Well, it's been a while since I've updated a Tyrian site and there's
been SO many fan mails that I just haven't had the time to answer them
all. Even though it would have been nice to...
As a quick test, this is the current state of the Tyrian GBA game,
since people had interest in finding out about it. It was never
completed, of course, and I don't know what I would do at this point to
do so. Especially since it's very hard to release a GBA game and
it needs a decent bit more polishing.
I think all I got out of writing that was a 14" LCD monitor. :)
But ah well, contracts don't always go through like you hope they
do. One of the perils of working as a contractor.
Tyrian Full
After hours of searching through backup CDs and choosing the one
mysteriously marked 'Tyrian 2000 Final Backup CD' I seem to have come
across a valid version of Tyrian 2000.
DISCLAIMER: The company XSIV games is sadly no more. Which is why
I'm putting the game up. Feel free to play it all you want and
share it with friends, but for the moment I'd like to just have a
central backup place (here) for the game. In the future I might
not mind other sites sharing it, but I do enjoy amusing fans. :)
Also, the main complaint is that it doesn't work with the audio of most
systems. Tyrian was written with the 'Loudness' sound system and
I haven't got a clue how it -really- works. We released a sound
blaster live patch, which really used a different sound system I
believe called 'Diamondware'... though I really think that might
be the wrong name. Anyway, not sure where that patch is at the
moment, but here is the main game...
TyrianFull.zip << Aug 12 - Not the version I wanted to put up but good as temporary fodder.
You may or may not get it to work. But that's to be expected from
an archaic Dos application that hasn't been touched in years, isn't it!
:)
More Files
Another file from my archives, this time we have the Gameboy Color
version of Tyrian that was never released. This actually got -very- far and through about a
month of heavy beta testing. I tried to cram as much junk into
this version as I could (though sadly there's no version of Destruct,
for all the heavy fans). (Note I had a bad, old version up for the first ten minutes of this post without audio.)
I might be getting too uppity, but I rather felt this might have ended
up one of the better Gameboy Color games. Music was done by
Alec, just like the original, and I did all the graphics conversion
(phew). Lots of hard work, but the company I wrote it for didn't
know how to get it published. It's a lot harder than you'd think!
Fans :)
Thought everyone would love to know more about how some of this came
about and what happened over the past couple of years. It wasn't
until -too- long ago (early this year) that XSIV finally 'kicked the
bucket' to start with. Later on I got back the rights to the
title and sat on it for a few months as people kept requesting the game
through email. For a good while I'd respond and say 'I don't know
exactly how to get it but contact this guy.' However, I've since
lost contact with the former head of the company. Was trying to
get all the old copies of it to send out in case anyone wanted to
collect a hard copy box of the game.
Prior to the company giving up I was working on those GBA and GBC
versions of the game under contract. It was mostly me doing all
the work, though I had Alec and an artist to help me. Plus an
actually decent set of testers. We ended up pretty close, though
it was a -lot- of work and kept me really busy. This was of
course right after giving up on Jazz 3 since the licensing costs were
too high. Funny to go from Unreal back down to Dos and then the
GBA, but I guess life takes weird turns.
Anyway, about a month ago I finally decided to give in and just put it
up. Perhaps I'd make another Tyrian game someday (since I do have
the rights to it), though I suppose I'd do a 3D adventure/shooter game
of some weird sorts with collectable items and the like. There's
lots of designs and simple sketches and stuff lying around. But
that's on the back burner as I now do GBA games for Amaze
Entertainment. Which is lots of fun, though still keeps me a
little busy. So, to make a long story short I made this website
and found a nice place with enough storage to distribute from.
