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Review: BZFlag 3D Tank Game
GonzoJohn writes "LinuxOrbit.com reviews the 3D Tank game BZFlag. 'Have you ever been walking down the street, minding your own business, and suddenly look down to find something you hadn't expected? It might be money, it might be a decoder ring, it could be anything. But the almost universal reaction is pleasurable. 'That's a nice surprise,' you think as you stoop and pocket whatever good fortune has dropped in your path. The same thing can happen in the strangest places. For example, a recent post on our message boards inquired, 'What's your favorite flag in bzflag?'. Not being familiar with the game, I had to ask "What's bzflag?' Little did I know that such an innocent inquiry would result in an almost indecent obsession with a very cool game.'"
I'm not surprised about the addiction. It was so good for its time, even in its single-player mode, that the military took a look at it to train its troops.
Based on Atari's BattleZone, it remains my favorite Video Arcade game.
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
There used to ba a game exactly like this. It was for the Macintosh if I remember correctly. I think it was called Spectre.
i became hooked on this game in school... a bunch (usually 8 or so) guys would stay after class to play until the kicked us out. this went on for the better part of four months.
but the best flag, imho, is stealth. guided missles are pretty good, but invariably, everyone teams up on the dude with missles. stealth allows you to act as an assasin - picking your targets on your own terms.
some would say this tactic is 'cheap' - i think cheap is getting missles and jumping onto the highest building and firing constantly. stealth isn't 'cheap', it's 'tactical'. 8^)
I LOVE this game, I came across it a month or two ago while looking for 3d games that me and my house mates could play, even on low spec / linux machines. I wasn't convinced when I first loaded it up and had a tank which could jump and very simple graphics, but then we started playing.... I have to say this thing rocks, multi platform, network play, LOTs of players on line a once, serious good fun.
I do have one gripe though, some of the flags are REALLY anoying if playing with only a few people, homming missle being one of them. All the person needs to do is get on top of a high platform, and thats it, everyone is dead and stay that way until he decides to drop the flag.
Having said that a lot of the flags are great fun, narrow and wide still make me laugh :). I would like to see the ability to choose which flags are included in the game.. a nice options menu where you can change what's allowed - like the one worms had to allow you to customise the numbers of each type of weapon.
I was refreshed to find this came.. it has one major thing going for it - good gameplay, it just goes to show that you can still have fun without needed in GeForce 4 graphics card :)
If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, let'em go, because, man, they're gone.
It ran Quake pretty well, too...
The CS Department at my school has a 24 hour access rule, meaning that when a good game of bzflag starts, nobody has to leave. These games start very randomly. If a bunch of people are sitting around the lab working on stuff, all there needs for a game is for one person to *cough* and say "bz." The next thing you know, there are 5 to 10 people signed in, with the first person starting the server. It is an amazing phenomenon.
As far as flags go, here are the best flags:
- Guided Missle - This flag is the best flag for longevity. Right click and then fire, you just killed someone.
- Laser flag - instant death from across the board.
- Stealth - When you are not on someone's radar, they get really pissed.
- Cloaking - It is hard for them to shoot at what they can't see.
- Narrow - You become two dimensional in a 3D world.
- Shock Wave - Everyone within a certain radius of you becomes no more!
There may be more flags, but those are the best on the version that we play with.BZFlag is an excellent example of a game which places gameplay above graphics. THe graphics are certainly not like Q3A, but instead made mostly of simple polygons. There are some interesting effects (such as the smoke from the Guided Missile) but clearly the focus is on gameplay.
:)
The gameplay is simply excellent! It is amazing how such a single game can produce such varied gameplay. For example, several friends and I have been playing BZFlag with max 1 shot delay and good flags only. Of course, each of us developed our own strategy and all was fine until we decided to increase the max shots to 5. Interestingly, all the strategies we used went to waste since they actively took advantage of the 1 shot reload delay. With 5 max shots delay, different flags became more important (ie SuperBullet is vastly more useful in 5 max shot delay).
All in all, this game is very addictive. Highly recommended
Ahimsa Paramo Dharma Nonviolence is the highest form of religion.
From bzflag.org
BZFlag now officially runs on the Vectrex! This amazing console uses vector graphics instead of the more common pixel-based graphics, making for amazing gameplay! In fact, the Vectrex has the same type of screen used in the original Battlezone.
Whoa! Is this an April 1st thing or something...
It would be very very cool - the vectrex is one of my all time desert island systems - but I can't find any more information on site or anywhere else, and I'm pretty certain that Veccie hardware would struggle.
Can anyone confirm whether this is just a particularly inspired April oneth thang?
(Gods, I hate this time of year - can't believe anything you bloody well read)
Cheers
Chris
There are too many cheat clients for this game. Just showing up in an arena is like asking to be bungholed.
I used to enjoy this game, but then a few servers started making the latency requirred to be so low that only broadband can play. The servers just boot dial up users after a while..
There goes something else down the tubes for dial up, thanks to those certain server admins..
And the rest of the servers stink anyway... The games networking either way needs some serious work, but I don't have much faith since dial ups are just ignored today anway.
