• Chip's Challenge 2... is finally back.
    37 replies, posted
[url]http://store.steampowered.com/app/348300/[/url] [video=youtube;drZgseY2_Jk]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drZgseY2_Jk[/video] It's been seventeen years since this game was originally cancelled, and as my brother was on the dev team, I grew up playing my own unreleased copy of the game. Compatibility with modern Windows broke ages ago on my copy, but it looks like - alongside creator Chuck Somerville [i]finally[/i] getting the legal situation sorted - the engine's been updated to run on modern machines. This may be a Windows 98-era game right here, but let me tell you anyway: you guys are in for a goddamn treat. With the stuff this game did [i]years[/i] before anyone else, it's criminal that gaming at large is only getting to experience it now, seventeen years after it was originally intended to release.
I remember being 8 years old and racing to finish my maths work in school so I could play chips challenge on the class PC before anyone else. Great game.
And this means... MY NDA IS FINALLY OVER! Alright, dude. [i]Dude.[/i] This game did Portal before [i]Portal[/i] did. Alright, so CC1 had teleporters, right? Those became blue teleporters in CC2, and there were three other types: red, yellow, and green. Each only linked to others of that color, and in a specific order. Blues teleported in reading order; when you entered one, it would look at tiles to the right and then went down a row if it couldn't find any, scanned [i]that[/i] row from left to right, and then kept going. But you could also wire blue teleporters together to create pairs, removing them from the main "network" of blue teleporters and just linking to each other. But that's not the Portal part. Then there were reds, and they went in [i]reverse[/i] reading order. And you could wire [i]those[/i] not to each other, but to switches, and those could turn the teleporters on and off and remove them from the red teleporter network. Then there were greens. They sent you to a random green exit, in a random direction, but the randomness was based on a seed generated by the level layout itself, so as long as the level itself wasn't edited, you could figure out the order. But [i]those[/i] weren't the Portal part. And then there were yellows, and [i]those[/i] were the Portal ones, because you could frigging [i]pick them up[/i] and put them into a four-slot inventory, and there was a separate inventory for each playable character on the level. You could pop 'em down somewhere else and all sorts of crazy solutions sprung up. Like, this was Portal [i]nine years[/i] before Portal actually happened. Hell, due to CC2 having co-op with everyone having their own inventory, it even had Portal 2's co-op beat! And bear in mind, the number of co-op characters in one level is only limited to how big the level is; you could have [i]hundreds![/i] Like, this is why when Portal initially came out and everyone was going bonkers over the concept, I was like, "eh, seen it all before." And with Portal 2's co-op, I was like "well this isn't so hard." This game is why! Agh, I can't believe you guys are only getting to play it [i]now![/i] This was the [i]nineties[/i] for me! The game has a built-in level editor! I've made [i]hundreds[/i] of 'em! There are so many elements to work with that CC1 didn't have! I friggin' learned level design [i]in my childhood[/i] from this game. What this game would've done for gaming back in the era it was supposed to launch... Like - oh man, you guys are in for [i]such[/i] a treat.
HOLY SHIT THIS GAME! It's so nice to finally know the name of the game i played with my chill babysitter.
Nice the first one is coming out on Steam too.
Thread music? [media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcV8H3GlzN0[/media]
Portal before portal.
[QUOTE=ChrisR;47547595]Thread music? [media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcV8H3GlzN0[/media][/QUOTE] O-ho-ho, you might think. CC2's soundtrack is actually completely MIDIs of Scott Joplin tunes. "The Entertainer" is the main theme for the game (as a kid I just knew it as "the CC2 song"), and if I remember correctly, it might have a drum section that my brother added. I dunno if that's something he just did for fun in our copies or if it made it into the gold release, but it sounded pretty nice. ... Christ, looking through my copy's music folder, this was back in the era where file names could still only be eight characters long. ENTRTANR.MID, there it is...
