Blobs Old Mac Game
| Bolo | |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | Various |
| Publisher(s) | Various |
| Platform(s) | BBC Micro, Mac OS, Mac OS X, Linux, Windows |
| Release | 1987 |
| Genre(s) | Tactical shooter |
| Mode(s) | Single player, Multiplayer |
- Sep 13, 2017 By the way, if you want to stay on top of all the latest Mac games updates, retro or modern, make sure you check out Pure Mac. The 10 Best old games for Mac: Revisiting the classics For the record, old-school classics are not exclusive to older gamers.
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Bolo is a video game created for the BBC Micro computer by Stuart Cheshire in 1987, and later ported to the Macintosh in its most popular incarnation. It is a networked multiplayer game that simulates a tank battlefield. It was one of the earliest simultaneous multiplayer networked games.
It would appear that Microsoft has reconsidered the decision to end the Age of Empires line, as they’ve recently released two significant updates—Age of Empires: Definitive Edition and Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition.These updates improved the graphics quality and also moved to DirectX® 11 as the graphics library upon which the games are based. Using parallels on mac. I wrote about Age of Empires: Definitive Edition and Parallels Desktop in an earlier, and in this post I will discuss.I won’t keep you in suspense any longer: because Parallels Desktop™ for Mac moved to and now supports DirectX® 11, Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition plays great in Parallels Desktop on my MacBook Pro®.
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A similarly named tank game was created for the Apple II in 1982. Cheshire says this was 'an unfortunate coincidence',[1] and that his Indian wife inspired the name. As Cheshire noted in his original documentation for the game, 'Bolo is the Hindi word for communication. Bolo is about computers communicating on the network, and more important about humans communicating with each other, as they argue, negotiate, form alliances, agree strategies, etc.'[2]
Description[edit]
Old Mac Computer
In Bolo, the player commands a tank that can be driven around a battlefield within an orthogonal, top-down view. This gives the visual impression that the battlefield is being viewed from above with the player's tank being controlled remotely. The tank is relatively well armored and will take a number of 'hits' before being destroyed. Tanks can also be destroyed by driving them into deep sea.
The tank's primary weapon is its cannon, which fires only in the direction the tank is pointed and has a fairly fast rate of fire. The tank also carries mines as a secondary weapon, which can be dropped on the move, or planted by an engineer who runs from the tank and 'drills' the mine into the ground. In games where the 'Hidden Mines' setting is activated, such mines are invisible to other players until they drive quite close to them (often too close to stop in time). Hidden mines remain visible to the player who planted them, and to other members of his team.
Ammunition, both for the cannon and mines, can be refilled at a limited number of supply bases scattered around the map. The bases also repair damage to tanks, but this depletes the 'armor' of the base. Bases' supplies of ammunition and armor refill slowly.
The strategic goal of the game is to capture all of the bases on the map. Unclaimed 'neutral' bases may be claimed by simply driving one's tank over them, after which the player and his/her team may draw upon such 'friendly' bases' resources. 'Hostile' bases can be captured by shooting them until their armor supply is reduced to zero, after which any player may drive over them to claim them for one's own team. Bases that have recently re-armored damaged tanks are more easily seized since their armor supplies take some time to regenerate.
A primary tactic of the game is the capture and planting of pillboxes, which are also scattered around the map. Pillboxes are initially neutral and will shoot at any tank that approaches them. Like the supply bases, pillboxes can be shot at until destroyed, after which they can be redeployed and become friendly to that player's team. Unlike the bases, pillboxes can be picked up by the tank's engineer and then moved to more strategic locations. In the early Macintosh versions, the pillboxes were fairly easy to kill; in later versions, pillboxes progressively increase their rate of fire as they are attacked, eventually becoming extremely deadly. Players have developed an array of tactical tricks to accomplish speedy pillbox capture, such as the decoy (where a player draws fire away from the pillbox while an ally shoots it) and various pilltakes (where one or more walls and/or friendly pillboxes are placed so that they block the hostile pillbox's shots but allow the tank to shoot past it at the hostile pillbox).
The engineer, better known as the 'LGM' (for 'little green man') can also perform building tasks. In order to do this he must first be sent into a forest to cut trees, which act as cash in the Bolo world. He can then build roads in order to speed travel, or concrete walls to protect bases and form traps. The engineer can be killed on these missions, and a replacement will parachute in after a time delay. Killing enemy engineers has also developed its own set of tactics, one of the nastiest being to plant a mine in a forest where an enemy is known to be collecting trees.