Which is a shame for millions like myself, where there isn't a reasonable alternative (sattelite != reasonable).
-- Note: If you don't agree with me, don't bother replying. I won't read it.
Do you know who ported this to MacOS X?
BZFlag is released under the GPL, but the source for the MacOS X port doesn't seem to be available.
Domain Name: HZSYSTEMS.COM
Administrative Contact, Technical Contact, Billing Contact:
Avila, Kevin (ZTNXCJGPSI) kevin@hzsystems.com
The guy hosting it probably knows...
If you play this game make sure to set UDP instead of TCP in preferences. TCP is just to slow, and the lag will make the game intolerable.
badness 10000
It was an "official" event in the Linux section of Xuventude Galicia.net (only spanish and galician, sorry!), a LAN party born about 3 years ago here in Galicia (Spain). And there was another "almost official" tournament in the Arroutada Party (the mother of the galician LAN parties). I even partaked in this one (I was only a spectator on the Xuventude's one), and though I was quite The Ultimate Killing Machine in the "training games" (being first almost all the time), I only was the 3rd on the oficcial game. Man, do I suck :-/ ;-)
Anyway, everyone had a fun time, as I've been told :-) The game is very network-friendly, and very addictive. Some game balance problems that people tell happen because they allowed too many "special options", IMHO. We just played with flags, and no other option (i.e.: no jumping, only 1 shot each time, and so on). That way, game is quite balanced, though if you get the Guided Missile flag, the Stealth flag or the Laser flag, you can be the ruler of the game for a long time :-)
The Laser flag is my favourite, and specially fun when you play with shots being all ricochet. Well, at least it's fun until you kill yourself for firing straight against a wall. Ouch :-)
Stealth flag is fun, yes, but Real Men (tm) play guided by their radars, and not their eyes (Or was Stealth the flag that didn't show you on the Radar? I don't remember now :-m) Use of The Force and any other special powers is also encouraged, or course :-)
Anyway, speedwise it sucks in my P2-366 Compaq Armada 3500 :-/ I think it's because of the graphic card, but haven't looked at it deeply. Well, it absolutely rocks in my Athlon 800 with GF2MX, at least ;-)
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This is really a gem of a game but I urge people setting up servers not to do the easy thing and hike up the shots to 10 or something and allow jumping.
The game is *much much* more fun without jumping, though it doesn't immediately seem so. You start to learn how to drive correctly and defensively and it is a much richer experience.
Games with and without these options can be described as follows:
With jumping and lots of bullets: You spend most of your time jumping up in the air dodging other people's sprays of bullts, spinning around and landing in directions you just don't want to land in.
Without jumping and lots of bullets: You actually can play cat and mouse. When your opponent's 2 shots are gone and you've dodged them, you can release at will. Much more interesting game. The other is just silly, but that's how people tend to start and they never learn better.
The analysis of Cloaking is missing one crucial bit of info: cloaked tanks are immune to Lasers. (Makes perfect sense, but most developers would've missed that.)
Cloaking is of limited use otherwise - skilled players use the radar at least as much as the viewscreen, if not more.
BTW, my favorite config: all good flags, all bad flags (15 seconds or 1 kill), 3 shots, jumping. (The fewer shots you have the more the strategery of the game shines through. BZ can't compare to Quake for adrenaline-pumping click-festiness, but the cat and mouse of stealth vs. gm can't be matched by Quake.)
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
In my graphics course here at Algonquin College (Ottawa, ON) we learned OpenGL on SGI O2 workstations. These things were amazing. There'd be 15 of us all in this room playing BZFlag and yelling and screaming cause we'd be having such a good time. Often we'd miss other classes cause we just didn't want to stop playing, it's THAT addictive. Strange that it's not popular on other platforms.
Yeah, but remember how annoying it was in Point Blank that you couldn't shoot up hills reliably (or at all IIRC). And the Plane was nearly impossible to use (plus it was easily shot out of the sky by those dammable missiles on the hovertank (or was it just a light tank?).) Still, it was plenty fun to play nonetheless.
I read the internet for the articles.
sounds as addictive and fun as xpilot used to be when i was in school. i wonder if there's still a big community at the Uni playing xp these days or if they've all moved up to quake and it's brethren. i haven't played any really good networked games since xp (and that includes all the hours of q3 arena, etc i've put in in the last year or so)
xp was introduced to me as "asteroids, but you get to kill other people" and i thought "now that sounds fun"
and addictive. dang. i spent more nights staring at little blips on the computer lab screens than i care to count. as i got more into it, i even started designing my own ship outlines - and even started to see other people copying them.
I was Delta Clipper (after the NASA project) and occasionally Happy Fun Ball (tm) due to my tendency to bounce around the screen, rather than actually try to navigate...
no flags, but there were little powerups (i forget the term we used for them) that would bestow invisibilty, speed, bouncing or multiple shots, mines, guided missiles, and loads of other stuff i never really learned how to control - the game used just about every key on a Sun keyboard, plus meta+key combos.
man, what a fun game. (http://www.xpilot.org/)
so, what's this about tanks? is there a Darwin/OS X port? can i play on my ibook? i'm about ready for a new addiction...
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