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Half-Life was built on the solid foundation of id Software's Quake engine and QuakeWorld network code. While Valve made some extensive additions and even threw in a smattering of Quake II code, Half-Life's core is basically heavily remodeled, prettied up Quake tech.

There was an interesting top 10 done on Half-Life on gamespy the other day, thats where I got the above info:

Top 10 reasons why Half-Life is still #1

Actually what's more crazy is Half-Life is based off the Quake 1 engine.
Read first paragraph

I'd have to agree with the parent though. I've noticed lots of open source 3d engines coming along. It seems no one is makeing any games from these. I guess all those people are busy moding commercial engines.

Well, EA has made some good games but for me it's more and more a game-studio killer, buying other game makers and shutting them down (more or less)...

The interview with Lord British that was posted recently on /. gives some insight into EA's thinking: make money fast, even at the cost of quality, it seems.

Very sad...

I prefer this kind of attitude.

Apparently you can!

Tim

The same thing happened to me, but that's far from the only bad engrish in the game. My personal favorite was "The truck have started to move."

Here are some other quotes from Metal Gear (skip over Silent Scope 2), from a great video game-only Engrish site called Whazzat!?!

Why would anyone go to an AIC when there are hundreds of better sites ?

I thought Gamespy.com had already cornered the market in crappy masturbatory game reviews. Hell, they're even going in the opposite direction by getting into crappy ill-informed boring articles on movies! AICN will have to sink to new lows if it plans to top a group who admit to not seeing movies they review.

Fight!

So, with that I just want to ask: "WHY DO THESE "REVIEWERS" KEEP REFERING TO GAMES LIKE FINAL FANTASY AS ROLE PLAYING GAMES" They are not and this has nothing to do with the actual worth of the game. No, this has in fact everything to do with professionalism and common curtesy. A buyer (or someone viewing web pages) should be able to look up "RPG" and expect the kind of game that he/she wants in order to then read the review, look at the features, etc and make his/her decision based on that. What should not happen is for them to not be able to trust that Game X is in fact a action and/or adventure game set in a fantastical setting (elves, dragons and magic most often) while Game Y over here is independent of its actual setting but is a dynamic, free flowing game that forces the player to instead of just following the dotted lines and being a mere observer/watcher must actually make the game unfold. Story and Plot do not a RPG make, but they are important to the underlying backdrop. (Gary Gygax once said that it is actually the players that should create the story, not instead be bumped around and blatantly (read: obviously) steered within the stories very linear bounds)

I have heard on countless occasions a very serious (but admittingly often inflamatory) statement that RPG is defined as any game where you play a role of a character and control them. Well, that would therefore mean that Mario Bros is a dedicated RPG, and since it also has story and plot as is the second most often heard definition, then it must be the trend setter of RPG's.

I have enjoyed many of the Final Fantasy games, even some of the recent ones to a degree. Yet I can no more approve allowing the continued bastardization of a categorization system for these games then I could if suddenly it became hip and cool to call Trucks and Van's "compact cars." That only serves to confuse people.

However I will add this... I believe when these foppish reviewers (and any other people who add and organize content on a "professional" web site) call games such as these "RPG" then I begin to question their reasoning and pattern recognition skills... both of which are rather important in coming up with objective reviews and organizing their thoughts in a cohesive enough manner to make it clear to readers what exactly is unique about a game and what things make it bad, good or just average. Given their inability to see the difference between Role Playing Games and Action/Adventure games (or "Interactive Story" perhaps) then I can more put faith into their judgement of games at large than I could based on the opinion of some net straggler I see write, "Yeah, that game was the bomb" or "that game suxors."

Rumors of buyouts have been swarming the gaming world recently. Nintendo will buy Sega. Microsoft will buy Sega. Nintendo will buy Capcom. EA will buy Capcom. Nintendo will buy Sega AND Capcom. Microsoft will buy Nintendo. Sony will buy General Electric (ok, so I just made that last one up). You get the idea.

Please. Until you read about this from Microsoft, Vivendi, or on legit gaming sites, assume that somebody made this crap up and are just looking for web traffic.

There was no cover charge. That's one of the initial requirements.

The hottie in the metal bra runs a bookstore, so you dreamers who would be intimidated by a Viking shaped lass in person, in metal, might acctually enjoy a conversation with the one wearing the dainty dragonfly. Having avoided the contest, you'd also miss her serious questions about what was going on on-screen.

I'd say there were more than 10 women in attendance, but maybe not more than 20.

Please, someone get informative and tell me where else on a weekend night can you find as many thinking, technically oriented, conversational individuals enjoying a beer in a non-smoking room, in Austin? Don't try to push your Dave & Busters claims on me, that place is fun, but not conversational, and has fewer coin-op video games than Alamo has. Super groovy would be getting the owner of this place north of town involved somehow, he doesn't have the arcade open over the winter season.

