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

Patch?

[The Pi-Guy]

I can only think one thing, being the typical paranoid slashdotter... E. T. Phone Home! And then get caught by the cops!

I think it's just a few "fixes" to make people download it, then it phones home.

--j

No more unofficial D3 news!!!

[DaHat]

Come on, the first Doom 3 story about it being leaked was fine as a reporting of the news. The story did get a little overboard with publishing links to help people find and use the alpha... but this is just worse, a story not about news but completely about piracy. You should be ashamed!

I Know

[strateego]

I know why you never hear about in other Half-Life mods.

First their are not that many people playing anything but counter strike. If nobody is then no one is going to play by themselves.

Two People are sheep if everyone was still playing wolfenstein every one would be bragging about it.

That's my two cents.

Re:I Know

[Spy Hunter]

The number of people playing Counter-Strike as opposed to other FPSes is truly staggering. Take a look at Gamespy's stats. As I post this there are over 100,000 people playing Half-Life mods, and 60,000 of those people are playing Counter-Strike. The next-highest commercial game is Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, with an order of magnitude less players than Half-Life (less than 10,000).

Natural Selection isn't doing too badly for a new mod with 2700 players online at the moment. However, the ratio of players to servers for Natural Selection is much higher than for other games. This probably has to do with the large amount of processing power a Natural Selection server needs. If NS gets more servers I imagine the number of players will go up as well. It really is a unique game. It encourages teamwork and communication to a degree never before seen in any mod. I think this is its greatest strength. In CS you can play without teamwork but in NS it is really necessary. When teamwork is pretty much forced on people, it actually starts working. Good luck joining a random Counter-Strike server and forming an effective team; in Natural Selection cooperation is the norm and not the exception. Assaulting an alien hive with 3 guys backing you up and your commander watching out for you is a cool experience.

New Games

[Tempelherr]

Some of these new games coming out are really awesome, but I find myself disappointed in the lack of games that still provide single player action. So many of them are going multiplayer only, and that leaves out a large group of people still stuck in the stone age with mdoems like me. Good thing I've still got Lan parties to fall back on for good entertainment.

Warez Patches?

[Hays]

John Carmack personally posted on Slashdot to express his frustration with the leak of the Alpha, and Slashdot keeps advertising it and aiding it's distribution anyway? Who cares if it's illegal, it's extremely immoral to continue hyping an effectively stolen piece of software that the authors desperately don't want us to have yet.

And this is id! They're an unbelievably community minded company and this is how we pay them back?

Mirror for Doom 3 Alpha patch

[KarateBob]

You will need to register if any of you can figure out how to bypass registration, like NYT's website, Please reply

useless "patch"

[demmer]

this this is 2MB.. for what? for a few bytes changed in cfg and map files? useless. should not be on /. anyways, but since it does not do anything "great" it should REALLY not be here.

While NS isn't a cstrike killer...

[Thomas A. Anderson]

It is my 2nd favorite Half-Life mod. Is has a level of detail and replayability found in maybe only cstrike and dod (and neither of them are as unique as ns).

We are playing ns right now in my linux-based gaming center - it's very popular so far.

My take on the game after playing it recently:

[bertok]

I have tried a few dozen games of N.S. recently. I even played as a commander a few times. In my opinion, the concept is good, but the game seems incomplete and unbalanced, but I expect that that'll be fixed in upcoming versions. Some impressions:

• The HUD display of the aliens really helps teamplay. I wonder why other games haven't had the same feature earlier...
• The game is somewhat unbalanced. In the first few minutes on the smaller maps, aliens have a massive advantage, and can win quickly by rushing the human base.
• Later in the game, the defensive structures are unbalanced. Human turrets are nearly impossible to kill for the aliens, but the alien structures fall quickly to heavy machine guns or grenade launchers.
• The commander interface is a good, but they need to improve the mini-map. If it were bigger, more detailed, and showed team requests, it would make the commander's job much easier.
• The ability of the commander to heal 50% of a soldier's health instantly is too powerful, because it allows the commander to turn a few soldiers into unstoppable juggernauts. It would be better if the health packs only healed a few hit points per second.
• Neither side has enough weapons and upgrades to make the game interesting in the long run. I'd like to see humans with medic packs and an alien infiltrator class (like the Team Fortress Classic spy class).
• The jetpack and flight controls don't suit the maps that come with the game. They cause huge bursts of movement that prevent hovering or level flight, and all the maps have ridges and beams everywhere, making the flying classes nearly useless.

