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GameSpy has a funny article about this neat mod. It even made fun of the poor chickens that was on the news earlier in the week. :)

On the question of supposed chickens abuse.

#2 - Nintendo's PR and designers have made statements that the console currently named "Revolution" will be a "different" sort of Console.

To wit: THIS.

WTF? Demo *after* the game hits the shelves?

See GameSpy article on this.

Who the fuck buys a game without first playing the demo?

Let's also examine this exchange:

quote:Originally posted by Unknown Target Derek,
we're all trying to calm down now. Please don't instigate people to flame again. This community is 99% proffesional, and everyone that's been here for more than 1 or 2 months acts very mature. If you'll look through the other threads, you'll see this to be the truth. It's just this whole...issue has raised tempers somewhat.

Wot? You finally decided to take your meds? I'm not inciting nor flaming anyone. Thats not my style unless the other side (like you for instance) starts first. I'm an equal opportunity jackass.

It is generally unwise for the public face of a game company to start flamewars with the potential fanbase. Hence, you don't see Gabe Newell showing up and talking smack whenever someone makes a fat joke. It is also unwise to believe this statement: "Gents, some of the posts in this thread, are EXACTLY the reason why game developers AND publishers hardly pay attention to a game's fanbase." Game developers and publishers don't stop paying attention to its fanbase because a few people start spewing vitriol about them. They simply learn to ignore their anti-fanbase. Derek Smart, on the other hand, pays way too much attention to his anti-fanbase.

Battlecruiser 3000AD is not as horrible as everyone makes it out to be. The initial reaction was mostly the fault of Take 2's decision to release it in a buggy, unplayable state. But because of the Derek Smart mystique (somewhat akin to the John Romero mystique), people get in on the running joke without really knowing anything about the game. Then again, were Mr. Smart not so outspoken, he probably wouldn't have as much name recognition as he does now. (Does anyone know who the lead developer for Extreme PaintBrawl was?) Maybe Battlecruiser would have just faded away if he hadn't kept himself in the news. So I guess it works for him.

Let's also examine this exchange:

quote:Originally posted by Unknown Target Derek,
we're all trying to calm down now. Please don't instigate people to flame again. This community is 99% proffesional, and everyone that's been here for more than 1 or 2 months acts very mature. If you'll look through the other threads, you'll see this to be the truth. It's just this whole...issue has raised tempers somewhat.

Wot? You finally decided to take your meds? I'm not inciting nor flaming anyone. Thats not my style unless the other side (like you for instance) starts first. I'm an equal opportunity jackass.

It is generally unwise for the public face of a game company to start flamewars with the potential fanbase. Hence, you don't see Gabe Newell showing up and talking smack whenever someone makes a fat joke. It is also unwise to believe this statement: "Gents, some of the posts in this thread, are EXACTLY the reason why game developers AND publishers hardly pay attention to a game's fanbase." Game developers and publishers don't stop paying attention to its fanbase because a few people start spewing vitriol about them. They simply learn to ignore their anti-fanbase. Derek Smart, on the other hand, pays way too much attention to his anti-fanbase.

Battlecruiser 3000AD is not as horrible as everyone makes it out to be. The initial reaction was mostly the fault of Take 2's decision to release it in a buggy, unplayable state. But because of the Derek Smart mystique (somewhat akin to the John Romero mystique), people get in on the running joke without really knowing anything about the game. Then again, were Mr. Smart not so outspoken, he probably wouldn't have as much name recognition as he does now. (Does anyone know who the lead developer for Extreme PaintBrawl was?) Maybe Battlecruiser would have just faded away if he hadn't kept himself in the news. So I guess it works for him.

How does he plan on shutting down the Ferrium project? The minute I read that, I instantly thought to myself that the fact that the source code for Freespace 2 has been available for some time which would be a huge dent in any attempt Derek tries to shut the project down. reveals that since the code for Ferrium isn't using any of the Interplay code it should be pretty safe. Of course, IANAL...

The listed article seemed vague about the MMORPG issue, but this one clearly states that it is not. There's some other interesting tidbits, such as their tentative plan to use their own technology (e.g. not Morrowind's) as well as developing for a number of different platforms.

Well, perhaps the case they are thinking of is K. C. Munchkin, which was a travesty of justice, paricularly considering the fact that Atari's Pac-Man game seemed like it was designed to make children cry.

Gamespy's dumbest moments in gaming

Although since the game was removed I guess it might have been the smart thing to do from Midway's perspective.