Maybe linuxtopgun can get a game console company involved, one of the ones that has linux-ability (that discounts Xbox, yes?)

The technical difficulties decidedly do need to be addressed exponentially better as the event continues to mature.

Personally, I miss the glory days in Austin, when there were weird cool venues to dress-up for on a closer to weekly basis. Planet Austin, Proteus, Paris25... Places you could get a mix of danceable music, see interesting and even well done fashion efforts, with a few nooks where you could talk without having to shout.

Half-Life is an EXCELLENT example. It's not new or visually up to date.

The dynamic statistics page below shows how new Quake & Unreal type graphical eye-candy isn't the most important thing about having a successful game.

A few numbers from the link below:

113,856 Half-Life players
5091 Unreal Tournament players
6171 Quake3 players

Online Half-Life players outnumber Quake3 / MOHAA / Unreal / etc... COMBINED

This list is simply hillarious. For the worst of the worst games (i.e. Custer's Revenge) I was thinking that the screenshot shows a cowboy shooting to the left an Indian to the right. But... the explanation is about pr0n. LOL....

Go straight to this game's explanation.

What's more, Konami Arcade Advanced did make it into GameSpy's GBA Game of the Year awards list. It's right here.

Whoever submitted this article only linked to the PC section, but they should have linked to the main page, which has awards for PS2, Xbox, GCN, GBA, PC, and 'Multiplayer'.

What's more, Konami Arcade Advanced did make it into GameSpy's GBA Game of the Year awards list. It's right here.

Whoever submitted this article only linked to the PC section, but they should have linked to the main page, which has awards for PS2, Xbox, GCN, GBA, PC, and 'Multiplayer'.

...which is kind of odd, considering the console games market is consistantly larger than the PC one.

Anyway, the entire feature, with Top 10 lists for PS2, Xbox, GCN, GBA, PC, and 'multiplayer' can be found here.

Merry Christmas!

...would be a little something like this
I'd buy it in a heartbeat.

You're exactly right. It is, as you say, very odd that there are so many 5 posts on Slashdot. You'd think once it got up to 3 or 4, people wouldn't continue to throw points at it unless it was really great, but soon enough, someone does it anyway.

Another good example of this phenomenon can be seen at The Daily Victim. The ratings for the daily comic usually include a healthy dose of 10's, some more normal ratings, and, even on some of the really funny ones, a whole boatload of 1's.

It's up to you to decide whether that's because of the binary mind thing you suggested, or because the Daily Victim is frequented by a lot of stupid kids, of course.

"I am surprised no one has made a real-time chess game. I'll even give you a good name for it: "Xtreme Chess"

Actually, its called Kung Fu Chess

3D worlds are getting more and more common.
Here is an alternative, you can even create and share your own objects and scripts: Second Life

In an industry scrutinized by the government as a drug infested haven that pollutes our communities and destroys the ability to lead a productive life, there is another industry that has the potential to become even more dangerous than any drug addiction. I'm not supposed to be writing this. What was supposed to happen was I prove my thesis that I couldn't be sucked into a virtual reality like many people I have met before. I never really understood what I was getting myself into when I started my research experiment, playing a Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game.

Three years ago at a nightclub I bumped into an old friend of mine who went by the nickname "Iggy". I was really amazed to see him because no one had seen nor heard from Iggy in over a year. Many of his friends had all wondered what happened to him.

"Jesus Iggy, where in the hell have you been?!"

"Everquest," was all he said. He looked down at his feet when he said it.

"Huh?" I had no clue what he meant.

"I've been playing Everquest."

As we spoke, Iggy opened up to me and confessed that he had lost his job, his friends and didn't want to go out much anymore.

"It's an addiction. I'm only out tonight because the server is down for patching and I'm miserable."

For some reason, he couldn't look me in the eye while he was talking. He was obviously embarrassed.

"Um. Okay." I mean, what was I going to say to something as incredulous as that? I've heard of game obsessions, like those college kids in the seventies that murdered their whole family while playing a Dungeons and Dragons game, but I just thought that sort of obsession lies only in the minds of sociopaths or people with a lot bigger problems than playing a game. Iggy was a really nice, normal guy who had lost a lot to some online role-playing game called "Everquest". I had no idea what to make of it.

I never saw Iggy again. Neither has anyone else who knew him that I have asked. Since that night I really pondered the absurdity of his situation. It nagged at me.

On the web you can put the words "gaming addiction" into Google and discover a thousand and one sites for support groups, self help courses, testimonials and various studies. There's the "Everquest Widows" forum, a site called "Ariadne - Understanding MMORPG Addiction", and a myriad of articles on topics like game addiction and the innocent bystanders that suffer from it.

