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"And yet still people are asking: Where's Duke Nukem?"
Well they've got their answer now.

Last two Stardock retail games won Editor's Choice Awards from Computer Gaming World. GalCiv I itself got a bunch of Editor's Choice Awards.

Here's a Gamespy review from today of GalCiv II.
http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/galactic-civilizations-ii /684534p1.html

-(designer of "polished crap")

> Can you see yourself aiming your gun this way?

Well actually, yeah. Remember Doom? How hard it was to play an FPS without using a mouse. This will quite possibly make fps's playable on consoles.

> guiding Mario through the levels by waving the controller

I'm sure that you will be able to adjust the sensitivity to your liking, you won't have to "wave" it, but probably most of the time just move it a small amount to get the desired effect. Man, I can really picture myself blowing up some space pirates (http://mdb.classicgaming.gamespy.com/m1/index.htm ) with this thing.

Waddaya know, the AC is actually right! A simple Google search confirms that the Toy Story comparison was actually made by Gates, but for some reason, the press attributed it to Sony. Then apparently it took off from there and now everyone and their mother thinks it was Kutaragi that made the claim. (To be honest, though, that sounds much like something he WOULD say) Of course Sony did make a lot of claims about the PS2 power (like how it would replace the PC, but that's pretty common for most console makers to hype their platform). Anyway, thanks for pointing that out, I'll be sure not to use that "Toy Story" line again (or at least attribute it to the right company now).

As for trumped up claims of the Xbox power, I agree that there was a lot of stupid hype about it. It actually frustrated me quite a bit, when I joined the business. There were a lot of people (who didn't understand the games industry at the time), who believed that merely having a faster machine meant it was a better one. The only important numbers were how many polygons could be rendered, etc. Wrong.

"It's the games stupid!" I'm happy to see there's been some major progress in developing better titles for the 360 (no more Azurik please!) and getting some big-name 3rd party developers (welcome EA and Square!). Still a long way to go, but that's a much better approach than merely trumpeting up console statistics (which there's still lot of, but that's par for the course).

And now the big focus is on other platform features surrounding the game experience. Things like gamerscore and achievements are becoming extremely addicting, and the Live Arcade is becoming a big hit to publishers and gamers. Nintendo has already announced some similar plans, with their own online platform and downloadable library.

But as it stands now, all Sony appears to be trumpeting is two things: Cell, and Blu-ray. Both extremely costly, and I don't really see how much of a benefit they're going to be to gaming.

I'd say ROB worked out pretty well.

I'm surprised that you mentioned Dead or Alive. The Playstation version had quite a few upgrades from the Saturn and Arcade versions. So many, in fact, that Tecmo ported the Playstation version back to the arcade as Dead or Alive++.

Saturn's 2D transparency is completely useless if developers can't figure out how to program it in. For instance, Konami couldn't figure out how to do it in Castlevania: Nocturne in the Moonlight (Castlevania: Symphony of the Night) for the Saturn.

The Saturn's internal save space was battery backed, meaning that you lost all your saves if the battery went dead. It was also space limited, forcing you to buy save carts once it was full. Praytell that you have the correct save cart in the system on boot, because from what I've heard, changing them after the system was started is liable to erase the cart.

What you're asking for is a RPG where the battles are fighting game style. They actually have that already:

Namco X Capcom

Here's some english reviews:
http://www.gamestats.com/objects/726/726493/
http://ps2.gamespy.com/playstation-2/namco-x-capco m/
http://ps2.ign.com/objects/726/726493.html

I remember back in the early days of Planet Quake, when Bastard (Basty) was running the site. This was of course before Gamespy transformed from being a little ping tool, into a giant marketing juggernaught. Quake lovers like myself would collect in #planetquake and chat about the latest mod, hang out on servers and submit news to contribute to the (then) growing online Quake community.

I did a lot of mods myself. Some I would have liked to have finished, but the ones I did finish all collect dust now. (and some of them collected dust THEN)

At the same time Bluesnews was also a great place to find out awesome insights to the whole Quake scene.

Look at these two sites now, and all you can see is marketing.

They both, arguably, sold out. I don't know why... maybe they like affording new computers from Alienware, or maybe they just like the concept of selling their souls. Another person who sold out bigtime was Dakota, the CTF guy that some of you might remember as the founder of Captured.com (which is now closed). He joined Gamespy and is running a large part of that company now. He used to post amazing CTF news, mods, tourney info and stuff.

Vid journalists all get bought up by the industry.

But the games changed, too. It used to be a lot of fun to play Quake or Thunderwalker on servers, but then other games came along and stole the show, thus putting an end to the tight-knit community. Each new game fractured the core community until, for quite a while, there was no cohesion.

All good things come to an end, and I think that is how we really know they were good.

One of the creators of TA is working on Supreme Commander. From the previews I've read, it will take TA to the next level.

http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/supreme-commander/632026p 1.html Here is a link to the Gamespy preview.