Eh, I just remembered hearing the old MIDI versions of those two songs in the version of CC1 I had which was bundled in my Win98 computer (Or so I believe, I was like, 5 or 6, I didn't know anything.). This one, to be precise: [img]http://www.scuzzstuff.org/chipschallenge/chipschallenge.png[/img]
I wish they would add the first one with the release and make it a whole package. Why wouldn't they? [editline]17th April 2015[/editline] Just to be clear I mean the original one as it was when it shipped with Windows, I don't see why not if they've finally sorted out the legal troubles just for nostalgia.
[QUOTE=LSK;47547802]I wish they would add the first one with the release and make it a whole package. Why wouldn't they? [editline]17th April 2015[/editline] Just to be clear I mean the original one that shipped with Windows, I don't see why not if they've finally sorted out the legal troubles.[/QUOTE] From the Chip's Challenge Wiki (No idea how up to date of a source that is): [quote]It contains the original 149 levels of Chip's Challenge 1, plus 200 new levels, and lots of new tiles.[/quote] Sounds like that's pretty much what you're getting.
First one is coming to Steam, although CC2 also includes every CC1 level. You can play either campaign separately.
[QUOTE=laserpanda;47547867]From the Chip's Challenge Wiki (No idea how up to date of a source that is): Sounds like that's pretty much what you're getting.[/QUOTE] I know that, it's just the old tileset I want. Maybe you can mod them in, it's not a big deal I just really liked the artstyle is all.
[I]Guys!!! [/I][B][I]This game took longer to release than Duke Nukem Forever![/I][/B]
[QUOTE=TheRealRudy;47548045]lucky for us it didn't fail as horribly.[/QUOTE] It isn't out yet though..?
[QUOTE=LSK;47547918]I know that, it's just the old tileset I want. Maybe you can mod them in, it's not a big deal I just really liked the artstyle is all.[/QUOTE] Tileset is stored in a bitmap file that you can edit freely. I've been using a custom one for years; there's actually a really old video of mine floating around out there of one of my levels with that tileset. Bear in mind, CC2 is closer in look to Lynx CC1 than the Windows version, so it's significantly more animated. There's no real way to get rid of that and go back to the choppy tile-by-tile movement of Windows CC1 if that's what you're looking for.
I've never heard of this game at all but it sounds great! Can't wait for it to come out.
Will this be 5 Euros for old 16 bit executable? I hope we get Steam achievements
Chip's Challenge was my fucking childhood man, never knew there was meant to be a second.
[url="http://store.steampowered.com/app/262590/"]Don't forget about Chuck's Challenge, folks[/url]
[QUOTE=aurum481;47548208]I hope we get Steam achievements[/QUOTE] That's highly unlikely. CC2 is running off a circa-1998 codebase and was developed in a pre-DX8 environment; I doubt Chuck has done more than update the game for modern Windows compatibility for the Steam release. The game had practically gone gold when it was cancelled.
What caused it to not be released?
The real reason the game was originally cancelled was because the guy who was supposed to convert it from the primitive DirectX it was developed in to a wider API standard took [i]way[/i] too long to get that done. So long that Epyx, the original publisher, went under [i]ages[/i] ago and its IPs just sort of floated off to different places. Chip's Challenge as an IP landed in the hands of one Bridgestone Multimedia, a Christian edutainment company who was completely clueless on how video game business worked and basically gave Chuck legal hell for the past several years, demanding [i]way[/i] higher sums than any sane dealing in the games industry. Hell, I asked him how he finally pulled it off after I heard the news earlier today, and all I got back was "approximately five years of very frustrating negotiations. The rights owners don't understand the game industry." That's a direct quote. But after finally having been able to sort out the legalities of the whole thing, Chuck must've found another means to get it running on something better than DX7. I wonder if it's now on an API even newer than it was originally intended to release on, actually; my copy hasn't worked since XP, so there's a high chance of that.