As one Everquest Widow puts it, "I plan on starting "Widows Weekly." It will be a group that meets in a local coffee shop. Here, spouses can talk and help one another through this difficult process, and begin to realize that there is a life out there despite the loss of our loved ones. I plan to send the bill for coffee and snacks to Verant. It would be but a small compensation on their part to repay me and others for the loss of our loved ones--so pay up, Verant!" -- Christine Gilbert CD Mag.com

What I find interesting is that many of the people who author these articles or sites have usually neither played the games or have just been the "victims" such as spouses or family. Others who dissect the topic of game addiction tend to be outsiders looking in, shaking their heads or turning the study into one giant mouse in the maze science experiment. It's rare that you find someone, who actually plays games passionately, speak up or write anything about negative side affects.

The more people I met who played computer games, the more I wanted to understand the obsession. I also had another stake in this because my partner, Low, is a gamer and a "geek" in every sense of the word. Not to mention my fiancé. It was beginning to cause some strain on us from time to time in terms of "quality time". I was getting really angry with him on a regular basis actually. According to Low, it was I who had the problem, not him. This is how most gamers think. Deal with their gaming or don't deal with it at all. They will play either way.

So I eventually decided to do some investigation and find out what makes these gamers and role players tick. What sort of recreation has the ability to absorb people to the extent that marriages break up, jobs are lost, and they lose friends? How does playing a game on a computer make someone lose functionality in the REAL world, because they want to spend too much time in some imaginary reality? For crying out loud, I thought, it's just a game.

I had a lot of questions but no one I talked to had answers. Gamers would tell me, "You won't understand unless you are a gamer yourself." Ok, no problem. I figured I could just play a game I find entertaining and get bored and write about what nut cases gamers really are.

It just wasn't that easy. This little experiment of mine turned out to be more dangerous than I ever imagined.

I wasn't able to begin playing a game right away. The opportunity just never really presented itself directly to me. There just wasn't a game I really liked enough to "get into it" for long enough. Low would play his Quake, Unreal Tournament, Black & White, Carmageddon, Fallout, Diablo II and a multitude of other first person shooters, but nothing seemed all that captivating to me and there was no way I could play these games with him due to his extreme level of skill and years of practice in a 3D environment.

I played a little Diablo and actually had a bit of fun with that, but I found I only really enjoyed it when I played with Low or our friends in multi-player mode. We would go "adventuring" together as they call it, fighting demons and wizards and monsters and coming out winning or dying, but having some fun just playing together. It was my first taste of actually playing with another player in a game as a team. But when Low moved onto the next game, bored with Diablo, I didn't have the same drive to play anymore. So I put my project aside and put up with his gaming as best as I could.

Massive Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games (MMORPG) have been around for many years. You can find thousands of websites, magazines, web-zines and the like that are devoted to the enormous market out there for online gaming. Sites like GameSpy, that literally receive millions of visits per day from gamers and industry types from all over the world, provide an almost infinite amount if information about these types of games. Hundreds of thousands of people play games like Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot, Asheron's Call, and Ultima Online each day from all over the world. With the upcoming launch of The Sims Online, analysts and game reviewers are expecting the largest online game community ever seen to develop.

"The Sims promises to be one of the most interesting human experiments in the history of the Net." -- David Kushner, Entertainment Weekly

Low had tried many of these MMORPG's. He never stuck with one very long because, as he puts it, "I got tired of being a crappy tree-elf that always fell out of the damn tree village." In Ultima Online, he "got tired of having all my stuff stolen from me and getting killed by stupid 'PKers' (Player Killers)." Apparently for him, the rewards were far and few between to keep him interested in these games. He also has a very short attention span with most games. Play it, beat it, and move on to the next game is his motto. The more games you play in a single year the more well rounded you are apparently. With the new enhanced graphics engines, hardware and development that goes into games these days, it's amazing how stimulating the market can be right now.

Early in 2001, however, Low's opinion of online gaming changed drastically. He read an article about a new online role-playing game that was set about 30,000 years into the future, on a colonized planet. The story line was science fiction themed, with monsters, mutants, futuristic weapons, wars, and sinister political plots. The player would have the ability to create a character avatar from a wide variety of attributes and be surrounded by very realistic 3D graphics, with incredible scenery and sound. You would have to defend yourself, form guilds, make friends and alliances and your goal would be to "learn" or level your character as the game progressed in order to increase your skills and possessions. There would be PVP (player versus player) combat, PVM combat (player verses mobile or "mob" for short, a term used to explain computer generated enemy or monster) and a variety of other things one could do while in the game online. You could fly a plane, morph into animals and go on dangerous missions and epic quests. The game was called Anarchy Online.

Something about this Anarchy Online game really had his attention and right after it came out in July of 2001, he bought his copy and began playing, and once again I lost him to a game. He could not stop going on and on about how "cool this or that was" or the graphics or all the people he was meeting. His excitement was just ridiculous in my eyes but I had been through this before. Nevertheless, the game also captured my interest because of its science fiction theme. I am a sci-fi buff and the storyline had such a great plot that they actually sell the novels online for it. I read the chapters as they were released and was hooked on the storyline.

