Slashdot Mirror

That would help more if people would stop writing articles that read like:

"There's an article on CNN about a new sequel to the popular PC game Half-Life by Valve Software (and published by Sierra Entertainment. I'm sure all of Slashdot will be glad to hear this news. GamePro also has an article. The White House had no comment.

That would help more if people would stop writing articles that read like:

"There's an article on CNN about a new sequel to the popular PC game Half-Life by Valve Software (and published by Sierra Entertainment. I'm sure all of Slashdot will be glad to hear this news. GamePro also has an article. The White House had no comment.

EA has NEVER been able to approach Papyrus' NASCAR Racing series, even in their wildest dreams. And if you're not interested in running Bills's OS but want to play a NASCAR simulation, get NASCAR Racing 2003 Season for Macintosh (read Unix). In addition to the stock CD material, you'll have access to 1000s of usermade drop in paint schemes from the Windows version, and hundreds of additional tracks made from scratch and converted from previous games.

Learn about the OSX versions of these games here.

However, not everyone enjoys sim racing. For quality arcade racers, the consoles are a better platform for that.

Hey, TF2 also appeared at E3... in 1999. It's still not out. Valve has not had an official comment since 2001. So, why is anyone getting excited about this announcement?

Don't get me wrong. Half-life was a good game. Still is. It's so good, in fact, that it has spawned a grass-roots development community that has been incredibly prolific.

Still though, I've lost patience. In five years, Valve has made one game. ONE GAME. That's only one more game than I've made and I'm not even trying.

Oh, they've also become quite good at taking the mod's and add-ons developed by other people and putting them in cardboard boxes. Kudos, Valve. Oh, and there's Steam: their nifty content delivery mechanism for downloading that one game they've made.

In short, I'll believe it when I see it.

Hehe, a bit older than that. From Sierra's own site: "TF2 named: 'Best Action Game', 'Best Multiplayer Game', E3 1999". Just imagine how good it's got to be by now!

If there are people interested in RPGs that are willing to become free game testers in the Orange County, California area. Troika Games, LLC the makers of Arcanum, and now Greyhawk: Temple of Elemental Evil are looking for people to do in house quality assurance and gameplay testing.

These are unpaid internships, but if you turn out to be someone who isn't a total jerk, we would be more than happy to write you letters of recommendation and if you are a real asset to the company even hire you on ourselves.

So far we've hired 5 people out of unpaid internships and they are some of our best workers.

If you are interested please e-mail jobs@troikagames.com or give us a call (949)250-4933 or mail us (our address should be on our website. Please only inquire if you are willing to work in the Orange County, California area. This isn't for "Closed BETA Testing", this is an actual quality assurance position where you will work in house with the developers.

It's time for another interview here on Curmudgeon and this time we have with us Brian Hook, president of Pyrogon Games and former developer at id Software and Verant/Sony Online Entertainment. Before working on the seminal shooters Quake 2 and Quake 3: Arena, Brian was the original architect of the Glide API used by the 3dfx Voodoo line of video cards. After departing id, Brian worked as a Senior Technology Architect at Verant, concentrating on development of technology for next-generation massively-multiplayer online games (MMOGs). After founding Pyrogon in 2000, he created the puzzle game Candy Cruncher, which we reviewed earlier this year. Two additional Pyrogon games have appeared since then, NingPo MahJong and Letter Linker, both available for Windows and MacOS X. (A Linux version of NingPo MahJong will be shipping in the near future.)

This interview covers a wide range of topics: game design criticism, OpenGL/D3D, making money as a smaller game developer, and the importance of porting software to different platforms. Indeed, something for just about everyone. It's quite long, so you might want to bookmark it and consume it in more than one reading.

The interview questions were prepared with the assistance of regular CG authors ruffin and michael.

jvm: What kinds of games do you enjoy playing the most?

Hook: That's a tough question. I guess in some ways I just have very high expectations about software these days, so most games pretty much turn me off within the first 5 minutes when I spot egregious design flaws.