Wait, wait... Chuck's [url=http://www.vg247.com/2015/04/17/chips-challenge-chips-challenge-2-pc-steam/]updated[/url] the Steam release to have Workshop support and trading cards! So I guess achievements are a possibility, too. Oh man... I've got - like - around 190 custom levels to upload to that Workshop. I hope the old .C2M map files are still compatible. (I'm asking forgiveness in advance if they suck; file dates only go up to '06, so I was no older than 14 when I stopped and some of them go as far back as when I was 8...)
what a goddamn strange coincidence.. i was just trying to run the old chips challenge that was for windows 95 on windows 7 not a day past. i must say i am pleased to see this.
[QUOTE=VinLAURiA;47552152]Wait, wait... Chuck's [url=http://www.vg247.com/2015/04/17/chips-challenge-chips-challenge-2-pc-steam/]updated[/url] the Steam release to have Workshop support and trading cards! So I guess achievements are a possibility, too. Oh man... I've got - like - around 190 custom levels to upload to that Workshop. I hope the old .C2M map files are still compatible. (I'm asking forgiveness in advance if they suck; file dates only go up to '06, so I was no older than 14 when I stopped and some of them go as far back as when I was 8...)[/QUOTE] If they're not compatible, see if you can talk to Chuck about how to make them compatible. That shit can't go to waste.
[QUOTE=NightmareX91;47553059]If they're not compatible, see if you can talk to Chuck about how to make them compatible. That shit can't go to waste.[/QUOTE] Oh man, you don't know how irritated I am at the moment that my copy isn't working. I would [i]love[/i] to show you guys some videos of what you can do with it. The [i]really[/i] big one that you guys are going to love - bigger than the early Portal concept - is the [b]logic circuits.[/b] That's right, this game predates the friggin' redstone in Minecraft. Those wires I mentioned earlier can be hooked up to counters, switches, buttons; a whole bunch of stuff, including [i]boolean gates.[/i] AND gates, OR gates, NAND gates, XOR gates, latch gates, inverters... The wiring system turned CC2 from simply CC1 with more elements to something with a complete binary logic system in it that you could do all sorts of crazy stuff with. When I was twelve years old (file modification date for the level is 2/21/2005, eight days before my thirteenth birthday), I made a functional five-bit [i]binary calculator[/i] with it, using a diagram I pulled out of an old copy of [url=http://www.amazon.com/The-Things-Work-David-Macaulay/dp/0395428572]The Way Things Work[/url] (come to think of it, that book was another big part of my childhood.) I'm not kidding when I say that if this game was released when it was intended... oh, man. Gaming as a whole would've seen a lot of concepts earlier than they ultimately appeared. Agh... Stupid assertion failure, why won't you let the game load...
I think I just slammed into a wall of pure nostalgia whilst travelling faster than the speed of light.
[QUOTE=VinLAURiA;47553152]Oh man, you don't know how irritated I am at the moment that my copy isn't working. I would [i]love[/i] to show you guys some videos of what you can do with it. The [i]really[/i] big one that you guys are going to love - bigger than the early Portal concept - is the [b]logic circuits.[/b] That's right, this game predates the friggin' redstone in Minecraft. Those wires I mentioned earlier can be hooked up to counters, switches, buttons; a whole bunch of stuff, including [i]boolean gates.[/i] AND gates, OR gates, NAND gates, XOR gates, latch gates, inverters... The wiring system turned CC2 from simply CC1 with more elements to something with a complete binary logic system in it that you could do all sorts of crazy stuff with. When I was twelve years old (file modification date for the level is 2/21/2005, eight days before my thirteenth birthday), I made a functional five-bit [i]binary calculator[/i] with it, using a diagram I pulled out of an old copy of [url=http://www.amazon.com/The-Things-Work-David-Macaulay/dp/0395428572]The Way Things Work[/url] (come to think of it, that book was another big part of my childhood.) I'm not kidding when I say that if this game was released when it was intended... oh, man. Gaming as a whole would've seen a lot of concepts earlier than they ultimately appeared. Agh... Stupid assertion failure, why won't you let the game load...[/QUOTE] will it run in a virtual machine?
This fucking game. I can't believe it. I still remember that computerized voice saying "Bummer" every time I fucked up.
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