Mobile Forces rocks!
But you are right they given a poor support to this game!
...still one of the best fun games i ever played

Tyler

Yup, the Bitmaps are still around. They have got a WW2 RTS which is due to be released soon, and they are also working on Speedball Arena! w00t

www.speedballarena.com
www.bitmap-brothers.co.uk


"The key to immortality is first living a life worth remembering - Bruce Lee"

The only three "old school" Brit dev companies that I can think of offhand that are still going are Codemasters, Rare, and System 3

What about the Bitmap Bros? They released a sequel to Z a couple of years ago and I think they're still around working on something. GODS rocked!

This company folding is simply a matter of natural selection.

By and large 90% of therir games were complete and utter shit. Anyone played Crash on the Xbox?

No matter what the format the games were childish (mostly) poorly supported (always) and David Beckham Soccer alone deserves them to go down the pan.

Whilst I feel sympathy with the individuals concerned - the company as a whole never once produced the goods, so simply they deserve to go

:/

Well its good news for gamers of JA2, but kinda proves the point...

Although I have not played JA2 so I don't really know how fundamental these fixes are ? (I thought they went belly up too ?)

"The key to immortality is first living a life worth remembering - Bruce Lee"

For example check out
jagged alliance 2 gold patck post.
http://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/board.pl?action=viewthread&threadid=39588

Its nice that they are fixing the bugs, but jesus, look at them!, all the bugs are really bad gameplay bugs, nothing to do with hardware.

Creston, I agree the whole mindset is another nail in the coffin, although if patching console games becomes the norm then I can see it becoming an 'accepted standard' which IMO is a totally bad thing to happen.

With fixed hardware (consoles) then there obviously shouldn't be any compat' patching, but when developers can retro fit gameplay 'bug' patches to console games then this is going to be a worrying situation.

As for patching PC games with 'game' patches (bugs, not content) it pisses me off, I can appreciate there are circumstances when its unavoidable - but its still an annoyance that its seen as an 'easy' option for developers or publishers to take.

"The key to immortality is first living a life worth remembering - Bruce Lee"

EDIT: I before E

This comment was edited on Jan 17, 05:52.

XEON,

I fully respect your opinion, ofcourse, but I think it's the whole "patching is a way of life" mindset that's going to kill off the PC industry before too much longer.

Once again, bugs due to weird hardware combinations, bad drivers, or whatever, no problem. The developers can't test everything, so I can live with those.

But GAME bugs are a big fat no no in my book. If your Q&A department didn't pick those up, then fire the morons and hire some DECENT testers. But because there is a prevalent attitude of "oh well, we can always patch it anyways", why would publishers and developers BOTHER to even playtest anything anymore anyways? (that's a lot of any's..)
Heck, put it on the shelves, listen to gamers flame your ass off for two weeks, rush together a few patches that fix most of the grievious errors and tadaah, you've saved yourself the cost of an actually effective Q&A department.

Call me nuts, but it wouldn't surprise me if this is how it's actually starting to work with some of these developers / publishers.

Oh, and patching for the Xbox? Ofcourse there's going to be patches for it, you didn't think that Microsoft could actually make like a TOOTHPICK without it having bugs, right?

But that is a scary thought, yes. Now with consoles having access to the 'Net, beware of patches for the consoles too. After all "nothing can be programmed without bugs!"
(Funny how not so long ago most console games COULD be, but apparently soon not anymore).

Creston

Posted in error
This comment was edited on Jan 16, 04:38.

No, we won't have to.

_____

The possible pain, suffering and sacrifice of discovery are by no means an excuse to remain ignorant.

Yeah maybe they will, don't have to like it though



"The key to immortality is first living a life worth remembering - Bruce Lee"

You must realize that PC's and consoles will become one. It is only a matter of time.

_____

The possible pain, suffering and sacrifice of discovery are by no means an excuse to remain ignorant.

Creston I agree with your point re: patches and the fact that the tab had 'already' been picked up. However, the sad fact is that patching is a way of life for PC games and when they need to be produced outside of the development budget then somebody has to pay for it somewhere down the line and if the developer won't do it and the publisher won't pay then the gamer gets stuffed.