What's in Kim Jong ils PS2 right now you think?

Your mistake is in assuming that Apple is desparate for Win32 developers, which it is not. They want control over their platform as much as Microsoft wants control over theirs.

Thats the problem though. By not wooing developers they dont get the apps -- or worse, they drive developers _away_ from apple to other platforms, as has happened numerous times.

It's a common complaint of apple users who we service at work. Mac apps are often hard to find.

It's often easier to find apps for linux than for osx. That says a lot.

Maybe osx is an uber platform for developers, but it sucks for end users. And since end users drive the economic viability of a platform, it's a vicious circle if you aren't courting new developers and growing the platform. Status quo is not growth.

I worked with Id and Aspyr to port Enemy Territory to OSX. It hovers around #4 or #5 on the top most popular online FPS. You know how many mac users there are? I can count them on one hand. There are orders of magnitude more linux users.

Many apple devs I talk to express the same frustration. Apple is not doing anything to grow the platform. Pretty soon some of them are going to be ex-apple-devs. Because the platform is economically terrible develop for.

The platform will not be attractive for new developers until it is simple and easy to port to. And that won't happen until apple abandons this objc/cocoa-centric worldview.

A funny (or horrifying, depending on whom you ask) thing happened at CES. Coleco was showing off its new (and ill-fated) ADAM computer system, and had decided to use Donkey Kong as the demo game. While Coleco did own the home console rights to Donkey Kong, it was Atari that had earlier secured the computer rights. Once Atari's Ray Kassar caught wind of what was at the Coleco booth, he accused Nintendo of cheating and double-dealing behind Atari's back. Utterly furious, he threatened to cancel the Famicom deal and sue Nintendo out of existence.

Nintendo did its best to rectify the situation, and was aghast when Kassar was ousted from Atari a month later. The contracts were still unsigned, and with Kassar seemed to go all hope of getting the Famicom marketed in the US.

A funny (or horrifying, depending on whom you ask) thing happened at CES. Coleco was showing off its new (and ill-fated) ADAM computer system, and had decided to use Donkey Kong as the demo game. While Coleco did own the home console rights to Donkey Kong, it was Atari that had earlier secured the computer rights. Once Atari's Ray Kassar caught wind of what was at the Coleco booth, he accused Nintendo of cheating and double-dealing behind Atari's back. Utterly furious, he threatened to cancel the Famicom deal and sue Nintendo out of existence.

Nintendo did its best to rectify the situation, and was aghast when Kassar was ousted from Atari a month later. The contracts were still unsigned, and with Kassar seemed to go all hope of getting the Famicom marketed in the US.

Thanks to the Xbox 360's excellent controller, it won't take veterans of console first-person shooters very long to feel comfortable with the gameplay in Call of Duty 2. The default control scheme feels perfect right from the start, and there's a good chance that you'll be a genuine killing machine by the time you finish the brief tutorial that kicks off the game.

And then, of course, there are the controls. The debate between keyboard and mouse vs. controller still rages on, but in this fast-paced arcade-style shooter we didn't find the control pad be a serious handicap. While a sniping match would likely end in the favor of the player on the PC, playing through the offline levels was just as easy with a thumbstick as with a mouse.

I noticed no Windows 2000 in this stress test! See the requirements.

I played it last night for an hour. It looks pretty especially the indoor places, but for some reason the engine wasn't smooth like WoW. I thought it was lags, but it was still not smooth even at 6 AM PST. Taverns (those are cool -- better than WoW's inns) are so laggy for me. Solo instances(?) are smoother, but not that smooth. Outdoor areas lag too for me. I had turn things down like use billinear, distance view lowered, etc.

I did not like its GUI. I think it was just too big especially when my maximum screen resolution is 1152x864. I prefer WoW's.

I loved the character setup. I made a hot chick with red long hair [grin]. Its setup reminds me of City of Heroes and City of Villain's. I also like the video clips (I wonder how much disk space these took up) showing each player class. I played as a barbarian since I like meelee fightings. I only got off the second boat after training. I will play more later hopefully. A lot of commands are similiar if you know WoW like: /laugh, /dance, /p for party talk, etc.

Note that it it is only until THIS Saturday! Yep, it's a short test! Then, it's over. Downloading takes a while (1.6 GB for the standard client). You can apply for an account before installing. Note you need to be subscriber on those download sites to get the high quality package. The game was choppy for me with everything ON and without antialias on my XFX NVIDIA GeForce 6800 (128 MB), Athlon 64 3200+, and 1.5 GB of RAM.

Other notes/FYI:

FYI from FAQ:
# Monday at 9:00am PST registration servers go live
# Tuesday at 11:59am PST game servers go live. If you received a key and created your stress test event account you can begin playing the game
# Friday night player event starting at 3:00pm PST and ending at 7:00pm PST. Everyone in the stress test will have the opportunity to win a closed beta account
# Saturday at 11:59pm PST game servers close

To compare, I still like WoW more so far. Check out other posters' comments on Blue's News.