Low bought another copy about two weeks later. "I want you to play with me." By this time we were under some strain because he was really absorbed by this game every night. It looked really intimidating to me and I opted not to play it right away, stalling for time. The 3D environment bothered me because any game I had ever played, like Diablo, for example, had always been in third person view, which is a bird's eye view of the environment. The 3D graphics were dizzying as I looked over his shoulder from time to time.

In the end I caved in under the pressure and began playing it in September of 2001. I was a horrible player in the beginning, running into walls and getting lost or killed all the time. It didn't matter to me. I was playing a game with my boyfriend and found with each day that went by, I wanted to log on and play more and more.

So what was the appeal? Before I realized what was happening, I became addicted to playing this game. While logged into this game I met wonderful people, via their avatars, laughed to funny antics via chat window discussions, and experienced a futuristic sci-fi world via incredibly realistic 3D graphics and sounds. We ran through swamps with mutant wolves chasing us, the sound of our feet making wet suction sounds just like you would have in reality. We could hear birds chirping in forests we scouted and vultures crying overhead as they spotted us and attacked.

Our adrenaline would pump as we fought for our lives against twenty-foot tall robots with buzz saws for hands, or as we went on safaris to hunt giant brontosaur-like animals. We had the ability to heal and save each other as well as other members of our team at the time. We also had the ability to gain the respect, over more than a year later, of many online players, for being a great couple of characters in this game. We have, in fact, become high-ranking officers in our guild, which is almost like a family or alliance with other people to help you in the game.

In South Korea, some in-game alliances are valued more than real life friendships. A game called Lineage: The Blood Pledge has captivated approximately a third of the population. In Lineage, characters can take on the role of Princes, Wizards, and Knights and vow their loyalty to their clan or guild. This loyalty had lead to an incident in 2001 where a player was nearly beaten to death in real life for virtually killing the character of another player.

"He boasted that he had offed the gangman's virtual character just for the fun of it. Bad idea. The roughnecks dragged the 21-year-old into the urinal and pummeled him until he was covered with real-world bruises." -- By Michelle Levander, Time Magazine

It is easy to lose yourself to your imagination while you become someone you could possibly never be in the real world. You can become a hero, a bad ass, a wealthy person, someone with special powers or gain an enormous amount of respect from people who look up to you. This isn't to say you can't be that kind of person in reality, but what if everyone had this ability to find respect, admiration and status, simply by being in the environment long enough. What if all you had to do was play each day and level higher and higher, each goal leading to a new goal of achievement and possibilities. And what if you never had to leave the comfort of your chair to do this?

What if you could really become a diva, a soldier, a magician, or a samurai, and people respected or admired you unconditionally as long as you had a long red bar looming over your virtual head. Or, as in especially my case, what if while you were in this virtual reality, you didn't have to worry about deadlines, due dates, over 1000 emails per day to read and answer, or day-to-day stress that comes with what I do. The virtual reality could absorb you so much, that for the time you are logged in, you forget everything else. It doesn't seem to matter whether you are a strict role-player (someone who stays in character) or 'hardcore' (someone who spends more time in-game than an average user). You still can be addicted and absorbed with the attention you get.

The official Anarchy Online Community Forum, which gets thousands of posts per day, has also been one of my sources for observing how obsessed people have become with the game. Recently, a devoted and well known player had to throw in the towel due to her addiction problem.

"The level to which I got into things here is what has lead me to this point where I must say goodbye. My internet addiction and denial of it has taken me to a point where I must get a hold of it. I realize that many people have what it takes to play a game like this "casually" in a healthy manner. I am unfortunately not one of those people. I am currently battling bi-polar disorder (manic depression) and the escapism that a game like AO offers is too much like a drug for me."

The ability to be respected, to be admired, and to succeed, even in an imaginary world, is a very powerful lure. It can cause a person to produce endorphins, a chemical released into the brain that causes a feeling of energy and well being. Gaming also causes adrenaline production and extreme excitability. Scientists have proven that endorphins and adrenal rushes are incredibly addictive.

"There are indications that pleasurable games and activities cause the body to produce endogenous opiates such as endorphins. These substances are actually addictive. Some addictive drugs, such as heroin, are chemically similar to these natural substances, while other addictive drugs are thought to stimulate their production."
-- Leonard Holmes, Ph.D. from the article, Is Pokémon Addictive? 1999

It should be easy to see why gaming can be addictive as a direct result of the physical effects on the body. I also believe that people can become addicted to respect, admiration and power as well. Even though the production of endorphins can be a positive side affect in one way, it can be easy to overindulge and put aside productive living. But there are many ways to do this and online gaming is not the only vice out there. People find many different ways to escape the problems in their life or to combat stress.

