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They did? Duke Nukem 3D had levels that looked like real places. Half-Life looked like some hodge-podge of hastily thrown together empty box rooms and random stuff with signs tacked on afterwards.

It's called early 3D. Things were blocky due to hardware limitations of the day, at least Half Life was fully 3D and not using sprites like Duke 3D and HL supported TCPIP out of the box (Quake came out around the same time ('96) and supported TCPIP). Duke was dated when it came out (see Quake).

You keep mentioning sales figures and accolades, which have absolutely nothing to do with how good a game is.

Yes, to back up the fact that it sold well because people liked it. Because it was (arguably) better than the other games (Why would you buy something that sucked compared to what was out there at the time?).More so than any of the offerings you've mentioned. You also switch between using good and fun like they're synonyms, they're not. Don't discount that people may buy multiplayer games because of their friends.

Unreal set the benchmark for game visuals for years to come and featured an absolutely awesome, dynamic soundtrack composed by ex-demoscene musicians. The game was overall one of the best ever made.

The same Unreal which used a software renderer, advanced visuals that only performed well in Glide? Unreal was overshadowed by Unreal Tournement which came out in 1999, which is still played to this day. Quake II beat them to the punch as far as engine tech in many regards. Also in 1999 Quake 3 was released which was the big engine of its day and also supported curves (1999 thread about it). A comparison of vintage screenshots: UT screenshot circa Sept 1999 Quake 3 circa Feb 2000. I'm a fan of the demoscene btw and happen to like 'chiptunes' so while I think this is awesome, in 1996 Quake had CD audio made by none other than Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails fame. Perhaps you know of GL Quake (or the Quakeworld client) which is responsible for many mods, such as Team Fortress. The Quake engines featured many impressive things from lighting to OpenGL support. Unreal featured some really cool texture technology but it only worked well in Glide (remember that?). As for the "The game was overall one of the best ever made" claim I think Mario takes that cake.

I don't know, hype probably.Why don't other desktop operating systems sell as well as Windows?

I know you're half serious but I'll bite. Because none of the other OS run as many applications (games are applications) as Windows does. Love it or hate it Windows is the first operating system to have an 3D sound API made specifically for games. It runs most hardware, especially high end stuff with little fuss. It's what people know and it has a large well documented API and development tools aplenty.

As I said before, I don't place much value in awards and popularity because I am able to form my own opinions without outside help.

Perhaps you've forgotten what its like to be young? Many people buy things their friends have to play with them. Online gaming has grown exponentially and so has the culture around it. These multiplayer games made it so that you didn't need a LAN party to have fun, but you could meet someone online and jump directly into the action, this was a relatively new thing for many people at the time and there was the whole modding thing empowering creativity in the community. These factors were also responsible for the popularity - not simply so

Pirated? EA made C&C a free download a few years ago for the twelfth anniversary.

Hey pal I agree with you on piracy, which is why more and more of my games are coming straight from the nice folks at Good Old Games where they treat me as their customer and not their bitch. NO DRM, easy to back up installers, no limits on how many of my machines I can place it on, extras like soundtracks and wallpapers, in short they give me MORE value for my money instead of making me jump through hoops.

But the problem is that piracy is the ultimate magical bogeyman for the game publishers, because there isn't any real way for them to measure it, so they can just make up any numbers they want. Just look at that crazy number the BSAA has been pushing as gospel, what is it now...something like 600 billion they are claiming now? It is just like how congress can use kiddie pron as a bogeyman, because nobody knows what is really out there they can claim it is growing, its an epidemic, basically pull any numbers out of their ass they desire.

Ultimately though I think everyone is missing the forest for the trees, because as I said I don't think the real goal is stopping piracy, but control. Since the bad old days of dongles publishers have wanted complete and total control of the platform their software runs on. Until this last generation it simply wasn't possible because the consoles weren't online. Now that it is I truly believe the goal is to wipe out PC gaming and force everyone onto a black box where they control the price, the way you play, what content you can have, basically turning gaming into cable TV where you are fed what they want you to have...period.

But luckily for me there are literally thousands of good PC games I have never gotten to play, with more being added to places like GOG every day. And by cutting off new games my 4650 1Gb should last me that much longer without needing an upgrade, since what few new games we are getting are nearly all "multiplatform"...shudder...which means it is nothing but an X360 game badly ported.