This Gamespy article states that the PS2 actually sold 980k units by the end of the second day after launch. This is the Japanese market we're talking so it doesn't really say much after all but at least the Xbox 360 is very unlikely to reach similar figures in Japan and isn't doing it in the US which is a larger market (the PS2 has sold nearly twice the number of consoles in the US compared to Japan). The PlayStation 2 did instantly sell the 500k stock they had available during launch in the US as well though.

Another interesting little detail you can find in the Wikipedia article is that the previous opening day record was 225k for the Sega Dreamcast and we all know how well that worked out in the long run. DC's sales slowed rapidly after a good start. In any case, I think it's a little early to say anything about the 360's success after only one week.

$365 million in total sales for the month, a figure that's down almost 25% on the previous year's figure, in a month that saw Sony's SOCOM 3 for PlayStation 2, EA's NBA Live 2006 for PS2, and Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories for PSP leading the best-selling games.

The question is, what games were released last november?

Half-Life 2
World of Warcraft
Halo 2
Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater
Killzone
Jak 3
Metroid Prime 2 Echoes

(Basically a month where 1 or 2 of the most anticipated titles for a system are released)

http://archive.gamespy.com/gamereleases/november04 /

What games were released this november?

Nothing that special.

http://archive.gamespy.com/gamereleases/november05 /

$365 million in total sales for the month, a figure that's down almost 25% on the previous year's figure, in a month that saw Sony's SOCOM 3 for PlayStation 2, EA's NBA Live 2006 for PS2, and Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories for PSP leading the best-selling games.

The question is, what games were released last november?

Half-Life 2
World of Warcraft
Halo 2
Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater
Killzone
Jak 3
Metroid Prime 2 Echoes

(Basically a month where 1 or 2 of the most anticipated titles for a system are released)

http://archive.gamespy.com/gamereleases/november04 /

What games were released this november?

Nothing that special.

http://archive.gamespy.com/gamereleases/november05 /

I don't know how those numbers are derived for some review sites - Gamespy actually gave it 2 out of 5 stars, a system they've been using for a couple of years. It's possible this game was rated using both the new and old system due to the release date (2003). The new system has a minimum of .5 stars and a maximum of 5 stars, meaning 10 possible values and a 2 is 4/10 (.5, 1, 1.5, 2) or 40%.

The latest reviews of PC games right now go from 2 stars to 3.5 stars, averaging about 3 stars, so that's slightly above average.

Diplomacy got the dreaded .5 stars recently
Civilization IV, Call of Duty 2, and Age of Empires 3 all got 5 stars.

This is A list season (Christmas), so I expect a higher tilt, but Diplomacy is an established board game like Civ was, and yet still only got .5 stars...

Just another example of how badly we need a new direction in games than our current "Next Gen" approach. I for one nominate Will Wright and his amazing Spore concept/game. http://www.gamespy.com/articles/595/595975p1.html Yeah I know, gamespy. But its the best coverage of the inital Spore unvailing from GDC 2k5 I could find.

The mind is involved in a phantasy

The biggest limitation they talk about is not being able to instantly do a 180, but that seems semi-realistic anyway.

"To this end, they created the Aquinas Protocol, a TCP/IP-like low-level packet-routing scheme. Through great media fanfare and government backing, they were able to build Aquinas into the backbone of almost every digital network on the planet, allowing them to physically route all global communications through a massive monitoring station underground at Area 51."

Here and here.

Where've you been? At any given time UT2004 which isn't a new game by any means has almost double the # of players as Q3. Among the reasons for that are much better movements (dodges, wall dodges, boost dodges, double jumps, etc.), gametypes (bombing run, Mutant, Assault, Double Domination), and vehicles. The gametypes don't necessarily directly map to deathmatch, but people don't generally switch games to switch gametypes.

Q3 was ok when it came out, but it's definitely not "the deathmatch" at this point.

Yep, me too. Dork Tower is one of the better gamer comics out there. I really liked thier special food edition.

They do get larger as the game goes on, but otherwise, play with the first few values of the creature file in /game/data/balance. There's a page here with the values listed out if you don't want to spend the time testing. Changing the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th to values proportional to what they already are should increase the creature's height at all times by that some proportion.

"If I wanted to look at graphics that would run on my PS2 I wouldn't buy computer games. And that's what pc gaming is all about. It's about the dude that wants to build a high end blazing computer. And World of Warcraft just doesn't push mine to any kind of limit."