But using the actual "Tetris" trademark was just plain stupid.

I've also been playing this game since the demo. About half of the community has moved to Battlefield Vietnam (as you can see at Gamespy's stat site), but many of these players also play BF1942. The gameplay is very fun, and I remember laughing so much in the beginning when I saw those bodies flying up in the air when hit with a shell from a Chi-ha on Wake Island. The conquest gameplay type is engaging, and there are many community mods, chief among them being a modern desert warfare mod "Desert Combat".

Well, that reminds me: you know what I'd _really_ want to see? The Bitter Gamer Magazine that Gamespy's Fargo came up with in a humour column.

I mean, forget positivism. It's not that I hate games or anything, but there are thousands of sites and magazines already who focus on telling me why I should love a game. I'd like just one who tells me all the bad, ugly, or unfinished aspects. Really tell me all that the reviewer didn't like about it.

Just so I can pair it with one of those all positive reviews, and actually make a more informed decision. I'd like to actually know both the good and the bad parts.

Well, that reminds me: you know what I'd _really_ want to see? The Bitter Gamer Magazine that Gamespy's Fargo came up with in a humour column.

I mean, forget positivism. It's not that I hate games or anything, but there are thousands of sites and magazines already who focus on telling me why I should love a game. I'd like just one who tells me all the bad, ugly, or unfinished aspects. Really tell me all that the reviewer didn't like about it.

Just so I can pair it with one of those all positive reviews, and actually make a more informed decision. I'd like to actually know both the good and the bad parts.

It seems as though some id employees feel the same as you.

Taken from a GameSpy interview with John Carmack :

GameSpy: I am surprised that you do not see Quake IV using this next generation engine.

John Carmack: Wolfenstein worked out so spectacularly well. Inside id there is a group that really, really does not want to do another sequel. Our next game is not going to be a DOOM, Quake, or Wolfenstein sequel, it's going to be something new and that is a foregone conclusion.

Indeed, we shouldn't have any time on their hands to play Doom 3, what with us all being Romero's bitch and all.

This is definitely a fun read about a bot that plays Star Wars Galaxies.

Post want-ads on graphics Internet boards. Search the web to find graphics boards. Here are a few to get you started:

CGTalk
Polycount

And there are many others out there. Many have help-wanted boards.

Just use a standard work-for-hire type contract. That is, you will own the copyright. Then you can do whatever you want with it (like release under an open-source license). This is just standard practice for contract work of any type. There are lots of contract templates on the web and just about all of them assign copyright of created works to the person/company paying for it.

I knew that place was in trouble the day I walked into the Dallas office and saw the huge 10-foot wide Ion Storm logo inlaid in the floor in Italian marble.

Best car racing game ever. You get bonus points for driving as dangerously as possible, and the crash mode has you try to flip and smash your vehicle at an accident blackspot so as to cause the maximum possible carnage.

I know, +1 Funny, but Akklaim have a page about how "Burnout 2 saved my life".

Been OverClocking your dsl again?

half-life has more players than any other games by a huge margin, check out this if you need proof it has 9x the number of available servers as any other game on the list.

want me to use linux on my xp desktop? get half-life to run and run well (anyone remember when q2 finally game out for linux? i dont like the green tint and my sound Just Works in windows).

linux fan mod-troll disclaimer: i started with slack '95, i use linux every day but never ever as my desktop too much work to make it useable, lack of support for what i love most (porn and games, mplayer2 beats the fuck out of everything else).

Uh, you realize that the developers of this game (Level 5) are Japanese, right?

Yes, but developer != to marketing director :-) Microsoft still holds the cards with regard to publishing the game.

Honestly, I think the game would've done alright in the US, simply because the US has a much larger Xbox user-base, many of them craving a decent RPG for their 'box. But in Japan where there are already plenty of great, arguably better RPGs, you'll be stiff to find enthusiasm.

This was one game that I was reeealy looking forward to. With 4-person gameplay, each person with a unique mixture of skills (from a pool of over 300), and fully deformable environments (use telekenisis to grab a piller to bash one oponent, while causing the walkway to collapse on another oponent), it looked extremely fun.

Wright sits down at the café table and holds out a small baggy filled with old Soviet commemorative lapel pins. Wright: Take one. GameSpy: Russian pins? Wright: I'm uncollecting. I buy collections on eBay, and I disperse them out to people again. I have to be like an entropic force to collectors, otherwise all of this stuff will get sorted. It's like the opposing force, uncollectors.