People log on each and every day to find a level of respect that doesn't come easily in day-to-day life. They log on to escape reality or to escape other real problems such as illness and stress. I have met people in this game who have mental disorders or physical impairments. I have also played with people who are in IT jobs all day long, listening to customer complaints, getting bitched at regularly. Some have even admitted that they never hear the words "good job" in the real world.

One player who works in the IT technical services industry, told me "I get my faith in people restored when I get online. People treat me with respect and are actually nice to me. They don't expect anything in return. Also, they believe me when I tell them something because of my level in the game."

I know of other overly stressed out people who log in each day to escape their day-to-day experience of working or living in hard reality. We met a person in game, for example, who is an EMT. Everyday he witnesses death and horrible accidents. He told us that he plays the game to get it all out of his mind. I also met a nurse online with a similar story, and a school teacher who teaches eleventh grade in the Bronx, NYC, who is very stressed out by his job.

"Most human beings pass through periods in their lives, when they feel compelled to engage in some apparently mindless activity that, for the time being, seems to provide some relief from the prevailing chaos in their lives. This could be something as simple as spending hours in front of the television set. Or going on uncontrollable buying sprees just to feel and smell the newness of the product. Or getting into a series of dead-end relationships. Or going on eating binges. Or playing computer games, uncaring of unattended work piling up. Or playing snooker every evening at the club regardless of the family's legitimate demand for more attention. In other words, binging on anything potentially destructive to the body or the soul. Fortunately for many of us, after a period of this compulsive indulgence, we pull ourselves back to the mainstream and get on with our lives, until the next compulsion hits us."
-- Dr. Vijay Nagaswami, from the article, Who? Me? An addict, The Hindu Folio 2001

This is not to say that there are not positive aspects to interacting with people online. Online gaming opens the doors to people who might not have the ability to do so due to time, geography, or many more reasons. Gaming online is an inexpensive and quick way to make new friends, chat with people all over the world and share an experience with people you would never meet because they may be continents away.

One of our online friends, for example, who goes by the character name "Docker", lives in Leiden, Netherlands. Another friend, "Chanell" lives in Einselthum, Germany. These are really interesting people we would never have met if it was not for the game we play online. I asked Chanell why he started playing online games.

"It all began with Diablo II being released. Then my friend, Yppo, made me try it online. I found it was an incredibly boring and annoying game. Then Yppo made me try it online and I loved it. I joined his clan and had months of online fun, then it got boring, close to the moment DAoC [Dark Ages of Camelot] was released in Europe. While I went to DAoC, Yppo chose to go to A.O." Eventually Chanell started playing A.O. as well.

When asked how playing A.O. affects his social life, he reflected, "As for my friends... yes we hang together a lot less. This could be related to A.O. or the fact that we don't work in the same city anymore. I am not totally sure. I still have a lot of phone calls and meetings so I am not "lonesome" it just isn't an as high frequency as before."

And with that I can only think that one's social life is in the eye of the beholder. I interact with Chanell almost every day. In fact I interact with more people than I ever have before because of playing a computer game. They just are not all physically in my proximity.

Interaction with people... It got me thinking and I began to develop my own theories on what causes the addiction. Psychologists can use fancy terminology like "Motivation Factors" and "Attraction Factors" such as self-esteem and self-image problems. They can harp on the role of achievement problems and relationship deficiencies in a person's personality. But I think I can sum it up to one word that would work for any individual needing his or her game "fix" each time they log in, regardless of how well rounded they are in their lives or how much of a basket case they could be perceived as.

RESPECT.

I think it is just that simple. I like the feeling I get when people look up to me in the game or ask my opinion. It seems to be a common drive for players in general. That is, to be respected for being the best and reaching the next level in the game.

Not everyone who plays games neatly fit into these Psychologists stereotypes. "Solories", another Anarchy Online player, is an example of someone who just logs on for the sake of play.

"I would say that I am responsibly addicted, meaning I have never been late to work due to AO.
My wife would prefer that I not play AO as much as I do, but I always make time for her every night, and try and do one thing planned together every weekend. I have never been late to work, but the first night I played AO I stayed up until 4:00 am and had to get up at 6:00 am and the next day I played until midnight. I don't feel that AO affects my work habits, work is work and when it is time to play, it is time to play. I enjoy watching my character grow in his skills and MMORPG's in general let you get away from the normal day to day monotone life and do something out of the ordinary. In AO I am Solories Enforcer of Rubi-Ka a defender of the cause. I fight battles that help my guild get better and help the clans win a war against the Omni."

In the process of my gaming experiment, I became a casualty of the concept of being respected. If someone had asked me in September of 2001 if I expected to be obsessed with an online role-playing game a year down the road, I would have said with confidence that I am one of the most level headed non-addictive persons I know. No way could this happen to me. In fact, I would have been reminded of poor old Iggy and his demise.