That said, the games I've played and enjoyed the most recently have been No One Lives Forever 2, which I felt had some of the best production value I've ever seen in a game, and Ghost Recon, which is a hoot in multiplayer.

jvm: So you play mostly on a PC, as opposed to a console?

Hook: I should really get some consoles and play console games, but it's hard to justify the time.

jvm: Could we get an example of a game with these egregious design flaws, complete with a breakdown of those flaws? The more popular the game, the better.

Hook: That's dangerous ground =)

But a typical example I have is what I call "simulations that think they're games". To me, a game should be fun and exciting, which means that I should be making interesting decisions that lead to success based on the data I have at that time. Too many games today STILL punish you by just killing you because that's "realistic".

Hitman 2 is a good example of this. Starting with the very first mission, you can pretty much expect to go through and play that mission 20 times before you complete it, because there are timed events that you don't know about a priori. Which is a shame, because the actual mechanics in Hitman 2 were extremely fun. It was probably the one game in recent memory that I really wanted to like but which ended up being so frustrating and tedious that I couldn't enjoy it. Obviously it's a popular game, so I'm in the minority on this.

I think the games that really got a lot of this down were the 1980s LucasArts adventure games like Lo

Is it just me, or does the enemy in that last screenshot you linked from your post look conspicuously like another type of alien we all know and love.

I really find it hard to believe that someone would have gone to this much trouble just to play Richard and Alan's Escape From Hell or Hillsfar.

But as for your suggestion for using an Atari or Calico -- there was no Bard's Tale for the Calicovision, nor Space Quest. For DOS, however, we had Wing Commander, and a whole series of Leisure Suit Larry. By 1991, we had the original BattleTech and BattleTech II, not that wierd MechWarrior similator thing.

Hmm...I wonder what I did with the scratch and sniff card from Leather Goddesses of Phobos?

Hmm...it's times like this when I'm glad there's places like emulation.net so I can find something interesting to play with.

(yes, this is partly sarcasm...it's up to you to determine what part)

Their corporate overview mentions Sierra Entertainment, as does their list of studios. The only time Valve is mentioned is on the articles reporting this. And Sierra says on their own corporate info page that they have a partnership with Valve, they don't own it. So don't sweat it yet, Half-Life 2 could still be released for Linux.

Despite everyone's assumptions, nothing called "Half-Life 2" has ever been announced or talked about by anyone connected with Valve. Team Fortress 2 has been shown publicly, however.

Tons of students studied CS at my old college, but we all majored in Comp Sci and others..

Plus their shitty way of handling the patches didn't help. They needed a "update from any version" like half-life, just some insane numbering scheme like 22039802-220930948.exe, 220099034-2229923.exe, etc.

The stupid naming scheme never gave one a clear indication as to which patch is which, what order to do it in, and you had to apply several patches instead of one "update from a to current version c" patch.

I never trusted their "auto-update," last thing I need is to have update the game if it messed up and I had to reinstall it. I would rather deal with the insane patch names.

I also hated how they didn't even bother hosting all of their own patches, I noticed that a lot of places had versions that they were not hosting. I guess they where try to save even more fat sacks of cash by having others host the patches they should have been hosting themselves.

Looking at the offical page at least they now have a update from original disk to the latest option and are hosting the fixes, but are still using the crummy numbering scheme.

Maybe I will give it another try some time.

Dsanfte is Right on about game companies not wanting to assist gamers about various issues.

I'll provide two examples as well, Two good and one bad.

I've never played Everquest so I can't comment on what this person is going through but I can comment on the following games:

No One Lives Forever 2

007: Nightfire

Day of Defeat - a Killer World War II Half-Life Mod

Both of these games have a predecessor that have had sucess in it's previous incarnations.

The 007 Games have had a standard to live up to ever since the console game 'Goldeneye' was released. This game gained it's popularity with the awesome multiplayer aspects on the console. IMO this was the predecessor to all the on-line console games that are out now.

