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

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?

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: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.