Speed Kills

[Flack]

Back in high school, a friend of mine gave me a copy of this game. I can't really remember the name of it but it was kind of like Galaga, only some of the ships would leave behind special weapons and such when they exploded. The game was played with the mouse. Left and right moved your ship left and right. The left button fired your lasers and the right button launched bombs. Both buttons together send a mechanical arm up into the screen which was used to grab the bonus letters, which usually gave you additional guns or bombs. Like I said I can't remember the name at the moment but I do remember it had 100 levels.

My friend gave me a copy of the game and I beat it like two days later. My friend kept saying there was no way, that the game was impossible after level 10 or so. I told him that at level 50 there was an intermission. It really surprised me how good I was at the game and how terrible he was!

So one day I stopped by his house after school. My friend had just purchased a 386 DX/40 and was playing the game on his computer. My dad had a 286 which I believe was 10mhz without turbo turned on and 12 with. Regardless, I saw the difference immediately. His computer was TONS faster than mine, and he was right -- on his computer, it was a lot harder!!! On my dad's 286 the game was slow almost to the point of being boring. No wonder he hadn't beat it! Anyway I never told him about the difference between our computers and I just let him think that he sucked and that I was really good at the game, haha.

Do you have any stories about old games running particularly fast or slow on your hardware?

[Pantechnicon]

I first had X-Wing loaded up on a 386-25 with 3MB. You cannot believe how abysmal the framerate was...perhaps 1/6 of what it should have been. You could pretty much shoot your lasers at a target, then go make yourself a sammich in the kitchen, and come back to watch the lasers hit. Yet I had the patience to get through about 3/4 of the game on this system, being none the wiser. When I upgraded to a 486-25 with 4MB I was shocked at how fluid the gameplay had become.

Years later I heard an old friend of mine comment about how it was more or less an affront to the very profession of game programmers that LucasArts tried to create a polygon engine that would run on a 386. I think he may have been right.