No One Lives Forever 1 (NOLF1) was an amazing game with a multiplayer aspect that immensely enhanced the single player game and was the major reason that this game won all the awards that it did. (Running over people with Snowmobiles is sooo fun)

When NOLF2 was released the reviews on the single player was favorable but nothing was said about the multiplayer aspect. I began researching this game for a possible purchase and began vewing the Sierra Forums and noted Two problems:

1) All MP aspects that made NOLF1 a great game, was removed for a 'co-op' multiplayer version. The 'Co-Op' version was essentially teams of online players playing against an AI Opponent.

2) The MP code was buggy. People were complaining of too many dropped packets.

Sierra'sattitude for #1 was initally "If you don't like it go buy another game that has on-line player vs online player this is not what this game is about". (These threads have since mysteriously disappeared)

After player after player were complaining about the lack of the cool MP aspects that made NOLF1 famous and the fact that people were mad that couldn't return the game (they were all expecting the same MP aspects of NOLF1 in NOLF2), news came out that a new patch would be coming out to add DM maps and better MP code.

Needles to say this alienated players and left sour tastes in peoples stomach. This reason alone and Sierra's initial atitude/response to this issue are the reason why I didn't buy this game and I laugh when it received Game of the Year Award by Adspy..er GameSpy.

007: Nightfire is EA/Gearbox's entry into the James Bond Game arena. This game is based on the Half-Life engine and has an original storyline. The Single player is amazing and has all the cool elements of a Bond Flick. The Multiplayer blew me away by the maps and mods it released. (Imagine a CTF/DM map that is a near perfect recreation of the Fort Knox Scene in 'Goldfinger'.)

Granted, when this product was initially released, there were issues with the game (MP Exploit, No Server manual, No MP manual for N00bs who don't understand the concept of Team-Killing). EA/Gearbox provided two methods to give feedback about this game (EA - E-mail and Gearbox Via their forums) and they (after about amonth of the PC version being released) are releasing a SP 'after the new year'.

In addition, with immense interest in Modding for this game (our clan is looking into creating MP maps that are recreations scenes in Bond Movies. We're looking to create maps for all the Bond Movies.), There will be a SDK released after the New Year as well.

Day of Defeat is probably the best Mod I've ever played in MP (not a big counter-strike fan). In short, this is a World War II mod with the Axis versus the Allies in various map situations. The weapon Recreation, maps and the general popularity is slowly growing every day. I beleive one of the main reasons why this is is that The Day of Defeat MOD team has a direct link to the public through their forums and are looking for contunuous feedback on how this game can be improved.

I will always be a fan of this MOD because of the direct link to the developers.

My advice to anyone who have problems with various games is to browse/Post to the game designers forums or e-mail the company with your concerns, more often than not the various companies will listen to the customers for they are the people who will come back tothe various companies for their next release of a given game.

Granted, you may not always find forums with direct link to the developersfor Games (ID Software is a good example of this) but if you do, utilize these resources.

My advice to Game companies is to listen to your customer base and give them a foum to give feedback for they pay your salaries and they dictate wether or not your game will continue to sell.

Issues with games are easy to fix, runied reputataions over a given game are next to impossible to fix.

Dolemite

Dsanfte is Right on about game companies not wanting to assist gamers about various issues.

I'll provide two examples as well, Two good and one bad.

I've never played Everquest so I can't comment on what this person is going through but I can comment on the following games:

No One Lives Forever 2

007: Nightfire

Day of Defeat - a Killer World War II Half-Life Mod

Both of these games have a predecessor that have had sucess in it's previous incarnations.

The 007 Games have had a standard to live up to ever since the console game 'Goldeneye' was released. This game gained it's popularity with the awesome multiplayer aspects on the console. IMO this was the predecessor to all the on-line console games that are out now.