And just so I don't look like a total idiot (if that's possible), here are some links with more info:

• http://www.autoassault.com/
• http://www.3dgamers.com/games/autoassault/
• http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/auto-assault/516265p1.htm l

It's really "Sailing the WINE Dork C. That's why the geeks mattered.

Of course,m the problem here is you have to play the game to make money. One guy tried a scheme in Star Wars galaxies to automate this. Here's how well he did.

What! You mean more realistic than this?

Gamespot has an article about the Nintendo DS, and the reporter actually played on prototypes.

After reading it, I am really excited about it. But playing WarioWare on it arises a serious question...how durable will be he ouch screen?

Gamespy just released an article detailing a hands-on with DS. You can check it out here. Also, it seems like every freaking video game website on the net is slow as anything. In fact, Nintendo's own website appears to be down. Ouch! I wish I could find some free videos of today's press conferences, since I am too cheap to pay for accounts to video game websites.

As can be seen from the screenshot at gamespy, there is a funky green man in the corner. He looks a bit like a spy. Personally, I think it detracts from the aesthetics.

• Nation of Domination
• Noddy
• Nodwick

• Global Defense Initiative
• Windows GDI
• G-d damn it

They also killed Privateer Online, Battletech 3025 (MMP Battletech anyone?), and a whole host of other titles. Many of these cancellations were accompanied by the associated teams being laid off. Being a part of EA rapidly came to mean dreading the first quarter of the fiscal year. March is almost always EA's layoff month. It appears that the foolishness of laying off an entire team at one whack hasn't dawned on them yet. Much of their competition in the MMP space (and other markets) has come from ex-EA employees. The Privateer Online team wound up becoming the Star Wars Galaxies team for SOE. The Ultima Online 2 team comprises a large chunk of the developers over at NCsoft Austin working on Richard Garriot's next game, Tabula Rasa. ION Storm Austin recruited much of it's talent from EA layoff's. As did Digital Anvil and Wolfpack studios.

EA's bumbling in the MMP market is often amusing, however, as they can't seem to grasp that it takes longer than a year to produce a MMP product of any worth. On top of that, they seem eternally frustrated by the continued success of the now ancient Ultima Online. EA wants and expects to have 6 month to a year product cycles. To have a game live on for 7 years drives them a bit batty. Not only are they dumb as fence posts when it comes to the MMP market, but they don't listen to those of their employees that have been there before and repeat mistakes made with previous products.

They also tend to be total jerks. When UO: Third Dawn was coming out, they had just laid off the UO2 team (I forget if Kesmai was shutdown that March or the next) and when speaking to the survivors they were asked if the Origin name and logo were going away (it had certainly felt like that for a while). The CEO asked what the employees thought and everyone vehemently expressed their desire to keep the OSI name and logo. At this, he stated that he had a strong belief in the employees of OSI and would make certain that the OSI name and logo continued to exist. Then the Ultima Online: Third Dawn retail boxes were handed out to everyone. No Origin logo...anywhere. No mention of OSI as an entity, studio, nothing. Except in the fine print of the license agreement. Plenty of EA logos everywhere, though (actually EA.com, the bizzare, doomed to failure enterprise that was to be structured around magically converting the 1.5 million unique visitors of Pogo.com, which they had just bought for around $150 million, into $10 a month EA.com subscribers). No subsequent product would ever carry the Origin name. Just this last March, EA shutdown the Origin studio in Austin.

Of the great PC gaming companies of the 90's, EA has taken over and slowly strangled to death Bullfrog, Westwood, Origin, Kesmai, and Maxis among a number of other smaller companies.

...they understood the humor behind X-Play's spiritual leader 'Dik Dik Van Dik' and why guys drool over Morgan Webb (Insert Cat Calls here)!

Dolemite
_______________

In the twenty thousand years of our Mission we have heard more pleas for mercy than you can possibly imagine. Civilizations which saw their doom before them called upon their geniuses to calm us, to no avail. ... You are not our enemy. We have NO enemy beyond the Kzer-Za, our partners in the eternal conflict. You are simply... a spore, a seed. Today you are nothing... insignificant. But if allowed to bloom and grow someday... someday, you might represent a threat to our freedom and security. So we cleanse.

Some of the other races are positively fascinating, particularly the pyrophilic fungus with the capability to consciously modify its genetic makeup.

