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Some guy even pulled it off in Ultima Online during the beta test. The story is here.

Sharky's Home LAN Guide
Gamecenter's "Build a Home LAN"
"Configuring an Internet Firewall and Home LAN With Linux"
The CNET home LAN guide (if you're not a /. reader)
The Home LAN Project
The do-it-yourself under 50 bucks home LAN guide

whew. um... anyone got something that ain't covered already?

You obviously didn't read the review for Tresspasser I nearly got kicked out of the lab when I read this one the first time, and I can still remember some of the lines years later.

My problem with Gamecenter was that they seemed to give "famous" games a couple of points automatically. For instance, Mechwarrior III got an 8/10 while Heavy Gear II (a decidedly better game IMHO) got 7/10.

Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.

It wasn't Donkey Kong cereal, they were put out by different companies.

What's your question?

I had a feeling you were going to say that.

OK, Midi Maze was on the Atari ST, but we're talking about the 15 most influential games, not most influential DOS/Windows games. If you want a good list, use CNet's Hall of Game Innovation list.

OK, Midi Maze was on the Atari ST, but we're talking about the 15 most influential games, not most influential DOS/Windows games. If you want a good list, use CNet's Hall of Game Innovation list.

http://www.gamecenter.com /Ne ws/Item/0,3,0-4604,00.html

Gamecenter did another story about the the top 10 worst of all time.

http://www.gamecenter.com/Features/Exclusives/Top1 0worst

Airport Tycoon has got to make the list of top ten worst games this year. Ugh. What a horrible waste of money.

Awful graphics, awful game-play, awful tutorial, awful manual, awful user interface, TONS of bugs...

But the worst thing? The awful waste of what looked to be an awesome concept. Man, if they had made it on the level of playability and usability of something like SimCity or TransportTycoon, it woulda been an awsome game. A real opportunity lost.

Here's a link to a review of the game. In my opinion, the review is much too kind. I wiped it off my disk and threw the CD, box, and 'manual' in the dumpster. First time I've EVER done that with a game.

Utter crap. Stay away. (For the record, the game's original name was "Airport Mogul" in the UK, and aparently it was just bought, repackaged, and renamed with no attempt to actually have the new name reflected in the software, installer, or even in parts of the manual... totally sloppy and slip-shod).

- Spryguy

A bit of nostalgia: http://www.gamecenter.com/Features/Exclusives/Xpic ks/ss03.html .

Another connection to the Sims and Supernatural Forces can be found here ; ; .....

(Aw, hell...I couldn't resist. It's just such a damn funny story.)


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Since the PS2 uses USB, keyboard availability shouldn't be a (hardware) problem. Any standard USB keyboard should work. It's interesting to note that Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, have chosen to use all parts except the connector of the USB standard for the Xbox. This means that while the machine could communicate with any keyboard, you can't connect it, since the plug won't fit. Also, in a recent interview, they stressed the point that the Xbox is a console, not a slimmed-down PC. Weird. Perhaps they don't know about Turbine? ;^)

If these projects are, in fact, based off of the source code of Falcon 4.0 doesn't that make them kind of, you know, illegal? Especially seeing as how the source code was stolen and leaked onto the net back in April?

And wouldn't having such high profile projects like these open them up to a world of hurt from Hasbro and Microprose?

it has two spaces in it, near the end.

This link should work just as well...

Check out the Review and Demo

Here they are linked:

http://www.gamesdomain.com/news/3036.html

http://video.gamespot.co.uk/ects2000/

http://www.diabloii.net/expansi on/ects-2000-1.shtml

http://www.stomped.com/publ ished/jcal968167198_1_1.html

http://www.gamecenter.com/Ne ws/Item/0,3,0-4710,00.html

http://www.mgon.com/article s.phtml?id=31931&language=en

http://www.hardwarecentral.com/hardwarecentral/rev iews/2272/1/

click :)

I didn't follow them for accuracy. I just linked them.

But, since you've asked, we're all gonna answer.

A quick search on Google gets us some answers.

Historically intersting is this commentary on this very topic from John Carmack from December 1996. This article at Gamecenter rehashes Carmack's comments and adds some other game programmer's comments.

Another spoon-fed link will be GameDev.net's 3D API forum, where there is a discussion on this very topic between people who actually use the APIs in question.

The report focus on a lot of smaller details which have been improved, such as the minimum font size in the browser etc.

