Afterlife - ADG Episode 292
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- Опубликовано: 15 окт 2024
- The eternal city simulator! ...sorta...
Today on Ancient DOS Games, Gemini's taking a look at Afterlife, a city-building simulation game spearheaded by Michael Stemmle over at LucasArts and published in 1996. While having the typical creativity, wit, and charm you would expect from one of their titles, and plenty of inner complexities, the simulation falls notably short of achieving the same feeling the SimCity series does for a very specific reason, which should become more and more apparent as the episode unfolds. :B
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This game has that "unfinished/unexplained" mystical quality that SimTower (Yoot Tower - Maxis) has. You make your own fun.
The fact I'm a hardcore Lucas Arts fan and never heard about this probably says a lot about how quickly it fell into obscurity.
Afterlife is definitely one of those games that doesn't feel quite finished or fully explained, but I do enjoy it all the same. I mentioned it on LGR's video, but the best tip I ever received is to just focus on building Heaven and getting it profitable first. Once it's up and running and sustaining itself, you can start working on Hell. The amount of SOULs waiting to get in by that point will lead to rapid growth and it should be sustainable in time as well. Of course, it doesn't take much for things to get messy after that.
i usually did the other way around, but then again with no proper tutorial quite hard to do it
Definitely works either way, starting with one and then getting to the other after the first is stable. The tutorials also kind of make you think you have to handle both at once from the very start, or that it's the most sensible way to play. Not necessarily, as it turns out!
Yup, Afterlife is definitely one of those games where the idea & aesthetics behind it are stronger than the actual game. It's the worst kind of bad in that it's not honestly even "bad" it's just... Not as good as it should be given the ideas behind it.
I mean, to be fair, the devs were effectively trying to create a brand new model for city simulation practically from scratch. SimCity works because its underlying simulation model has a grounding in reality that it can draw from to achieve a semblance of normalcy. What they came up with here though was effectively just an overcomplicated exponential growth curve. :P
@@Pixelmusement 8 different zone types, all of them residential! That's how I always found it to be, anyway.
Also, it's worse than just zones providing different vibes to manage, but each structure that can be built automatically in each zone provides different vibes, which can really make it feel random when trying to optimize an afterlife.
Also, you can tell this game was made by an adventure game studio when their main source of necessary game info is a strategy guide, sheesh.
Looking at the source code for DOSBox-X and DOSBox SVN... 1152x864 is there in the VESA modelist. 256-color mode would take just under 1MB of video RAM, and SVN appears to default to 2MB for svga_s3. It's possible the game might assume VESA BIOS modes rather than enumerate the available modes, as some lazy programmers did back in the day. For example 640x480 256-color mode is usually always mode 0x101.
Man, I remember playing the demo of this as a kid and getting freaked out at the Surfers of the Apocalypse, especially since at the time I had no idea why they would show up (and honestly even now I'm not sure if they were showing up because I had gone into debt, as they do in the full game, or just because it was how the demo limited things).
"ad infinitum" is latin, not english ;)
Love your videos!
I remember 1152x864 on Macs being a somewhat common available resolution. Starting with one of their earliest "big" Macintosh monitors, the "Apple Macintosh 21-inch Color Display" having a fixed 1152x870 resolution, and later multiscan settling on x864 as the "default 20-21 inch monitor resolution". I know I ran that on my 21" monitor on my Windows 95 system, as it wasn't as small as 1280x1024 (which was itself not a 'proper' resolution, 1280x960 was the proper square-pixel resolution, but almost everything defaulted to x1024 instead!) but not as huge as 1024x768 on that big a screen.
I found interesting that Mac monitors had only one resolution, so one could only change the resolution by buying a larger one.
afterlife did many original things, but it dies from micromanagement.
You can have functioning small cities, but they require extreme micromanagement to make every building as efficient as possible.
This thankfully can be neglected a bit in the end-game.
I like how 2 maps need very different styles for optimization.
hell is "better" with large parcels and fewer roads, because traffic jams are actually good here.
heaven needs more roads and smaller parcels.
having 7 zone types instead of 3 also adds so the game. The game is oozing flair in flavor-texts of countless text descriptions.
7 zones-demands of afterlife are completely set by the globe-sim that you can not interact with unless you chose to promote reincarnation.
“Afterlife dies from micromanagement”🤣
Having played this and been disappointed by it back in the day, I think there's a more fundamental problem that's deeply compounded by the poor explanation of its mechanics: It's complicated and unintuitive. One of the reasons SimCity works is that even a child understands the basics of "how cities work." City-building is intuitive. Afterlife is not. It's complicated and fiddly and arbitrary and you're never given a good conceptual model of what you're trying to do, which makes it all the more frustrating to puzzle out.