I have chosen my offsprings' memories carefully from my set of remembrances, the sweet and warm times of my existence and those of my parents' parents' parents, the bits of a million lifetimes coalesced into a birth gift of complete awareness.

As the story progresses, you learn of the interdimensional meddlings of a mysterious race that has apparently had occasional contact with humans for thousands of years. They are aloof but benevolent, referring to themselves as being from "above", and warn you about dealing with the other interdimensionals from "below". But guess whose participation is necessary to win the game!

There are even occasional encounters with space probes, misprogrammed so that they identify every object as a potential source of raw material for replication. This includes you and your ship, so prepare to be broken down into your component elements. Combat is fast-paced and easy to learn, but every ship has its strengths and weaknesses.

The music in the game plays a part in making it so enjoyable, too. While most games of the time were using cheesy FM synthesized music with occasional wave effects, Star Control 2's soundtrack is 4-channel MOD files, written by a variety of composers from around the world. This bloated the game onto a massive 4 floppies, but anyone who's played it will tell you the few minutes spent copying the files to the hard drive was well worth the effort. Each race has its own music that comes up during a conversation, and the pieces are incredibly well chosen. Trusty allies sound noble, despicable foes sound menacing. The weird fungus music is eerie but pleasant to listen to, and downright funky in parts.

There are moments of hilarity, sex, confusion, negotiation, sympathy, and plenty of downright evil. All in all, Star Control 2 has far and away the most engaging and moving storyline of any game I've played. I think that might be because it was designed by two incredibly dedicated guys who wouldn't settle for anything less than excellence. When management wanted to release the game as a shootemup with a bit of storyline, Fred and Paul took an unauthorized jaunt to Alaska and returned with a nearly finished version of the game we now know and love.

The best part is that while the name "star control" is s

Sorry, it looks like they hit you with an ad. They must not like internal linking.

Fargo from gamespy has also put up his (rather entertaining) account of the event:

http://www.gamespy.com/articles/508/508603p1.html

From the C|Net article, dateline May 7, 1997:

Yocam maintains that Microsoft is luring personnel away with huge signing bonuses, some in excess of $1 million. "They have the audacity to send limos to Borland's headquarters to take Borland employees out to lunch. I mean, this has got to stop."

Ah, the good old days. Million-dollar signing bonuses. Limos for job prospects. Corvettes for hot programmers fresh out of college. Penthouse suites with the company logo in genuine Italian marble.

Why did it ever have to end?

Oh, wait, don't answer that...

Link to article

They also mention revisiting Kingpin, Earthworm Jim, Dark Alliance, Airborne, and Exhaulted.

Found this article at GameSpy.
Has a lot of cool pictures of the the N-Gage as well as a hands on preview.
It almost makes me want one of these things (Never had any desire for that old ugly thing)

Youre thinking to specific, mr genius - and why so defensive?

Eh, my Nintendo fanboy alarm was going off, so I panicked a bit. ;)

Nintendo has how many millions(billions?) in the bank? Maybe the N64 didnt tickle your fancy, and wasnt much compared to the PS/PS2 successes, but, yes I would consider Nintendo a successful company in Japan over the last 20 yrs.

Billions is correct. And to the contrary, I loved my N64, purchased at launch - never even bothered with the PSX (though I did play around with a few PSX games via emulation), and I didn't pick up a Saturn until around two years ago. As I did mention, Nintendo certainly did make some innovative stuff in that era. I will concede that if you focus on the past 20 years, your comment is correct.

Umm.. The Japanese game market and world PC game market are starting to slide - 2 markets usually on the cutting edge of gaming...hmmm no sign?

And even if those arent direct signs, that does NOT mean the bubble won't burst. That's why they call it a bubble. POP!

It has been a long time since the PC and (to a lesser extent) the Japanese market have been on the cutting edge. I say this as a huge fan of PC gaming and much of the quirky and/or old-school Japanese gaming designs (big fan of Sega and shmups, for example).

