Finally getting into this thread.
pasquinelli Dude I could have told you black shades by name with only a few words of description. That game is great. Me and friends spent a good amount of time going into the config .txt files and breaking things. Turns out if you turn the difficulty way down (or something?) assassin’s models start just drifting apart into bits and you get a like tornado of body parts whirling around the VIP until somehow something clicks and a dude’s knife attack triggers. Can increase bullet impact force, etc. A great time.
This game defined my loathing for most FPS in which your hands don’t exist in reality, and planted the seed for me to love Trespasser. If a game as simple as this can do free-aim with working sights effectively, what the goddamn hell were people doing for all these years?? (I thought as a non-FPS player)
I had forgotten until getting to sdate’s post that black shades was the way I got into following Wolfire games, whose output was largely focused on Lugaru and subsequently Overgrowth, which was the first place I saw a dev really work on reverse kinematics and dynamic animation. Super stellar stuff to have followed back on their youtube in the day.
Ahhhh OK now we are cooking - I found black shades through the UDevGame contest, which was RIFE with dope-ass mac-only games in the early 2000’s. I haven’t even cracked into scrounging those depths yet, don’t have too much hope that archive was able to keep any of those files around, but that’s a vein worth mining.
Alright, I have another metric ton of things to say about gaming on a mac, as I seem to be the kid who you all went over to their house to play KidPix at. Basic lineage for now:
Mac SE/30 - somehow my dad had one that his work was just getting rid of - my dream computer to acquire and get back up and running.
Then a Performa (Color WOW, could now compete against neighbor’s down the street with a Quadra and external CD drive and Lode Runner: The Legend Returns and Muppet Treasure Island), with a massive amount of pack-in software that is just dope as shit that I could write a post about. Other limited-game-option purchases like Gridz, and Bonkheadz Deluxe.
Then a green iMac, and the world of Diablo II, Broodwar custom maps, first internet connection. Also fed by shareware off of Mac Addict CDs. Connectix virtual game station. (Also later used that Performa as a TV tuner to plug a later-aquired PS1 into and play FF7 in my room when the iMac was downstairs, which really meant I’d made it in the world.)
Then lastly a G4 tower, who went with me to college, did it’s darndest. Overheating the video card trying to play SimCity 4. Woke me up a few times going into jet engine mode with its fans at 3:30AM.
I will say that the peak of the macintosh operating system (in my eyes) is PowerPC architecture running 7.5.3. Keep that shit bare bones and not a PC. Running PC software on a mac still equates to running what my mind considered an emulator rather than booting some wine business or whatever the whippersnappers are up to today.
As such, getting an OS 7.5 emulator up and running on handhelds is a primary target of mine, once I realized that it was a possibility with the PSP. I’ll write about that someday, but will stop for now.