I really wish there were more games that explored the idea of the afterlife. I know it's not the most pleasant thing to think about, but it's an untapped gold mine of ideas. The only other one I can think of is Spiritfarer.
ever play Soul Reaver? lol
@@wexenhex not the same, soul reaver is just about mythical vampire stuff etc, this is about our own religions
"Replay Cheesy Intro" - LOLOLOL! Well, that on the main menu sums up how serious the designer took the game's premise!
It barely qualifies but this is another LucasArts classic with the signature creativity and humor. Their first strategy-type game, a genre that over the years LucasArts would have trouble getting quite right, though as someone who appreciates them I enjoyed those such as Rebellion and Force Commander which weren't received that well in general. That seemed to be their issue with strategy games over the years: being too elite by trying to enhance the formula their own way and force a bit too much trial and error on players to find success, factors that dog everything from Afterlife's quirks to use of an unsuitable engine for Galactic Battlegrounds (I have no qualified opinion of Empire at War because I've yet to play it).
The Macintosh and Windows (which is on the same disc as DOS) versions are the ones offering higher resolutions and may also be more stable for their time, but under modern PCs and Macs the DOS version (through DOSBox) is the only one simple to get working at all.
Oh man, I love Afterlife! Stoked to see you cover it :)
Edit: I won't spoil the episode but I do agree with you. That being said, not having much replayability isn't a big issue for me, I'm happy with having a limited time with a game when it has as much personality and charm as Afterlife does.
The game has a lot of charm despite its flaws and sometimes, when you just need to kill some time, that can be enough to carry a game for some people. I mean, me personally, I'm not that much against grinding so long as the grind is interesting in some way with a payoff of some sort, possibly why I enjoy the more recent Monster Hunter games and a few old RPGs. :B
The European Box is a simple 2 half closing box. Fun game tho.
pretty sure that intentionally ofuscating games back then to sell strategy guides and hotlines was common; sort of like rental games being made extra hard. latter i.e. Aladdin and Lion King
Depends. Console games, absolutely, but it was more out of necessity than intentional obfuscation because ROM chips were REALLY expensive so the less memory you could fit your game into, the more money it would make per sale. Computer games, different story. With so much more memory, bigger boxes, and bigger manuals, there was an expectation for things to be better-explained, thus this was less common there than with console stuff. :P
It's too bad. It sounded like a really interesting game.
I suppose Heaven and Hell have to be managed together, rather than _SimCity 4,_ in which you can manage two maps separately (and exploit the neighbor import/export feature).
this game is easily better than sim city 4.
Infinitum doesn’t come from infinity, it’s the other way around… Also why should Latin words be pronounced like English words? Any other languages where you want to tell the natives how they should pronounce their own words?
Still, love the video as always!
Pretty sure you don't pronounce it like this in Latin though
@@ImperatorZed You do, the difference is in English the syllables for infinity are broken down: in-fin-i-ty where as in Latin it's in-fi-ni-tum. You can look up the IPA for pronouncing it you want to confirm.
The problem here is English is a mess and we're like vocabulary magpies "oooo shiny word!".
We should start over. Everyone get to learning Loglan or Esperanto ASAP.
@@Chaos-Goat "'Ad infinitum' is Latin for 'to infinity'. We can't be sure of how Latin was originally pronounced but from the 4th century, Latin has been used by the Catholic church, and the pronunciation from this time on has remained stable up to modern times. Using this pronunciation, 'ad infinitum' sounds like 'ad in/fi/NEE/toom'.
The 'new' or 'modern' way of saying 'ad infinitum' follows modern pronunciation rules, and has become correct by usage. It is: 'ad in/fi/NI/t[e]m', with the capital 'I' sounding like 'eye', and a neutral vowel on the 'u'. (A neutral vowel makes an 'uh' sound like the 'a' in 'China', and the 'e' in 'the'). To put it simply, just pronounce the '-itum' like the word 'item'. This is the most popular pronunciation today, and the one you are likely to hear in the media.
If you want to sound old-worldly and scholarly, the old pronunciation is the way to go. Otherwise, use the modern pronunciation."
@@ImperatorZed what's your source on that?
@@Chaos-Goat Google. But also from what I've learned during my high school days in a German school. I have not taken Latin but we have learned how to pronounce it and I'm certain the "ad infin-item" pronunciation is an English invention. Latin is pronounced just as it is written (as read by a German speaker), unlike English.
I remember playing the demoversion from a magazine CD Rom back then. The game was so frustrating and confusing that i never touched it again.
