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New Starcraft: Ghost Trailers
Bobartig writes "Blizzard Entertainment has put up gameplay trailers for their upcoming console title, Starcraft: Ghost. It looks hot. It's available both in both Quicktime and DivX, with plenty of mirrors."
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Yes, it looks good... but how does it PLAY? I'm waiting till the release. Blizzard pretty much outsourced most of the work to Nihilistic, so it might not have the same 'feel' as blizzard's other games. But I guess it would be hard to capture the feel of RTS games in an FPS anyway, heh.
I am a filthy pirate.
Something I notice on their site is that they'll specifically mention Linux on the trailer download page... perhaps they see Linux (Or *nix/BSD users in general) users as a potential market? One can only hope.
I am a filthy pirate.
Its a third person shooter, not first, and although Nihilistic is doing most of the work, Blizzard is still watching it closely.
Also, Nihilistic was started by a group a programmers that left Blizzard after working on StarCraft.
Do I STILL have to wait 30 seconds to use the nuke?!
Direct download link for DivX, worked for me:
_ Gameplay2002.avi.zip
http://www.nforcefiles.net/afilesa2aa/movie/Ghost
If I used the AAlib library (http://aa-project.sourceforge.net/aalib/), can I get ghost is a shell?
Strange that Blizzard would release a trailer showing a fair amount of gameplay not much more than a month since the game itself was announced. Remember how long Warcraft 3 was in development?
Damn! I lost my schedule again.
Could someone please remind me if we hate blizzard this week?
thanks.
nbfn
The QuickTime version is in Sorenson format, as I suspected before I even downloaded it. If it was in MPEG4, it would have been about the same size or smaller than DivX, since MPEG4 and DivX share the same video codex, just differing in audio format.
Took me a while to get the QuickTime version, though. The mirrors weren't working, save perhaps File Planet with its mandatory registration, and I couldn't reach Blizzard's own FTP server with a browser. I used a stand-alone FTP client instead to download it.
"Common Sense Ain't" -Unknown
OK, I don't want to troll here... or something. But... the movie... isn't that voice the same that used to do the "descriptions" for bad 70's porno films from Sweden?
..we can still click frantically on the terran units and make them say funny things. :P
I never knew that the SOUL of the WARRIOR had so much to do with wearing form-fitting wetsuits and posing suggestively...
Will there be dramatic netative-color fade-outs that make her ass crack glow in the game too? If not, wanna run out a patch for that? Thanks.
Fwoosh! Blinded by da booty! Take that, Zerg overlord!
Goodnight everybody!
apart from the cool cloaking effect and the fish-eye view, I see little or no revolutionary stuff. From what a trailer can tell, I'd put it in the oni/halo category, which happens to be a rather crowded one.
:-)
It's been a while (since the doom3 trailers actually) since I've had a 'wow... this shit is awesome...' reaction, and SC-G doesn't trigger that for me.
Then again, I might have played just a bit too much fps games to get wowed anymore. All I see in those trailers is cannon fodder
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
is this just me, or are her boobs to small for an average digital female warrior ?
big fat ass tho... might spurr ideas...
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
That Hyrdalisk that was right on top of him was pretty cool though :) Think of all the cool Starcraft shit that could be in the game... Lurkers and Battlecruisers and Goliaths and Archons.. thousand of zerglings.. :) could be a fun game.
But of course, who really knows. As with everything, have to wait and see...
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
Blizzard currently denies any SC2 plans but if you finish Warcraft 3 on hard, you'll see some Space Marines, some Space Orc-Flamethrowers and alot Zerg Hydralisks, all running in the WC3 engine. They are shooting and killing each other, so I assume that it won't take long to do Starcraft2, as the engine is ready and even some models are already done .
Quod in aeternum cubet mortuum non est,
Et saeculis miris actis etiam Mors perierit
I've never heard of a game being released on *all three* consoles before. Is this new? And, do they really have the leverage to tell the console makers that they don't get an exclusive lock on the game? This seems pretty strange to me.
:)
All that being said, I'm looking forward to GTA4 on Oct 29 much more
When I play this trailer I just get the 'key frames' with no motion in between...
I downloaded and installed the latest DivX codec.
Anyone else get this?
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Twelve Arbiters
Eleven Science Vessels
Ten Ultralisks
Nine Battlecruisers
Eight Archons Burning
Seven Zerglings Swarming
Six Zealots Fighting
Five Newborn Queens
Fout Hydralisks
Three Marines
Two Terran Waiths
And a brand New SCV!
... I wasn't impressed.