But don't buy into the "its teh evils piratez!" bullshit, because look at the facts. Assassins Creed I sold millions of copies, made best seller lists on every platform, so what do they do? Fuck the PC gamers for buying their product! That sure smells more like trying to kill the medium than fighting piracy. Oh well, I just downloaded Command and Conquer Tiberian Sun and Firestorm for free and I haven't played those in ages, so it is time to kick some GDI butt. BTW plays perfectly on Windows 7 HP x64!

All boyish giggling aside, body motion physics do take a lot of the plasticity out of characters and make things more fluid. Why doesn't someone's leg deform when kicked in a fighting game though? Why don't people keel over when punched in the stomach (okay, so they do in Drake's Fortune), etc.

The new natural motion engine generates character impacts and animations in real-time for example, taking into account body structure, weight, strength and a neural AI simulation to create animations on the fly based on circumstances for the upcoming Backbreaker (American) Football game.

Gun porn, for the record!

Parent link is to Window version.

Here: http://www.gamershell.com/download_47540.shtml is the Linux version.

The main site seems to be slashdotted out of existence, but I was able to find a download link as GamersHell.

Yes, but you are talking IRL and we are talking game. Hell your MP3 analogy doesn't even hold up IRL because you can't actually "hoard" MP3s, as you can plug your flash into my PC and "take" my MP3s and I'll still have them. And in game it is a whole different ball of wax.

For instance I like this game called Sacred Gold that I picked up out of the bargain bin. I never heard of it but the screenshots looked good and for $20 I'll give any game a shot. if you haven't picked it up it rocks. Anyway they have this "green" armor, which gives major bonuses in a set, like in Legends of Aranna. Unlike Legends where you could get a walkthrough to tell you where each piece is Sacred is random drops, and the green set armor is one of the rarest. Worse, since there are six characters you can get green drops that aren't for your character and even if they ARE for your character there are about 5 suits per character so it may not respond to the set you are trying to build. So I'd set there for hours going "nope nope nope nope Green? &^%^&%$&^%$ Gladiator crap! nope nope nope" while I'm dripping with expensive items and all the cheap shit is in 20 foot mounds around my character.

But who cares? It is A GAME. And I'm enjoying myself, even when I'm cursing the damned gladiator and battle mage because I keep getting their crap. By hoarding i now have huge amounts of money by selling the lesser crap, so when I walk into a village and see a "ring of badass" that is a crazy price I just slap the gold on the table, my character has gotten powerful enough that even midlevel monsters refuse to attack me for fear of getting their asses kicked, hell its fun. So while I HATE those "bring me the asses of 20 snow goats" kinds of quests, which thankfully aren't that many in Sacred, as long as whether to hoard or not is my choice and it is fun, who cares . it is a GAME. The whole bloody point is we get to do the kinds of antisocial crap we wouldn't pull IRL. And as long as the designer remember to make it fun as opposed to "bring me the asses of 20 snow goats" I'm a happy little camper.

And if you haven't tried Sacred give it a spin. Good graphics and random monsters and items makes for the fun and lots of replay in my book.

I don't know about COD5 but I would say that SoF:Payback probably topped it. Sadly I can't really find any good screens to convey how over the top it was. It was actually SO over the top I thought it was funny. I mean you expected a fountain of blood if somebody stubbed their toe in this game. I thought SoF 1&2 had some rough stuff going on, but when I picked this up for a whole $7.99 along with Quake Wars I was amazed that someone spent that much time going overboard on the gore level. You can literally blow someone's hand off at the wrist to disarm them and a "Kill Bill" sized fountain of blood will go blasting out of them. Blow off limbs, when you do a head shot you REALLY do a head shot, as in the head is over here and the rest is over there, just crazy with the gore.

But for those that didn't want the gore there was a simple "no gore" button right there at the front of the game, if you don't want it, switch it off. But I as an adult should be able to play a splatterfest if I want to. I am so tired of somebody picking up a GTA style game for their kid and then being shocked at the gore and sex. Well duh! It is not FOR kids! Git your kid Mario and shut up already! I don't want every damned game to be kid friendly just because some parents refuse to do their job and actually take an interest in their kids lives. I am so damned tired if all these nanny state types that want to kid proof the world because some lazy ass parents refuse to take responsibility for their kids. Blame the parents for being failures and quit trying to child proof the planet.

