Spectre - ADG Episode 258

[@LGR]

Aw yeah, Spectre! First played the Macintosh version of Spectre VR back in the day, had a fondness for these games ever since. The oddly-shaped boxes for this and Spectre remain some of my favorite boxes ever too, they're just delightfully angular.

[@Pixelmusement]

+LGR That explains your coverage of "Hover!" awhile back. ;)

[@psychoticgiraffe]

would you be down to join a Spectre VR online lan party there might be a way to actually do that, problem is this game uses NETBios, so I have to look more into how to get that to happen.

[@karenelizabeth1590]

A recent LGR video had me looking up this game, and here he is again! O_O

[@lilwyvern4]

Kris, your channel is criminally undersubbed. 14k for how long you've been around and how much detail you put into these reviews? Unforgivable!

[@simone2059]

Yeah, it's a shame People wants only silly things to watch

[@MarquisDeSang]

Quality content require quality viewership.

[@Pixelmusement]

+MarquisDeSang Everyone take notice of how the comments on my videos are not a lair of depravity and insults; I'll gladly take a lower sub count in exchange for literally the best viewers on the face of the planet! ^_^

[@lilwyvern4]

@@Pixelmusement Amen!

[@stormthrush37]

I loved this game so much back in the day. Definitely a great one.

[@2HeadedHero]

Man did I play so much of this as a kid, great video!

[@avarisclari]

Looking at this makes me think of the description of the internet's VR mode in "Snow Crash"

[@scottquarrington9845]

Awesome ADG episode as always Kris!

[@Kaucukovnik666]

I must have had some kind of demo or something for one of these Spectre games. The gameplay, visual style and especially sounds are extremely familiar, but I don't recognize many elements from either of them. For instance I don't recall any textured surfaces, but I seem to remember both wireframe and solid colors. Finally once again I know the name of one of my first games on the 486. Thank you for this episode!

[@jdbgmgr]

I know your comment is 3 years old but I experienced the exact same thing as you. I also had the wireframe/solid colours without the textures. I'm trying so hard to find footage of the version we played!

[@itsgruz]

Cool vid! Think I've only played Spectre VR, so it's cool to see this original version. I've got the boxed compilation release that Apple put out of Spectre VR, but it's sealed and I can't bring myself to open it yet... Might have to on my channel. I checked that site for Spectre 3D and it isn't available in the iOS app store anymore, at least not in the US.

[@Pixelmusement]

+killgruz I would say if you've got a sealed copy you want to open, make sure to actually do a video of the unboxing! And yeah, it was noticed pretty early after this video went up that Spectre 3D wasn't available anymore, so I added that note into the video description. :/

[@mattj2217]

I'm the dev of the iOS app. It was a remake from scratch. Took it down due to a flatline in sales and some other reasons. Maybe it will come back some day?

[@SchizoMelody]

This game was mind blowing when it first came out on Mac

[@BeyondTheScanlines]

Watching how this diverges from the Battlezone formula from other games is certainly interesting to break down. Doubly so with all the secrets and other elements present. (As for the iOS one, I think it's DOA - trying to access its links from the official site don't return anything. Probably one of those lost in the 32-bit purge of 2017...)

[@Pixelmusement]

+hellfire64 Ah nuts. I'll go post that info in the video description. :/

[@mattj2217]

@@Pixelmusement Hey, I'm the developer of the iOS game (for proof, see my channel for various WIP junk posted years ago). I took it down for... reasons. I don't know if it will ever be back though I'm kinda considering doing a WebAssembly build (or something of the sort). Honestly, it didn't sell well and there was little to no interest in it. I think some of the original crowd that remembered the game managed to pick it up, but beyond that there was little engagement, either with my new single player mode or the very, very functional multiplayer mode. The source works for Windows, OSX, and Linux but never saw any release. I developed it almost as a serious PC game but for mobile, and in reality, mobile players weren't as interested in things like real-time multiplayer. Plus it was honestly just a little too retro and niche :(

[@mattj2217]

@@Pixelmusement Love your channel by the way :)

[@Pixelmusement]

