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Take, for example, Games Domain. A site that had been around for AGES (at least five years, probably more like eight or nine) prior to Yahoo acquiring it.

They used to have a huge PC game patch database.
Yahoo got rid of it.

They used to have a magazine section with various authors writing about the gaming industry.
Yahoo got rid of it.

They used to have demos for practically every game that had one, even older games.
Yahoo got rid of it, and instead linked to their own service.

See, when Google buys companies, they keep them running, and might actually extend them. Yahoo buys companies to assimilate them into the collective. This is why I will continue to use Google.

The Allegiance Demo is available here.

I had purchased William's Arcade Classics a few years back and was able to set it up to run with sound and VGA graphics under RH Linux 5.2 with DOSEMU, but damn was it a pain to get working right.

Sadly, if you go to the images page, it is apparent that gladiator is not actually all that bloody. It's not a member of the elite class of games where you can hack your opponent's limbs off, for example. There are no explosions, so bits of grizzle don't spray everywhere like in FPS games. No internally bits are ever on the outside. It's not even funny. Where is the violence? The nastiness? Where is the dark foreboding nature of of the world laid bare like scraped flesh covered in dirt and pebbles?

No, what we get is a series of repetitive blood textures added to the grounds around where a traditional penetration damage model is taking place. Nothing new here.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have some Happy Tree Friends to watch.

Have a Mac? Like artificial life? Try Creatures [mikeash.com]

That's not Creatures. Not even 10% of it, it seems. There was a Creatures game made by CyberLife, which was also available for the Mac in its first version, IIRC.

Screenshots: Creatures, Creatures 2

Got some good memories of playing those games for hours :-) Unfortunately the linked one looks really boring in comparison.

Here's the REAL goal list, let's see what the /. community can think of on those points.

There's an enoumous drive for skill points in these games. Those are likely valued higher than money, and a more stable (albeit untradable) property. Since people excert so much energy to boost their stats (or gain money), why not take a ride on this and turn the stat/money acquiring process into:

a. Something that is actually productive in the real world. Manually decrypting 3DES, I dunno :-P. If you manage this one, You'll probbably be the first to make an MMO with an open economy (i.e. an economy that can grow. An economy that can contain more _real_ money than the sum of what all the subscribers paid. An economy where everyone can become richer, as opposed to an economy where for every dollar that player A withdraws in real cash, player B must pay said doller, and that's without mentioning the operator's fee)

alternatively, b. Something that is productive within the game. That too is harder than it sounds. Having players build their own maps/levels that will incorporate dynamically into the world? Have them contribute artwork? too few people can do that. Have them contribute lawyer/accountant/coder skills? Have virus-writing contests? It's still too narrow to invest in a game that will facilitate it. How about a game where you "add" non-game-related-activities that apply to people who have real skills in the real world?. It's just a mishmash of ideas, but maybe if I raise the question, someone will think of an answer :-)

alternatively, c. Something that is FUN TO DO. Here are some examples:
1. Arcomage
2. Tetris, like the article mentioned
3. If you're completely unimaginative and see only black when you close your eyes, I think even chess/backgammon would do. Hell, Chrome incorporated the oldest memory-game in the book while hacking computers (as opposed to watching progress bars) and That old 'Broken Sword' quest had you playing arkanoid while waiting for saved games to load.

And only if all else fails, d. Repetitive mouse-clicking on a single point on your screen that can be done by anyone with the IQ of an oat.

Now [a] and [b] are definitely very serious challenges, both in the thinking and implementation categories. [c] is easy in both, but nobody does it. All MMO's just go for [d]. Am I the only one whose intelligence feels insulted here?

And am I hearing the words "Market Opportunity" reverberating in the brain of some investor who is reading this?

I'm just wondering since your opinion seems to be somewhat askew from everyone else's.

"Re-shape the internal studio?" This seems like a job that anybody in their right mind would not want Romero for. For Midway's sake, I'm hoping "Daikatana John" learned lessons from his past mistakes with Ion Storm, where he spent a buttload of money making the place look "cool", only to have the whole empire crumble around him.