Anyway, the Japanese market is falling down for many reasons, not the least of which is the increasing dominance of Keitai (mobile/portable gaming). Can't see that happening in the USA - the demographics are very different when to comes to commuting, the importance of ownership helps out too (as the Gamespy article I mentioned points out), and just the nature of play in our culture (Americans like to do it at home, generally, with friends). The newly-allowed used game sales are most destructive to Japan's traditionally strong gaming markets (linear RPGs), whereas the strongest selling genres in America are stuff like sports games, which are massively resistent to that. And though neither the Japanese nor American economy is doing well, it will be quite a few years before the USA falls as much as Japan has. But the main point is that the Western console games market is growing, has been for quite some time, and has shown no signs of that stopping. We simply aren't at a saturation point, and no entertainment form seems poised to intrude on interactive gaming. And let's be honest - Japan overall hasn't been putting out all that great stuff, compared to maybe six years ago. The lack of risk-taking and cultural myopia ("We need to make games easier!") prevents new market expansion...

PC gaming is doing poorly for a number of reasons: a comparatively limited control scheme (only good for FPS and strategy games), more competition from older games (Ex: I would rather emulate or play Alpha Centauri in many cases than play a new FPS game), developer/publisher irresponsibility (the bugginess of PC games is criminal), driver issues generally getting worse and not better, and just a huge lack of innovation overall. Seriously, name a big PC release in the next year that isn't a RTS, FPS, or MMORPG.

And of course a bubble could pop. We could also we wiped out by an asteroid tomorrow. That doesn't mean either are all that likely. :D

I'm not talking about the current generation here, Snippy. Iwata is talking about the Future. There needs to be innovation or there may be a crash - thats the point. And why are my standards unreasonable just because I'm sick of WW2 games?

Well, why isn't he talking about the current generation? Both MS and Sony have put out more innovative and influential games than anything Nintendo has attempted, and I can't understand why.

Being a huge fan of Sega, I love innovative games. Don't get me wrong - I agree that innovation is massively important, if perhaps occasionally overrated. (Oftentimes the innovator loses m

The summary points to the last page of the article. Here is the link to the first one.

Draw a shape with a tablet, have it automatically converted to reasonably similar 3-D primitives, use this as the basis for the search. No problem. The sytem doesn't seem to work this way now, but it could.

As for being unable to draw at all, this is a system for design engineers. As I understand it, design engineers take mechanical drawing. Computers are great for final plans, but you still need drawing skills for the concept sketches, yes? No?

Disclaimer... I am not an engineer, I am a graphic artist. I'm sure in the reverse situation an engineer might be saying "it really isn't that hard for an artist to calculate deal with concrete density mathematics in an approximate way. You people deal with clay and marble all the time, right? An understanding of material physics is necessary for an artist." I may be suffering from occupational chauvinism.

No, he'd want to make everyone else his bitch.

I watched a "trailer" for the game, and as expected it had the generic electronicaesque guitar rock in the background, cool camera angles with a green filter, shiny clothes and sunglasses that defy gravity, and then (gasp) . . . People. Running. Around. I know it's early, but the whole thing screamed BORING. The combat looked coerced and campy, like Enter the Matrix but turn based, if you can get crappier than ETM combat.

The only thing this has going for it is that it's produced by Monolith, of Shogo/NOLF/Tron fame. It's licensed (strike one), it's the Matrix (should be worth two strikes after ETM but we'll be fair give it one), and Ubisoft dropped it amidst an ever-crowding market of pointless MMOs. Strike three?

The only way I see this title being any fun at all is if Monolith somehow works in their crisp sense of humor. The machines are developing sheep bombs, say, or the game goes into bullet time whenever someone slips on a banana peel. I, for one, would very much like to see a man-cube perform martial arts while dodging bullets in slow motion.

Once again you are making an analogy with a much smaller percentage of the population. If you go check Gamespy Stats and add up the number of players currently playing it comes to about 200,000 concurrent users right now. That is just online multiplayer games that can be tracked (and during non-prime hours). It doesn't even include single player PC games or MMORPGs which would be considerably larger. So no, I'm not just talking about my friends.

The number of PC gamers is in the millions, and they do make an impact on hardware sales. How else could NVIDIA and ATI afford to do the research and development on new GPUs every 6 months if the people that bought them (the PC gamers) were negligible when it comes to sales?

I still have to think about it though...

The definitive statement on this subject is here at Dork Tower.

Bingo! Stuff like ChaosUT and Unreal4Ever are the reasons I *love* the UT franchise. The crazier the weapons the better. My absolute favorites are the proxy mines that talk smack to you while they hunt you down & the Quantum Singularity Generator (i.e. the Black Hole Gun).

Jaysyn

Playing Lifeline is like trying to play a text adventure with a malfunctioning keyboard - Gamespy

Seems to me like a very true statement.