+mattj2217 Good to hear from you! Yeah, I was surprised to see the mobile port in my research because it immediately set off warning flags in my head like, "How is that even going to compete or gain any traction?" If you'd like my recommendation for getting people interested in future Spectre releases, make it an ACTUAL VR game on PC or PS4, with support for the VR hardware that we have now. That'll get some better attention given Spectre's history! Also consider adding a story mode, given how wild and ridiculous the backstory in the first games were. ;)

[@mattj2217]

​@@Pixelmusement Interestingly, the iOS version had an anaglyph 3D mode. I also tried to get on top of the MFi controllers when that was a new thing, but truth is, gimmicks weren't a good way to sell the game. Another issue it had was that screenshots tended to look terrible when shrunk to thumbnails. I had to write auto-screenshot code that would attempt to take screenshots shortly after big explosions, just so that my promo material looked more interesting. The screenshots at spectre3d.com required hours of play and spamming rockets to make it look cool ;). I think that the game, as it is, isn't really marketable in any way that would make it worth the hours invested (I wrote everything from scratch, including the multiplayer code). Especially in a a world of Fortnite and PUBG. The main demographic for this game are essentially a small group in the 45+ range, and a few millennials like me who happened to stumble upon it in elementary ;) So really you can target pure nostalgia. As an online tank battle game, the majority of gamers are playing something else. So, that's why I wasn't super inclined to continue maintaining the game. New iPhones, iPads, Facebook API changes, iOS breaking changes and so on were all things that have to be attended to. It had a small burst on its initial release in 2010 thanks to TouchArcade, but as a product I don't think the market wanted it such that it would have been worth the time to continue updating it. That also means that adding "new" features/gimmicks just means additional bits to a game nobody was playing in the first place. So, yeah, VR support would be cool to "say" I did it, but I doubt it would drive enough sales to even pay for the VR headset, hehe.

[@GeneralVanRyberg]

Nice! I had a demo disk (maybe from a magazine cover disk or something), back in the day and have been wondering which game it was. Thanks!

[@AnyUserNo2]

This was crazy addictive back in the day.

[@ABalazs31]

Thank you for the new episode. I did a search for "Spectre" in the Mac App Store and didn't found any games - so I guess it's not available? (or maybe only on older versions of Mac).

[@Pixelmusement]

+Attila-Mihaly Balazs The remake was for mobile iOS devices, not Mac computers... Probably could've been more clear about that... ^_^;

[@Lachlant1984]

@@Pixelmusement I've just done a search on my iPhone and couldn't find Spectre 3D, I can think of 2 reasons for this. Firstly, the game was a 32 bit app and Apple dropped support for 32 bit apps a few years ago and I don't think you can get them from the app store anymore. Secondly, Spectre 3D may have only been available on the iPad, I don't have an iPad nor do I want one, so unless I can ask somebody who has an older model iPad, I can't find out what iPad only apps and games are available unless I get an iPad. It used to be possible to browse the app store via iTunes, but you can't do that now.

[@EdmondDantes224]

Gosh. I actually got Spectre VR at Goodwill (on a CD with Jetfighter II and Oh No More Lemmings) and when I saw this video I was like... "how is this any different from Spectre VR?" They literally seem like just the same game with different titles.

[@AmyraCarter]

I remember this game alright. Had lots of fun with this one long ago, that and a brief brush with Battletanx on the Vectrex around the same time period... also, that intro reminded me of the Game Theorists' video on the SuperHot games...I dunno why...lol Hmmm...but now I wonder if my experience was with Spectre VR... :/ Either way, this was one game I loved, definitely miss...

[@Pixelmusement]

+Amy Carter If you have memories of a blue, cybernetic person greeting you on the main menu, or memories of playing it in Windows 3.1, then you had Spectre VR and not Spectre. :B

[@AmyraCarter]

@@Pixelmusement Hmmm...no, and it was a Mac I played it on.

[@rjnash2610]

Hey man, I've been meaning to mention this for ages. Would be really interesting to include the packed and/or installed game size with the info sheet for each game.