BTW, off topic, but re: patches. Just seen that Digital Extremes who did Unreal Champ for XBOX are actually 'patching' their game, I used to at least gain some comfort that my console playing was relatively bug free cos Somy, Nintendo & MS has tight guidelines for testing...FFS though,patching a console is a scary glimpse of the future

"The key to immortality is first living a life worth remembering - Bruce Lee"

If you were a part of Rage and you lost your job today, then click this link.. at least you will have a laugh:

http://216.136.200.194/auction/Jan/2003153458908209864901.jpg

(work safe, unless you work for Macintosh!)

- Dr. Del
"the video game industry is in dire need of a new revolutionary genre of gaming..."

RaRe not RaGe. Thanks guys

And yeah, sorry to see them have to go, I thought Hostile Waters (know here as Antaeus Rising) was a fantastic game, I still have it installed and play it every now and then, one of my favorite games of all time. Too bad it sold about 5 copies

One comment down below kind of made me frown though.

"creating a patch costs money in dev time and if no-one is going to pay for it i.e. the publisher then there wasn't much they could really do - sadly"

Alternatively, one could say that any issues that have to be fixed by a patch SHOULD have already been working when the game was put in stores, right?
I mean, "the patch has to be paid for", didn't the gamers pay for that patch when they BOUGHT the game?

It's a different story if those issues were simply requests from the players, or additional content, etc, but if these were bugfixes, then in my opinion even a small time developer should do that patch for free if they have to.

Nnot flaming anybody here btw, I don't know any of the particulars of that game, or its patch, or if the publishers forced it out onto the street early or whatever. Just seeing more and more that developers refuse to patch the bugs in their games because "nobody is picking up the tab". Hello, the people who BOUGHT your game ALREADY picked up that tab, thank you.
This, in my opinion, is why PC gaming is losing ground so massively to console gaming. The simple fact that games these days just DON'T work. (and I'm not talking about bugs due to crappy drivers by Nvidia or a wrong Via 4-in-1, I'm talking about simple GAME bugs that are not hardware related. Not many of those in console games, but it seems the majority of PC games is rife with them these days.)

Oh well, just an opinion.

Sorry to see you go Rage, you made some great games

Creston

Hump m8,

The patch rift was over getting paid for the job, RtW the developer was happy to fix and improve Mobile Forces and stated repeatedly on the forum that this was the issue, but couldn't create a further patch without getting paid for it - whole heap of stuff went one, Essentially they did what they were paid for and I think MF is a good fun game, there are issues with the game and a further patch would have really sorted things out. (they released one patch update which addressed some issues)

RtW are a small developer (a startup, originally Rage Dundee) - creating a patch costs money in dev time and if no-one is going to pay for it i.e. the publisher then there wasn't much they could really do - sadly.

There is whole threads dedicated to the matter on the official MF community forums over @ www.mobileforces.org with posts from the dev team - shame for the game, but I can totally see where they are coming from.

FWIW - the community is pretty small, although hot & oily. If ppl have the game they should check it out. One main member (a moderator) released a mutator addressing some of the weapon balancing issues and also released a OS/2 hack to run it on that OS (instead of its native Win32) so there is some community support if not from the publisher

"The key to immortality is first living a life worth remembering - Bruce Lee"

The Dizzy series totally, utterly ruled.

Tough stuff, some of them. I would have the utmost respect for anyone who ever managed to complete Spellbound Dizzy.

for whats its worth I found Gunmetal for the Xbox pretty cool (I guess we can forget about the PC port )

Nothing incredibly deep mind you but it was just a nice looking blow-stuff-up-real-good-in-my-mech type of game.

this just shows the kind of idiots in the computer game "industry"

@17: Codemasters started out in the industry doing cheapo budget titles for C64, Amstrad, & Spectrum. They published a fair few now-almost-forgotten games like "Ghosthunters" and "3D Starfighter" before 'breaking out' with more 'popular' titles like the "Dizzy" platformer series and "BMX Simulator" (which spawned many more "-Simulator" titles). Some of these later appeared on the Amiga, but I think the original "Micro Machines" was their first hit on that platform.

This comment was edited on Jan 15, 18:43.