Yes SoF:Payback was lame with the AI, but the gore added a level of Bruce Campbell over the top cheese that it made it fun for me. Sometimes when done to extreme overkill you can reach that Evil Dead level of campy BS fun. And sorry if I got a little ranty, but I'm getting tired of the "we know what is best for you" nanny state types. If a bunch of parents refuse to do their jobs raising their kids that is not the game designers fault, it is nobodies fault but the parents. Don't take away my right to cheesy gorey fun because some parents refuse to read a warning label or ESRB rating.

There is still http://www.gamershell.com/ for those of you who don't like Fileplanet.

F.E.A.R rocked,especially the sounds. When you would hear that little "bzzzip" that let you know those damned little invisible bastards were SOMEWHERE but you don't know where,that was scary. One thing that pissed me off though: the flashlight. I am this big bad strike force guy and the freaking battery on my flashlight is crappier than a Fred's $1 special. And it wasn't like they needed to pull that either,because if you left it on too long you'd hear a bad guy go "Flashlight!" and they'd be ready to put a cap in your ass when you went in there.

Another game I'm shocked nobody has mentioned,especially since now you can get it free(see the link) is The Suffering which while not as scary as F.E.A.R had its moments. Also had a bit of that "Jacob's Ladder" what is real and what is not kind of feel. But it is a good game to whip out for Halloween,and of course free is always nice. So if anybody here hasn't tried it give it a go.

When EA releases C&C games as freeware, they really mean it. Back during the "12th anniversary" celebration, they released the Command and Conquer Gold. It's still free a year later.

http://www.gamershell.com/news_41337.html

C&C Gold and RA look about the same graphicswise, and they both require a little bit of configuration on modern machines to run smoothly (to run with sound and arrow keys working properly), but it's worth it.

If that's true, then where are they?

How about this one? The torso of the guy in the middle of the shot casts a shadow onto his left leg. No you don't get shadows in every nook and cranny with shadow maps due to aliasing (you need to bump the map resolution a lot to remove that), but you don't need that to get fairly decent results.

Crysis also has screen space ambient occlusion (oh noes! more fudging) which makes up for a lot of the details lacking in the shadow maps. The over all effect is in my opinion much better than the pixel perfect ray traced shadows in the Nvidia demo. That looks about the same as the stencil shadows you saw in Doom3. Horrible stuff.

I don't think that means what you think it means.

Yeah, my terminology may be off. What I meant was shadow mapping that works uniformly across the entire scene, of which perspective shadow maps are one kind.

Shadow maps ARE a form of projected shadows.

Again, my terminology is probably off. I was thinking of per object projected shadows which project a shadow from the object onto the ground, but nothing else.

I think the answer is yes, take a look at the mirror in the green car demo shot (bottom right, at high res), that's a pretty impressive following of the contours of the car by the shadow, a 'straight' computed shadow would never ever do that, compare this shot:

http://www.gamershell.com/static/screenshots/9451/264393_full.jpg

from crysis, where the shed shadow meets the terrain contour.

That's exactly the kind of thing I meant.

If it gets /.'d

http://www.fileplanet.com/182564/180000/fileinfo/Warmonger-Gold-Install-(Free-Game)
http://files.filefront.com/Warmonger+Operation+Downtown+Destruction/;9142023;/fileinfo.html
http://files.totalgamingnetwork.com/file/4835/Warmonger.exe/
http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/863/Warmonger_-_Operation:_Downtown_Destruction_Full_Game.html
http://www.gamershell.com/news_43755.html
http://www.chip.de/downloads/Vollversion-Warmonger_29641300.html

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines True v5.04AT Unofficial Patch

I have Vista, an 8600M GT and the 'Bioshock' drivers, 163.44 and they're rock solid. Zero crashes, zero glitches.

Not surprising really, since Bioshock is the only thing that was unstable with the drivers that came with the laptop and these were released specifically to stabilise it.