[@Pixelmusement]

+RJ Nash Interesting idea, but that would be a lot of work for a piece of info that can be subjective based on what the expectation of the stat is and not really all that useful in a day and age of CompactFlash and terrabyte-sized HDDs, so... probably not gonna add it. The year the game was made is, 95% of the time, a perfectly good indicator as to the kind of system specs required. :P

[@NewAgeSoldier]

I clicked on the iOS version (Spectre 3D) on their site and the app store says, "App not available in your region". I live in the US.

[@Pixelmusement]

+New Age Soldier Early last night I was told it's no longer for sale at all. :/

[@Lachlant1984]

@@Pixelmusement That really sucks.

[@mattj2217]

@@Pixelmusement Working on a browser-based port: spectre3d.com/web-alpha/

[@AnonymousFreakYT]

The really oddball thing is that I only had the one tan DOS disk - all other DOS disks I've seen were black. But all *Macintosh* disks I saw were tan. I wonder if tan DOS was a goofup?

[@Pixelmusement]

+Anonymous Freak As pointed out in the video description, once I realized the versioning wasn't a good indicator, the more likely reason is just inventory. Publishers have to get the disks from somewhere and they probably just didn't have enough black disks in stock to fill a particular batch of orders so just used whatever was on hand. :P

[@AlyxxTheRat]

Such a cool game.

[@CherryPixelBun]

Oh heck I love the SNES version of this game, especially the splitscreen

[@phj9894]

Looks interesting, I like battlezone style first person shooter. I'll check it out.

[@Lachlant1984]

The Spectre game disk we had was given to us by my step father's father, the disk was black and I think its label was green in colour. Sadly we didn't keep the diskette, we gave it back to its original owner. I wish we'd kept it.

[@Blackchain119]

I am a little surprised, friend. I love me some DOS games, but Stonekeep isn't on your channel! How can someone forget Stonekeep!!! I hope you see this cause damn I would love to see that!

[@Pixelmusement]

+The Sophisticated Otaku It's in my requests list but not very high up in it. Feel free to eMail in a request if you wanna give it a little boost in the request rankings! (eMail can be found on my website or at the end of every video. I don't accept requests from comments because it's nearly impossible to track them properly here.)

[@lmttn]

Have you ever considered an episode on the notoriously broken Battlecruiser 3000AD?

[@Pixelmusement]

+letmetrythisname Not yet. It's not on the requests list and I don't own it. Maybe someday but it won't be any day soon unless someone sends me a copy. :P

[@lmttn]

@@Pixelmusement The developer legally released both the original DOS 1.0 version and the Windows 9x 2.0 rerelease as freeware in the early 2000s.

[@Pixelmusement]

+letmetrythisname Really...? Then... why does it not show up anywhere as a free download online? I mean, they may've limited free distribution strictly from their own website, in which case if that download disappeared then its freeware status would disappear with it, but if you know any legitimate, non-abandonware sites to get it from, let me know! :B

[@lmttn]

@@Pixelmusement 3000AD's official website hosts a zip archive version of v2.09. This version is fully in DOS. The installer is a 9x installer. Unfortunately, the only link to 1.0 on their site leads to a dead mirror, which is a shame because that's the one that puts the "notorious" in "notoriously broken." Really, the story of the developer overpromising for years and then fighting with customers for even more years is far more interesting than the game itself, if you can even get it to cooperate.

[@Pixelmusement]

+letmetrythisname I've downloaded the 2.09 game from their site. It's very interesting to see that the devs are still around and are being so blunt about the original story, which quite frankly, I don't blame 'em. All things considered, it kinda makes sense to cover the game the way the devs intended it to be and leave 1.0 to rot away into obscurity. I'll see if I can fit it into next year's schedule somewhere. :B

[@IdahoBookworm]

Wow, I had no idea there was a PC release! It's so chunky and the sounds are so fitzy compared to the Mac version. And is it running at correct framerate or is it something wrong with an emulator? The minimalist design is because it was a fully 3D game in 1991! And it hits that early-90s cyberspace aesthetic. I loved this game as a kid. It's currently my son's favorite game, running on a restored old Mac. Actually, Mac games from the the early 90s tended to be higher resolution than their PC counterparts, so I don't think the Mac lacked any power in comparison. They also had on-board sound that a 1991 PC would require a sound card for. Also, the mid-90s PowerPC transition didn't really move Macs towards "standard components." If anything, it was a step away because it was a move to RISC, and no one else went there. Macs and PCs got closer in the early 2000s and then became almost identical with the Intel transition, but now they're moving apart again.

