includes the following questions and answers:
A: There are currently FOUR different versions of battalion available:
yup, I'm sure that cleared everything up :)
The most recent version is the OpenGL version, so if you have a newer Silicon Graphics machine I would recommend getting that one. If you have an older or slower Silicon Graphics machine I would recommend the GL version. If you have a Sun, you can download the Mesa version, and if you have something else you can download the source code and try and compile it on your own.
If you want to play a bunch of games on your Silicon Graphics workstation, pay your $5, or buy a new SGI and get the Indizone 3 version of the game. None of your $5 goes to me, but there is some very good stuff on that CD.
A: This error occurs if you have the Indizone version of battalion on your system and try to run the GL version available here, or version 1.0 of the OpenGL version. The indizone version of battalion did not include the sound for Techs' weapon and the older versions of battalion on these pages first look in the indizone's data directories for the data files. This has been corrected in the OpenGL version 1.1 and subsequent releases.
A: the way I did it was to put the following 3 lines in to my .xsession file:
setenv BATTALIONDATADIR /full/path/to/battalion/battalion.data haven -k haven /full/path/to/battalion/battalion -quiet -backdrop &
A: Aside from the obvious movie and TV influences, battalion was influenced by two of my favorite old apple ][ games: Jon Freeman's 'Crush, Crumble, and Chomp: the Movie Monster Game' and Mark Allen's 'Sabotage!'
CC&C was a strategy game where you played a movie monster in a major city, eating people, fighting the national guard, trying to avoid stepping on power plants, and keeping a sharp eye out for the mad scientist in his helicopter.
Sabotage was the original(?) 'lone gun emplacement beseiged by paratroopers' game which has since been reincarnated many times on many different platforms.
If you have access to an old apple ][, or one of the many apple ][
emulators available these days, I highly recommend checking these games out.
I've included a couple screen-dumps of the games below:
A: yup.
If you look in the battalion.data/data directory you will find 3 files: road.data, tank.data, and tree.data. At the bottom of each of those files you will find a key to what the various numbers mean. road.data holds the various roads, tank.data holds the prepositioned army vehicles, and tree.data holds the trees, buildings, and other landmarks. There is no limit to the size of the landscape you create except for how much it slows down the playing speed.
If you do come up with a new fun town layout please let me know!
A: depending on what kind of computer you have, maybe.
battalion was originally written in GL and has now been ported to OpenGL. The OpenGL version is now being compiled for different platforms and linked with either OpenGL or the Mesa 3D graphics library. This should allow battalion to run on a wide variety of platforms (at a wide variety of speeds.) Currently Silicon Graphics, Suns, HPs, Macintoshes, and machines running Linux can run battalion.
You can also download the source code and try and compile it on your own if you have either Mesa or OpenGL on your computer.
A: 
A box arrived on my doorstep on 3/26 with several copies of the CD
so they should now be shipping with all new Indys and Indigo2s.
A: Well, you can try:
http://www.sgi.com/Products/Indy/IndiZone/
http://www.sgi.com/Fun/Free_games.html
http://www.sgi.com/Technology/Inventor/Games/gamesExecutables.html
http://www.cdrom.com/pub/idgames/idstuff/doom/sgi/
http://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/games/x11/video/INDEX.html
A: Not at the moment. Last year I switched most of my efforts over to OpenInventor and based programming (and have since gone on to Performer :) ) and one of my first efforts was Graveyard Shift. This game is still in the beta stage but I have lots of plans for it ... whether I get around to implementing any of it is another question.
A screenshot from 'Graveyard Shift' is shown below:
I was also involved in the creation of 'Castle Smurfenstein' from 'Castle Wolfenstein' back in the early 80s. 'Smurfenstein' was a modification of the original 'Castle Wolfenstein' written by Silas Warner. Our version included goose-stepping smurfs with digitized smurf voices, a very strange sense of humour, and an odd obsession with Canada.
This was back when we had 8 colours, 2 of them were white, 2 of them were black, AND WE LIKED IT!
The modified title screen is shown full size below:
I have seen disc images of 'Castle Smurfenstein' floating about so if you have an Apple ][ emulator laying around, or even better an old Apple ][, check it out for a bit of history. Note that everyone we knew back then had modified their Apple ][s to have lower case, so of course our game used lower case for a lot of the text making it rather unreadable in some of the current apple ][ emulators.
For more info on Smurfbutcher Bob, check out the 'official' Castle Smurfenstein home page here.
A: I have no idea. I originally intended him to be a bird named Tweet, but he didn't turn out that way; so I consider him to be a bird-bat-bee-butterfly combination.
A: For many years I have wanted to make a strategy game where you would play the army and deploy forces and allocate resources to combat the attacking giant monsters. When the indizone contest came along it was obvious that such a game was not appropriate but that an arcade version of the concept would work.
A major inspiration for the look of the game came while I was watching my Japanese laserdisc of 'Radon' (I prefer this version as it lacks the unending naration of the American version, and all of the characters do not sound like either George Takei or Keye Luke.) While watching the battle between the Radons and the army in Sasebo I started making some drawings and that led to the game.
