November 2017 Meeting Report

On this sunny, summer day in Melbourne the November MACE meeting was attended by Andrew, Tom, and a few tumbleweeds blowing by - fitfully faltering in front of our ST's screens before continuing on their way, driven by the dry wind. Unchained, released, but never free, the winds captive.

That laborious intro out of the way, onto less fanciful content: at today's meeting we continued a deeper look at Tautology 2 by Reservoir Gods, both the gameplay, and with Assempro's decompile function. It's always an amusing and fruitful idea to decompile programs written in C and try to understand the assembler output. I for one have no idea what's going on, but Andrew and our guest from the Microcontroller MelbPC SIG (this month, and last), Mohan Gupta, had some.

Tautology 2, for the Atari Falcon

Tautology 2 is a favourite of ours and is an original and interesting take on the Mahjong theme.

Other random noteworthy happenings on the Atari scene over the last few months which were touched upon include:

• The rebirth of the Atari-legend website. The new version of the site is looking great and hopefully it can become a centre of collaboration from the Atari community again, in preserving and documenting the old games and software we all love!
• We watched this interesting, 25 minute, documentary by released by Wrestling With Gaming last month on the rise and fall of the Atari Jaguar. A nicely done, fairly balanced (some retrospective narratives on the Jaguar are overly critical in my opinion) review of the rise of the Jaguar, the cancellation of its ST-related predecssor, the Atari Panther.
  
• Daimakaimura / Ghouls 'n' Ghosts arcade port by AnimainCorpore (Sascha Springer). This is really quite an incredible achievement on the STE, eclipsing the original game graphically by a significant margin and causing some scratching of heads over on the English Amiga Board which is a rare and enjoyable thing for an ST production.
  
• We had look at a Wrath of the Demon game play video. We are meant to be nostalgic types, we're meant to view the past through rose-tinted glasses, however in my opinion this games appeal has been tarnished with age. The graphics are impressive for the time, but the game play looks tedious, repetitive, and recycled.