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"Gotta keep killing those fan games"

http://www.telefragged.com/thefatal/ava/index.php?content=inc_download.htm
http://www.velv.net/FFEN.html

Say what? Do you even bother LOOKING for these things?

There was a not very popular mad for Quake 2 called Action Quake 2 that sucked me in back in the early days when mods started to gain popularity as alternatives to the plain vanilla game. The Urban Terrormod is basically an improved copy for Quake 3 with different weapons.

The idea is the same though, realistic weapon mechanics, including long reload times, very powerful bullet hits resulting in a lot of damage, hits require bandaging to avoid bleeding out and dying, bandaging requires you to stand still for many seconds unable to protect yourself or run away. Grenades are absolutely deadly with very large blast radiuses making them very powerful but they require time to prime and throw that can result in you getting shot and killed before you throw your grenade off. There are many, many one-shot kills due to snipers, well placed automatic gun fire at your head, grenade blasts clearing hallways on the front-line of the fight between bases.

The Capture The Flag type games turn into a grenade spam, sniper alley, and death-rush type of scenarios if both teams have competent players who can hold and defend a mid-point front-line bottleneck such as a hallway or two. Most maps have multiple routes to the enemy's base resulting in 2 or 3 front-line bottleneck hallways, with shotgunners camping waiting for people to run through, noobs grenade spamming the hallway, and snipers sitting far back picking off any folks showing their heads.

The more interesting game is the Last Man Standing with teams where each team goes against the other and there are no respawns but usually in those games the team with better squad work and team work will take out the uncoordinated noobs running around looking for a fight. Ambush scenarios are very common with multiple people camping a well known walk-by spot to catch a few folks from the other team off-guard. Camping is usually the default tactic so you end up walking along walls and checking all corners before walking through them.

These two mods kept my interest a lot longer than the run-and-gun type games since there was more skill required to survive and larger penalties for failure when you did get shot. Marksmanship became important since even a lowly shotgun or sub-machinegun was a great weapon and you didn't require ultra power rocket launchers or plasma guns. Pistol battles and knife attacks were also quite common since the reload time penalty was so high that it was faster to draw your sidearm and try to finish off a wounded guy in a firefight than it was to reload your primary gun. You could hear this happening all over the levels with trrrat, trraat, trraat machinegun fire then a pause, with pop, pop, pop pistol fire.

Very interesting and engaging mods. A lot of good memories and times.

AQ2 was a big one for me during Quake 2 server. I even hosted a server ("Ant's AQ2 Movie Set") on my friend's cable modem server until it got hacked. :(

Ooer ... there's my own WAD in there too. Five maps of single-player mayhem, for Doom 2. Released over nine years ago, which was pretty late by Doom standards...

If you want something a bit more modern, there's always this for Half-Life, and this for Half-Life 2: Episode One (Liverpool nil). And some reviews!

Aaaand ... some bonus Quake!

Ahem. That's quite enough links, I reckon!

omg! I had forgotten all about ActionQuake. I played that as recently as 2001. Ran as smooth as butter on anything and the action was even more fast paced than CS. Given the shear number or skins (we played all the bots as R2D2) and maps available (some quite creative) it might be my favorite FPS (given the nostalgia factor).

Side Note: But I won't resign myself to the waxing curmudgeon. While, imo, FPSs haven't gotten too much better over the years (save for BF2), RPGs have by far advanced.

The PSP's big deal is homebrew, which the DS is lacking.

Thats not entirely true. Check out DS Homebrew project wiki

I recently became interested in it after discovering projects that could enable SNES emulation of my old games on the DS.

Of course this may or may not require jumping through a few hoops since you have to use the GBA slot, but some of the fellows have done a few interesting project (besides emulation) such as web browsers, PC game ports such as (Hexen), and VOiP.

If you use JavaScript to render content, you're going to have a really hard time getting indexed by the search engines. If you're an individual, not such a big deal. If you're a company... make sure you have an alternative to pure javascript so that the search engine robots can find the content.

There's an FPS game map review site I used to visit often which has an utterly pointless Javascript 'compression' system behind it, originally coded to supposedly make it load more quickly over dialup connections.

As a result, the site is effectively invisible to search engines, and isn't exactly healthy these days.

I've found that one of the best 'fallback' browsers for simulating how a search engine sees things is good old lynx - as a result, I make sure my own pages are legible, navigable and sensibly structured from a low-level point of view. Also, it's a good way of checking that you haven't introduced too many wheel reinventions when good old <a href=...>s would have done the trick...