I hope you make a Pro video about Raptor, but i highly doubt it :)
Raptor would be a very tricky one to cover in terms of stats because it's auto-scrolling, though given things I know about the game I suspect there will be at least one more video about Raptor in the future... ;)
Can you tell me what the timestamp is where he goes over the fundamental flaw with the game?
There's not really a specific timestamp as it's a slow buildup from around 10:00 onward that eventually concludes that success or failure is dictated solely by a single number which the manual does a terrible job of explaining in order to sell strategy guides. :P
Hell yeah I got it right last episode!
1152x864 is only well known as a Mac video mode in the 90s. This is probably why DOSbox can’t see it.
Not impossible, but the DOS installer has the option listed but greyed out when I try to select it, so... that's not evidence enough that it can't work in DOS, just a possible explanation for why it's listed even if it's hardcoded not to work.
I used it in Windows at the time, so it wasn't a Mac only thing. That said I've never seen a DOS game supporting it, not even Descent or System Shock which could handle higher VESA modes than that
@@fisk0 The complicated thing to remember about VESA video modes is that up until the VESA 2.0 standards, there were only a handful of supported high resolutions: 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, and 1280x1024. The 2.0 standards introduced resolution independence so that you could now define your resolutions however you wanted with the onus being on the hardware or VESA support drivers to indicate which video modes are supported. Also, System Shock only natively supports up to 640x480; The Enhanced Editions which were modded into the game much later on added higher resolution support.
IDK what you're going to say, but for me it's having to micromanage every building constantly. I forgot what the mechanic is called, but it was a constant, never-ending annoyance. I **love** this game, the presentation and the concept are top notch. I want a reboot! But dang it, it's just not fun to play.
Ad Infinitum is Latin not English hence the way it's said. We just stole it and retrofitted it to our language as is our way.
I open a ADG video for some chill time with a DOS game only to discover that the gave was gifted by my older brother
It happens. ;D
Didn't Kris already cover this?
Nope. LGR did though! ;) ruclips.net/video/-azFNwF6fa0/видео.html
@@Pixelmusement then I’ll give this a watch!
I remember this game being advertised in a magazine as a kid. No screenshots, just a text description. The description made the game seem like you're playing as an angel of heaven against hell. My mind was picturing a Doomlike. So surprising to see this was a sim game!
What I really hate with remakes of Movies and games, is that they always take something that was done well/a hit, and try and redo it for money.
Why dont game-publishers and Hollywood start remaking stuff, that had potential but didnt succeed?? Like this game: it could be redone, just much better. Because this game had potential. Cool idea, that just didnt play out so well.
I can tell the problem with me. It’s a mess. The graphics bleed together and idk wtf is going on.
I'm gonna be honest. I was willing to let the ads run to help with your channel. But there's nothing in hell that can force me to chew down a 90 second ad. These guys are getting a bit out of hand with their crazyness. (It's not the uploader's fault I know that)
Hey, skip any ads you want to, that's what the skip button is there for! I make over 90% of my revenue from Patreon support anyways! ;)
My cousin got this game and one day gave to me. It came with the guide, manual and game on my language, everything in the right place and since i love sim city 2000 i tought it would be a blast. To this day i dont understand crap of what happens here and i tried a lot. Stopped on that thing about good and bad vibes, no matter what i did it was always the problem.
Your pronunciation of ad infinitum is the correct latin pronunciation, it is like infinity
always loved this game shame it was so goddamn hard to understand what was going on
Dunno about replayability, I could never get into this game, to begin with. The worst tutorial in the world played its part, but my pet peeve is the visual design. Yes, the buildings look unique and each is a pleasant sight separately. Yet, when put together and placed over that god-awful blackness, the mishmash makes the game so damn ugly that I wouldn't even call it style. The eclectic clutter, the awful UI - all that always looked utterly distasteful to me.
I don’t like the cluttered look.
Infinity comes from Infinitum... but your way of saying it is closer to the Latin pronounciation anyways.
I like the aesthetic of this game compared to Sim City.
Top-down shooter, DOS, borrowed sound-effects, multiple weapons, bang for the buck, is it Cyber Dogs?
For someone who hates English, you spend a large amount of time in your Shovelware Digger series poking fun at small spelling errors and being outraged by them. Just saying.
I hate vacuuming and doing dishes too, doesn't mean I can't be exceptionally good at those tasks. You can hate things you're good at doing! :P
“I hate English” - welp ‘ad infinitum’ is just Latin so I guess you hate Latin
Ugly, depressing-looking game about a morbid subject. Gee, I wonder why it's forgotten?
This looks like a infinightly terrible game