The idea of playing the army quickly faded as it would have been extremely difficult to control all of the various units involved, so the player was soon playing the monster. And after all, you always did want to be the monster when you were a kid. When I decided to make the game look like the kind of battle children would have with plastic monsters on a model railroad the style of the game all fell into place. As mentioned above, 'Sabotage' and 'Crush Crumble and Chomp' clearly influenced the game play, as I had found them highly addicting over a decade ago. I also wanted to make the kind of game that Calvin (from Calvin and Hobbes) would love to play ... though he would probably also want to be able to crush the fleeing citizens.
The one other requirement for the game was that I wanted to have what I dubbed the 'MechaGodzilla firestorm' from the 2 1970's MechaGodzilla movies, where there were pyrotechnics and coloured rays shooting all over the place. MechaGoogelon originally was to play that role, but I thought adding a hero (a non-denominational Ultraman, UltraSeven, Mirror-Man, or whichever your favorite is) better suited that purpose ... and its just fun to blow up Ultraman.
The game was simultaneously being written as a desktop game for the indizone contest and as a virtual reality game for an upcoming art show, which made coding the stereo-video version of the game easy. The VR version was actually completed and shown first and the comments I received from it were then used to modify the desktop version further.
A: Googelon was the first monster I created, and was the only monster for the first few weeks of development. I think he has the most personality of any of the creatures, so as a character he is my favorite ... which is why he is the mascot for the game.
However, when I play battalion I usually play Flutter.
A: Here are the ratings I have given the various TOHO and TOEI fliks:
| Year | Title | Rating #/10 |
|---|---|---|
| 1954 | Godzilla, King of the Monsters | ********* |
| 1955 | Godzilla Raids Again | ***** |
| 1962 | King Kong vs Godzilla | ****** |
| 1964 | Godzilla vs Mothra | ****** |
| 1964 | Ghidrah, the Three-Headed Monster | ***** |
| 1965 | Invasion of the Astro Monster | ******* |
| 1966 | Godzilla vs the Sea Monster | **** |
| 1967 | Son of Godzilla | ***** |
| 1968 | Destroy all Monsters | ******* |
| 1969 | Godzilla's Revenge | * |
| 1971 | Godzilla vs the Smog Monster (t) | ***** |
| 1972 | Godzilla on Monster Island (t) | ** |
| 1973 | Godzilla vs Megalon | *** |
| 1974 | Godzilla vs MechaGodzilla | **** |
| 1975 | Terror of MechaGodzilla | ****** |
| 1984 | Godzilla (t) | ******* |
| 1989 | Godzilla vs Biolante | ******* |
| 1991 | Godzilla vs King Ghidorah | ****** |
| 1992 | Godzilla vs Mothra | ** |
| 1993 | Godzilla vs MechaGodzilla | ******* |
| 1994 | Godzilla vs Space Godzilla | **** |
| 1995 | Godzilla vs Destroyer (t) | ****** |
| 1998 | Godzilla (US) (t) | ***** |
| 1999 | Godzilla Millenium (t) | ****** |
| 2000 | Godzilla vs MegaGuirus (t) | ******* |
| 2001 | Godzilla Mothra King Ghidrah etc (t) | ********* |
| 2002 | Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla (t) | ***** |
| 2003 | Godzilla etc: Tokyo SOS | ***** |
| 2004 | Godzilla Final Wars | ******* |
| 1956 | Rodan | ******** |
| 1957 | the Mysterians | ******* |
| 1959 | Battle in Outer Space (t) | ***** |
| 1961 | Mothra | ****** |
| 1962 | Varan | ** |
| 1962 | Gorath | **** |
| 1963 | Matango | ******* |
| 1963 | Atragon | ******** |
| 1964 | Dagora the Space Monster | *** |
| 1965 | Frankenstein vs Barugon | *** |
| 1965 | War of the Gargantuas | ****** |
| 1967 | King Kong Escapes | **** |
| 1969 | Latitude Zero | *** |
| 1977 | War in Space | *** |
| 1996 | Mothra | ** |
| 1997 | Mothra - Battle Beneath the Sea | *** |
| 1998 | Mothra - Attack of King Ghidrah | **** |
| 1965 | Gamera the Invincible | ***** |
| 1966 | Gamera vs Barugon | *** |
| 1967 | Gamera vs Gaos | ***** |
| 1968 | Gamera vs Virus | **** |
| 1969 | Gamera vs Guiron | *** |
| 1970 | Gamera vs Jigar | ** |
| 1971 | Gamera vs Zigra | ** |
| 1980 | Super Monster Gamera | * |
| 1995 | Gamera (t) | ******** |
| 1996 | Gamera 2 (t) | ******** |
| 1999 | Gamera 3 (t) | ********** |
| 1999 | Gamera: Little Braves (t) | ****** |
A: Yup, a whole bunch. Here are a few:
Godzilla:Monster Zero
or if you are more into the 'good guys' then:
The Ultra[Man] FAQ
Tokusatsu Page
Copyright © Andrew Johnson 1995-1996