No One Lives Forever 1 (NOLF1) was an amazing game with a multiplayer aspect that immensely enhanced the single player game and was the major reason that this game won all the awards that it did. (Running over people with Snowmobiles is sooo fun)

When NOLF2 was released the reviews on the single player was favorable but nothing was said about the multiplayer aspect. I began researching this game for a possible purchase and began vewing the Sierra Forums and noted Two problems:

1) All MP aspects that made NOLF1 a great game, was removed for a 'co-op' multiplayer version. The 'Co-Op' version was essentially teams of online players playing against an AI Opponent.

2) The MP code was buggy. People were complaining of too many dropped packets.

Sierra'sattitude for #1 was initally "If you don't like it go buy another game that has on-line player vs online player this is not what this game is about". (These threads have since mysteriously disappeared)

After player after player were complaining about the lack of the cool MP aspects that made NOLF1 famous and the fact that people were mad that couldn't return the game (they were all expecting the same MP aspects of NOLF1 in NOLF2), news came out that a new patch would be coming out to add DM maps and better MP code.

Needles to say this alienated players and left sour tastes in peoples stomach. This reason alone and Sierra's initial atitude/response to this issue are the reason why I didn't buy this game and I laugh when it received Game of the Year Award by Adspy..er GameSpy.

007: Nightfire is EA/Gearbox's entry into the James Bond Game arena. This game is based on the Half-Life engine and has an original storyline. The Single player is amazing and has all the cool elements of a Bond Flick. The Multiplayer blew me away by the maps and mods it released. (Imagine a CTF/DM map that is a near perfect recreation of the Fort Knox Scene in 'Goldfinger'.)

Granted, when this product was initially released, there were issues with the game (MP Exploit, No Server manual, No MP manual for N00bs who don't understand the concept of Team-Killing). EA/Gearbox provided two methods to give feedback about this game (EA - E-mail and Gearbox Via their forums) and they (after about amonth of the PC version being released) are releasing a SP 'after the new year'.

In addition, with immense interest in Modding for this game (our clan is looking into creating MP maps that are recreations scenes in Bond Movies. We're looking to create maps for all the Bond Movies.), There will be a SDK released after the New Year as well.

Day of Defeat is probably the best Mod I've ever played in MP (not a big counter-strike fan). In short, this is a World War II mod with the Axis versus the Allies in various map situations. The weapon Recreation, maps and the general popularity is slowly growing every day. I beleive one of the main reasons why this is is that The Day of Defeat MOD team has a direct link to the public through their forums and are looking for contunuous feedback on how this game can be improved.

I will always be a fan of this MOD because of the direct link to the developers.

My advice to anyone who have problems with various games is to browse/Post to the game designers forums or e-mail the company with your concerns, more often than not the various companies will listen to the customers for they are the people who will come back tothe various companies for their next release of a given game.

Granted, you may not always find forums with direct link to the developersfor Games (ID Software is a good example of this) but if you do, utilize these resources.

My advice to Game companies is to listen to your customer base and give them a foum to give feedback for they pay your salaries and they dictate wether or not your game will continue to sell.

Issues with games are easy to fix, runied reputataions over a given game are next to impossible to fix.

Dolemite

Haha, how's this for hype? They have "awards" for TF2 posted already!

The crown has to go to either Team Fortress 2 or Duke Nukem Forever. TF2 was being developed as far back as 1998! As for Duke Nukem Forever... hell, I remember when they were using the Quake 2 engine!

What's wrong with dark, depressing and dystopian? I like dark, depressing and dystopian!

It is true that many mind-less first person shooters have spawned into existence since the release of Doom, but certainly this is not the only sort of game that is unleashed upon humanity today.

As for 3D adventure games, I liked Under A Killing Moon a lot. It has a compelling storyline, great graphics and yes, a dark, depressing and dystopian 3D environment. It's awesome!

More recently, I finished Sierra's Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned. It too has beautiful 3D graphics (for its time) and a great in-depth plot. Lots of things to explore and figure out, and I think it does justice to the old adventure genre in that respect.