[@Pixelmusement]

Yes, the framerate is correct; I always strive to get that right when I make these videos! And yeah, because Macs by default do not support any screen resolutions below 512x342 you rarely saw games on the Mac with chunky pixels. Conversely though, there are definite trade-offs. As a kid, I remember playing Descent on both my own PC at home and on a Mac. That Mac, despite being a more powerful system in every regard, ran Descent at a slightly lower framerate, despite being set for double-sized pixels, because it was still having to buffer and render out a high-res display. It's really hard to say exactly what early Macs were better at compared to PCs with comparable specs, since the optimizations were vastly different between the two platforms, so it was often just random chance whether a game performed better on PC or better on Mac, though typically, whichever platform was the original target was where a program would run best. :B

[@antdude]

I barely remember playing this game on an IBM PS/2.

[@Michael-im5mq]

It would be cool to see a reimagining of this using a modern engine like Unity or Unreal with VR support on SteamVR and Oculus Quest2. I think flat shaded polygons look pretty good in modern VR and remind me of the big promises of VR back in the 90s that have finally been met. If I'm not mistaken you have one of the Microsoft mixed reality headsets right?

[@Pixelmusement]

I have an Oculus Rift S, which I got before their braindead move to force Facebook account usage to use them. Still, I've played enough stuff in VR to know that the whole synthwave aesthetic is poorly tapped, as the surprisingly popular VR genre is Horror of all things. That said, something we take for granted in reality is how many tiny little details our brains use to confirm our position in 3D space, many of which are absent in an environment such as that presented here in Spectre, so you can get disoriented surprisingly fast in VR when the environment around you has literally no shading or texturing! :o

[@Michael-im5mq]

@@Pixelmusement check out Race The Sun in VR mode if possible. That game is flat shaded similar to Spectre and looks pretty good in VR without any disorientation. It does simulate ground movement better than spectre though to create a sense of speed.

[@AlexeiVoronin]

Never heard of it, but it looks weird enough to (maybe) spark my interest some day :P I hope you're working on those suggestions I sent you.

[@Pixelmusement]

+AlexeiVoronin Requests are based on the number of them I get for each game. The requests list is over 300 games big and contains somewhere over 500 total requests. That doesn't make sending in requests any less important because each one influences that list to prioritize some games over others! :B

[@komojo]

I remember playing this at a friend's house back in the day. There's something incredibly appealing to me about the flat-shaded polygons with chunky pixel edges. I think it would lose a lot of its charm if you remade it in HD.

[@Pixelmusement]

+Komojo Oh no, if you remade it in HD but kept the same style it would be way better. One of my biggest complaints with vector-style graphics is seeing the edges of the pixels; I love seeing that stuff super sharp and crisp thanks to high resolution! Heck, on the old vector-based CRTs, that's how it was! :3

[@ethelchip3620]

Looks really cool. Any idea if this is better or worse then the snes version?

[@Pixelmusement]

+Ethel Chip Almost certainly better as the SNES wasn't designed to do this kind of 3D rendering and probably relies on a combination of Mode 7 and sprites to achieve a similar effect.

[@AmyraCarter]

The only way the SNES version would of been decent is if it used the Super FX chip.

[@MindstormXL]

Wait Ive been playing a the sequel this entire time?

[@Pixelmusement]

+MindstormXL Possibly! ;)

[@MindstormXL]

@@Pixelmusement I got Spec VR from a compilation of 5 CDs my dad bought from a computers fair it has 2 I don't remember and a children's book CD and Dennis Miller's that's geek to me

[@andrewheather4970]

Pixelmusement i just wondered when do you upload adg game episodes on your channel

[@Pixelmusement]

+Andrew Heather ADG videos go up on the first three Saturdays of every month between January and October. November and December are my break times since those are my busiest months outside of work. :B

[@jasonblalock4429]

I remember playing this back in the day, and being kind of disappointed because I'd heard it was really good but it didn't impress me. Although that might have been because I played it after playing Stellar 7.