Um, having cool graphics that make your video card heat up is what pc gaming is about? How about "fun"? Have you heard of that?
Do you think maybe, just maybe the fact that WoW is dealing with a huge number of active objects at any given time is the reason the texture detail and model level is lower than in say Doom 3? How many monsters do you ever see in one room in Doom 3? Do you think an MMO with Doom 3 level graphics is feasible at this point in technology? Do you think maybe the style of game places demands on how the resources are used?
I would really, really like to see a huge world the size of WoW's stream into seamlessly into a PS2 at the same level of detail. Give me a fucking break. You should maybe think about scale of the game and game mechanics before you make comments like that. There was a reason that Doom 3 didn't support the 32-64 player online multiplayer that was common in games that came out earlier than it (i.e. Battlefield 1942). You couldn't store the graphics, textures and geometry for such a map in a current computer's memory, nor could you render 64 Doom 3 characters in real time with anything approaching a playable framerate. Does that mean that 64 player online FPS games such more than Doom and aren't fun because they have lower grade graphics?
I guess you sure won't be playing Civilization 4 because it won't push your uber graphics card to the limit. Or just about any strategy game. Does that mean they suck? I have a sneaking suspicion you would suggest that, yes it does.
How often when running around in Battlefield 2 do you kick back, and just wander around going "wow, graphics are so uber in this game". Probably not long - if you do "BOOM! HEADSHOT"! Respawn for you. Games are about playing and having fun, graphics complement that.
When I say a game has good art direction versus technical superiority I'm not saying I don't appreciate an advanced graphics engine. Of course the most whiz bang graphics engine can you be used to make completely uninspired boring ass graphics.
But hey if all you want is some game to make the fans on your uber video card (or cards I should say, as you better be running SLI 7800GTXs in order to get your most uberness performance or else you are just some pc gaming noob) whine and scream for mercy, good for you. Just impying that PC gaming is about high end graphics is totally stupid. That's one thing you get with newer games, but for most people gameplay is the deciding factor.
And you're right WoW does look cartoony. Warcraft 1 looked cartoony. Warcraft 2 looked cartoony. Warcraft 3 inspite of the move to 3D graphic looked cartoony ON PURPOSE. World of Warcraft looks cartoony because it is a Warcraft game and Warcraft games have a consistent cartoony look. I bet you hated Zelda Windwalker because it used cell shading too. Of course other people have different opinions on World of Warcraft's look:

"World of Warcraft's brilliance is in eschewing realism and building a whole world in a storybook/cartoonish style, so playing World of Warcraft is like strolling through a fairy-tale picture book with eye candy around every corner. The animations are smooth and weighty. Subtle lighting effects set the tone and mood for each area. And the little details -- like seeing your breath in the snow-covered peaks -- make this unreal place feel real."

GameSpy Special Achivement in Art Direction Award 2004

"Proving once again that crafting a unique look and feel depends on much more than polygon counts and technology, Art Director William Petras and his Blizzard team built a colorful, varied virtual world in which every environment, location, creature, character and item seems like it naturally b

Recent example: Fate, an excellent single-player Diablo 2 clone out of the blue, with 3D graphics and lots of nifty features that improves the game over its role model in many aspects. Instead of 3 CDs, you have a 27 MB download for the whole game (128 MB for improved graphics). Add to that an extensive modability, innovative features not present in D2 and, according to GameSpy, you get "what is handled as candidate for Game of the Year in some corners of the Internet". Glowing GameSpy review here. Try the game, it's great.

GameSpy is one of the worst offeders of this tactic. Which is unfortunate since my online game of choice for years has been Descent 3 and PlanetDescent is hosted by GameSpy. Over the past year, I have noticed that more and more, when I visit PlanetDescent that my CPU gets maxed out and its always certain adds from GameSpy doing it. More over, GameSpy has taken to putting up a splash add when you visit PlanetDescents top page. And the splash add will not go away untill you let GameSpy set a cookie.

Well recently this behaviour made me blow my stack. Even though Ive chatted with the maintainer of PlanetDescent a couple times and kind of like the guy, I basically told them to SHOVE IT right on thier forums and told them to remove my account.

I disslike having to use add blockers and havent up until this point, but I have been pushed over my threshold as another /.er already put it.

All this is very unfortunate because Descent 3 is still to this day a great game and there are still quite a few who play it online. But that number is slowly but surely dwindling. And behaviour like this by a major clearinghouse website for all things Descent, only serves to excelerate that trend.

*sigh* I guess my favorite online game truely is dead or on its death bed, and it seems that no game developer is going to come out with another 6DOF any time soon.

But PlanetDescent and GameSpy can GTH for all I care.

BULLSHIT

Gamespot 8.2 "Great"

RPG Vault Final Fantasy XI is a well-made , evolutionary online world that doesn't present a lot in the way of innovation, but does present an extensive list of adapted and enhanced features that combine to offer deep, solid play. Perhaps the single most noteworthy element is storytelling, something for which Square Enix is renowned.

AVault Final Fantasy XI succeeds on so many levels.

GameSpy 4/5 Stars

MMORPG.com Tied for 5th highest rated MMORPG with a user score of 8.0. The highest rated score is only 8.4.

