I just saw this news bit show up today:

http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/2003/07/14/commodore/

"Tulip Computers NV, which owns the Commodore brand name, plans to relaunch the brand to take advantage in an upsurge of interest in the obsolete Commodore 64 (C64) computer and its 1980s-era games, the company said in a statement Friday."

This seems to generally be a good thing, except there is one line in the press release that may be disturbing:

"Unauthorized use of the Commodore name by other organizations will be stopped, Tulip said in the statement."

Commodore, like Atari, are things of the past... still they are intent of bringing them back in hopes of gaining the connotation of old glory.

I can't really blame them though. There is at least one toothpaste brand (forgot the name) that was re-launched 10 or 20 years after it went under and it enjoyed a great commercial success with minimum advertisement. Nevertheless they should be aware that if their quality/games/hardware suck, then they are going to go under as well no matter what. This is not the Dot-Com era anymore...






[download a life]

What a bunch of rubbish

Granted some games nowadays are amazing but many have amazing graphics but no gameplay.

I regularly play Sinclair Spectrum or C64 games as theres some classic games on those machines and also obviously it recaptures your youth.

Thats why people listen to music from the 80's etc , to many people it might sound rubbish but they have great memories of them etc.

Some console games nowadays are superb, others are overpriced pieces of crap with fancy graphics.

As you can tell from searching the net old-skool emulators and games are still huge. I'm sure in 10 years time you'll be playing the games you did 10 years ago whilst your kids play some new fangled latest game.

Each to their own

> I regularly play Sinclair Spectrum or C64 games as theres some classic games > on those machines and also obviously it recaptures your youth.

Sure. But are you willing to pay the same money that you did back then for your games? In a day and age of cross-platform compilers and interpreter, is it really a bonus to pay a premium for a mere port of a program?

For example, Pacman, are you willing to buy it for $40? $30? $20? $10? Or just go get one of the free clones? How about 4 pacman games at once (that's only $10 per game)?... etc. Most often than not, publishers who try to "resurrect" old games do either a crappy conversion or make a compilation that leaves you wanting for more. And that's the problem IMHO, these compilations could be better. The only good one that I've seen is the Hanaho CD, with 10 or 15 arcade games IIRC.

They could just move on and try to do something new. Like integrate their games as mini-games in a new game (e.g. Animal Crossing).





[download a life]