Atari vs Amiga article

[Linde]

You can say that again. Mid-ninties had heaps of horrible looking 3D games. Suddenly when 3D became possible, everything should be 3D. I still think Castlevania - Symphony of the Night was the best game on Playstation. Why? Because is was 2D, something the console did really well.

Well, if the only quality of these games was the graphics I would agree with you, but 3D literally enables another dimension of gameplay. Good looking or not, it afforded these consoles a new type of gaming experience at the time, and that proved to be extremely popular and interesting to the market. Really crude looking 3D titles have left lasting impressions in the gaming world. Wolfenstein 3D, Elite, Sentinel... You name it, the graphics obviously weren't as important as the interaction with a 3D space was.

[Linde]

Just checked on this thread again...

The maps are flat, therefore the game world is 2D. How that 2D space is visualized is completely irrelevant.

You can't really talk about spatial dimensionality of a game in any other sense than representationally, can you? To say that the visualization is irrelevant is kind of an arbitrary idea that I don't think anyone will agree with you on, but let's pretend that we do for a moment and consider this situation:

Two regular brown uniform guards are standing in a straight line in front of the player character, one hidden behind the other. Only when the closest enemy starts aiming at you (thus spreading his feet apart) can you see the enemy behind him by looking between his legs. This is a situation where x, y and z are all important to the outcome of it, not only in a visual sense. If you were to disregard the Z dimension of the game and only look at the upper half of the screen only, you wouldn't have seen the furthermost guard.

[Linde]

What you're describing could be implemented on the c64 with sprite priority, it doesn't make it 3d.

On what basis? Since the C64 is perfectly capable of 3D games and game engines, I'm assuming that that alone isn't what your argument is based on. If you literally have consider situations that arise in the game spatially in three dimensions, how can you argue that it isn't 3D?
 

Isometric games also have x, y & z and aren't really 3d.

In thorham's opinion, if x, y and z all actually matter to the game and not only visually, as far as I understand him, it' 3D.

[Linde]

The internal representation of a world and the way it's visualized are two different things. You could make a three dimensional world and represent it in the form of purely text based descriptions.

Both the three dimensional world and the text descriptions are different representational abstractions, and I'm not sure how you can argue for the completely arbitrary distinction between the two that you seem to subscribe to. On a lower level of abstraction the 3D world is just a file in a file system or so.