> Now they play idiotic action games* on their game consoles
> * see http://www.gamershell.com/articles/884.html on what's wrong with today's games

As a game developer (PC,PS2,Wii) Anthony Brock is missing one thing -- the difficulty of porting a fixed-function console to a generic variety PC. i.e. He didn't discuss the poor port of Halo from X-Box to PC. The game was written all in C, emulating a object-orientated system, using hacks such as loading directly to memory to get maximal use of the 64 Megs of memory, using position, velocity, and acceleration of the thumbstick to minimize the dead-zone of the controller, and its low 640x480 resolution lets the GeForce "3.5" run the game's pixel shaders at a decent rate, reduced texture sizes because on a TV crisp textures don't matter as much as compared to high-res textures on a monitor. All these little "nuances" become problems in the PC world because they change the game "Feel."

Console game development took off, because it is about control -- both for 1st party and 3rd party. As developers we _know_ what the target hardware is, and will be. Flexibility and Performance tend to be inversely related. The less flexible something is, the greater the performance can be drawn out. Also, we don't have to waste our time trying to figure out the billion combinations of hardware, scratching our heads why some things work on one system and not on another. And to the end user -- they just want to play the dam game, so it is kind of a no-brainer why console gaming took off.

PC developers are also in a lose-lose situation with regards to graphics -- if they don't have fancy graphics, almost everyone reams on them for having crappy "last-gen" quality. (Everyone in the biz remembers the commercial jealousy of the "Deer Hunter" games.) If they DO have fancy graphics, almost everyone moans that you need such a high-end system. Blizzard seems to have figured out the secret is first making a fun game, and having a good balance of graphic requirements. Thank-fully the pissing contest of which graphic card is better/faster is becoming less and less of an issue, so we can focus more on game play in the future.

The other hold back to PC gaming is Walmart. 90% of games are sold in Walmart. If you game is not being carried by them, good luck getting "decent" sales.

I'm not sure why he is blaming the medium (consoles), when he completely ignored
game design. There have been good and bad games on both platforms. Consoles tend to encourage a "tighter UI" (they also tend to lack button customization which annoys me greatly.)

And while gaming these days is almost about licenses -- the publishers thinking "which license can we use to print money." -- I agree with the conclusion, gaming has been "commercialized". The commercial industry doesn't like to take risks, and is usually financially punished when it does. A lot of people loved how Ico was different, but yet financially it wasn't a hit. But it is about utilizing the strengths of the respective platforms. I see Indie games are changing the way the industry thinks, and our salvation. Counter-Strike & Portal came from Indie development. I suspect future popular games will come from people willing to take risks, and not so much concerned about what they "have to lose", but what "they have to gain."

Exactly.

Today's parents just suck at parenting. They lack the minimal backbone required to tell their kids "no," because they try to be friends rather than parents.

I can't stand how bad parents let their fat kids keep grabbing the Frosted Flakes instead of insisting on Cheerios or Raisin Bran. My grandmother had a strict "no sugared cereal" policy. My siblings and I knew it and didn't even bother trying to get her to budge on it. When I got to choose a computer game for my birthday present one year (the original Civilization), my grandfather not only looked at it (out of parenting and curiosity), he made sure that I was firm in my decision, and didn't just grab I'd toss the next day. Today the most sugared cereal I eat is store brand honey nut cheerios and I don't make impulse purchases. I owe it to the previous generation's parenting skills- my parents were pretty lousy at it.

Kids used to watch too much TV instead of playing outside. Now they play idiotic action games* on their game consoles (the new "idiot box") and have asthma as an excuse. As Mike Gravel said: "Americans are getting fatter and dumber". Hard to imagine, given the current the amount of flab you see everywhere and the numskull currently occupying the White House.

* see http://www.gamershell.com/articles/884.html on what's wrong with today's games.

get downloading!
Worthplaying
Gamershell
Computer Games.ro
Fileplanet
3D Gamers

I just ripped the links off Voodoo Extreme. reply with more mirrors!

You can get the Ubisoft games from Gamer's Hell or FileShack too.

Try the EMS Top Gun . Works on plasma, LCD and CRT. Calibrates to sensors placed around the edges of the screen. Works well for me, and has been given decent reviews ( for e.g.)

For anybody that wants to try this thing out for themselves, there's a game demo available for download, although it doesn't seem to be available on the official site anymore (I think GamersHell.com is a reputable site, but you might want to run an AV scan on the binary first).