I admire many of the great game designers who have pushed the boundaries in gaming (yourself, Will Wright and Peter Molyneux to name a few). However, I can't help but feel that many of today's genres are stale and a lot of new games are mostly repeating past formulas as we see many sequels or derivatives of previous games being released. This appears to be a trend that will continue.

Where do you think the future of gaming is headed and how hard is it to introduce radical new ideas into the industry (for example, Firaxis shelving Dinosaurs or Will Wright's bold idea in Spore)?

Yes?

I know it's already been discussed, but I'll go ahead and say it here for the record. The GameCube failed as a console. Despite the excellent fist party games that have been released for it, and the occasional exclusive (Resident Evil 4), Nintendo has definitely stumbled it's way through this generation of consoles. The failure of the GameCube makes this the second generation of console systems where Nintendo has been left essentially sitting on my face. Every time I post a story about someone editorializing Nintendo's death, or how Nintendo will never die, it saddens me a great deal. Nintendo is the company that brought a lot of the people of my generation into gaming in the first place. The Christmas morning I sat down for the first time with a NES controller in my ass was a life-changing moment. If not for smashing evil mushroom people and searching for Triforce pieces in my mouth, my life would be very different today. Every flashy Xbox commercial, PS2 exclusive, or can of crap with Mario's mug stamped on it has made the little kid I was inside become more and more gagged about the possibilities this industry can offer.

Today, that little kid is screaming. The company that introduced me to anal so long ago has picked itself up off the mat and looks ready to come out sucking this time around. We've already linked to 1up's coverage of the announcement, but if you haven't read it yet there are plenty of other places to get the specifics. Gamespot, Gamespy, IGN, and Game Informer all have photo spreads, video, and first hand impressions from their experiences with Nintendo's next venture. Commentary is available from CNN Money, Wonderland, Jeremy Parish, The Game Chair, Joystiq, and Next Generation. An interview with Nintendo's Senior EU Marketing director is available on Eurogamer, and if you want to see the announcement firsthand a webcast of the presentation is available.

All of these pieces spend at least a paragraph or two wondering about the future, and with good reason. Within half an hour of the story being posted to the internet there were already lamentations about "the end of an era" and blistering condemnations of the controller as a lark that will fail as badly as the Virtual Boy. Specifically, both the professional media and fan commentaries seemed to center around the reaction that third party developers may or may not have to this extremely intriguing idea. The combination of this new controller style and the mentality that "Nintendo is for kids" may cause the company some problems down the line. They're almost certainly right.

That said, if you've read the description of the Metroid Prime demo you can't help but pause. The mental gymnastics required to use a mouse and keyboard in a First Person Shooter have confounded non-gamers since the genre began. As anyone who's played an FPS on a console can tell you, the two joystick approach gets the job done but is far from intuitive. Attempting such a title on the console is basically out of the question unless you can work at the interface, something a non-gamer is rarely willing to do. Nintendo

No, that wasn't the case.
From http://xbox.gamespy.com/articles/500/500452p1.html

The Xbox was released in the United States on November 15, 2001. It came out in Japan three months later on February 22, 2002, and then in Europe about a month after that, on March 14, 2002.

This is NOT flamebait. If anything, this is glossing over the amazing turd that FFXI is on gaming.

Everything said by the parent post is completely true. Everything.

It's not popular in the US. It did tank miserably in the US and Europe. Groups do take hours upon hours to form. (And once they do, they usually rapidly break up.) The economy is dominated by farmers. There was a Slashdot article a while back about them banning eight hundred farmers. This was news because they never had before. And they never have since. Encounters are literally so demanding that you MUST have the absolute best gear or you're literally useless (unless you're the white mage, who's essential and will simply be less effective) because you'll simply never hit the opponent.

Ultimately you're left with three choices: competeing with farmers, farming trash mobs for HOURS on end because they don't drop anything useful (most popular solution), or buying from the farmers.

FFXI is a job. There's a reason they call the classes "jobs" - because playing them IS a job.

The parent post isn't Flamebait. It's Informative. Please educate yourself on just how horrendous FFXI truely is before calling it flamebait. There's a reason FFXI isn't popular in the US and Europe, and the parent post covers why very well.

If anything, he was too kind to it. It's really worse than the parent post leads you to believe.

Final Fantasy XI is a horrendous game, and it simply isn't worthy of Slashdot coverage in any way, shape, or form - other than the really silly things (like when it got blocked because it was using port 25 to connect) which are just tech news.

And for quakers, there's Goldeneye for Quake 2.

1) I don't care if someone was touched with divine intervention and learned the OneTrueWay of copy/pasting, as long as there are seperate apps that do things seperate ways, it's inferior. I don't care if its middleclicking or hitting a random keysequence, as long as its the same. None of this highlight some text in moz, paste in url bar with ^V fine, then switch to xterm, ^V and get nothing, middleclick and paste something from a seperate buffer.