It is:

http://www.nordichardware.com/Reviews/?page=15&skr ivelse=326

http://www.telefragged.com/reviews/quake3/

I played the lost coast demo and minerva, can anyone recommend any others?

How about the second part of MINERVA?

...

Oh, hang on - not finished yet. Sorry... ;-)

As for other maps, there's a couple around. I haven't played all that many, but there's some reviews here, more reviews here and another map here. There's a pretty cool total conversion here, but it's incredibly short and defiantly non-Half-Life 2.

There's also eleventy billion work-in-progress multiplayer mods with endless unskinned weapons renders and concept 'art' drawn in crayon; if you look really carefully you might find one that's actually been released...

I haven't played Quake 4 yet, but there's a vaguely similar-sounding map in the classic Zerstörer: Testament of the Destroyer mod for the original Quake. You descend deeper and deeper into some horrifically complex facility without encountering a single enemy, in search of some elusive artefact - you reach a colossal underground arena and the Sanguinoch lies just in front of you, and you just know that when you take it, you're going to have to fight untold hordes of enemies in order to escape...

Zerstörer's also notable for having what I reckon to be is the best ever ending for an FPS game, ever. It's seriously brilliant! ;-)

I have practically downloaded every free mod available for HL2. So far they all feel very beta-ish. Plan of Attack, Garry's physics mod, strider mod, you name it... it seems like the HL1 mods were much more fun.

Well, if you look at the first year of single-player maps for the original Half-Life, for example, there wasn't a huge amount of quality content appearing. A couple of classics, such as USS Darkstar and ETC, but even they seem somewhat lightweight when played now.

Half-Life 2 is undoubtedly a great modding platform, but everyone's been very busy figuring out how it all goes together. Until recently, the documentation was a bit lacking (it ranged from a little being great to the majority being non-existent) but fortunately the Valve Developer Wiki has changed the situation tremendously.

I've been learning single-player Half-Life mapping since about late January - I assumed it would be easy (the software is superficially similar to the original Half-Life) but some months later I'm only now feeling proficient enough to consider releasing the map I've been working on (less cryptic version!)...

The best part of a year for around 45 minutes of gameplay? It's hard work!

Of course, the second map's going to be far easier, and I suspect Valve themselves are finding something similar now they've learned how to operate their Source engine...

You forgot about the DS ports of Hexen and Heretic. I am currently in the process of creating a Lumines clone for DS. Tepples has already released a Lumines clone for GBA called Luminesweeper.

I also forgot to mention ScummVM, which ironically... I was flashing to my flash cart while I was writing that (it works great!).

I understand what you are saying about Nintendo making the classic roms available for a price (legally) but if you are playing them on the PSP illegally already then you can play them just as well on the GBA or DS using a flashcart without worrying about which system you use it on, etc. There is PocketNES (NES) SMSAdvance (Sega Master System) along with a Turbo Graphics emulator.

Here is also Super Nes emulator for the GBA with a list of "Most Playable/Fully Playable" games here http://www.snesadvance.org/ and a NES Advance Controller & Adapter for the GBA as well.

Did anyone see the stuff they are pulling off on the DS now? Someone has Hexen running on it http://www.telefragged.com/thefatal/index.php?cont ent=inc_si_ds.htm

One of the best custom maps I've played is the WTC level from Singe. If you are a HL2:DM player, I recommend finding a server hosting it.

Stay the hell away from the "gaming industry" as a career. Find an interesting job in programming something else, and write games as a hobby.

I muck about designing single-player maps for my favourite games. Occasionally, I even get round to releasing one. People seem to like what I do, even if the plots are wilfully obtuse and cryptic.

I probably could get a job in the gaming industry, but I really can't be bothered. I'd rather be able to completely change the ending of one of my maps at a whim than have to follow some long, drawn-out design spec for a game I might not particularly enjoy. Working on Half-Life n could be great, working on the more likely Barbie's Fashion Designer n+1 wouldn't be.

So, I'm messing about pushing quirky game engines around, building scenes more complex than any in the original games, concentrating and tweaking the gameplay I enjoy. I don't bother with voice acting (in the style of Marathon, plain text can beat all but the very best voices), new textures are those I mangle together with the Gimp and my digital camera.

I build maps I enjoy playing. If anyone else likes them too, then that's their problem. Why do I do this?