I technically have ended my experiment. In the process, I haven't lost my job, and due to our simultaneous obsession, I have not lost my fiancé either. I haven't lost my real life friends, but they do sometimes look at me funny when I talk about the game I play. Low and I get our work done, run our business and have a great balanced life together I think. Anyone who actually knows me in real life can tell you that I have no self image or esteem problems and in fact, I have been accused of having quite an ego. I won't even go into Low's ego. I will admit though, that I have missed quite a few parties, nights out with the girls, shopping, and some chores needed around the office and home because of Anarchy Online. I will also admit that I want to log in as much as I possibly can every single day.

People have worse entertainment addictions than playing computer games. If I am going to be addicted to something, I would choose online gaming over drugs, bowling, gambling, television, or being a baseball fanatic easily. I don't have to wear ugly shoes, lose my hard earned money or do the wave next to someone I don't know and that just about makes it a no-brainer for me. It IS after all just a video game, like Neal describes in his great novel, Snow Crash. It is just another amusement park.

"Amusement parks in the Metaverse can be fantastic, offering a wide selection of interactive three-dimensional movies. But in the end, they're still nothing more than video games."
--Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

And I will leave you with that. Signing on now... Tenjikiito, level 157 Female Solitus Adventurer, Advisor to the Clan Guild Synergy Factor, the best damn guild on the world of Rubi-Ka, with the best damn virtual people one could ever virtually meet.

Special thanks to the following people for help with my research and leveling:
Sohjiro (Low Tek), Theevilcouch, Demnspawnt, Akarah, Chanell, Sheffy, Mr. Cheeze/Conqueso, Solories, Kirishami, Docker, Ramzie, Boco (who is to blame for all of this), Sultanx, Asmoran, Caddock, Meurgen, Tergwannabe, Trus, Ayanamie, Cplkane, Spherana, Ankokujin, Thedwarf (aka Notmyfault), Stromm, Molg, Butwalrus, Ciyt/Toonot, and Yokoduna.

Related links:

Anarchy Online
Dark Age of Camelot
Ultima Online
Diablo II
The Sims
Everquest
Try Anarchy Online free for 7 days! (We dare you to). =]

Don't forget to visit the discussion board and the channel 44 forums

Don't forget to visit the discussion board and the channel 44 forums

..gamespy is a good example of a website that's become more and more obessed with loading advertisements in the site. Before the site opens, you have to sit through a commercial even. It's so bloody annoying, I wonder if pop-up blockers can stop these kind of flashy, 'on top of webpage' commercials..

I should note here that the word from Nintendo is that the device will not play all Gameboy games - some early ones are apparently left out in the cold.

You should definitely buy a PS2 and a Gamecube. You will then quickly find out that neither of them is any more able to play imported games than the Xbox.

I'm aware, I just hate Microsoft. ;-)

Hell, you can even play your games online if you choose (at least games with the system link option) via the Gamespy Tunnel.

Ahh, I was not aware of that. Cool.

Therefore, if someone blew $50 on Xbox Live, they were, in my opinion, taking a risk and Microsoft bears no responsibility for any loss incurred doing so when they couldn't get on XBL.

Oh, absolutely. My point was wouldn't it be nice if this was accomodated for, i.e. doesnt' matter if your system is modded as long as you are playing a valid, licensed game?

Personally, I think that region coding is stupid, especially in the US - why especially in the US, you might ask? Because we have a significantly larger number of people in this country who speak languages other than the accepted "national" language.

That being said, modchips aren't around to simply allow playing imported games. Their purposes go much further than that, extending into the ability to read burned discs and run unsigned software. That latter ability is the reason I'm happy (as an XBL subscriber) that Microsoft is preventing the use of modded consoles on their network.

It also seems relevant to point out that being banned from the Xbox Live service does NOT mean that you can't continue to use your modded console to run Linux and the rest. You can still do so. Hell, you can even play your games online if you choose (at least games with the system link option) via the Gamespy Tunnel.

My last comment on this subject (I've already replied too much tonight :]) is this: Anyone who modded their console knew a long time ago that there was a possibility their console was not going to work with the Xbox Live service. This would particularly be true amongst those with "legitimate" purposes for modding such as the homebrew folks working on Linux, media players and the like, who have discussed this at length in the past. Therefore, if someone blew $50 on Xbox Live, they were, in my opinion, taking a risk and Microsoft bears no responsibility for any loss incurred doing so when they couldn't get on XBL.

I do hope, however, that the people who were mistakenly banned - assuming they're telling the truth - get taken care of in a timely fashion so that they can get the service they paid for.

Yeah, and it's not like you could use Gamespy Arcade for free!

Nosirree, you'd rather prance about in your fanboy-ness...

