[geeks] Gaming and .NET

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Today I decided to take a look at "Caesar 4".  I always liked the whole
Caesar, Cleopatra, and Poseidon series, the latter being the last and
the best.

Now Sierra has released Caesar 4, so I downloaded it expecting great
things.

It's pretty, it has a few new nice features, and it sucks like a 12
thousand horsepower Hoover.

I've not seen code run this slow in a long time.  It was DOG slow on my
Athlon64 3000.  Others running even the new Core2 duo CPUs report it as
being slow if *anything* else is running.

It really isn't that pretty really.  The primary advantage over the old
version is slightly more flexible positioning, and it is a real 3D
world, not just isometric.

However, I wasn't that impressed with the graphics, especially not for
the speed hit.

How could a game be quite that bad?

Well, I should have paid more attention to the install: this game is
written in .NET.

Please tell me people aren't going to start writing games with this.
The Java games are already horribly slow, and so far the .NET stuff is
worse (despite having a smaller memory footprint).

Please, please, please, keeping writing with a real compiler!

-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["Consulting wouldn't be what it is today
without Microsoft Windows" -- Chris Pinkham]