Maybe something like an episode maker. Include craploads of animations and sounds and graphics on a CD, or DVD even for the PC, and let people make Simpson's episodes.

Do you mean like this?

Another good one, a virtual springfield. Pick any one of the zillion characters and live out their day in the town. Have multiple decision paths for each character, unlockable characters and a zillion minigames or some such to determine outcomes of things.

Perhaps this?

What it comes down to is that both have been created, and both suck.

Mike

Revenant!
Couple years old, it was sort of a dungeon hack -- Diablo style -- and the voiceovers for the main character (Locke) were simply ATROCIOUS. The game itself was sort of decent, but I actually gave up in disgust after a while. It was impossible to take the plot line seriously! I'm sure those of you who played the game agree. Anyway, I did a quick google for reviews, guessing I wasn't alone in thinking this, and sure enough:

Understandably , Locke is angry and confused to suddenly find himself in a situation beyond his control, and he certainly shows it when he delivers his lines! I mentioned the character voices earlier, and, without wanting to over emphasise, I must mention that Locke does have a habit of bellowing his words to the point of agitation.

It was just too bad that many of the voice actors were so over-the-top in their line delivery with lines containing so much potential. Locke in particular had an annoying habit of screaming his lines, especially ones that did not need to be said with such intensity. I found this to be so distracting that I often avoided conversation with other characters and thus occasionally missed important pieces of information or quests.

Less impressive was the extensive recorded voice dialog for Locke and the many NPC's you can interact with. While some of the performances, especially the snake in the grass performance of the court Mage, are well done, they are sabotaged by the often unintentionally funny voice acting of the main character Locke. It's unfortunate that the character with the most dialog is the worst of the lot and it does detract from the game in a very real way.

I don't know, I think it's pretty cool to be able to do this at smooth frame rates.

Compared to what you were doing on your 486.

The porn is much better now too.

Rocket Propelled Grenade worm, I thought.

Hyearh, and Hyearh!

Rocket Propelled Grenade worm, I thought.

Hyearh, and Hyearh!

Try the "Start/Pause" button.

"That's not flying! That's falling with style." ;)
-- Woody

All kidding aside, due props to the fellow. Anyone else had flashbacks to Pilotwings 64 on the Nintendo 64?

"Others steal toilet paper from their work place, others steal ideas from popular games. Toilet paper thiefs go to Hell, idea thiefs to sales charts, especially if they are as good as Blizzard with Warcraft"

Obviously, the game before Warcraft was Dune II from Westwood.

Still, I can't recall a game that I haven't been addicted to without playing the demo first, e.g Uplink, System Shock 2, Sim Golf or even Rise of Nations. I mean even Mr. Driller I tried out before I bought the damn thing.

I cannot think of one game that has not been demoed, developers know that the one way to get a good game known and bought is to release a demo, well except for SS2.

Personally I'm looking forward to Unity - a Llamasoft development (being paid for by Lionhead). Tasty VLM goodness with Minter gameplay - gotta be good! And prettier than Rez, if the really early-in-development VLM3 demo DVD is anything to go by.

The Typing of the Dead. The Typing of the . I see a trend here...

Action Biker signifies a depressing trend to link grotty software with expensive advertising campaigns. Let's kill this off instantly by refusing to buy such garbage.

Software like this gives junk food a bad name.

Not long after the DOOM phenomenon began, I had to sleep in my basement during the period after I gutted my bedroom and before my new furniture for it arrived. The basement has wood-paneled walls, and a lot of stuff hanging on them. One night as I was sleeping down there, one corner of a "frameless" picture frame decided to let go of the nail upon which it was hanging at about 3am one morning. It began swinging back and forth on the remaining nail, scraping against the paneling. It made a noise that was practically indistinguishable from the tearing noise you heard when one of the baddies in DOOM (the guy on the right side in this screenshot) got too close to you and started inflicting damage by clawing at you.

