Gaming Goodness

Let's shoehorn a few gaming submissions together: tabby writes "For those not in the know here's the most amazing game I've played in ages. Its a Half-Life mod called Natural-Selection. Try to imagine CounterStrike + StarCraft. Its essentially a multiplayer First Person Real Time Strategy game." real_b0fh writes "I'm surprised no one mentioned it here yet, but Silicon Ice Development has released the beta 2.6 for their very cool Quake 3 Arena mod Urban Terror. Have played it a bit and it features cool things like better weapon hit model, some anti-cheat features, improved maps and some new nasty bugs. Well worth a try if you are into FPS games." And on the lighter side, LSDsmurf reports that there's a patch for Doom III Alpha. Yes, you read that right.

Comments

Balancing Issues in NS

[TekReggard]

One of my assosiates in a gaming organization is in on Natural Selection because he helps moderate their forums. Due to this, my team of gamers got a first crack at Beta 1.00 and 1.01b [before it was released no less :)] and are still pointing out something thats obvious. The game needs some major balancing before it reaches its acme, as do most games. At first players complained that Aliens were underpowered and Marines could win the game in just about any situation. Now while the game is a little more even the Aliens are starting to come out a bit more powerful and the marines a bit weaker. The most obvious flaw in this game is that the whole outcome can be determined in the first 5 - 15 minutes of the game. With an average game running anywhere between an hour to four hours this is considerably undesirable. One team knows they're destined for doom hours ahead of their demise.

Another note is how players constantly claim that aliens can rush marines in the beginning and overpower all their foes easily with the high attack power on the level 1 alien creatures. Well the night before last I displayed what a marine rush and an alien rush can do:

Aliens Win: ~5 minutes
Marines Win: ~3 minutes

I'm pretty sure they didnt make this game to be played in under 10 minutes. So while it does have great prospects and is a considerably nice idea, I would like to see it balanced out before I start calling it the best game ever.

Re:PA's dream come true.

[brett42]

PA is a little bit faster than slashdot when it comes to game news.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/news.php3?date=2002-11 -04

Re:Doom III patch

[killthiskid]

The patch:

What's new? :

• Removed binary for loading intro. To watch video:type: map e3/intro at the console
• Removed flashlight3.tga and pointed the doomconfig entry to the existing flashlight2 changed flashlight lag so it is more responsive
• added F5 and F6 keymapping for recordDemo and stoprecording
• bumped up number of speakers to 6 and enabled stereo. Conflicting stories of whether this works or not.
• changed r_useNV30 back to 0 since noone should have one of these yet
• added give_weapon_flare to F12 weapon bind. (Use 0 to pick flares)

There you have it.

Natural Selection is Fantastic

[Rayonic]

It's easily the best, most innovative online game I've seen in a long time. It's amazing that a independently-developed, free mod for a four year old game can put the likes of UT2003 to shame.

To those who haven't tried it, it's a game that pits some Zerg-like aliens against a team of space marines in an innovative FPS/RTS hybrid. The humans are led by a single commander (a player voulenteer) with a bird's-eye view of the battlefield. The aliens have no central commander but -- this is neat -- they can "see" their teammates, important waypoints, and any enemies that another team member is seeing right then. (Sort of like an organic built-in radar.)

Anyhow, anyone who likes action games should try it out. There has been a lack of fast servers out there, so if you've got a decent spare box then set up a dedicated server by all means. Also, there may be some balancing issues so early after release, but honestly it's hard to tell.

Mirrors

[RudeDude]

Natural Selection V1 full install (90MB)
Natural Selection Server Patch 1.01 (2.1MB)
Doom III Alpha Patch (2MB)
Urban Terror Beta 2.6 FULL (239MB ouch!)
BF 1942 patch (15MB)

I may not be able to keep that Urban Terror one up there too long, that's huge!
Free mirrors provided by Mr HOSTBOT. From that link you can get a free Gig with a new account.

Urban Terror mod & Natural Selection

[antdude]

Remember that UT mod can be played under Linux port of Q3A easily. I play it often.

I love Natural Selection especially marines part (think Aliens movie). :)

Re:My take on the game after playing it recently:

[Soulslayer]

1) Marines get a similar HUD bonus when they advance far enough to get motion tracking.

2) Rushing works when the Marine side is unprepared and disorganized in the opening moments. Aliens always try to rush with Skulks in the opening minutes and almost always are easily defeated so long as you don't have unskilled morons on the marine side.

3) Human Turrets are very hard to destory. But you are either playing an unpatched server or haven't read the docs if you think they are hard to disable. All you need to do is take out the Turret factory and all the turrets near-bye will cease to function.

4) Commander interface has a hotkeys to jump around the map more easily, the problem is that a lot of this is not obvious to newbie commanders. The biggest thing a commander needs is a headset. Communication between commander and troops is vital and with 10 marines yelling at you it is hard to type responses to all of them.

5) No this is not too powerful at all. It is very easy to take out a marine faster than the commander can select a new health pack and drop it and if the marine manages to last a long while the commander is occupied with that area and ignoring others which are then far more vulnerable.

6) Medics are not really necessary with the commander and the aliens already have the ability to cloak with an upgrade not to mention the skulk being able to climb walls and cielings to avoid detection. In the middle of a huge battle with turrets everyewhere I managed to sneak my Skulk all the way into the command area and attack and kill a commander and his command station.

7) There are several levels where flight is crucial and you can effect very very nasty surprises from the rafters of super tall rooms. One alien tactic is to evolve into a Lerk then fly 10 stories up to a vent then evolve into a Fade and bomb any humans that enter the room to death with acid rockets and the like.

Overall I have found that while there were some minor balance issues with game initially, with the server side patch NS is almost perfect and virtually all the "problems" people list stem from an inability to play the game properly. This is not a deathmatch game. This is not Team Fortress. There is a lot more strategy and tactical prowess need to play NS properly.