Personally, I appreciate that MS is controlling the user experience so much. That makes it that much higher quality.

Oh, and don't compare the online play system for a console to elections in Iraq. That's just stupid. There's three major console systems, each with a good chunk of market share, in good competition with each other, each with plans for online play, two of which have working online systems.

Yeah, I'm very interested in these announcements too. And the terawatt cooler looks awfully hip, dunnit? But then I see the pictures, and become disappointed. Computer games look more detailed than ever before, but they're all obviously computer generated. So I've promised myself I wouldn't get excited until I see a significant jump in actual picture quality.

I guess Carmack got it right (doesn't he always?) -- we need 100 passes per pixel.

There are already programs for the computer that allow you to talk to the other players...

... like Roger Wilco for one.

Counter Strike could be amazing with high-end graphics, but perhaps there is a reason that DoomIII isn't going to have really advanced multiplayer? Carmack said, some multiplayer, but not that much multiplayer. Could it be that DoomIII is too cumbersome to play over the net? Maybe too cumbersome to play over a LAN? (*ahem*Blood2*ahem*)

I really think that a Counter Strike realism factor could rock, but what about the new Nvidia graphics language everyone keeps talking about? Maybe it won't be hard for us to make leaps toward a fast net CS game with super cool graphics. Maybe the new code would enable the CS team to split off from the Half Life engine and do their own thing?

If you look at the stats on Gamespy, Counterstrike takes the biggest share of online use. Take that and think about Valve and how much money they made on the backs of that project!

*shudder*

To clear up my point, I think that a glossy Doom3 version of CS might be immersive, but it might also lack the networking capability that the current version has. CS today doesn't take up much resources on higher end systems, or even lower ones. Today it's pretty cheap to get CS enabled.

Maybe that plays a factor.

Natural Selection isn't doing too badly for a new mod with 2700 players online at the moment. However, the ratio of players to servers for Natural Selection is much higher than for other games. This probably has to do with the large amount of processing power a Natural Selection server needs. If NS gets more servers I imagine the number of players will go up as well. It really is a unique game. It encourages teamwork and communication to a degree never before seen in any mod. I think this is its greatest strength. In CS you can play without teamwork but in NS it is really necessary. When teamwork is pretty much forced on people, it actually starts working. Good luck joining a random Counter-Strike server and forming an effective team; in Natural Selection cooperation is the norm and not the exception. Assaulting an alien hive with 3 guys backing you up and your commander watching out for you is a cool experience.

And then there was the high-speed button-smashing game called Track And Field circa 1983.

That was musical too...if you wanted to learn how to do a drumroll.

When it comes to A.I., Chris Taylor says it can be done, but it will cost. "What I want is A.I. that evolves and has monsters coming at you from behind and changing their tactics encounter-to-encounter. That is very hard to do with scripting because it is so labor intensive and so testing intensive. What you really want to do is have those things done with algorithms, powerful algorithms."

"In the future, I see frightening realism." - Chris Taylor, Gas Powered Games And algorithms are processor intensive, according to Taylor. "The thing that we truly don't have is the CPU power to make our artificial intelligence as intelligent as we would like. That is something that you won't hear from a lot of people, but it's starting to rear its ugly head.

On page three of the GameSpy article, they get into AI a bit. I wonder if we're ever going to have AI cards like we do now with nics and graphics cards.

Why not? Why not have a whole processor dedicated specifically to the type of algorithmic applications that AI requires?

Check out this Dork Tower cartoon.

Says it all really. Had they discovered any shoot-em-up computer game at the sniper's home, especially one featuring a sniper rifle, there would have been a massive call to ban games all over America.

Not ban guns, mind you, as that would be UnAmerican...

Bzzzt...wrong answer. Half-Life and its mods are kicking the living crap out of all other FPS games and Counter-Strike is the most popular Half-Life mod by a long-shot. Thanks for playing

FPS stats

HL stats

Bzzzt...wrong answer. Half-Life and its mods are kicking the living crap out of all other FPS games and Counter-Strike is the most popular Half-Life mod by a long-shot. Thanks for playing

FPS stats

HL stats

NOLF2 and DooM III are single-player games. Counter-Strike: "Blue Zone" doesn't exist. I think you mean "Condition Zero," which is also a single-player game.

At the time of this post, CS has 85320 players (source). Medal of Honor: AA is in second place. With less than a tenth of the players that CS has.

Recent server data shows that this shift is reflected across most servers, as Counterstrike population is decreasing, RTCW is up a little, and MOH:AA is up dramatically.

You're probably not lying, you're just totally ignorant. I've been following HL for ever (see my site), and today is the first time I've seen the game break 100,000 players largely due to CS.

You can use your anecdotal evidence all you won't, but there is no "shift across most servers." You are absolutely wrong, I'm sorry.

