Omega Race

Hi all! A few ramblings from a lurker.

        Well remember Midway? Remember the one vector game they released?
Omega Race. Love the game. Well, I was over at Paul T's place yesterday,
the purpose of my visit was to hit a few surplus places and play his omega
race cocktail to death. And we did. We also noticed a few technical things
I thought I would mention.

        We sat down, me as player one, Paul as player 2 and started to play.
I took me a bit to get back into it, as I am a little to used of the physics
of Gravitar, and omega race is much more responsive. (although nothing will
ever unseat Gravitar as my favourite game!)

        Then it started happening... When Paul was playing, and only for
the player 2 side, the machine would freeze for up to a second, randomly,
about every 10 seconds. It would kinda pause....then continue, with the
screen freezing, then jumping to the state the screen should have been in
had it run through the pause. It never watchdogged. It was the oddest
thing, and about the only way I could come close to his score :-)

        So he swapped in the spare boardset and all was fine.

        Other notes:

        He gets the odd, stray vector. Like maybe one every couple of
minutes, possible based on the number of vectors being drawn. Hard to
notice (infact, non vector lister may not even see them!), but it does
happen. Any one with an omega race see the same thing?

        Kinda cool, in cocktail mode, we played many games, and I don't
know the full logic here, but.....

        It would alternate who was player one. On the first game, I,
sitting on the player one side, went first. On the second game, Paul went
first, on the third game I went first, on the fourth game Paul went first.
Seems to be a neat feature, but for what purpose?

        And, although probably common knowledge, when you get an extra ship,
it let's you go again, which I can only assume it is it let the players
finish together. If the one player (Paul) is much better than the other
(Mike), Mike get's to stay, and play until the end, rather than potentially
getting up to play another game while Paul finishes. A revenue tactic me
thinks!

Well, that's all! Happy Holidays!

Mike

        
Received on Wed Dec 22 07:58:15 1999