Ok, I'm not very much exposed to MSX (especially MSX2) games and other applications. Lately I downloaded some games from funet and tried out some MSX2 games, and guess what... they are not as good as I thought.

On the other hand, people who are deeply engulfed in MSX scene have done better than what video games companies in the 80's-90's have done. All I want to say is that MSX home developers are really doing better than these videogame-dedicated company. Few people to name are Caz Cramer of Parallax and his Blade Lord and other stuff. (Sorry if I'm not mentioning other people.)

You are mastering MSX like never any other company can do, or don't you think so?

There are some exceptions, like Space Manbow from Konami or SD Snatcher from Konami or......Everything from Konami .....And Compile......Falcom...Microcabin Naah, seriously, I do get your point. The amateurscene reached a level which indeed surpassed the level of many commercial MSX developers in the 80s, early 90s. Especially when it concerns technical effects. Amateurs really tickle the Z80 and the V9938 to their maximum.

Quote:

Ok, I'm not very much exposed to MSX (especially MSX2) games and other applications. Lately I downloaded some games from funet and tried out some MSX2 games, and guess what... they are not as good as I thought. On the other hand, people who are deeply engulfed in MSX scene have done better than what video games companies in the 80's-90's have done. All I want to say is that MSX home developers are really doing better than these videogame-dedicated company. Few people to name are Caz Cramer of Parallax and his Blade Lord and other stuff. (Sorry if I'm not mentioning other people.) You are mastering MSX like never any other company can do, or don't you think so?

No I don't think so. Although there are some awesome amateur projects you can't say that they were (or are) doing better than the commercial companies. Of course that all depends on your own opinion but I haven't seen an amateur game that could rival the likes of SD-Snatcher, Solid Snake, Metal Gear, Xak, Ys or Psycho World. Some are awesome at pushing the power of the MSX (Akin comes to mind), some are pretty huge (Pumpkin Adventure) but in my opinion the videogame companies are still ahead. I mean, we worked hard on DASS but Aleste was still better, in simple terms of ambience and playability.

Quote:

... I mean, we worked hard on DASS but Aleste was still better, in simple terms of ambience and playability.

Yeah, never really liked DASS because of the gameplay. It had this unnatural feel..
But I do liked the tape with the soundtrack!! Some pretty nice tracks...

It's indeed surprising to see how quickly the community was capable of mastering the MSX system. Like MrRudi said, it's still hard to achieve the same kind of gameplay, to think of new game concepts etc. and most productions cannot level with the high quality games already mentioned.

But, all in all, a lot of 'amateur' creations were better than the average commercial games. Especially the European community was very good at exploiting the MSX hardware to the max. For instance: the multilayer scroll in Almost Real. It's a small 'in your face' to Konami, to demonstrate the Neo Kobe introdemo of SD-Snatcher could have been multilayer as well

Quote:

>>... I mean, we worked hard on DASS but Aleste was still better, in simple terms of ambience and playability. << Yeah, never really liked DASS because of the gameplay. It had this unnatural feel.. But I do liked the tape with the soundtrack!! Some pretty nice tracks...

Basically the controls were to lineair, to direct...you never had the fluidity of control that Gradius and Aleste had, but hey...how the hell were we supposed to know? Some of the weapons were completely useless, or made it too easy (shield). Not to burn my own product to the ground, but it could have been a lot better. It was good on the graphics side I think, and "not bad" as a shooter but nothing really good either. I think the games that look and feel professional the fastest are games like Dix, Trojka etc. Esp. Trojka was magnificent.

I was actually very impressed with DASS. It was a very ambitious project and many people said you would not make it at all. However, it all comes down to the finishing touch. Cool graphics, good coding, great music don't matter anymore when the game is too difficult (at least it was to me ;P) and the gameplay is not good enough (the controls you mention)

For that matter, the Japanese have been very good at making the finishing touch -> GAMEPLAY -> so damn good that most of the time it didn't even matter the graphics or coding could have been done better. Quite some cool games scroll in a horrid way. Some games had massive, unnecessary loading times. It didn't matter because the end-result was still highly playable and had an amazing cool-factor

To give an example, I played with Loderunner 2 and I didn't like it. The music sucks, and the gameplay is too slow. Loderunner 1 is much better. How come Broderbound didn't use the features of MSX perfectly??
And remeber that most commercial videogames are made by a complete team, whereas 3 people or less are enough to develop a game for MSX.

Quote:

I was actually very impressed with DASS. It was a very ambitious project and many people said you would not make it at all. However, it all comes down to the finishing touch. Cool graphics, good coding, great music don't matter anymore when the game is too difficult (at least it was to me ;P) and the gameplay is not good enough (the controls you mention)...

It was indeed a very ambitious project. I still remember the way it was presented at the fair in Tilburg! It had everything to become a classic: professional packaging, soundtrack included, great storybook included, lotsa hype.... guess the gameplay killed the whole project. Too bad

On the contrary, Dix was a great game with high-level arcade gameplay!

Quote:

Some of the weapons were completely useless, or made it too easy (shield).

I guess I used that weapon when playing DASS for the first time, since I played through the whole game the first time I played it. I liked DASS, but it was way too easy. If it only had been 30 guilders cheaper...

Loderunner... ahum. xcuse me if I LOL on this.

Mister, you really, really oughta try out some other games like the whole Konami series (too briliant to understand anyway)
Well the MSX really had some GREAT RPG games like the XAK and YS series. Not to mention (again) SD-snatcher and Metal gear ofcourse.

So many great games, with high level of game playability. good luck finding your games..

Hey, How about other applications (not games) that devloped by fans only like viewers, GUIs, trackers, internet packages. Even MSX-DOS got developed a step ahead, not to mention FAT16.
Even hardware developed by fans better than any other companies could have done.
Fans take care of MSX better than even ASCII could ever do, or am I exaggerating here?

I think scratch_disk is basically talking about graphic quality only. Some amateur products indeed outclass a lot of commercial MSX2 games in the graphics department.
Gameplay, story, (and even sound) is another issue...

However, I think it's because the amateur scene has had a lot of extra years getting to know the MSX2 VDP. You can see the difference in MSX2 games written in 1990 is huge compared to those written in 1985.

The same counts for SNES, Playstation, etc... You learn while you go.

Code-technically, I think the demoscene is ahead of the 'old' gamecopanies (konami, falcom), but in terms of gfx, story, music etc. there isn't much which can rival them.

Space Manbow is an exception I guess, when you count the number of sprite(-splits) you'll agree on the technical excellence of Konami.

Yup, but you'll lose count of the splits in Multiplex
Ofcourse it's a turboR game, but still