As for RPG's since Doom, you may have forgotten about Baldur's Gate, which is-- God forbid-- a 2D game, as is it's successor Baldur's Gate II, but if you want 3D exploration, let's have a look at Neverwinter Nights or maybe you've got more interest in mindless hack & slack ala Dungeon Siege. Let's not forget the more recent hits in mindlessness; I think good fun can be had with Grand Theft Auto 3, despite it being mindless, but if you want something more intelligent in that vein, have a look at Mafia.

So, no. I don't think the gaming industry is totally down the drain. It could be better, it always can be. There's no such thing as the perfect game for everybody.

Sierra has known about this for some time now.

But we're not getting much at all from big PC game companies like Sierra (who gave up on the mac with HalfLife) and so we don't have Homeworld, for instance - and we're not likely to see Homeworld 2 either

But we're not getting much at all from big PC game companies like Sierra (who gave up on the mac with HalfLife) and so we don't have Homeworld, for instance - and we're not likely to see Homeworld 2 either

Damn, you beat me to it, Let me see, Team Fortress 2. oh, yeah, that was 2 jobs at dot-com-fakes ago. :)

Sad to see how the time between each news post got higher and higher.

Isn't that QuakeTF not HalfLife TF, which is a horrible conversion and not anywhere near the greatness of the original?

The Black Mesa Federal Research Facility had a maglev train, at least, until it was destroyed by aliens from planet Xen.

Some that I enjoy:
Empire Earth
Think AoE but with somewhere around 12 ages to go through.
Cossacks
Again, similar to AoE but a much more limited time period.

Jedi Knight was a game I always had a lot of fun playing over a lan (any of the three versions). I spent way too much time playing JK with my roomates in college. One of the nice things about this, though it is a FPS, is the jedi powers. They add a whole new level of strategy to the game. Having a badass gun isn't near as useful when someone can just rip it out of your hands. :)

homeworld cataclysm would be a perfect game for a highschool lan party.

Since I don't have the game installed anymore, I wasn't able to try out the code, but it did successfully compile under MSVC 6.0.

Is this the complete source code of the game and if so, why couldn't the author try out the code without having the game installed?

Also, I had never heard of this game before now (I live under the third rock on the left) so I'm wondering if it is still available for sale somewhere or if I need to start scouring the web for a used copy? From the screenshots, Freespace 2 appears to be similar to Homeworld and Terminus. The latter is noteworthy as a there are versions for Linux and Mac OS 9. I was quite suprised (and very pleased) to find all three versions included in the same box.

It is these gaming communities that build interest in the games, add features, etc. These enthusiasts dump untold hours into improving games and this is how the software companies reward them?

I have some ties to N.E.R.D., the worlds 3rd largest CounterStrike server and would venture to guess that 90+% of the gamers happily paid for their software. The community only gets better when Sierra Games backs the gaming centers.

You can check Sierra's page for the Spacequest series here, it gives a good over on each of the games and the cover art is nostaligia in itself.

I really hope they do release this, and its not just rumor. I think I would actually be compelled to purchase a game for the first time in years. Maybe I'm just old though, I hope people who never played the originals will check it out.

Counter-Strike (www.counter-strike.net) has used more hours of my life than any other game. It's about three years old, and is regularly updated. There isn't a game around I've played for three year's time. It's free (as in beer) and only requires that you own a copy of Half-Life (www.half-life.sierra.com) wich currently runs about $30. Running a Counter-Strike Guild (www.dohguild.com) doesn't help much either!

Ahh, I remember the first time I saw an advertisement in a game - it was the Sprint banner that popped up for a second or so whenever you made a subspace comm connection with another ship or a base in Space Quest V ("Roger Wilco and the Next Mutation", by Sierra On-line).

However, I live in New Zealand, and had no idea what Sprint was, let alone how I could give it any money.

As such, for me at least, that was a pretty pointless ad. It was a novelty to see advertising in a game though...