Internet games typically begin with a period in which teams are set up while players remain in deep sea, generally returning to agreed-upon starting points prior to an agreed-upon signal initiating active gameplay. The next phase is usually a base run where players attempt to quickly seize as many neutral bases as possible. After this initial phase, various strategies may be employed. Most involve the quick capture of a number of neutral pillboxes, which may be used defensively to prevent opponents from aggressive attacks on one's bases, which can quickly result in resource depletion. Pillboxes are frequently used offensively, however, by pushing them forward toward an opponent's bases, using their firepower to control territory. Games frequently feature fronts of opposing pillboxes – when one side breaks through or flanks the opponent's front, they will often deploy pillboxes to spike bases and force the opposition to refuel farther back. Eventually, the successful team will push more pillboxes forward and/or seize ill-defended enemy bases, progressively limiting the territory of its opponent until all of the enemy's bases are captured or under fire.
Although it is possible to set a time limit, this feature was rarely used. Instead, the game ends when one side has successfully captured all of the supply bases, preventing the other team from gaining ammunition. In practice, most games generally end before all the bases have been captured, as the losing team concedes that its supply situation has become untenable due to a combination of lost and spiked bases.
Networking[edit]
Bolo's networking support allows up to sixteen players to join a single game. Networked games were still extremely rare in the late 1980s, and those that were available were generally fairly simple. The game supported only AppleTalk and did so through an implementation that formed the basis of Cheshire's dissertation for Stanford University.[citation needed]
AppleTalk included a feature known as Name Binding Protocol (NBP) that assigned human-readable names to network addresses. This was commonly used to find printers, file servers, and other network resources. In Bolo it was also used to find games on the LAN. On startup, Bolo would use NBP to find all the devices advertising a Bolo port, collecting the unique names to produce a games list. These were then presented to the user, allowing them to select an existing game, or start a new one. If the user chose to start a new game, Bolo then registered a new Bolo device with NBP, say 'Stewart's Bolo Game'. New players starting up could then join this game by name, and if they did so their own machine would also register itself on the network with the same 'Stewart's Bolo Game'.
The game used only a single packet that was sent from machine to machine in a round-robin fashion. The packet was fixed-length, with enough room to carry the information for the sixteen players. Each machine in the game inserted its AppleTalk address into one of the sixteen slots in the packet, on a first-come, first-served basis. The first machine on the list would insert its game data (position, whether they are firing, etc.) into a payload area, then look for the next address on the list and send the packet there. That machine would then read out the first's state, insert its own, and pass it off again. The list was looped, so the last machine would send the packet back to the first. After one such loop, the packet contained the game state for every player.
The single-packet approach reduced network traffic compared to a system where updates are sent individually to each machine. In most common networking schemes one machine is chosen to be the host, and the other machines send their updates to that host, which then sends the aggregated updates out to all of the machines again. Given a sixteen-player game like Bolo, at any particular point in time up to fifteen clients would send their update data to the host, which then sends fifteen larger packets with the game state back out. Bolo's implementation had only one large packet on the network at any given time, greatly reducing traffic.
In the case of a newly starting game, the first machine to start up would generate the packet, but seeing no other addresses in the list, would do nothing. When a new player asked to join a game, they did so by sending an interrogation packet to the first machine that responded when it asked NBP to list all the Bolo Game machines on the network. In this example there is only one such machine on the network so far, so the new machine would send this request to the machine that started the game. That machine would respond by sending back the current game state, inserting the new machine's address into the packet, and then handing the packet off. The packet would then bounce between the two machines. If another machine joined, the list generated by NBP could return either of the machines already listed in 'Stewart's Bolo Game' as the first hit, so in this fashion even joining the game was distributed across the machines.
The advantage to this design was that there was no host machine. New players could join by sending a request to anyone, and existing players could leave by simply removing their address from their slot in the packet. This meant that the game was completely headless; even if the starting user left the game, the rest of the machines in the game would continue to pass the packet and respond to join requests as normal. As long as there was at least one machine remaining in any particular game, it would continue to be available for new players to join.
The downside of this approach is that any particular machine has to wait the entire round-trip in order to receive updates. Thus the overall latency was relatively high. In an era when most networks were local and a round trip might take only a few hundred milliseconds, this was not a problem, whereas the low throughput of LocalTalk could be if the protocol used many separate packets. In modern networking, where most or all of the links are likely to be over the Internet, the latency of this approach makes it unworkable. Even with 'fairly local' players, the delay between machines is likely to be a few tens of milliseconds, and a round trip would typically be well over a second.