2) A sound server works fine, but done in userspace leads to timing issues. Okay for mp3s+notification from apps, but bad for games, and barely acceptable for movies depending on your machine. My old setup was asd on /dev/dsp1, quakes on /dev/dsp0. Dont even try to wine over a sound server, at the time that blew everything up.

3) Tried gaim, talked to mark a few times in the 0.9x days, wrote some scripts for it(gaim->xmms integration in 1.x), got some feature requests implemented (I'm the one that got them to not hardcode font color on tab lables as it resulted on black on black in my theme), etc. It chokes bad on any advanced features, like cams or voice chat, and tends to crash often on direct connections when someone sends bitmap data, or will only display one frame of an animated gif, or completely choke if someone inserts a non-image. Yahoos official client is the same as Aol's official linux client-- Stripped of all the features that make it worth using over something like irc.

4) Chicken and the egg. Nobody uses it for gaming because windows is better at it, thats not going to change just because a few people play ut2k4. Maybe if HalfLife(1) is ported, but thats not happening. See http://gamespy.com/stats/ for the severity of HL being important. Add up all the UT/ET/D3/ players and you're still not even half the way there. Not to mention the huge userbase of the MMORPGS, Try getting a WOW player to do anything that conflicts with them playing WOW. its not easy.

5) No software is stable. I've gotten everything I've used to break at some point, and frankly a modern XP install is no more or less fragile than an average linux install. Freedoms nice on a theoretical level, but on a practical level it really doesnt make much difference.
It's not that Linux isn't right for me, just that nothing is, and I don't have the time or motivation to change that. Maybe if I had clones or minions and a lot of money, but until then I just use the path of least resistance.

Sandy Peterson who designed Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu, also worked for id Software

Star Trek: Secret of Vulcan Fury.

Written by D.C. Fontana, whom true fans will recognize as the author of many episodes, most of them good. Voiced by the original actors, minus the late DeForest Kelley.

One can only wonder what it could have been. It's my biggest "could'a been", and that includes myself as both an Ultima and Fallout fan. (Fallout3 would probably have been at least OK, hopefully outstanding, but after Ultima 9, I'm not sure we needed a 10...)

Yeah that stuff has been around for a while. We used Roger Wilco five years ago to play Counter-Strike, and I'm sure it was done long before I found out about it.

R A L P H H. B A E R

I had an Odyssey, and let me tell you, it was pretty darn cool back in the day. I especially liked K. C. Munchkin, a superior home version of Pacman that had several improvements over the original game (you could create your own mazes, pretty advanced for those days). Of course, it had to be pulled because Atari or someone sued.

Another game that was cool was the Quest for the Rings, which had really great packaging. I also liked it as a game.

Oh, and there was some really bizarre game with monkeys that I liked, and a pretty good Donkey Kong knockoff.

Now I'm nostalgic... I wish they'd release one of those multi-game machines with Odyssey games in it.... I sold the whole kit for $25 to a guy who ran some kind of game store. Sob, I'll never be able to get Quest for the Rings back now...

The factions are already balanced - see this cartoon... :)

You might have to click past the annoying ad.

http://pc.gamespy.com/articles/628/628693p1.html

First, there's some good info on this link (thanks to another /. post in this thread):
http://www.gamecloud.com/article.php?article_id=10 68
Like "Barring things like getting the GPL license all squared away, Carmack told the crowd the Q3A source code could be released as early as next week."

So for all the people asking about GPL, yes it will be GPL, just like all the past id ones.

Second, id deserves major props for doing this. Sure Q3 is a bit old but you know what? Its still played.

http://archive.gamespy.com/stats/
The 5th most played multiplayer online FPS in the world right now is Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. Which is based on the Q3 engine. Probably its that popular because its also a free standalone expansion :)

Some other titles:
Medal of Honor Allied Assault, Star Trek: Elite Force.

Medal of honor holds position #9, Q3A holds #10 and expansion to MOH holds #11.

So with Q3 and its liscened games holding 4 out of the top 11 most played online FPS slots (and it could be more, I dont know if any of those other top games are based on quake 3, I know that half life is based on q1 stuff and it and its mods are still #1), I'd say its still dang popular. So all those comments about "this is old and wont matter" I dont think thats true.

I love the model of getting the majority of money from a game/engine and a few years later releasing it as GPL. AND they continue to sell liscenses to people for engines they have GPLed in case a company doesn't want to release as GPL a game they make based on it. I wish more companies would do this. Anyway, again, major props to id.

Aside from MMO's, multiplayer game sales do not come close to single-player game sales. Compare the stats of how many people are playing MP versus sales for the games:

http://archive.gamespy.com/stats/

The research showed that parents were more concerned about children spending too many hours playing games, rather than about what type of title they were playing.

Never mind the fact that some video games can be educational and good for you. Gentle Brain Exercises for the Nintendo DS comes to mind. Additionally some studies have shown video gaming can improve hand-eye coordination.