I tried playing the demo a few months ago. Overall, I thought it was pretty crappy, but it was kind of amusing and there were some game mechanics which I thought was pretty neat. For example, in most RTS games "converting" units to your side is a special thing which happens fairly rarely, while in Left Behind its a central game mechanic.

"While The NPD Group's retail tracking service shows what appears to be a decline in PC game sales, critical developments in the PC games industry, specifically the Internet, is fundamentally changing the PC software industry," Anita Frazier analyst at NPD said in statement. "With the increase in high speed Internet access, not only are users purchasing their games online, they are also willingly paying additional recurring fees over and above the price of the game to subscribe to services that let them play with others online."

Intel's share of the 74.9m GPUs that shipped in Q1 rose from 37.5 per cent in Q4 2005 to 39.1 per cent. ATI took 28.7 per cent of the market, up 2.2 percentage points, while Nvidia's share was up a third of percentage point to 18.7 per cent.

Intel claims the X3000 is Shader Model 3 compliant, and meets Microsoft's GUI requirements for Vista Aero Premium. Intel has released production version drivers for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows Vista that enable the Aero style.

PC Gaming is dying. If you want to make a truckload of money, just get out of the PC entertainment market and sell to consoles exclusively. If idiotic tripe like Star Wars: Republic Commando and The Guy Game never touched the PC I'd have no beef with you, but by developing for consoles and then porting those horrid, god awful titles to the PC you consistently stifle the development of original IP, and original IP is what has made the PC game market so consistently great over the years.

I'm ambivalent about this. On one hand, it's Sam and Max. I loved "Hit the Road." However, Telltale Games also brought us "Bone: Out from Boneville," which, IMO, lacked the comic book's charm, and padded itself out with too much walking around.

Comparing the old title to the new one, I just get the impression that Telltale has made it too sterile, and drained it of some character.

Well, EA recently renewed the trademarks on System Shock 3.... although they have probably done this just to sit on it (and stop fan made successors?). AFAIK the IP relating to the SS series is owned by different companies (this was in an interview on one of the SS fan sites).

Bioshock the spiritual successor to the SS series, so we'll just have to see how that lives up to expectations when it comes out.

And yet everyone else has already surpassed the Unreal 2.0 engine, and maybe even Unreal 3.0.

FYI, lucasarts was almost done with a Sam and Max 2 when they pulled the plug on funding at the last second.

They even had a trailer done and it looked fantastic:
http://www.gamershell.com/download_2120.shtml

I have no idea if this game is related in any way, though.

Nintendogs sold 250,000 copies in the first week, and 1.5 million since launch in the USA alone, that's a seriously huge hit..

http://www.gamershell.com/news/24482.html
http://www.gamespot.com/news/6141751.html

I'd argue that it is. Unless MMOG doesn't mean massively multiplayer online game (look at it written like this: massively-multiplayer online game to see where the emphasis on the title really is). I do believe they have greater than 1 million players (quick google search gave up this clicky and that's a 9/05 post), offer a fairly large world to adventure in, but just because that world is instanced and not seamless like WoW, EQ, etc., doesn't NOT qualify it for the title of Massively Multiplayer Online Game.

1. Shmups are about the action. Some are about reacting quickly, some are about carefully maneuvering a huge mess of bullets and some are about performing a dance with steps you have to find out by trial and error (R-Type anyone?). They are never about finding some super-kill-everything weapon. Well, the japanese shmups aren't, anyway. In western shmups you'll often have to upgrade your weapon to insane levels to kill even the smallest enemies in later levels (Tyrian and Raptor, for example). Superweapons are sometimes only good for clearing out bullets, in some games they don't even do damage. Cho Ren Sha or rRootage are popular vertical shmups and pretty representative of what the genre is like these days.

2. IMO the hardest V-shmup ever is Radio Zonde. The default setting is infinite lives and you'll have to change that in the options menu (or select a character other than the two you can see on screen). I've never made it past the first level. I've seen videos of other games that claim to be harder but those are usually at high difficulty. Radio Zonde is impossible at normal (easiest) difficulty.

3. Ikaruga was an arcade game. What are they supposed to do, butcher the game to make it more home console friendly? Most arcade fans want arcade-perfect ports.