'Cause it's fun. Isn't that what games are about? :-)

my dreams come true, A lightning gun in real life. Now all I need is the Quad and I'm set. ooh ooh, even better, the Beserker Rune.

Jeff Strain: I definitely think that Guild Wars will change the way gamers think about online games and subscription fees in particular. As a passionate gamer myself, I like to play around with a lot of games at once. I may not finish them all, but I love the fact that I can play Zelda: Four Swords Adventure for a few weeks, put it down to play Half-Life 2 and Burnout 3, and then come back to it a few months later on a rainy afternoon. I don't have to feel guilty about not playing. I don't have to feel like I can only have one game that I am actively playing at a time. We think subscription fees are contrary to the way most people want to play games, in that they force you to pay every month, even if you are not playing. Our goal is to provide an online experience with all of the support and evolving ongoing content that you get with a traditional MMO, but without the need for that subscription fee; that is exactly what Guild Wars is all about. There are no gimmicks, hidden advertising, or fees in small print. You will not be paying in installments, or paying more than you would for any other AAA game. It just works exactly like you would expect: buy the game, play online for no additional charge, and when a new chapter comes out every six months or so, decide whether you think it is cool enough to buy. The choice is always yours. Do I think players will want to see more of this type of business model for online games? No, I think they will demand it!

Guild Wars: http://www.guildwars.com/

I've been working on map design for various computer games in my spare time for the last six years or so. I haven't actually released many maps yet, but with my skills in map design and texture art I could almost certainly get a job in the games industry. Several of my friends already have, and are working on games you've almost certainly heard of.

Except I don't want to work there. From what I've heard, EA isn't alone, with many young, idealistic people working for long hours on lacklustre games because, well, it's what they always wanted to do. If they give up because of lack of pay, or quit because they simply can't continue to work like that, then there's always someone else to hire, someone else who hasn't learned how bad some of the employers can be.

So, I keep modding as a hobby, mapping purely for enjoyment. It's much more fun being able to work on your own projects without some looming deadline, without a boss breathing down your back. The games market is already saturated with clones, sequels and utter trash, and the chances of working on something memorable are pretty slight. Instead of working on Barbie's Fashion Adventure 7, I can build my own Twelve Monkeys-inspired, ultra-dark adventure in Half-Life 2 (one of my upcoming projects!)

However, I'm intrigued by Wideload Games' new approach, contracting in work as and when required with just a core team working on a project full-time. It's not so dissimilar to the work I'm doing at the moment, as a freelance web programmer and designer, and I wonder if it'll catch on. No, I wouldn't be able to make a full-time living from it, but it could make for some interesting side work, assuming anyone would want me... :-)

I would definitely pay that kind of money for community-created mods if I knew it had gone through some kind of BioWare QA process. Sifting through thousands (?) of mods on fan sites just isn't worth the time.

Blame the fan sites, then. I've never played Neverwinter Nights, and haven't a clue about its modding community, but over in the land of Half-Life there are well-respected sites like Ten Four reviewing single-player releases.

In need of something to play? Click on the reviews index, sort by rating, then look through the well-written reviews to see if there's anything that sounds interesting. (Disclaimer - one of my maps has a 'gold' rating!)

I suppose this has some advantages over a more community-driven approach (like the NWVault thing mentioned above), in that the real crap simply doesn't get reviewed, or gets clearly marked as such, and the poor taste of the general public doesn't rate pointless siege maps beyond the real works of art (oh, I sound so pretentious!).

If there isn't such a site for NWN, then why not create one? Write some quick reviews of mods you liked, add some statistics (how many players, difficulty etc.), upload them somewhere, then see what happens. Oh, and tell the mod authors. When you're doing something as work-intensive as creating a mod for free, positive feedback is incredibly rewarding. :-)

I would definitely pay that kind of money for community-created mods if I knew it had gone through some kind of BioWare QA process. Sifting through thousands (?) of mods on fan sites just isn't worth the time.

Blame the fan sites, then. I've never played Neverwinter Nights, and haven't a clue about its modding community, but over in the land of Half-Life there are well-respected sites like Ten Four reviewing single-player releases.

In need of something to play? Click on the reviews index, sort by rating, then look through the well-written reviews to see if there's anything that sounds interesting. (Disclaimer - one of my maps has a 'gold' rating!)

I suppose this has some advantages over a more community-driven approach (like the NWVault thing mentioned above), in that the real crap simply doesn't get reviewed, or gets clearly marked as such, and the poor taste of the general public doesn't rate pointless siege maps beyond the real works of art (oh, I sound so pretentious!).