That noise immediately triggered said DOOM character's appearance in a dream, and about 10 seconds later I bolted upright, wide awake and feeling around for my gun, any gun-- what woke me up was the feeling panic that I was taking damage from that guy, and I couldn't see where he was to shoot him. Then I realized it was a dream. THEN I realized I still heard the sound, even though I was awake. Finally, I noticed the swinging picture frame, laughed sheepishly and pulled it off the wall before going back to sleep.

According to Moby Games, he also worked on some other games, but I don't know how accurate that information is.

aaahhh... I remember getting a lot of the 640 KB memory free after putting in DOS=HIGH,UMB in CONFIG.SYS .. man that was fun.. and after so much work to free memory, did we do something useful? Nope.

i dunno. the original C&C had foot soldiers being torn in half by cannon fire. Maybe you got the gore free version.

I felt so sad for those poor bastards. they were so small. only a few pixels big.

Review is at gamesdomain. I'm afraid the only way to describe this game is that THEY FAILED IT.

nup, that was aquanox and it is nothing like the plot.

It's already been done. Well, kinda. It ran at about 3-6 FPS, and the very complex layered scenes couldn't be done on the fly, but they were pretty close to real-time rending - and with "geforce 3 equivolent" tech - back in August.

Well, I found this, and while it's OpenGL with 3d-characters, I thought more about something in the lines of a Heretic, or even Quake-like engine(raycasting probably prefered because of the random dungeon-thingie.). :)

Whether the caracters are sprites or true 3D, are not that important, since it's not a big deal to have fully polygonal characters and obkects, in a raycasting world(Like f.eks. Chasm did.).

Ahem...

Or, back to Populous with Populous: The Beginning (ok, ok minus the first person perspective - but it's got a 3d world!).

Unfortunately, the project was put on ice and never completed; the Accolade development studio was acquired by Infogrames and it gradually shut down over the following few years.

The project itself was quite ambitious and well received by many of the early previews. It was not being developed as a strategy game, though, so it could have sat oddly with some of the old fans. I think the game had a lot going for it, considering it was done by the same company and the designers of previous Star Control games.

In the end it became just another fatality of the games industry battleground.

Still, it's nice to see that the legacy of the series lives on. Long live Star Control!

I think Sony owns something around 40% of Square, that's why I reffered to it as "practically first-party". It doesn't matter if square lost a lot of money, all that proves is that they had a lot of money TO LOSE because they were so successful selling FF VII for the PS1. The FF series is very important to Sony, so Sony is keeping them afloat.

I've read an endless series of great reviews for MechAssualt: Gamespot 9.0, Editor's Choice, IGN 9.2, GamesDomain 4.5 out of 5, Top Game, etc. And visually it looks stunning. So forgive me, but based upon the reviews I'd buy MechAssault first.

Mario's shines were good, but it was just Mario64++. I think Zelda will be a great hit, though.

I think the whole franchise itself is getting a bit old and dated. They haven't really kept it fresh like Square did with FF. Though I was never really a big fan of Mario and Zelda to begin with. I actually think Pokemon is a much more valuable franchise at this point.

The Dukes of Hazzard: Racing for Home is wildly popular amongst hardcore gamers in Georgia and programmers in Redmond!

Check here for info...

--chris.

WTF! Sam+Max are back? If the feel remains the same and it looks like a game such as Stupid Invaders it is a must-have!

And I never even played Full Throttle. :( Anybody have a copy lying around that needs reselling?

I am a Transgaming subscriber, but it's hard to justify paying for one of these games, when I have the Loki version of KIS, Starcraft (still haven't finished it), and Warcraft 3 to keep me busy.

I'm tempted to chip in for one of these games anyway, just to encourage a future port of Kohan II (when it is released next year) as well as due to the outstanding reviews Kohan has received.

More reviews here.

Amen, GNOME was a truly awful game... although I suppose it's possible they've made improvements over the last 5 years.

For what it's worth, I know the art director on the Army Game project very well. Luke Ahearn is a real class act and will listen to any concerns you guys have.

