Mission Asteroid fails as an introductory adventure game

An in-depth narrative analysis of Mission Asteroid. Consider subscribing to the channel. / @michaelcoorlim
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In this we examine the narrative elements and structure of Hi-Res Adventures #0 from Roberta and Ken Williams.
Watch my full playthrough here: • Mission: Asteroid - sh...
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Michael Coorlim is a science fiction author and game developer.
You can find my work here: www.mcoorlim.com
If you're interested in supporting my creative output and want access to early releases and the like, consider becoming one of my Patreon backers: / mcoorlim

[@Kaylovsky]

Holy SHIT.
This is a fantastic video. This is exactly the kind of analysis I find so difficult to find.

[@mikedrop4421]

I think watching the game draw the environment is more a feature than a bug. With computers being so powerful now this is like a peek behind the curtain.

[@parmesanzero7678]

I always liked it. Calling it a bug is unfair.

[@MichaelCoorlim]

The game does have bugs, but drawing the screen like it does is really more of a technological achievement. They came up with stylus tools that copied the artists' pen strokes to create art the same way on the screen.

[@MazokuRanma]

Holy hell, Sierra was my favorite game company growing up, I was a huge adventure game junkie. I've read and watched all sorts of material relating to their games and history and still never heard of this game.

[@MichaelCoorlim]

This was back when they were On-Line Systems, so it doesn't come up as much. I do plan to cover some golden age Sierra (and Lucasarts) classics.

[@anon_y_mousse]

Yeah, I'd love to hear more. Procedural generation is one of the neater ways to compress things and Ken and Roberta did a lot of that early on. Makes me wonder, is it possible to do more than ASCII art with telnet? It would be a pretty neat way of doing graphics for a MUD.

[@MichaelCoorlim]

Two others that immediately come to mind with regards to early proc gen'd content are River Raid and Elite. River Raid did have a single seed giving the same "map" every time; don't remember if that was the case with Elite.

[@anon_y_mousse]

@@MichaelCoorlim I've not taken the time to look, but the original source code for Elite was opened up at some point and you can actually download multiple versions. If you know assembly you might have fun with it. I think they targeted the 6502, but it might be the z80.

[@RAFMnBgaming]

@@MichaelCoorlim I believe Elite uses 8 fixed seeds for its 8 fixed galaxies. I remember reading or hearing somewhere that the devs just ran through a whole bunch of seeds and narrowed them down to what they thought were the best ones, which made it into the game. There's not much standing between Elite and being much bigger than it is, other than that the devs figured that 8 galaxies was the right size for the game to be, and that it gave them more curation over what did get in to it.

[@TabuKat]

ooo I remember this one! I had it on the same disk as a similar game with a town in a desert where every rock has a snake underneath that will kill you. I later learned there was one rock that didn't, but I never had the patience to figure it out.

[@MichaelCoorlim]

I *think* the desert game was Cranston Manor? Not entirely sure, but that sounds right to me.

[@TabuKat]

​@@MichaelCoorlim I googled a bit & it was actually The Wizard and the Princess. I had no manual, didn't even know the plot. I think we bought the disk at Sears in a white paper sleeve.😆I'm a huge fan of the Ultima series, subbed & thanks for what you do!

[@MichaelCoorlim]

Ah yeah, Wizard and the Princess - basically "King's Quest 0."

[@anthimatter]

I think I saw the plans for Starship at 6:22

[@no64256]

6:30 how... how does a game release with a defined ending and loss condition(s), not have anything happen if you win or lose? That just makes it seem like an unfinished game
Edit: looked at you other video and saw that you did get a message for winning/losing, but nothing happens. That's a *little* better, but still ridiculous

[@AverageJoeVinyl]

I don't disagree with any of your points, but Mission Asteroid was actually the first adventure game I ever beat, so I guess it did okay as an introduction for me. Nice channel.

[@MichaelCoorlim]

That's perfectly fair!

[@AaronJLong]

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but compared to this I'd rather take what my mind illustrates for me when I read "Ye finds yeself in yon dungeon. Possible exits are North, South, and Dennis."
Not knocking graphical adventure games, but if most of the time playing is spent waiting for the computer to painstakingly render scenes rarely worthy of wasting a fridge magnet on to the point where every turn not only makes you consider how much closer it will bring the earth to annihilation in game, but also how much closer it will bring you, the player, closer to your own grave, you might realize that while this is a neat tech demo, just because you can do something doesn't necessarily mean you should.
Ah, who am I kidding. For the longest time video games were about having something that clearly made your product stand out from the rest as being on the cutting edge of computer gaming. Perhaps the tens of thousands of dollars in 1980s money in extra costs per arcade cabinet for the synthesized speech were worth the investment at the time when none of the other machines were using vocals on the attract screen to let you know the game detects the quarters in your pocket, and for a long time there was a graphic arms race and while the average gamer didn't even know what a "bit" was we sure heard about whose machine claimed to have the most at the time through marketing. And HDTV hit the scene around the time that graphical fidelity was getting about as good as it was going to get on CRT TVs. There are still people that want the latest console and/or graphics card, it's taking so much more development resources and time to make games that actually use all of that added horsepower that we really need to ask if the payoff is worth it.

[@RudolfInderst]

Nice one.

[@iidoyila_live_]

grammar police with a courtesy call : usually , instead of saying "not inconsiderable" , just say "significant" . definitely don't say "not inconsiderate" .
notes : 1:20 -- "the time it takes is not inconsiderate" , a meaningless phrase . you obviously meant "not inconsiderable" , which is a double negative . " considerable " refers to a subject's objective Importance , so you're assigninh a strangely heavy value to "the slowness of screen-draw" . yes, Considerable is more-less a synonym with Significant, so people often use it this way . but this is still a lazy way to use "considerable" .