or Bungie in the past at least, who developed simultaneously for both PC and Mac had an advantage, because they planeed for bi-platform support from the get go. But both BTS and Bungie have histories that were originally Mac-only, anyhow, so maybe it's easier to start Mac and go PC than the other way around. The big deal now is consoles. You keep hearing about game companies delaying or even ditching Mac or PC games in favor of PS2 and Xbox development. Increasingly, you're getting games developed for consoles and PCs simultaneously. Of course, there are millions more consoles than Macs, so the lure is greater. If it is sometimes hard to convince a publisher to support the PC, when consoles beckon, how much tougher is it going to be when you ask them to support the Mac? Of course, Combat Mission fans won't have to worry about the PlayStation or Xbox taking over our game. I don't think . Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dittohead Posted January 26, 2001 Share Posted January 26, 2001 Diablo II = 2.75 million copies. Wonder how many PC and how many MAC copies. Sounds like CM2 should have the name Diablo II in it some where. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tankgirl Posted January 26, 2001 Author Share Posted January 26, 2001 Could someone explain Diablo 2 to me?! I DLed the demo, and it's fun enough at one level, but there doesn't seem to be much skill. You just kill and heal and be a little careful and eventually you get though it. At least the demo was like that. There seems to be very little challenge...it the full version different? P.S. Since they are sold out of CM till the end of Feb. What do people recommend for games to get. My main thing is i like to play over the internet with others. PBEM or live. I'm thinking about Risk 2 or Call to Power (older i know). I have a Mac. ------------------ "Snowpants are sexy!" http://www.geocities.com/wildhippychik/whp.htm Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Monte99 Posted January 26, 2001 Share Posted January 26, 2001 Originally posted by Slapdragon: 1) Macintosh users are much more picky about reliability, support, user interface, and value for money spent than PC users. I get a kick out of that whimsical, ad-inspired notion that Mac ownership confers a certain level of, um, refinement and sophistication in all things. After all, didn't Pablo Picasso own one? Puhleeze. Mac users buy CM because it's a good game and it's available ( or was until this week ). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Slapdragon Posted January 26, 2001 Share Posted January 26, 2001 Originally posted by Robert Mayer: Oh, I agree that companies aren't being terribly smart about game development and publshing, and that includes the decision whether or not to do Mac versions. Companies doing games too often ignore sure, small profits in the pursuit of very speculative larger profits. I agree that they'd be smarter in many cases to do Mac versions, but hell, they'd be smarter to do more focused niche games for the PC as well, and take sure small gains instead of risking everything on long-shot get rich quick schemes. From what I hear from dealing with developers--and as a game journalist/editor, that's pretty much what I do for a living, deal with game developers and publishers--developing for any additional platform beyond the primary one you're focusing on adds exponentially to the work load, no matter how clean and simple the task should in theory be. Companies like BTS, or Bungie in the past at least, who developed simultaneously for both PC and Mac had an advantage, because they planeed for bi-platform support from the get go. But both BTS and Bungie have histories that were originally Mac-only, anyhow, so maybe it's easier to start Mac and go PC than the other way around. The big deal now is consoles. You keep hearing about game companies delaying or even ditching Mac or PC games in favor of PS2 and Xbox development. Increasingly, you're getting games developed for consoles and PCs simultaneously. Of course, there are millions more consoles than Macs, so the lure is greater. If it is sometimes hard to convince a publisher to support the PC, when consoles beckon, how much tougher is it going to be when you ask them to support the Mac? Of course, Combat Mission fans won't have to worry about the PlayStation or Xbox taking over our game. I don't think . No, I see a split were twitch and shoots go to the boxes aimed at a younger audience, and the strategy groggy games with niche of special audiences go to the PC. In fact, boxes worry me not at all since to be as useful as computers they essentially have to become computers. All they are is a new niche growing from the old Pong ideal. Who may be in trouble is computer journalists. For instance Robert, did you read the Duke Nukem EULA, specifically the portion that forbids the use of the trademarked name or image in material that "(is) derogatory or defamatory manner, or in any negative context". How about writing a negative review but not being allowed to mention the name of the product you are reviewing. Kinda sucks if it flies, but since it is commercial speach it may not have a first amendment challenge. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Slapdragon Posted January 26, 2001 Share Posted January 26, 2001 Originally posted by Monte99: I get a kick out of that whimsical, ad-inspired notion that Mac ownership confers a certain level of, um, refinement and sophistication in all things. After all, didn't Pablo Picasso own one? Puhleeze. Mac users buy CM because it's a good game and it's available ( or was until this week ). The ad campaign was based on the target market for the computer, which is based on the previous market for the computer and the area where PC's are often perceived by end users as lacking (and thus giving the Mac an "in"). There is a big article in Adage about this, and a lot of stuff from Chait/Day - the creators of the ads, including some very interesting research about how PC users perceive their computers. These ad campaigns led to the single most successful roll out of a new model (the Imac) of all time, and a continued demand for the little things. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Hough Posted January 26, 2001 Share Posted January 26, 2001 Originally posted by Tankgirl: Could someone explain Diablo 2 to me?! I DLed the demo, and it's fun enough at one level, but there doesn't seem to be much skill. You just kill and heal and be a little careful and eventually you get though it. At least the demo was like that. There seems to be very little challenge...it the full version different? I have to admit I rather enjoyed Diablo 2, and still play it off and on, between games of cm. And, um, there isn't much skill. But it is fun, and you get to see your character grow in power, and there's some minimum of strategy in choosing how to develop your character. And once you've beaten the game and get to Nightmare, and later Hell mode, it does get considerably harder. Since they are sold out of CM till the end of Feb. What do people recommend for games to get. My main thing is i like to play over the internet with others. PBEM or live. I'm thinking about Risk 2 or Call to Power (older i know). I have a Mac. If you don't have Myth, I'd suggest getting Myth: Total Codex. Should be about 20 bucks for Myth 1 and 2, some extra single-player levels, and a whole lot of extra multiplayer maps... -John ------------------ so you can stay cool behind your window and choose the view you want to see but as long as there's others held captive do not consider yourself free -EMBRACE, "DO NOT CONSIDER YOURSELF FREE" Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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