Strachwitz

Hey man pretty fast reply...

Sorry I forgot one or two slashes, so the whole text- format went wrong...

Dammit... I know I should have used that preview swich...

For your convenience here is the easier to read version:

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(velik_m @ Aug 20 2006, 06:15 AM) [snapback]249708[/snapback]</div>The reviewer used the words , so this list of games must be understood as examples and cannot be seen as concludent! Of course, there are other games (older and newer ones, well known and almost forgotten) using the same or a similar diagonal isometric view (e.g. Civilization, The Great Escape, Marble Madness, ...). The reviewer neither claimed this game "Contraption Zack" to be one of or even the first one using diagonal isometric view nor to appear before any of the other mentioned examples. There is no use in discussing which game was more popular than others, because first the word "popular" has to be defined: schould it relate to the number of sales, the number of press releases, market durabilitiy, market spread, general public awareness or any combination of these properties? By the way, the visitors of this website are definitely not demoscopical representative, so simply calling a poll in order to research, which game is more popular than others, would be a bad idea.

Perhaps anybody is likely to write an article about different solutions for graphical projections of three dimensional structures by two dimensional electronic means of display, who knows this might interest some people, or the autor might achieve any degree. But this is no reason for accusations without substance against the rewievers, which in general do a great job.

But now for something completely different...

In fact that exactly is the case!

1. The evidence for the influence on popularity of a certain projection method any game could had, stands and falls (as we say in our country) with the definition of the word popularity. If you ask anyone on the street for a computergame, using first person view most of them will answer: Halo and Halflife (or Doom, CS, whatsoever...). If you ask for the earliest game using first person view many people will shrug, maybe some elder person will answer: Descent or even Elite. Those games were popular during a certain period, but are almost forgotten now in public. This leads to the problem how to define the word "popular" (not to forget that popular among gamers does not nescessarily mean popular among devellopers) and the two facts that popularity (however it could be measured) can never be considdered as zero or independent from time and that the abandonia- gamers are definitely not a demoscopical representative group (see above). Concluding: Halo and Halflife made the first person view popular, even more popular than it has allready been before. A similar statement could be given for the diagonal isometric view.
2. The adjektiv like is a bidirectional operator! That means any term, made by using this operator is true in both directions: if a is like b, than b will be like a!
So Halo and Halflife are games like Descent or Elite and vice versa, if you only considder the first person view. So it has not to be nescessarily the game Populos itself, which made the diagonal isometric view popular, but obviously this game was the first one rushed throug the mind of the reviewer (by the way throug mine, too), so its popularity appears to be significantly higher than zero.
3. Another example: If you think of popular classic composers you would surely remember the names "Beethoven" and maybe "Mozart" but did you ever hear about (or listened to) Händel, Grieg, Mahler, Gluck, Schütz, Telemann, Vivaldi, Orff, Bach (J. S.), Bach (F.), Bach (J. C.), Hayden, Mozart (J. N.), Bruckner, Brahms, Wagner, Chopin, Dvorak, Mendelssohn,... The lifeperiods of those composers streched over more than three centuries. The oevre of J. S. Bach is larger than the oevres of Beethoven, Mozart and Hayden together, but he has been almost forgotten a few years after his death. All those composers wrote music in an own unique style, but it is possible to state that the music from Beethoven is like music from Bach (and vice versa), as long as you only considder the fact that both are classic composers.
4. Very often truth depends on the personal standpoint (see the dialoge between Luke Skywalker and the late Obi Wan Kenobi in Episode 6...). If I want to catch a lion, I could put a cage in the jungle, step inside, close the cagedoor and define: "Here is the outside!".
5. If anybody wants to categorize all games into their display projection method or their game concept, in addition to genre and publisher, he should go ahead. Volounteers are always welcome... The reviewer of this game does not claim to be an expert on this subject (even though he might be).
6. The more substancial critic on this game review would be the lack of a manual and a clear explanation of the game controls. All in all it's a brief review of a brief game...