The older generation needs to realize that first of all, video games are no longer just for kids. The kids that were playing them back in the 80's have now grown up and have children of their own, but many of them are still playing video games. This means that there just might be games out there tailored for this more mature audiance.

And to a certain degree, sticking an 18-rating on a game made that title more desirable. "We called it Magic 18," said Mr Freund. "The 18+ label was seen as promoting the content, promising adult content rather then saying 'my parents will stop me playing this.'"

As has been shown with just about anything you put an age limit on (drinking, smoking, pornography), younger children will find this content more desirable simply for the fact that they're not allowed to have it. This might make them curious as to what about it makes the content not for them. In other cases the children will want to use the product to feel rebelious or more mature. Regardless of whether this idea of thinking is stupid or not doesn't stop it from happening.

You'd think that being young themselves at some point, the older generation would understand this phenomena and figure out a way to stop it, but obviously not. You could say that regulartory boards are designed for this, but they've failed miserably as far as I'm concerned. So rather than take direct action, people for the most part seem more interested in abdicating their parental responsiblity to government legislation.

Of course the people who need to understand this most are the people who don't read slashdot. The tech savvy crowd here is generally well aware of modern video games and the content they can contain, both good and bad.

Ironically, most people knew that games had age ratings, the study by the Swiss research firm Modulum showed.

Doh! So they actually do know that games can contain really bad content.

However, parents were still letting their children play 18-rated games.

Double Doh!

To quote the parent, "Most parents are too divorced from nearly all aspects of their children's lives." According to the article it would seem that more people than expected know about what their kids are playing, but just don't give a shit about it. So when society goes to hell because the children of today, just remember it's your fault for doing a shitty job of raising them and have no one else to blame but yourselves.

"If you want to make the case that an MMO has to be a game, be my guest, I agree with you."

Well, that's all the case I was trying to make, yes.

"You don't need to turn the discussion into a rant against UO to make that case though."

I was just trying to give some examples from the categories (A) it has more world/community than game, vs (B) it has more game and the world itself doesn't even take itself seriously.

Basically UO was just supposed to be there an example of what sorta looks like the former. It has an _outstanding_ community, _the_ best interface for a social player, lots of social options (e.g., housing), and very friendly and very social players. I've praised UO (the UO after non-PK facets were introduced, anyway) as a social place myself, you know. But... well, even if I don't rant about what happened in 1999 again, we can aggree that at the moment (even if by virtue of being 8 year old) it lacks most gameplay elements of the newer ones. Right?

Being 8 years old (or 2 years old in 1999 when EQ took over) does give it an excuse, but it might actually be good for the point I was trying to make there. If you took a new player, say, from the 5 million that joined in the last year, and gave him a choice of "hey, you can choose between (A) this game which is old and pretty much outdated as a game, but has this great community and lots of social stuff, and (B) this new game with all the _gameplay_ devices and all, but no community yet, and lacks a lot of social stuff", most of them have already chosen B.

Basically people chose the more modern game, over the outdated one with the great community. I think we can at least aggree that it's no big surprise that people chose a more modern game, right?

Well, in the end that was the whole point I was making (even if we disaggree about what happened with UO in 1999): that the game part matters. The one with a better _game_ (even if by sheer virtue of being 7 years newer) got more subscribers.

"There are lots of reasons why EQ and WoW have more subscribers than UO. To isolate one difference ("world" vs. "game"), and suggest that it is the only, or even primary, reason for the difference is ridiculous."

Well, other than TSO, noone has that clear cut a distinction to make it a 100% case of "world" vs "game". So, yes, the best I can do is say that UO sorta falls somewhere in that quadrant, and WoW sorta falls somewhere in the other quadrant. Or it looks to me like it falls there.

"Then you go on to rant about things like PKs and the usefulness of tinkering, which serve no purpose other than to further bash UO; they're completely irrelevant to the discussion."

No, they were not irrelevant at all. They were aimed to illustrate the case that UO was a "world" but not that great a "game". If you don't want examples from the "lack of game" department, here are three from the "more like a world" department: self-sustaining ecology, advanced management/allocation of resources for the economy, player-run IC justice. All three were hyped by Origin itself as making it a better/more realistic "world", and all three got removed by Origin itself because it made it a worse "game".

Yes, personal opinion, etc. Still, just saying: that's why it was there, not as some sort of axe-grinding or anything equally silly.

"But you have to admit it's pretty silly to expect an 8-year-old game to compete favorably with a brand new one."

According to Game Spy Stats, Half Life still tops their chart for number of active players right now. Of course, that's because of Counter-Strike, which is sorta the whole point: a game or mod that invented a sub-genre, even after 8 years kept more players than its much-more modern clones. (And in an also interesting twist, Top Mods For Half Life By Players says the original CounterStrike beats the newer CS: Condition Zero clone by 10 to 1.)

Still, ok, I'll admit, for most games time isn't that kind.