Hmmm...so partion the 3D space based on task types, or some other category system?

"Dave, would you like to play a game?"
"No, HAL, I'd rather go to my Happy Place."

Animated naked dancing avatars fill the screen, to the sound of delighted squeals.

(HAL reads the week's Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and New York Times yet again.)

Hello-

First off, in a static business such as id's, patches are very expensive to make. They are effectively lost revenue, as the time you spend on patches is time you cannot spend on new, money making endeavors. For a company that's making an MMO, a patch is supposed to help you keep your existing (paying) customers, and help you attract new customers. Also, realize that the game industry is small. There's only about 30,000 of us, and we all kinda know each other. And we know each other's business.

The rate at which Blizz burns through hardware is irrelevant--they don't own the hardware they're running on. World of Warcraft is hosted by AT&T's high availability clusters (at least in the US), as reported back in press release here, and mentioned quite a lot during the closed beta.

You must realize that if an area is not going to be a commercial win for Blizzard, they are not going to provide service there. It's one of the reasons they have not added servers in Australia. They mention this on their forums time and time again.

I think you misunderstood my chastising you for not spelling out the word 'fuck.' It was not to insinuate that you were young, but rather to insinuate that when you write something like '****ing', it just makes you look foolish. Cuss words only have negative meaning because we give them negative meaning. I'm certainly not going to take less offense because you chose to write it out or not. The thought was there either way, which is what is offensive (if anything). Just write it out, and be explicit. The only people who aren't going to take offense because you wrote 'sh*t' instead of 'shit' are most likely dimwits who are too wrapped up in appearances to have interesting or meaningful opinions anyways (or moms, who always take offense at that kind of thing.. Although your opinion is very valid mom, if you're reading this).

I'm comparing the rate of content releases by Blizzard to the rate of releases by NCSoft for Guild Wars, which is--by the way--free of subscription charges. They have a million subscribers, and they manage to release 2-3 updates a month. Blizzard, on the other hand, failed to get any patches out for the first 3 months, and still--9 "major" and 2 minor patches later--has failed to address issues that were plaguing WoW during beta. Then there's also City of Heroes, which releases the equivalent of Expansion packs *for free,* and has released 6 of them since their inception. They've also released patches that are too numerous to count. The MMOs that you cite with terrible patch times are the forerunners of the MMO industry. They were--by and large--the first guys out onto the pitch. Of course they were going to take longer to patch. But compare them to any of their competitors now, and they are sadly lacking.

Oh, and before I get any comments like "if you hate it so much you should quit..." I did. I cancelled my subscription a couple of months ago. Unfortunately, I'm on the six month renewal, so I still have 'till January before my subscription actually ends. I now play WoW about an hour a week, if that. And mostly that's just because I still pay for it. (I did, however, miss the entire 1.6 and 1.7 patches as I didn't play at all during that time).

Anyways, cheers!

I guess you haven't seen the trailers for
KillZone, or any of these

It couldn't have been one person.

Why couldn't it have been? How long has GTA:SA been out? 1.24MB is a pretty big file for "just flipping a bit", but perhaps not too big for someone to use someone else's 3D engine, someone else's objects and textures (they're still wearing their clothes even!) to insert a minigame where the player gets to bump two 3D objects together for a while.

I'm inclined to believe Rockstar's report on this one, until whoever was responsibile for the Hot Coffee mod releases a document showing step by step how to do it myself.

Their Dawn of Sorry page also has no link to any of the rather groovy trailers. http://www.gamershell.com/download_8186.shtml

Who would want to buy something like this...

(Looks at screen shots)

OMG! Puppies! Cute!

OK, maybe I can understand the appeal of this to crazy dog people like me. Darn it, now I'm pondering getting a DS.

Anyone care to comment where a card like this Geforce will be REQUIRED?

This Place (The Asian servers had 3 people on)

movie here.

Dogs and cats living together? http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/002690.html
North America having more than two presidential candidates? http://www.politics1.com/p2004.htm
Duke Nuken Forever going gold? And GPL'd?
http://www.gamershell.com/news/6581.html
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Ok, got ya there... it's 3D instead of Forever :)

In other parts of the world, beef is offensive.

Yes, and in India it would be really bad form to release a game about killing cows. Much like in this country it would be bad to release a game about blowing up Jews.