Live web cams
Sorenson Video 3.1 Pro is very competitive against MPEG-4 Advanced Simple implementations like DivX. It supports 2-pass VBR, B-frames, etcetera.
QuickTime can only decode Simple, not Advanced Simple, so SV3.1 can beat it handily.
Of course, they used Sorenson Video 1, which is much old and lousy. Presumably this is for backwards compatibility (to QT3), instead of the only months old QT6 which is required for MPEG-4.
MPEG-4 is awesome, but it is NOT all about maximum quality at small files. Propritary codecs beat all public implementations of MPEG-4 today on this measure.
Of course, being an ISO standard has other, huge, advangages.
My video compression blog
The reason everyone's making 3rd person shooter games is the same one that drove everyone to make platform games back in the NES/SNES/Genesis days. They follow a simple formula, have some level cliches to keep you from having to work too hard on ideas, and with the vast number of others out there it's easy just to copy ideas directly if it gets too hard.
Everything now-a-days has to be 3d (Why this is, I don't know. I'd really like to play another side-scrolling sprite-based Mario Brothers game), and while games like Crash Bandicoot, Sonic Adventures, and Mario64 did well in certain markets, they're not the kinds of titles that sell anymore. They manifestly lack flashy graphics and things exploding, which are what sells games, apparently. As such, the console market had to move on to something else. FPSes have a pretty tight upper limit as to what you can innovate, and most releases focus on the newer, flashier, more-memory-eating graphics than any actual difference in gameplay. Console game authors can't rely on hardware upgrades to support their latest endeavour, so FPS games are pretty much right out. Third-person shooters (or just 3rd person adventure games in general, to include games like Onimusha that fit the mold but lack the guns) give you a little more freedom to innovate ("In this one you play a ninja frog with 76 secret tongue attacks to unlock!") without really moving Too far away from the "slightly-maze-like levels with plenty of moving things to make scream, bleed, and stop moving" formula.
So until someone comes up with a new display medium, we'll probably be stuck with an ever increasing selection of 3rd person adventure games and progressively more movie-like RPGs to play on consoles.
"If a man hasn't discovered something he will die for, he isn't fit to live" -- MLK, Jr.
For some reason I can't access blizzard.com properly (did we manage to slashdot it or is it the screwy gateway on my host being weird again). On the trailer it mentioned all three consoles, but not PC. I assume this is because there's no logo for PC (unless we're going windows symbol and tux for linux, etc), or would they be so cruel as to release it for console before PC?
There's too much marketing going out to console games right now. I need something other than NWN to test my CPU and video card to the edge.
(and while they're at it, can they get the Squaresoft guys to bring out FFX for PC too?)
Actually Doom3 is on PC too, isn't it ? Or did you mean SC Ghost instead of D3 ?
theefer
I find it funny you call Diablo an RPG, but let's not troll.
Blizzard hasn't invented anything with its game. There was Dune2 before Warcraft. Their business lies in improving existing genres. See Starcraft. Nothing really new in that game, but it was so great because of the fantastic gameplay.
I don't see SC Ghost as a revolutionnary game either, but who knows what the gameplay will look like, maybe it'll just be the next reference in the genre. 'cause, imho, Warcraft 3 isn't.
I'm *glad* Blizzard is approaching new kind of games, and not yet another Warcraft/Diablo.
We all know how rare it is that radically new games (Populous, Homeworld, Myst, etc) are released. This is just business, they won't take risks if people keep buying Doom 19. The best we can expect is real improvement in existing genres (B&W, RCT), or mixed genres (I see Warcraft 3 as a failed experiment).
If they want to try some new orientations in game design, fine, let them do, 'cause it can't really be worse than a stupid clone.
theefer
What on earth makes you think they will use the WC3 engine for SC2, and what makes you think that "a running engine and a couple of finished models" means that it won't take long to complete a game?
It takes time to create the technology as well as the contents, you know. Not to mention alpha and beta testing, and tweaking, tweaking and yet more tweaking. This is Blizzard, after all.
Not to underestimate the creativity and amount of work which goes into a model, but creating a single model doesn't take that long! And besides, they've already got the SC models built. They used them for the cutscenes in SC, remember (and maybe even as basis for the 2D characters in the game itself).
The ending in WC3 is just an easter egg of sorts, and says absolutely nothing about SC2. And it sounds like you don't even know what you are writing, because the exact story you are replying to now is a 3D game based in the SC universe, and it actually has 3D models of Hydras, Zealots, etc.. Why on earth do you start talking about SC2?
And the WC3 engine for SC2? I hope that is not the case.
Clever signature text goes here.