Gawd, I gotta agree there; I found myself trying to read some stuff on C|Net's Gamecenter on an archaic 14" monitor @640x480. Even at that, the text was so small (KDE 1.1, Netscape 4.7) as to nearly be unreadable! Talk about eyestrain...

And so on...

Everybody loves Daikatana! Look at all these great reviews:

• Sharky sez it rawks! yeah right
• FiringSquad: "It is absolutely inferior in almost every conceivable way."
• Damage Gaming say: "I gave it a 3 out of 5, and that's generous"
• CTNews: "in the end all I got was frustration"
• GameSpot gives it a 4.6 out of 10
• DailyRadar: "Ultimate Gas Hands. Need we say more?"
• GameProWorld damns with faint praise: "It's not that bad."
• Computer Games Online gives it 1.5 stars - "amateurish epic lands with a spectacular thud"
• PC.IGN: "It's finally here. And we reviewed it. What? What else do you want us to say?"
• Honest3D - "You all know that I didn't enjoy Soldier of Fortune - well I liked it a lot more than Daikatana."
• GameCenter gives it a 3 out of 10: "Daikatana is a waste of your time and money. Go play Half-Life again instead."
• Happy Puppy: "It'll make you wish it never came out at all"
• GameZone actually seemed to kind of like it
• GameSeek really did like it! "f I had to describe this game in a word or two I would say that it is most entertaining!"
• Ingava didn't hate it all that much
• Game Revolution: "[A]lthough the game is nowhere near as good as it was promoted to be, ... it is not the worst game released this year. It is, however, stunningly outdated and mediocre."
• Maximum PC: "Four years for this?... It sucks. It sucks big-time. In fact, it sucks so bad, we have to wonder what kind of curious monstrosity the developers could have created with an eight-year product cycle.
• GameFan: "It's not as bad as you think."
• PCGamers.Net: "Final Score: 70 out of 100, and I'm disappointed. Sigh."
• GamePig: "Daikatana isn't a bad game, and was often fun to play. However, it's got several flaws that kept me from really enjoying it."

If you're at all curious about how the hell this happened, GameSpot has a great article called "Knee Deep in a Dream: The Story of Daikatana" that gives all the gorey details. They also have a complete walk-through, though the concept kinda makes me shudder...

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Anonymous cowards are looking forward to the DVD letterboxed release of Ishtar

5-10% speed improvement? Wha? I have talked to at least twenty people who have done this and have not seen that result. All had a drop in performance. I'd like to know where you got your numbers. Gamecenter shows 98 beating 2000 by 13fps and 10fps on identical machines. That roughly matches my own tests. The only game I've heard of even posting an increase was UT, and it was by 3fps - negligable.


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There really was a lot going on at E3. Free software is a pretty small part of it in some ways, but an important one not covered much elsewhere. Sort of like that bumpersticker that says "it'd be nice if one day the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy weapons and the local elementary school gets all the books it needs" (heavily paraphrased of course) ... Free Oses make what I hope will eventually become the platform of choice for games. The best example of what I'd like to see is the elusive but rad-looking FlightGear ... I want that, but for submarines:)

timothy

There are probably many other web pages talking about the many non-Linux-related aspects of E3 that you could find on zdnet or perhaps gamecenter.com. What exactly did you expect to find on slashdot?

That is a very good point.

Make sure Intel replaces your whole motherboard or else you will be stuck having to buy the 6-8 times more expensive RAMBUS memory when you upgrade later.

It is almost as though Intel planned this so that RAMBUS will get some guaranteed sales early on. Then Intel and RAMBUS can get together and issue a press release detailing the huge initial adoption by consumers of RAMBUS memory over regular memory (without mentioning that the surge is an artificial byproduct of Intel's defective motherboards).

Some other links (also at C|net):
Intel launches expensive recall due to chip glitch
Rambus at the root of Intel's memory troubles

Gamecenter and their readers suggested stuff like this twice already. ...But it's still fun. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

the higher end P3's beat the K7 at the same clock speed in most benchmarks.

Not according to the Athlon v. Pentium III tests that CNet ran:

http://www.gamecenter.com/Hard ware/Roundup/Athlonp3/


=================================

There is an extremely lighter review of the PS2 posted on gamecenter.com. Apparently, the antialiasing problem with the PS2 is "When the system runs in high-resolution at 60 frames per second, the graphics are spit out at an interlaced half-resolution (640-by-240 pixels) to speed up the graphics processing. This creates unacceptable amounts of aliasing on diagonal lines, and polygon edges flicker like crazy." Apparently the DC does not suffer from this as it "outputs video in a completely different--and more visually pleasing--manner". Could somebody enlighten me on this 'different manner'.