Being a game developer myself, I listen to the criticisms of my audience. If a sizeable enough portion of them feel that I've insulted their [group] through misrepresentation of [traits of those who define the group], then I've probably [done something really stupid]. Basically every developer I know, from those who do high-level society modeling to those who have to decide how exaggerated to make ethnic differences in character meshes, feel the same way. I don't see why this would be such a hard concept.

While City of Heroes has all of the women be Amazonians in skin-tight spandex, anyone who goes to City of Heroes knows to expect archetypal superhero outfits no more practical than the skirt worn by Zena. While it would be good to see a few nonstandard female characters, the current state melds with the expectations of the players. A Tale in the Desert is known for being an eglatarian perfect society... a society born of the goal of creating a persistent online world devoid of the traditional kill-anything-that-moves mentality of MMPORPGs. It has a reputation as a very Star-Trek like utopia, and it attracts the types of players for whom that would be very important. If this type of thing happened in a MMPORPG version of Manhunt, for example, that self-selected group of players probably wouldn't care. But A Tale in the Dessert is a far more socially aware group of people: they're even aware that they're building a society, and that's a major focus of the society. Sexism doesn't fit A Tale in the Desert, and the developers should have been aware of that.

Saying the market will sort things out is basic lazyness, the modern equivalent of shoot 'em all and let God sort them out. Take responsibility of the decisions that you make, and take the time to think through the ramifications of the decisions others make.

This patch corrects many, but not all, of MM9's known bugs. Most importantly, it will prevent all of the game-killing bugs

AMD is trying to tell consumers that a 64-bit architecture will make for a more enjoyable gaming experience. This reminds me of the marketing hype Intel was pushing about how MMX would make games that supported it oh so much better. As most PC gamers have learned by now, switching from last year's top-of-the-line processor to this year's top-of-the-line processor will gain you about 5%-10% frames per second. On the other hand, switching from last year's top-of-the-line graphics card to this year's top-of-the-line graphics card will gain you 50%-100% frames per second. The limiting factor in today's games isn't the CPU; it's the graphics card. The 64-bit transition will probably bring better performance gains than boosting the processor speed would, but still: all it gives you are higher framerates and faster loading times. Now this may allow for higher detail and visual quality for the 64-bit version at the same frame rate as a lower quality setting in the 32-bit version, but 64-bit gaming does not magically give you higher detail and visual quality on its own. Trying to get the point across with side-by-side screenshots is pointless. Real graphical processes like anti-aliasing, pixel shading, or ATI's Truform result in visible differences, but a performance increase is a performance increase. Konami didn't go from this to this by taking their Playstation code, sprinkling some 128-bit word size pixie dust and recompiling it for the Gamecube.

The ECE torrent is available, alongside direct downloads provided by BeyondUnreal.

Not clear enough? How about this from Blue's News?

The pack is an 84 MB download, available on 3D Gamers, FileFront, and GameSpot DLX (registration required), Gameguru Mania, Gamer's Hell, Game's Fusion, Tiscali Games, and Worthplaying.

Here is a very extensive list of mirrors courtesy of Blue's News.

3D Gamers, ActionTrip, Computer Games Online, Doom3.de, Doom3Maps.de, FilePlanet (registration required), FileShack (registration required), Fragland.net, Gamer's Depot, Gamer's Hell, GameSpot (streaming for free), GameSpot DLX (registration required), Gamehelper, Gaming Horizon, GenGamers, OzForces,, Yahoo! Games Domain

Couldn't post as a list because "Your comment has too few characters per line"

The funny thing is that he looks exactly like Kevin Cloud, one of the two primary artists. Check out his interview segments in the G4/TechTV spot.

g4_icons_doom3-hi.zip on 1Gbit/s Server :) Get it while its hot!

It's not *quite* as silly as it sounds. There's a Spy Hunter 2 release that came out not long ago. It wasn't very much fun.

What makes Hollywood think that a good game means a good movie is beyond me -- perhaps marketing is *so* expensive that it's worth it to double up on effort. I can't figure out why Woo is so obsessed with doing a video game movie. Aside from Resident Evil (which wasn't a *great* movie by any measure), all of the video game movies I can think of have pretty much sucked.