Alpha Waves
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| Alpha Waves | |
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| Developer(s) | Infogrames |
| Publisher(s) | Infogrames (International)/Data East (North America) |
| Designer(s) | Christophe de Dinechin |
| Release date(s) | 1990 |
| Genre(s) | Platform game |
| Mode(s) | Single player (DOS), two simultaneous players (Atari ST) |
| Rating(s) | N/A |
| Platform(s) | Amiga, Atari ST, DOS |
| System requirements | 10Mhz processor, CGA, EGA, VGA, or Monochrome graphics (DOS version) |
| Input | Keyboard, Joystick |
Alpha Waves (also known as Continuum) is an early 3D game that combines labyrinthine exploration with platform gameplay. By most definitions of the genre it could be considered to be the first 3D platform game, released in 1990, 6 years before the genre's seminal classic Mario 64. It was an abstract game with a moody, artistic presentation, curiously named for its supposed ability to stimulate the different emotional centers of the brain with its use of color and music.
It was developed initially for the Atari ST by Christophe de Dinechin, and later ported to the Amiga and DOS. The DOS port was done by Frederick Raynal, a notable game designer who would go on to develop Alone in the Dark, and Little Big Adventure. He has said that his work on Alpha Waves was a major inspiration for AitD. The PC version was also localized in North America by Data East, and retitled Continuum. Infogrames may have also published their own version in the US under the original title, and it was also released as a part of no less than two Infogrames compilations, on which it retained its original name.
[edit] Gameplay
Alpha Waves is a simple game. It features two main modes of play: Action and Emotion. The core gameplay in both is the same.
Players guide one of six craft (which are little more than geometric shapes in many cases) onto trampoline-like platforms. On these platforms, the player bounces automatically, higher, with each jump, until he reaches the maximum height possible for that platform (some are stronger than others). Every room in the game is a cube, and the walls contain doorways leading to other rooms. In this way, players have to work their way through the game's rooms, and reach different areas based on different emotions.
In Action Mode, players also work against the clock. Time bonuses are awarded for entering new rooms, and keys can be collected to open new ways. There isn't a particular end to the game, but the goal is simply to last as long and to discover as much as possible before time runs out. Emotion Mode allows players to explore the levels freely, without the time constraints.
[edit] Technology
Alpha-Waves may have been the first video game featuring full-screen, flat-shaded 3D graphics on a microcomputer. Games of the same era like Falcon or Starglider typically displayed 3D graphics on a very reduced portion of the screen. On the Atari ST, Alpha-Waves also featured a simultaneous two-players mode, the screen being split in half vertically.
Alpha-Waves ran on 16-bit microcomputers that did not have hardware floating-point capabilities. For that reason, it performed all perspective and rotation computations using only integer arithmetics. In order to avoid using integer multiplications, which were expensive at the time, it described objects using displacements that were multiples of a base vector. For instance, a square in the Z plane would have been described as "+1X +1Y -1X -1Y". As a result, the vast majority of geometric computations were performed using only additions, not multiplications.
The computation of sine and cosines was similarly done using only integer arithmetic. All angles were represented using not degrees, but 1/256th of a circle. A lookup table contained the value of the sine multiplied by 32767. Multiplying this value by a 16-bit coordinate gave a 32-bit value, and the 16-bit high-half of that result was used.
Another key to performance was a highly optimized polygon-filling routine, which used a number of tricks, including an assembly version of Duff's device to achieve a very high fill rate, besting the in-house self-modifying routine Infogrames was using at the time.