Here you go. A story I submitted a couple days ago (aka counterexample).

Equal Performance On Win2K Requires Much Faster Chip (articles,news) (rejected)

Here's the URL (/. doesn't keep track of the text) over at C|net:

http://www.gamecenter.com/News/Item/0,3,0-3775,00. html?

Intel executives have said that Windows 2000 will " require computers with processors that are 150-MHz to 250-MHz faster than those that ran Windows NT or Windows 98 to deliver the same level of performance."


In other words, AC criticizes /. over Microsoft coverage, so gets moderated up as Insightful.

The /. post doesn't begin to explain what this is about, so here you go:

From a Gamespot write-up on PowerPlay:
PowerPlay, a set of standards and protocols that will apply to both game developers and Internet service providers (ISPs). By working on both sides of the problem, PowerPlay promises to bring LAN-like gameplay to a modem near you. If you think that sounds like something that is well beyond the range of a single company, you are right--and that's why Newell got Cisco Systems involved.

Newell is Gabe Newell of Valve, makers of Half-Life. The reason Carmack's doing this is to contibute to the PowerPlay project.

John...wants to take a stab at rewriting the Linux IP stack and a soft modem driver to see how much latency he can remove, and use that to pressure Microsoft into cleaning up the Windows stack. That would be really useful data to have.

And here's the official PowerPlay website.


Pablo Nevares, "the freshmaker".

Direct3D, as far as I can tell, is just much, much easier to write drivers for--more stuff is left to the game developer to implement. Are there any experts out there who can verify?

John Carmack hates Direct3D. While his original rant seems to have disappeared from ID's page there is a news article here. John's arguments basicly centered around that A) Direct3D requires you to write more lines of code and B) The lines of code are significantly harder to read.

The point was that Direct3D was mush lower-level than OpenGL, and was a bad choice because of software manageability issues. So it would appear that you have your argument mixed up. :^)

It should also be noted that MS is trying to "fix" this by either funding or actually working on getting OpenGL to work on top of Direct3D with some sort of abstraction layer. I haven't been tracking this, so I could be wrong (or the effort may have been abandoned).

1. Read this little thing I made for the Gamecenter.com people. It's a reader-submitted thing, so I added a little something of a game that I wish I could see in stores.

2. Hemos posted this "How Not to Attract Geeks" crap!? Shame on you, Hemos! Does Rob have to get the paddle for bad posts?

3. Will nerds/geeks like us will ever get the proper training to talk to a girl? I can talk to "re-he-heally up there" women like singer/dancer/actress/painter/writer Ute Lemper, but not some girl in the educational equivalent of Siberia.

See also http://www.gamecenter .com/News/Item/Cont/0,4,0-1612_2,00.html.

Sid Meier's Firaxis Games recently made a deal to develop Civ III for Hasbro-owned Microprose, as explained in this Gamecente r story.

In other words, Microprose owns the trademark, but hired the original developer and his company to do the new version.

Also, the complicated rights situation for the Civilization games is explained (more or less) in this Microprose press release. In a nutshell:

* Microprose keeps the rights to Civilization, Civ, and related trademarks.
* Microprose gets Avalon Hill's non-PC-game rights as well.
* Activision gets to publish Civilization: CTP under license from Microprose.

So, this will (apparently) be the last game from Activision to use the Civilization name. Rumors had it that one company would get "Civilization" and the other "Civ", but the final three-way settlement (monetary amounts undisclosed) put that to rest. There is only one company who owns Civilization, and that is Microprose. Anybody else is just licensing the trademark from them.

Good news and all, but I'm worried about the negative issues I've seen about CtP on www.gamecenter.com. While the review in general was overall saying good things about CtP, there are some points it brings up:

No autosave
(Which can actually can be addressed with an Aborted() messagebox with a contained SaveGame(...) function... check out the SLIC)

Difficulty in identifying units on the map
(There may be something doable with the SLIC as well, by using a permanent or popup box which labels every unit you select or click on...)

Lack of explore/patrol
(Hmmm... looks like SLIC may be able to do something with this as well, though my be just a bit clunky)

I also wonder if the SLIC allows for the creation of Wonders and new effects...

I guess actually trying the game with some SLIC script would be the only way to find out.

I wonder what CmdrTaco(he does have the Linux port beta, doesn't he?) or other beta testers think of the review and these 'problems'.
AS