• The manufacturers have a nonexistent economic incentive to give away their work for free. If you look at it from their viewpoint, you will see that the best they can do is to not lose money from the proposition.
• Most software houses have licensed proprietary pieces of code or business processes from other companies, and they did not pay for the right of unlimited distribution. A vendor notorious for continuing this practice, then blaming the fact that its main product is still completely closed source, is Sun.
• Companies know that they can quickly gain popularity amongst open source supporters by releasing their code, so this often provides an impetus as it could lead to better sales for newer products from the resultant goodwill.
• Giving old products away to the general public has certain specific and often harmful tax consequences. Effectively the companies are declaring the value of their goods to be zero, which keeps them from using the standard 20-year depreciation chart to deal with unsold inventory. In a nutshell, this means that there are huge tax benefits to not releasing old software as open source.
• And lastly, code reuse is rampant because of the short development cycle of most games. I have seen code from Apple II games from 1987 show up in brand new product releases in 2001. Giving your code away gives your competitors an edge, and nobody wants to do that.

uncle isaac

Alright, for all of you who seem pretty uneducated about the Cyberathletes Professional League [thecpl.com] I'll try to fill you in. The CPL was formed several years ago (right around when StarCraft was the hottest game on everybody's list).

Generally there are several tournament's a year (one in the winter, one in the summer). This past event is held in Texas where some other tournaments are held as well (QuakeCon for one). Each CPL tournament has a featured game. This tournament's game was Counter-Strike.

The event hosts a Bring Your Own Computer Area, (for those who want to frag all through the night) as well as workshops, (HardOCP had one this year on overclocking) prize raffles/giveaways, and of course the tournaments.

This year there was also an Alien vs. Predator 2 Deathmatch tourney going on too. (Fatality of Quake3Arena fame wiped the floor with everyone and won a Ford Focus with a custom AVP2 paintjob) See Adrenaline Vault and TheCPL for photos.

The CStrike tourney was a 5 on 5 clan competition and players from all over the world come to compete in it. The prize money for the tournament totals to some $150,000 dollars and comes almost entirely from Sponsors. The fees that they charge for admission into the tournament go mostly to cover the expenses of the hotel, setup, etc. And while a $50,000 US purse may sound like a lot, after it gets divided 5 ways to $10,000 minus the cost of Food and Board and Airfare (When applicable) you might be a little bit surprised when you don't have as much money as you thought you had. And that really only applies to the winner! There are tons of people who come a long way and don't even make it into the top 100. But if the money were all the tournament was about then I think a lot of people wouldn't even bother going to one of these events. The tournament is mostly about having fun and working on becoming better at Video Games (LAN differs quite a bit from Online play).

One of the most amazing things about this tournament was the ability for Counter-Strike enthusiasts to be able to watch the Tournament on the internet with Half-Life. By joining a specially designed server, up to 80,000 people could have watched the final round (there were only 40 of 128 slots filled on the server I was on)
here's some info:

Speakeasy.net, Valve Software Launch 11 City Half-Life TV Network First-ever PC Game Broadcast Network built to support 80,000 Simultaneous Viewers Seattle - Broadband ISP Speakeasy.net and Kirkland based game developer Valve Software announced today the first ever launch of a fully national broadcast network of live video game coverage. The inaugural use of this network will give tens of thousands of viewers from around the world the best-possible spectator experience for the $150,000 Counter-Strike World Championships this week in Dallas, TX. The World Championships represent the largest of such competitions ever and is produced by the Dallas-based Cyberathlete Professional League. Speakeasy has partnered with Valve Software to support the largest broadcast installation ever using Valve's Half-Life TV server software. The software allows for anyone with a broadband connection and PC to connect to a live game and watch their favorite teams play as if they were playing along side them. Teams from Seattle to Sweden are flying in to compete in the four-day event; thousands more will stay home and watch the competition unfold live on the Speakeasy Network.

"Broadcasting the CPL finals to 80,000 viewers is an incredible achievement and a huge advance in our efforts to bring competitive gaming, and gaming in general, further into the mainstream," said Doug Lombardi, director of marketing at Valve. Spectators will be able to tune in to a live broadcast of the match simply by using their PC and installation of Half-Life, and will have the option of 11 different locations to choose from to guarantee the best experience.