CS is dying? That is totally false. What 'recent server data' are you basing this on? The online numbers of people playing CS is still hitting new peaks every week. For actual numbers and not just, "My friends and I quit CS for whatever reason, therefore I conclude that it's dying." check this page:

http://www.gamespy.com/stats/

Games like MOH:AA and RTCW have not been "up dramatically." In fact, over the past few weeks with the coming of BF1942 and UT2K3, those games have actually been the ones to experience a decrease in numbers, not CS.

PS: What is Counter-Strike: Blue Zone? Maybe you're thinking of Counter-Strike: Condition Zero?

Really? Looks pretty alive to me...

Wow... they're resurrecting the XBAND Video Game Modem and Network!

It amazes me that companies like Catapult (XBAND), Mpath (Mplayer), and TEN never achieved much in the way of financial success, but somehow Microsoft believes it has the Midas touch. The only way this is going to work is the only way that pay-for-play games on the Internet have every worked: MUDs, MMORPGs, and the like.

Even the voice-with-the-game gimmick has been done before... and Roger Wilco didn't do so well either.

Link

I know you are going to get slammed by the 'Bill Gates said 640k was enough' crowd so I thought you would like to know that Doom 3 isn't going to require a Freon cooled GeForce 3000 XP+ SupraGamer to be playable ...

Doom III playable on current hardware says John Carmack in Interview with GameSpy

-DR

An article all about this that makes one wonder why this story was posted at all.

They are making it like Warcraft / most RTS games where you all "gather" in a waiting room, then start the server. Big deal....

DOOM3 is a SINGLE PLAYER game... anything they say about MP is probably invalid as it's leaving thier mouths... id knows damn well that there will be MP gaming in DOOM 3, but they aren't thinking about it now.

Besides, if you want multiplayer gaming with the DOOM 3 engine, one could always play Quake 4, which is in the works as well.

Ah, you didn't read the QuakeCon keynote, did you? :) ...Carmack went on to sum up his opinion of those naysayers who believe that film-quality movies will never be able to be rendered in realtime thusly: "They're really just wong."

In gamespy's coverage of quakecon, Carmack says Doom3 will be, "believe it or not, based around the technology that became available with GeForce1-level hardware." (That's a quote from the article writer, not Carmack himself.) But if you buy the new ATI card, you'll see its advanced technology put to good use in 2-3 years.

I think that an upcoming game engine, either the next one or the one after that, will have a notably longer usable life for content creation than we have seen so far.

Right now Half-Life seems to be doing okay. It may not have the commercial creation push that engines like the new Unreal, but the end user Half Life is doing well. I don't have a pretty graph to show you about population vs time but I don't believe either of us is ignorant of reality. We also know that halflife is firmly propped by a single liscence, and the open community support will not provide for valve forever, so halflife should be on its way out soon. If everyone stopped playing today, the lifetime of the game would have been about 4 years. Thats a really long time. Its lasted through more new hardware releases than I care to count. This is may or may not be notable.

And the hl engine has evolved through time, although not nearly enough. It seems every year the public is offered a new patch that doubles the texture resolution for their baby child games. So how will the new engine break the mold while slowly evolving? Tweaking the models and adding resolution can only get you so far.

Honestly though, if half-life isn't notable enough for its shelf life, then I don't think that any game in the near future will find the adoption rate and life span of half-life. Because while real time polygon rendering may be finished with revolutions, games have not. I see 2 things changing the scene myself.

1)Real time ray tracing. Its been asserted by a few places and people that raytracing will outperform rasterization in high quality scenarios. I don't claim to fully understand their arguments or validity, but significant academic work is underway.

2) Dynamic environments. As games continue to evolve in complexity and interacivity, some are in dire need of a more flexible environment. More specifically, people want to be able to lanch a mortor or artillery shell or whatever and get visible persisting results on the dirt. A few games have approached this but the solutions have been unsatisfying to many. Using a height map yields an easily modifed environment, but it also means no rooms above rooms. Another design concern is loading times. A lot of developers have chosen graphical speed at the cost of punishing the player with load times. Dynamically or "passively" loading the data has been presented as one way of combating the load issue, but I don't see it as very compatabile with a persistant world.

A lot of what I pointed out is almost a simple restating of what you've said, but I wish to underline the significance of these things. Game creaters want malleable levels, to create new game mechanics that underscore creation and destruction, primarily.

This page says that Solitaire was included already in Windows 3.0 which was released in May 1990.

ION Storm had a burn rate over a million dollars a month. Eidos had to squeeze the life from a couple of other game companies to maintain John-boy's Ferrari for him. Among those was Looking Glass, the group that made Flight Unlimited, Thief and System Shock. Wow! What a great decision that was.

It isn't just the crappy game that JR made, but the wake of destruction he left behind him was incredible and did great harm to the gaming industry.

Check out TTLG, SShock2 and GameSpy for info on the people hoping to keep these games alive.