[@Pixelmusement]

+Jason Blalock That was still back at a time when companies were racing to make the graphics better and better, so taking a step BACKWARDS on graphics fidelity was a fast way to consign your creation to obscurity. :P

[@jasonblalock4429]

@@Pixelmusement Yeah, the graphics were a step back, but so was everything else. Spectre was a throwback 80s-esque arcade game in an era when even PC action games were trying to be more than just a high score table. (But then, I loved Stellar 7, so I may be biased.)

[@jasonhurdlow6607]

The Mac version was better (smoother, higher resolution, etc...) And the network play (PvP) was so much fun. We used to have epic tournaments in my dorm back in the day. My roommate and I had our Macs networked and the whole dorm would visit our room to play. I still have my old Mac IIsi out in the garage, no idea if it's possible to get it operable anymore. I think the only copy of it I still have is on the HD. Probably lost the box ages ago.

[@XanthinZarda]

This all reminded me of X/X-Scape.

[@sonidospectre646]

Y ahora es el nombre de mi sonido ....😅

[@tonk82]

I found the snes version for dirt cheap in the 90s... very few games i found that cheap. I remember it was the cheapest snes game i ever got xD but it was ... ¿ok? It had great music. Years later i played the Dos version and VR and i thought they were pretty decent.

[@anonamatron]

Got Spectre VR with my first CD-ROM drive long ago... I think it held my interest for about 5... 10... minutes? So, now years later out of nostalgia I'll spend 17 minutes watching a video about it. ..Oh.. and this isn't the same game...

[@Pixelmusement]

+anonamatron There's a difference between playing a game and learning about it. ;)

[@gordon2402]

Wtf Ive just take it out of my cellar to play a nice retro tank game ( snes) Cool

[@PlasticCogLiquid]

Have you messed around with making mobile games ever Chris?

[@Pixelmusement]

+PlasticCog Liquid I have not. I did some research in the mobile app market in the past and found it far too fast paced and oversaturated for a single individual to keep up with while making any sort of income.

[@PlasticCogLiquid]

@@Pixelmusement it definitely is over saturated with bad games, it needs more innovation and creativity.

[@PlasticCogLiquid]

@@Pixelmusement I think that space game you abandoned could be adapted to Touchscreen, should you ever revive it. It had the makings of something cool

[@Pixelmusement]

+PlasticCog Liquid ...which space game? If you mean Space Fortress 2, that game's very micro-management heavy so I don't expect a large enough market for it to warrant diving back into it. If you mean CGA Solar Warriors, I actually have a revised idea for it that's a lot more interesting which I might tackle someday. :B

[@PlasticCogLiquid]

@@Pixelmusement Yes, Space Fortress 2. I thought that game had a lot of promise! I don't think I've seen Solar Warriors.

[@Christopher-N]

I find Electronic Arts' _Arcticfox_ more enjoyable.

[@Lachlant1984]

Oh how dearly wish this was on GOG or Steam, I really do. I know about the iOS Spectre 3D game in fact I contacted the developer via the website to ask about the original DOS game and they have not replied to me, rather disheartening.

[@mattj2217]

I'm the dev of the iOS app. I'm sorry if I was unable to get back to you. The project died due to general lack of interest. I'm not sure if it will come back. What I'd like to do is a web assembly port, but that's a huge task. Honestly it would just be best as a lightly ad-supported game, but in today's crowded game space I don't feel like anyone would play it.

[@Lachlant1984]

@@mattj2217 I think people would buy the DOS version if it was on GOG and Steam, I certainly would, I know others have been wanting to play the DOS version too. If you go to the GOG website and type Spectre into the Community Wishlist search, you'll see there are people who do want to play the DOS version. I generally don't play games on my iPhone and I don't own nor want an iPad. I prefer to play games with a game controller or joystick or keyboard and mouse rather than on a touch screen.

[@mattj2217]

@@Lachlant1984 Working on a WIP browser-based port: spectre3d.com/web-alpha/