I used to work with him several years ago when he ran Goldtree Enterprises. They created Cylindrix and Dead Reckoning. They also released a number of FRPG utilities to help GMs run games. The web site is still online.

Review of Cylindrix

Review of Dead Reckoning

It's really a pleasure to see the fruits of labor finally. Army Game has been pretty hush-hush since Luke left New Orleans for the project.

Looks like Games Domain have come up with the goods: http://www.gamesdomain.com/e3_2002/

While not well known, Maxis did in fact make a network version of SimCity called SimCity 2000: Network Edition.

• Actually, the zombies were in the UK version [...] In the German version, you had to run over traffic cones.

Bear in mind that SCi went voluntarily trolling to stir up some controversy pre-launch, courtesy of their trashy publicist Max Clifford. They didn't have to submit it for certification at all, and the blood patch was available from day 1 (and everybody knew it). The German version (of Carmageddon at least, you may be talking about Carmageddon II) had robots instead of zombies or humans.

Download at GamesDomain

Ultimuh; The ultimate role-playing game includes scanned in digitized actors, emotion tearing sound track, and dramatic sequences! This is the best example of role-playing ever made in the history of man-kind. 8 Levels of digitally scanned in graphics... Each one more complicated than the one before. Can you make it.......?

This one beats the pants off anything in the Ultima series.

java, as it is now, isnt cut out for gaming... however, if there were to be a pretty extensive API (or whatever, i cant remember the name... DirectX is an example) created, then it could happen... it would have to be some pretty genious programming

i remember back when visual basic wasnt cut out to program squat in games... then M$ released DirectX7, and it worked with VB... a whole slew of unique games resulted from some independent game programmers (inverted dreams, close approach, DDCK: myth of creation (original homepage is down), and some really cool 3d engines whose names escape me right now :(, just to name a few)... now im not saying VB is the most powerful language to program 3d games in, but it just goes to show that a lot is possible with good programmers and the right API...

Read about it here.

So the federal government scales back, the US moves toward industury self-regulation (or lack thereof), and the RIAA and MPAA fill in the power vaccum.

In the meantime, we can take razor blades to our CD's. That way we'll be ahead of our time.

I always read GamesDomain for online PC game reviews. They always seemed much more uppity about things. Although lag was sometimes a bit painful for certain key reviews, it contributed to my impression that the reviewers actually played the games in question. I have to know, though, were they just taking their time, or was the lag some by-product of its (British?) origin? Or did they skate by like other reviewers, using the free time to pursue less noble goals?

Go ahead. Burst my bubble. I stopped reading the site compulsively after the last round of layout changes and site reorganization (more ads, less intelligent design). I just want to know the truth.

I can handle it. Honest.

I'm surprised someone else hasn't submitted this yet. Do any of you remember a spoof program named "Microshaft Winblows"? It was released back in January 1998 by Parroty Interactive (who, it looks like, has been out business for quite some time). They also released a program called Pyst (as you've probably guesed, it was a Myst spoof).

As far as I can tell "Microshaft Winblows" is the closest name to "Microsoft Windows" ever used for a non-MS piece of software. You can find an old review for the app here: http://www.gamesdomain.com/gdreview/zones/reviews/ pc/jan98/winblows.html . Check out how close the artwork is to the MS stuff (which makes sense since it was intended to be a parody)

-GameMaster

I don't know about all XBox games, but you are correct about Halo. Here's a short preview of the PC version.

There was actually a suite of parody games/toys that came out a few years ago called "Microshaft Winblows 98". I remember seeing it in a CompUSA store, me and my mom both had a good laugh.

You can find a review here.

He has no gaming credentials at all

He does: "The Dig" (1995), made in collaboration between LucasArts and Steven Spielberg. There are even reviews still on the 'net :)

It's not the best game in history, but it's a very well made adventure nonetheless. I remember spending a good many days at my friend's PC, enjoying the good storyline... and the (many) FMV's. They went nuts with FMV's in that game, oh yes they did. :)

Found another place to download the demo from it's here

http://www.gamesdomain.com/demos/demo/1577.html

I have a really good download speed from the 4th mirror