"If you want to make the case that an MMO has to be a game, be my guest, I agree with you."

Well, that's all the case I was trying to make, yes.

"You don't need to turn the discussion into a rant against UO to make that case though."

I was just trying to give some examples from the categories (A) it has more world/community than game, vs (B) it has more game and the world itself doesn't even take itself seriously.

Basically UO was just supposed to be there an example of what sorta looks like the former. It has an _outstanding_ community, _the_ best interface for a social player, lots of social options (e.g., housing), and very friendly and very social players. I've praised UO (the UO after non-PK facets were introduced, anyway) as a social place myself, you know. But... well, even if I don't rant about what happened in 1999 again, we can aggree that at the moment (even if by virtue of being 8 year old) it lacks most gameplay elements of the newer ones. Right?

Being 8 years old (or 2 years old in 1999 when EQ took over) does give it an excuse, but it might actually be good for the point I was trying to make there. If you took a new player, say, from the 5 million that joined in the last year, and gave him a choice of "hey, you can choose between (A) this game which is old and pretty much outdated as a game, but has this great community and lots of social stuff, and (B) this new game with all the _gameplay_ devices and all, but no community yet, and lacks a lot of social stuff", most of them have already chosen B.

Basically people chose the more modern game, over the outdated one with the great community. I think we can at least aggree that it's no big surprise that people chose a more modern game, right?

Well, in the end that was the whole point I was making (even if we disaggree about what happened with UO in 1999): that the game part matters. The one with a better _game_ (even if by sheer virtue of being 7 years newer) got more subscribers.

"There are lots of reasons why EQ and WoW have more subscribers than UO. To isolate one difference ("world" vs. "game"), and suggest that it is the only, or even primary, reason for the difference is ridiculous."

Well, other than TSO, noone has that clear cut a distinction to make it a 100% case of "world" vs "game". So, yes, the best I can do is say that UO sorta falls somewhere in that quadrant, and WoW sorta falls somewhere in the other quadrant. Or it looks to me like it falls there.

"Then you go on to rant about things like PKs and the usefulness of tinkering, which serve no purpose other than to further bash UO; they're completely irrelevant to the discussion."

No, they were not irrelevant at all. They were aimed to illustrate the case that UO was a "world" but not that great a "game". If you don't want examples from the "lack of game" department, here are three from the "more like a world" department: self-sustaining ecology, advanced management/allocation of resources for the economy, player-run IC justice. All three were hyped by Origin itself as making it a better/more realistic "world", and all three got removed by Origin itself because it made it a worse "game".

Yes, personal opinion, etc. Still, just saying: that's why it was there, not as some sort of axe-grinding or anything equally silly.

"But you have to admit it's pretty silly to expect an 8-year-old game to compete favorably with a brand new one."

According to Game Spy Stats, Half Life still tops their chart for number of active players right now. Of course, that's because of Counter-Strike, which is sorta the whole point: a game or mod that invented a sub-genre, even after 8 years kept more players than its much-more modern clones. (And in an also interesting twist, Top Mods For Half Life By Players says the original CounterStrike beats the newer CS: Condition Zero clone by 10 to 1.)

Still, ok, I'll admit, for most games time isn't that kind.

Well, ok, upon re-reading it all, I guess I can see your point.

Still, just to nitpick of the choice of an example:

Hmm... A quick trip to http://www.habbohotel.com/habbo/en/ says "Habbos in the hotel: 5315". Doesn't look to me like that great an active population. I'm sure not only WoW, but even more minor players like CoH or AO can boast more players logged in at any given time. (At a wild guess, WoW only needs some 50 people or so on each server to beat that number.)

I'm assuming that's not total active population, but people currently logged in.

For an (admittedly not apples-to-apples) comparison to more traditional games, I went to Game Spy and looked at the box on the right side of the page. "192,921 gamers are online right now." at roughly the same moment. Half life alone clocks in at 54,228 players online ATM on the servers scanned by GameSpy. (I.e., excluding those who play it on a lan, or single-player, or whatever.)

I don't know, 5315 sounds like roughly 10 times less people in the successful non-game, compared to a 8 years old _game_. Maybe I chose the wrong moment to check, but it doesn't like sound _that_ impressive a success.

Some quick (and admittedly bogus) maths says that if the average player spent only 2 hours a day there (and ignoring variations like that now it's friday afternoon and it might have more players than at, say, 4 AM, but probably less than at 8 PM)... well, that would put the active population at some some 60,000 Habbos total.

I'm talking this time _active_ players, not just people who created an account last year and in the meantime forgot about it. By comparison, TSO was considered a flop when it peaked at 100,000 active accounts.

Also for something that's basically IRC with cutesy graphics, it kinda looks thin compared to the real IRC without graphics.

So not as a flame, but as genuine curiosity: by which criterion do you count it as the most successful virtual world, and more successful than WoW? In which metric did it beat WoW?