If there isn't such a site for NWN, then why not create one? Write some quick reviews of mods you liked, add some statistics (how many players, difficulty etc.), upload them somewhere, then see what happens. Oh, and tell the mod authors. When you're doing something as work-intensive as creating a mod for free, positive feedback is incredibly rewarding. :-)

If you're seeing copied and pasted rooms, that's more due to a poor developer than due to a space limitation.

I'm a single-player mapper for Half-Life in my spare time. Stuff I've done has been fairly well received. And I can tell people this - map design for single-player games is difficult. I can spend a week perfecting something that'll last the player ten seconds. A simple room can take days to build, and this in on the original Half-Life where a suitably textured cuboid can be just about anything.

In a modern engine, the workload is increased enormously. You need 3D modellers to create the static meshes (which replace those textured cuboids of the past), texture artists to do the map-specific texturing (high-resolution now, and it can't all be photo-sourced), voice actors for the map-specific dialogue. There's scripting (which needs to be tested for all possible routes and combinations of routes - non-linearity's the thing!), there's map geometry, there's programming, there's playtesting, there's tuning...

And it all has to come together into a cohesive whole - and judging by some of the game demos I've played recently, it often isn't. Copied and pasted rooms imply that the game designers are concentrating on the wrong area of the game - graphics might be lovely, but if the map design stinks, the game's in danger.

Some people I tell this to try to argue that there is PC innovation and I'm wrong. If this is you then consider this. Why is Counter-Strike the most popular online game ever after all these years? When it came out it was revolutionary. Real weapons, team based objective gameplay that wasn't CTF. And staying dead until the next round. This did not exist then.

Actually Action Quake 2 came along way before CS and had many similar features - round based teamplay, realistic weapons etc.

The rest of your comment is however quite valid, and to be fair a lot of people are playing CS now whilst there are only a handfull of hadcore AQ2ers left...

Yeah, but what about the games that have made a huge impact on the US game market but haven't left a trace in Japan? What about Doom? Half-life? Those two games are easily two of the top 5 games of all time, yet they barely sold at all in Japan.

I think one or two people in Japan still 'get' these terribly Western games - for a start, there's Konmei Satou, who designed some gloriously surreal maps for Half-Life and Quake 2. If you haven't played his Half-Life stuff, I can seriously recommend it - here's some reviews to help persuade you. :-)

Yeah, but what about the games that have made a huge impact on the US game market but haven't left a trace in Japan? What about Doom? Half-life? Those two games are easily two of the top 5 games of all time, yet they barely sold at all in Japan.

I think one or two people in Japan still 'get' these terribly Western games - for a start, there's Konmei Satou, who designed some gloriously surreal maps for Half-Life and Quake 2. If you haven't played his Half-Life stuff, I can seriously recommend it - here's some reviews to help persuade you. :-)

That's what some of us do. I would love to get advice from /.ers on using open source techniques to create a good machinima mod.

The ILL Clan often uses game developers from all over the world to make movies. Being a part of the Machinima community makes us part of the Quake Mod community, and since Quake 2 is open source there's a lot of interesting things going on.

The BeefQuake mod let us upgrade to 128 bit color. qFusion allows us to use Quake 3 assets with our own Quake 2 camera and puppet mod.

We're at our best when we put it all together and perform Machinima live in front of an audience.

Larry & Lenny for President

There's lots of single-player maps available - here's a good listing courtesy of Ten Four Maps. Have a look through, see if there's anything you like.

I really liked UT (Urban Terror), it started to crop up around the time that Action Quake 2 started to die out (still an amazing mod btw, download it and play it if you get a chance). I know a few hard core AQ fans that have been salavating over UT for a while.

Does anyone know if Action Quake 2 is still being played at all? I know there is a "next gen" around. However are there still people playing the original?

In other words...

Action Quake 2

... even on Geek sites you can't rely on people knowing the correct format for an URI! ;-)

I found triple 7s' post rather eloquent in certain places. Come on, its a well-known fact that 90% of all computer users have shaken their stick at least once, but more often at regular intervals.

Yes, that mod was very popular. In fact, I ran a popular AQ2 server (Ant Farm's Action Quake2 Movie Set) when team play was introduced in this mod. First at LAN parties (before teamplay), this mod wasn't popular. Eventually, it did (two full Linux servers!) :). Ahhh, the good old days.