"We have customers that are running cable from their PC to a large screen TV just to watch this," said Edward Bender, Director of Online Gaming for Speakeasy.net. "I think this event will definitely get more people to recognize competitive gaming as a spectator sport." Counter-Strike, the number one online action game in the world, is a team-based multiplayer game built atop Valve's award-winning game engine. Valve released the multicast spectator technology (aka Half-Life TV) as a free update earlier this year.

Read about how to use HLTV @- http://www.cs-extreme.net/guides/HLTV/HLTV.asp

I think we're not at the stage yet where this should be considered Professional Gaming. I don't think anyone can make a true living off of winnings from the CPL. Maybe someday it will reach that point, and this is a great step to getting there. Sorry for the long post! Hope it helped some of you learn about professional gaming.

I just started grad school and I buy myself a game whenever I take a test.

Anyway, someone allready mentioned Civ III, and I second that. A design decision was made that simple-is-good, so in terms of the number of things that exist in the game, techs, units, bells and whistles for units to have, there are far less than in, say, Alpha Centauri. But, it's a big improvement in many, many, fundamental respects - it has whole new dimensions of play, which are simple yet profound. Personally, there are certain realism aspects (taking years for ships to circumnavigate the globe) that really annoy me, but the games very deep. It's also really difficult.

Art of Magic: Magic and Mayhem II is an attempt to make Sacrifice (nearly a great game) playable. Unfortunately, it fails and completely lacks the entrancing graphic artistry of sacrifice, so don't bother.

Pool of Radiance is a cute time waster. The game is a bit buggy, even with the patch, and their implementation of the D&D 3rd. ed rules is deeply flawed in a couple of respects (for those of you who are familiar, it won't let you pick your own skills and feats, and none of the really fun feats are even implemented.) Still, the parts of the game that take place on the surface are gorgeous in a technically uninspired kind of way, and the designs on the monsters and effects are solidly handsome and fun to look at. The big downside of the game is that big parts of it are just a dungeon crawl. There's a lot of very frank discussion abuot the merits of this game on the forums page (link above) which you might read before forking over fifty bucks.

One game that has seen surprisingly little hype is a Diablo clone called Throne of Darkness. The game, while once again not a technical breakthrough in the graphics department, is just beautiful. Really, the graphics are art. They've done something so that everything looks like it was drawn with those ink brushes - it looks like those highly detailed japanese landscape paintings, except unfortunately for the grass which is ugly and over-detailed like in Diablo (ah well). Unfortunately, the game play is just diablo. In fact, it is exactly diablo; Sierra has some kind of deal to copy the engine (I forget where I read this.) You get four guys at once, but the only summonings suck.

Finally, if you don't want to spend money, cosmic encounter online (which I tried to shamelessly promote as a Slashdot story, but it was rejected) is in development, and you can play as several races for free. No flares yet, but still.

Sam

• Civilization III - I only mention this because so many others have. I have it already. Yes, it sucks away all my free time and half my sleep time like a giant vaccum cleaner. However, that isn't really a *good* thing; I'm not really having all that much *fun*. If you, like me, sucked all the marrow out of Civ II, then it doesn't really bring a lot of new fun to the table. If you don't have a CIV right now though, yes you need Civ III.
• Kohan: Ahriman's Gift - I really liked the first Kohan. Its sort of a RTS version of Heroes of Might and Magic. The new version doesn't sound like much of a change, but as my main problem with the first one was that the campaign was too short, that could be a very good thing.
• Empire Earth - Sort of like Age of Empires, but in 3D. It could be great, it could be a bit dull. I couldn't really tell from the demo.
• Myth III - Squad-level RTS game. I keep hearing great things about this series, but I have get to get a Myth game, so I'm about due.
• Stronghold - RTS where you build and defend your own castle. Somewhat mixed reviews, but it looks interesting.
• Trade Empires - RTS Where the object is to build a trade network, not to take over the world militarily.