References[edit]
- ^'MacBolo Instructions'. Archived from the original on 18 May 2007. Retrieved 27 May 2007.
- ^'Frequently Asked Questions'. Archived from the original on 18 May 2007. Retrieved 27 May 2007.
Further reading[edit]
- Andrew Wilson and Stephen Intille, 'Programming a Bolo Robot: Recognizing Actions By Example', MIT Media Lab Fall 1995 - this paper describes using Bolo as a system for developing a programming by example system.
External links[edit]
- Stuart Cheshire, the author of Bolo
Before digital downloads, finding the best Mac games wasn’t always easy.
They were out there, but the Mac section of the computer game stores (they used to have those) seemed to stock nothing but “Mario Teaches Typing,” and the games that included Mac and Windows versions would inevitably be scattered around the “PC” sections of the store.
As such, compiling a list of the best classic Mac games is pretty tough.
That didn’t stop us from doing it. And because we want you to actually play these games, we made sure you can still buy them all in either their original form or as enhanced editions (not remakes). It also means some of our favorite old Mac games—such as Myth, Red Baron, and Fallout—didn’t make the list.
By the way, if you want to stay on top of all the latest Mac games updates, retro or modern, make sure you check out Pure Mac.
The 10 Best old games for Mac: Revisiting the classics
Avernum is an underground prison, and of course, your adventure begins when you’re exiled there from the surface world, known as the Empire. But Avernum isn’t simply a prison; an entire culture exists in this subterranean world, presenting you with myriad options on what to do next. With numerous quests, spells, and party members to customize and control, Avernum unfolds with the freedom of pencil and paper adventures.
Avernum: The Complete Saga gives you a ridiculous amount of content and a cohesive story arc that’s tremendously satisfying. The graphics are rudimentary, but Avernum is very satisfying if you can overlook that.
Another name synonymous with Mac gaming back in the ‘90s was Ambrosia Software. You simply didn’t know a Mac user who didn’t have at least one Ambrosia game on her PowerPC.Perhaps their most fondly remembered title is EV Nova, the third game in the Escape Velocity series. A space exploration and combat game, EV Nova is set amongst warring factions scattered throughout the Milky Way. Consider it Divergent amongst the stars, as you will select your faction then find your role in it.
Gameplay involves jumping between star systems to accept and execute missions, upgrade your ship, and wreck havoc. There are six major storylines and plenty of branching missions, and how you get involved is up to you. That leads to plenty of replay options.
It’s still easy to get overwhelmed by EV Nova despite its age, but Ambrosia offers plenty of resources at the company’s website.
Our second sci-fi first-person shooter to make the list finds you waking from cryostasis to a ship full of unknown aliens, a screwed up AI, and your now zombified companions. Fair enough. We’ve been through this before, so pick up the weapons and health packs and have at it, right?Wrong. System Shock 2 doesn’t give you a lot of weapons or health packs. Rather, it gives you an RPG-like system of upgrades that forces you to use strategy, stealth, and the environment to survive.
What really separates System Shock 2 from its peers is the ship itself. It’s creepy and oppressive, and you’ll be more afraid of what could be around the corner than what actually is. Story elements are revealed through logs left by the crew, limiting your knowledge of what’s going on in a manner that reinforces how alone you are.
Another game produced by Peter Molyneux, Syndicate Plus is a real-time tactical action game in which you lead a team of cyborg mercenaries in the “problem-solving” department of the Syndicate.When you hear the term “cyborg” you just know there are going to be plenty of customization options via augmentations. You will use these to create a team that moves through futuristic locations to achieve your employer’s objectives.
Although there’s plenty to address between missions, it’s the execution of those missions that is most fun. The citizens and their belongings (cars, for example) are there to suit your purposes, should you need them. Your radar tells you where you need to go, but the direct route isn’t always best. If you need some extra help you can “persuade” the people around to help get the job done.
Best of all, the music and sound effects were incredibly effective for the time. The music that suddenly kicks in when you’re spotted will follow me for the rest of my life.
I gave up on the Star Wars movies about 25 minutes into Return of the Jedi, and I’ve never been able to get back into it. I still quite enjoy the games, however, and my all time favorite is 1994’s TIE Fighter from LucasArts.This is because of the excellent story that drives the mission-based flight-sim combat, because of the smooth graphics, and because it was the first time I got to serve the Empire. The missions are what you’d expect from any competent flight sim, asking you to engage in dogfights, take down freighters, protect your own vessels, etc. But because you’re now facing off against the whiney Rebellion, there’s a certain evil glee that goes along with it.