I dislike the new AQ2-related sequels (Action Half-Life and Reaction Quake3). I am currently into these mods: Day of Defeat (HL), Urban Terror, and getting into Navy Seals (Q3A) :)

Yes, that mod was very popular. In fact, I ran a popular AQ2 server (Ant Farm's Action Quake2 Movie Set) when team play was introduced in this mod. First at LAN parties (before teamplay), this mod wasn't popular. Eventually, it did (two full Linux servers!) :). Ahhh, the good old days.

I dislike the new AQ2-related sequels (Action Half-Life and Reaction Quake3). I am currently into these mods: Day of Defeat (HL), Urban Terror, and getting into Navy Seals (Q3A) :)

Super Mario Quake - Not that it would make a great game, but blowing up that fat little plumber would set me up for the day :-)

There's already Target Quake (now apparently also for Q3A) and probably more 2d platformer mods...

My sister has Super Smash Bros. on her N64, and when I get a GameCube, I'll get Super Smash Bros Melee as the first game! The Bushiest One (or any other Nintendo character) kicks, punches, shoots, slices, and blows Mario up. Great joy. =) (Mario was not a fun character to begin with, and when they added the speech in Mario64, that was the last drop. =)

Quake had the best mods, ever. Hands down. Threewave CTF absorbed much of my time i should have spent studying and can be directly attributed to my poor ACT scores (I spent the entire night prior engaged in a ferocious clan battle against a german clan. We won, but the price paid was evident on my ACT scores...which I'll refrain from disclosing ;)).

And what about Quake Rally ? Jesus, those were some memories there. Really innovative control scheme that's just now catching on in other games. It did some really fantastic stuff with the Quake engine, but it just didn't seem as off the wall as.... Target Quake !!! God. A side scroller built on the Quake engine.. fucking _golden_ stuff there. Brilliant idea.. kinda reminded me of Abuse but in 3D.. :)

Oh hell, and what about the movies available for Quake? Remember Blahbalicious ? How about Operation Bay Shield ? Apartment Huntin ? Hell, the massive 4 hour Nehahra ?

Seriously, I haven't uninstalled Quake since 1996, i just keep transfering it over to my new hard drives whenever I upgrade. How the hell could I risk losing the ability to play Zerstorer or Scourge of Armagon ?


hehehe, i bet you thought i was going to forget the Quake Done Quick movies, didn't you? ;)

and podbots and goldeneye or action mods work well
and remember that the number one reason for "HL on linux failure" is mesa librairies conflicting with newer librairies.

• For Quake 2, Action Quake was hands down THE best mod. Action Half-life just doesnt quite measure up but its fun.

Alex Bischoff
---

QuakeForge is already discussing this problem and is planning to fix it WITHOUT requiring a closed source solution because we believe any closed source solution could at best be considered a stopgap measure. We will be coordinating our efforts to fix the problem with the Quake Standards Group. Any ways we discover in which cheating is possible will be fixed as soon as we discover the nature of the problem and the best course of action to correct it.

In the meantime we'd like to ask everyone to consider that at least half of the reports of people cheating are probably false alarms anyway. There are real problems in how the client and server trust eachother at the moment which are bound to lead to some problems now that it's possible to modify the clients, but they're certainly not fatal to quake as a game or the quake development projects such as QuakeForge.

I agree on your comments about 800x600 and I have fixed these problems, (thanks Crusader) as for fitting the entire page in a table, it was necessary to get the effect we were after. Everyone at Linuxgames has great passion for the site and wishes to see it flourish and be a resource that makes gaming in Linux a pleasure and not a fortnight worth of late nights and headaches.

As for my design... well everyone has different opinions, thats what makes the world such an interesting place.

My main focus on the site was keeping the Telefragged theme because Linuxgames is part the TF network. Plain and simple. as for the colours? Well I used real penguin colours to give a very dynamic Feel to the site, it's bold and it states that Gaming in Linux is here and it can only get better.

From what I've seen in the last 6 months on the gaming seen, Linux has a very prospective future.

However, your comments on Style Sheets are un-justified. Your not thinking of all the people who have lesser browsers than you and would have problems with things such as style sheets.

Unfortunately I do run on a very tight time shedule and I think 3 hours work re-designing a site I have always had a keen interest in gives me a feeling of self worth, and a feeling of doing my bit for Linux. (see what can I do for Linux even though I can't program? from about 6 months ago)

Also seeing the Negative comments posted somewhere as well as the postive ones helps me greatly. 640x480 support anyone? =)

ReV

but did they have to make it so much like telefragged?