This sounds suspiciously like the plot of Half-Life.

If you want a good small world to study, I'd go to Junkyard Wars on The Learning Channel (TLC). Most games are inherently top-down, identifying the high level structure of what you'll want to do and even often the tools you'll be using and leading you to just decide what order to press the buttons to make those tools achieve that goal. If you want strategy to be used, I suggest you being in a more bottom-up, Lego-like way giving some components with purposes that are not readily apparent but that invite experimentation, improvisation, and composition.

It bugged me a lot that in Pharoah, for example, that when I worked out a way to manage a small region of a town, I couldn't encapsulate that and start to build bigger patterns from smaller ones. There were no compositional tools. And eventually the game dies of its own weight because one gets tired of dealing with things at the micro level, and the time spent dealing with that distracts from the fun of building bigger patterns.

Computer scientists know that you can't build bigger and bigger things without creating aggregations (and aggregations of aggregations, and so on) or without creating abstractions and hiding detail; game designers need to come to grips with the fact that game players need these same tools to keep a game from wearing out. The issue of a commander having to give orders and have others implement them doesn't just add "realism", it adds tractability. It keeps the game "possible".

1. Sierra puts out (& have put out) a bunch of stuff that involve creative thought. 'The Secret Island of Dr. Brain', 'The incredible machine'(!), plus the others already mentioned.
2. Turn them on to html. Buy any old HTML 4 book w/CD. Use the CD repeatedly. Linux books w/CD usually have an Apache site already set up with the Caldera and Red Hat versions. Building a web site is relatively simple and can give them a chance to strut their stuff, literally. If you are running MicroSoft, the web site software (Option pack 4) is FREE, at you-know-where. If you are using Unix/Linux, the Apache web server software is FREE, too. So is the java stuff at Sun for javaServerPages (JSP). (Free there, too.) Allaire/Macromedia has a FREE JavaServerPages server (with no expiration date for a developer version) at . Have fun!

Here's a sample of what your average 'blog will look like by the end of the Summer:

8/20/01:
Just sitting here at my new Dell Dimension sipping a Jolt and I began to wonder about the future of the Internet. I mean, my Comcast @ Home service is wicked-fast. But what's next? I want to be able to stream the new LOTR trailer and snag the demo for Half-Life 2 without a long download.

I can't imagine sites pimping misleading links. But it could happen.

Second of all... EA doesn't own Lionhead or Black & White either! Just like with Sierra, EA is only doing North American Distribution. So stop worrying about it.

EA is one of several major software distributors in North America... Lots of companies use them for that as an alternative to going through Ingram Micro.

Whoever has played Homeworld: Cataclysm should see some similarity between this, and the game (which is a little scary really). Little ittie bittie spoiler here: For those of you who haven't, here's the gist of it: You're crusing around space and pick up a chunk of metal. On it is this semi-organic stuff. It actually is made up of lots of really small, nano-sized, half-robot, half living beings. They take over whatever they touch (basically) and convert it to whatever is needed. People's bodies are converted to neural networks (and are torn apart in the process, quite painfully). Ships are converted to be used by the nano-organism. Cataclysm page. There really are some scary implications to this. Say someone sprayed a whole bunch of them on you, or dumped some in your glass, what then? They get inside of you, and could basically do whatever they wanted to. Not fun.

A note on the web page, Cataclysm is an expansion to Homeworld. Happy hunting.

That was a great game You can find a demo version on Sierra's site in the download section.

Yay Tribes! I heard that female models are lighter and thus can fly higher than the male models. Just like someone was saying about Diablo, the actual game differences can make a female character much more attractive... from a strategy perspective, a strategy perspective!!

Here a link to some unofficial Stats reguarding Tribes2. Enjoy!

Tribes2 FAQs...Posted by Star Lord

I'd hate to have to destroy years worth of my own work. That's just about the lowest blow a programmer can take. Jeez, at least let him keep a few zip disks with the data on it.