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

[ShadowDrgn]

The game is somewhat unbalanced. In the first few minutes on the smaller maps, aliens have a massive advantage, and can win quickly by rushing the human base.

I blame this on inexperienced marine teams. If at least one person is watching every enterance, the aliens don't have a chance of winning with a quick rush. The problem is when the entire marine team has their back turned building something, and no one starts firing until the first guy is already dead.

Later in the game, the defensive structures are unbalanced. Human turrets are nearly impossible to kill for the aliens, but the alien structures fall quickly to heavy machine guns or grenade launchers.

As was already said, the lerk is the ultimate anti-turret weapon. With a bit of experience, you'll get rid of them in no time. Three or four alien defense chambers can make any group of chambers nearly impervious to grenade fire, and will only fall to dedicated heavy machine gunning by multiple marines. By that time, hopefully a few aliens are snacking on them from behind.

The ability of the commander to heal 50% of a soldier's health instantly is too powerful, because it allows the commander to turn a few soldiers into unstoppable juggernauts. It would be better if the health packs only healed a few hit points per second.

I like your suggestion, but I haven't seen that abused too often. A commander can't continuously heal everyone, and a marine with full life and no armor is dead in 2 bites anyway.

Neither side has enough weapons and upgrades to make the game interesting in the long run.

Aliens have 5 classes with 4 weapons each. Marines are a bit more limited, but the whole RTS integration adds more stuff than any other FPS has. Speaking of enough weapons, Counter-Strike has tons of them yet how many people buy anything besides mp5, ak/colt, and the awp? It seems that most people don't care about weapon selection, as long as they like the weapons they have.

Obviously the game needs more work, but it's extraordinary for a version 1 release.

Left out

[rinkjustice]

What about cool games that don't require a P4 screamer with a cutting edge video card?
Any recommendations?

Re:Agree.. but...

[ergo98]

Even John can't possibly turn down the free promotion Doom is getting from all of this. I mean, christ, it was an Alpha that barely worked, and people were going nutso over it!

The reason he gets upset is because of the Duke Nukem syndrome: Duke Nukem was a great game, however they came out with the demo version of it so many months before the actual release that by the time people could buy it, most people were sick of it: The novelty had worn off. Because Q3 brings a lot of graphical "invention" to gaming, if people have seen it for months before the actual game comes out, suddenly it might seem run of the mill instead of special.

ns

[tabby]

woo-hoo, my first posted story ;-)

Seriously though I work at a internet/games cafe in Brisbane Australia and there are about 12-15 people that have started playing it there since I put it on a few machines last week. It is still unbalanced and some things don't fit right, but it does suit many different players and styles, and can only get better. I have people playing this that have always hated FPS and only ever played RTS, and they are becoming good FPS players now.

Battlezone

[nounderscores]

Anybody remember Activision's battlezone and BZ2? That was one of the first RTS/FPS games around, where you could both drive vehicles and then hop out and snipe the pilots out of other vehicles.

one majorly cool feature of the BZ2 engine was the deformable models and terrain. Some alien units could literally morph from speed to combat mode, and buildings would deform the terrain, digging holes if you wanted to put in a semi-underground command bunker.

I've always wondered what would happen if somebody resurected the BZ2 engine and made a contemporary Afghanistan mod. all the tools are there. Mines, machine guns, bombers, satchel charges, buildings that can be instructed to build specific configurations of a particular unit, pilotable resource gatherers.... You could even have modular trench systems that the commander could have dug.

Re:Balancing Issues in NS

[ShadowDrgn]

e.g. Give the team a useful defensive weapon that has limited lifetime (pehaps a fixed number of proximity mines), so that they can lock down their base for a short period, while they build up.

Actually that's already in there. The marines have trip mines that they can place very early in the game for little cost. The alien side has the advantage that they can kill a starting marine in 2 hits so rushing them is usually suicidal. The maps are huge and the marines move slowly, so a dead marine early on has a long way to go in a rush.