#Harpoon no more
7 messages in this thread
Hey, for what it's worth, I just learned that Three-Sixty is no
longer going to support the Amiga. THIS MEANS NO MORE HARPOON!!
Including the much improved and expanded Harpoon II…. I've put in
my $.02 worth requesting continued Amiga support… anyone else care
to send a message to Three-Sixty??
I've tried, but they won't listen to reason! It' shameful that the
Amiga Game Market, once the pride of the computer industry, has been
reduced to rubble — dependent on imports for it's last breaths. You
can probably count on one hand the remaining companies that support
our Amiga…Sad.
I asked the Three-Sixty guy (Rodney Graves, over in Military forum)
if Three-Sixty markets to Europe and aren't they cutting off all the
Amigas over there as well… He said they market through Electronic
Arts, so perhaps EA would have some influence in getting Harpoon back
for the Amiga? I'd just hate to have to get a damned Mac emulator to
run the new Harpoon… They're gonna have to drag me kicking and
screaming into MacLand…..
Barry,
I agree; EA could be crucial. I believe they forced Origin's arm in
releasing Ultima – The False Prophet, but I could be wrong. Harpoon
1.1 works okay under 2.X but the Scenario Editor locks up. I do have
one good thing to say about 360, and that's Megafortress (dist. by
EA). 360 has released all the mission disks, but no Editor.
Megafortress even uses the 2.xx installer! Slick port…
I feel a little awkward playing Harpoon nowadays (the Russians are
our buddies now aren't they?) and I wonder how much the end of the
Cold War will affect games like it, which once prided themselves on
contemporary realism and are now just oddities <g>. Can the Amiga
survive with a weak game market? Yes, but it has to do a hell of a
job on the "other things" people use their computers for!
I think Harpoon's trend, as demonstrated in Battlesets 3 & 4, towards
exploring the potential for conflicts among small nations is a boon
for the game. If the Cold War had continued, then those scenarios
dealing with India/Pakistan, or Syria/Israel, and Turkey/Greece, are
pretty much fantasy… Now it is TOO real….
– Barry Jarrett
** letting my Amiga do all the work…. on Autopilot!! **
Personally, I'm not *too* worried about the game market decline.
Yet… <g> My guess as to what we're seeing is that the larger US
game companies don't see the *old* Amiga machines (A500, A600) as
profitable anymore because, while there are enough machines to sell
the games, they just don't have the processor power or the hard disk
space or the ram space or the 256 colors support or a combination
thereof to run the games they're making nowadays, and reducing the
game to fit that market is a *real* pain in the neck.
And on the other side, the AGA machines, with faster processors and
more ram and more hard disk space and support for 256 colors
(Commodore ought to stop selling A1200 machines without a hard drive
ASAP – ALL Amigas should ship with a HD if at all possible…) are
definately capable of running the games being made today, but they
don't have enough of a market share yet to justify porting the game
for AGA owners ONLY. So I fully expect the decline to continue until
the AGA base gets larger, then we'll hopefully start seeing the US
game companies testing the Amiga waters again… –>Steve Bennett
Good analysis, Steve. I sure hope you are right — I _want_ to be
able to do Amiga development again!