I’m also impressed by TIE Fighter’s staying-power. The gameplay is every bit as intense (and difficult) as it was in the mid-90s, and the space combat graphics are still very cool to view. Just make sure you play it with a joystick. Trust me on this.
There was a time when Bungie Studios was the shining light of Mac gaming. With Mac-only (or at least Mac-first) games such as Myth and Oni, they were the one company that made Windows owners jealous of Mac gamers.But then Microsoft bought them to claim Halo, and that shining light was snuffed out forever.
Mac gamers can still see what made Bungie so special by playing the Marathon Trilogy. This revolutionary series of sci-fi themed first-person shooters introduced features such as real-time voice chat and the ability to wield two weapons at once. The multiplayer options may not do you much good today, but the action and the story are every bit as entertaining as they were in the ’90s.
Honestly, Marathon would be higher on this list were it not for the steps required to grab it. The games are free, but you’ll need to install Aleph One (the free, open source continuation of Bungie’s Marathon 2 FPS game engine) to run them.
“But what if this was set in space?” is a valid question for every video game ever made…even games that are already set in space. That’s because space makes everything so much bigger and more imaginative. And the time this worked best was when Sid Meier took Civilization interstellar with Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri.The turn-based strategy elements all remained. Mac os games wikipedia. You choose from seven factions, then research an unexplored planet, build new technologies and customize your units, and conquer anything hostile (or friendly, if that suits you) to claim victory.
The fun thing about Alpha Centauri is that none of the factions are bad guys. No matter which you select, you feel like you’re doing the right thing when you conquer the others.
Still, why bother playing this when there are many modern alternatives available on the Mac? Because the only thing missing in Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri are the flashy graphics. The writing, voice-acting, and depth of gameplay options are still among the best the genre has ever seen.
For our next game, we go all the way back to the ’80s with Bullfrog’s Populous from Peter Molyneux. If it’s not the first “god” game out there, it’s the first that made god gaming so gleefully fun.In Populous, you’re given an isometric view of your world and tasked with manipulating this world to help your “followers” wipe out the enemy. More followers lead to more mana, more mana leads to more powers, and more powers mean earthquakes, volcanos, and all kinds of fun ways to punish the non-believers.
There are many similar games available now, most of which are much more involved and rewarding. So, why bother going back to 1989 for the original Populous? Because it’s still fun. It also contains a whopping 500 levels, and the rudimentary graphics create an odd connection with your followers. It’s more like developer and programs than God and subjects.
Those looking to relive the original adventure in this real-time fantasy RPG are in for a treat. The enhanced edition—released in April of this year—comes with the original version from 1999.No matter which version you’ll play, you are the Nameless One. A name like that means life isn’t good, and the horrors of lives you can’t remember are coming back to haunt you. Worse, a floating skull named Morte is leading your adventure that will take you to the very depths of Hell.
The characters you can recruit in Planescape: Torment are highly non-traditional, including a crossbow-wielding cube and a haunted suit of armor. You’re free to change your class and alignment throughout the 50+ hour adventure, so you’re not stuck with one way of thinking as with most RPGs of this time.
Here’s a case where the enhanced edition of a game expertly accomplishes its goal; it reminds fans of why they loved the original while making the game accessible to modern gamers.Why? To start, the remastered graphics lovingly reflect the look of the original, serving mainly to make them look sharp on today’s much larger monitors. The enhanced edition also adds four new characters you can simply ignore if you want to remain faithful to the original, and it builds Shadows of Amn and Throne of Baal right into the package. There’s now a multiplayer option, too.
The reason Baldur’s Gate II is so fondly remembered is because of the excellent story and well-balanced combat. As you’d expect from a Forgotten Realms-based game, you can play through as the good guy, the bad guy, or someone in between. Your actions affect how NPCs and members of your own party see you and will open and close quests and other options.
Good RPGs create worlds you don’t just want to play through, but live in. And in that regard, Baldur’s Gate II is one of the most successful of all time.
The thing about putting together a list of the best classic Mac games is that it’s constantly changing. More games become “classic” each year, but it’s more than that. Countless games bubble just under the surface, waiting to be rediscovered or to get their “enhanced” edition to lift them back into the consciousness of Mac gamers. And with the ease of digital distribution, don’t be surprised if we’re soon talking about more of our favorites.In the meantime, can someone remind me why the Mac versions of Fallout and Fallout 2 disappeared again?
Blobs Old Mac Game Strategic Conquest
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Blobs Old Mac Game Medieval Imagination
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