30 ноября 1995

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*  PART 4  - HAVEN'T I SEEN YOU BEFORE?  *
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By Stephen Smith(stevo@jonlan.demon.co.uk)

One  thing  that  I can't stand is blatant
plagiarism!  And  one  group  of items has
been  more blatantly plagiarised more than
most are Spectrum games. Being the natural
fountain  of originality that they are (in
most  cases), today's software houses with
a terminal case of programmers-block, like
nothing  better  than  to  get  out  their
trusty  rubber key, load up an old classic
and  then try and convert it to the latest
mega-computer fad, stopping briefly on the
way to maybe improve the graphics. So I am
here  with  my Roger Cook hat on to expose
this  seedy  trade  and put them under the
spotlight.

Our  first  suspect  is  a copy of Dungeon
Master for the Atari ST, probably the best
example yet of Blatant Plagiarism. How the
computer  world  raved  when  it came out,
announcing it as unlike anything ever seen
before.  Well,  that only applies to a man
who has been living inside a paper bag for
7 years; to us True Spectrum Users, it was
a  blatant  copy  of  that  excellent  old
Quicksilva  game Dragonsbane! Quicksilva's
legal  dept must have been half asleep not
to    spot    that   multi-million   pound
money-spinning lawsuit a mile off.

Flying   3D  shoot'em-ups  were  not  that
common  on the Spectrum. Of the few that I
can  think  of (Dark Star, Star Wars, Star
Strike)  one  that  didn't  have  the word
"Star"  in  the  title  was  3D Tunnel, an
altogether   different   game   with  some
excellent  ideas  - and it seems Descent's
programmer  agreed with me. Okay, I'm sure
that   you'll   all  spot  the  moderately
improved graphics on the PC (and if you've
got  a Pentium you'll even get to see them
moving at a half-descent (sic) speed), but
I  reckon that if the Spectrum was capable
of   producing  garoud-shaded  wire-framed
texture-mapped  graphics  in 1984, then 3D
Tunnel's   authors  would  no  doubt  have
produced  a  game  10  years ahead of it's
time.

Next  is  Doom  - it's just Catch 23, with
(as  all  games  mentioned  here) improved
graphics.  Having  never  actually  played
Catch   23,   I  am  giving  a  completely
uninformed  opinion  here,  but that never
stopped  Crash,  eh?  (only kidding, Crash
was  okay  (I  suppose - you can take that
gun from my head now)). But it seems to me
that  Catch  23  is a walking and shooting
game. Doom is a walking and shooting game.
Being able to see the walls from more than
just  the  wire-framed  edges never really
improved it that much, but the blood, gore
and weapons did.

Arkanoid,  another guilty game, did appear
on  the Spectrum so I did consider sparing
it from a tirade of four letter words, but
let  us  not  forget that it was a coin-op
conversion  from Taito (I think), so let's
have  a pop at their programmers and spare
Imagine's.    So    Arkanoid's    original
programmer   must  have  just  popped  the
Horizons  tape  into  the cassette player,
tapped their fingers for five minutes, and
then   started  playing  Thro'  the  Wall.
Knowing  a  great  idea  (but also knowing
about  things  like  copyright  law), they
resorted  to  that  most trusted friend on
improving a game - power-up's, in the same
way  that  Street  Fighter  2 depending on
Special Moves to differentiate itself from
Way of the Exploding Fist.

And  finally,  scraping  the bottom of the
barrel  and  running  desperate for ideas,
under  the  spotlight in this paragraph is
virtually   every  flight  simulator  ever
written   after   Flight   Simulation  and
Fighter   Pilot.   Knights   of  the  Sky?
F14-Tomcat  Fleet  Defender?  The  list is
endless,  and  they  all  owe something to
these two fine examples of the genre. kay,
so anybody would prefer to play Knights of
the Sky rather than Flight Simulation, but
that's only because there's no shooting in
Flight  Simulation.  When I was a lad, and
this  was  all  fields,  we had to make do
with aerobatics and navigation...

So  what say we all band together and take
these  scourges  of  the software world to
court  and then to the cleaners? No, we'll
spare  them  the  embarrasing  court cases
(and  hope they spare us for passing round
snapshots like it's going out of fashion).

Stephen Smith (stevo@jonlan.demon.co.uk)
"Spectrum users load before they shoot."

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