8/19/2023 0 Comments Play lode runner 2 online![]() Early flight sims aren't very well remembered, although they can have a retro aesthetic appeal. The construction feature was really novel and I used it too as a kid, but it doesn't really exist as a "game design" - it's software first, kind of like flight simulators. The thing PCS did is just one step in a lineage of pinball simulation software, starting with the Atari "Video Pinball" games and progressing through to today's games from Zen(Pinball FX) and Farsight(Pinball Arcade), as well as open source solutions like Visual Pinball. PCS disappearing when Lode Runner didn't can be explained simply: it played a bad pinball, and it was itself a kind of clone. This was useful for continuing to play after you'd beaten the game, as well as leveling up your characters to extreme levels and collecting multiple copies of rare or hard-to-get items. The game state was saved on the disk on which the action occurred, so you could enter an unaltered world just by putting in a fresh copy of the game disk. When you'd enter a section that was on the other disk, the game would ask you to swap disks. The game was split across two floppy disks, each covering roughly half of the map. ![]() :(įor floppy swapping madness, Wasteland is the game that comes to mind for me. The next time I was at my uncle's house I wasn't allowed to play. I'm sure my uncle was furious when he found the pile those things were fragile and I had treated them like they were Duplo. So I foolishly left the pile rather than face my parents' wrath. My parents called down and when I tried to spend the time to clean up my mess they made it pretty clear I needed to be up there 'right now'. By the end of the night there was a sloppy pile of floppies that had previously been individual sheathed in a nice 'rolodex'. I'd take one game out of the driver, drop it on the desk, and insert the next game. One night while the adults were visiting, I was down there excitedly playing the various games (The Dark Crystal, Loderunner, and Olympic Decathlon are the ones that come immediately to mind). My uncle had some variant of the Apple II in his basement. Somehow way cooler than an Atari 2600 cart. me was super proud to figure that out :)įloppies were magic for me as a kid. ![]() You could:ġ) walk to the right hand edge of screen 1ģ) cross to screen 2 - this would appear to reset you to the left side of screen 1ĥ) walk to right side of the "fake" screen 1 and cross to the next screen againĦ) presto - you're now on screen 3! Obstacle avoided!Īnd you could repeat step (3) multiple times to teleport across an arbitrary # of screens.Ĩ y.o. ![]() So lets say you had 3 screens 1-2-3 and '2' has an obstacle but '1' does not. If you removed the disk from the drive before walking to a new screen, it would grind the empty drive for a while, but eventually it would just use the old screen layout for the new screen but still "think" you were in the new tile. In the Apple II game "Below The Root", was a side-scrolling RPG kind of like early Zelda games, and you could use the floppy drive to wall-hack.Įvery time you walked from one screen to another, it would load the new screen from disk. Hurray for analog hacks!īy using the trick we were able to enjoy all 50 of the Championship levels at our leisure. Maybe today you could do kernel dumps or swap the in-memory vs disk binaries, but we were just kids not advanced computer wizards. But I don't think it would be easy to do today since switching the floppy discs was so instrumental to making it work. It gave me an idea of how the memory vs disc model of the game was operating. The original gameplay would load the Championship level as if nothing was out of the ordinary! I only think this was possible because the two games shared so much code structure. Somewhere along the line, we figured out that you could start the original game, go to the level-jumping screen, remove the 5 1/4" original floppy disc and replace it with the one for the Championship game, and then enter the level you wanted to play. As my brother and I got stuck in one of of the lower levels, this was very frustrating since we had no way of enjoying the higher, more advanced levels. The Championship game, however, had 50 levels that you could only play through in order, and only after you had beaten the prior level. The original allowed you to jump to any level through its title screen, so you could skip hard levels, or play them in any order you want. A crazy memory I have with this game is related to its successor, Championship Lode Runner (mentioned in the article).
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