Slashdot Mirror
Gobs Of Gaming Goodies
pandrew writes "Square has openly admitted to doing something people have been asking for for many years now: a sequel! Though not what most people have asked for (i.e. Final Fantasy 7) this is still a very big step in the Final Fantasy line, since no game in the series has ever had a follow up with a connecting storyline."
k-hell writes "The Mother of All Games, Scorched Earth has been updated to allow for playing on Internet. Rendered in OpenGL, Scorched 3D now features a 3D island environment and LAN and Internet play. See screenshots here. You can download a Windows binary package and/or Windows source package here. At the same time, you should also grab the excellent server browser The All-Seeing Eye."
Lucifer writes "'Sega announced a list of new Sega AGES game titles for PlayStation 2, remakes of their classic Master System, Mega Drive/Genesis, Saturn titles. Each game will retail for 2500 yen, and the first four titles are scheduled to release in Japan in summer 2003.' 15 years later and I'm going to start playing Phantasy Star again! ;-)"
Finally, bredroll writes "Attention fellow Geeks! Ever wanted to live 100ft underground in a ex British gov't nuclear bunker for three days and do nothing but geek at extreme levels and play LAN games? Well, we can help, This year's event includes food and bunks as well,
In-Bunker Events
- Battle Royale (Robot Wars-type event)
- Underground Noise Fest (see site)
- High-speed switched LAN
- Various LAN game tournaments
- NTK will be there
- + more ....
"Future of PC Gaming"
Why does anybody waste their time writing those?
It's not like they're going to be right anyway.
I just had to recommend this. Great gameplay over network.
I think the console development scene is more vibrant and innovative, especially Nintendo's first and second parties. Who cares where PC gaming is headed? Answer to rhetorical question: everyone except me :)
Aww, hours of my youth were wasted playing this game. So simple yet so beautiful. There is nothing quite like a properly placed atomic death head missile. Another great game along this same venue is Worms Armageddon. If you never plaed it you have missed out.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that Worms rules, despite being a late addition. Sure, it's not (yet) the classic that Scorched Earth is/was, but the idea of using old ladies as high-powered ordinance: brilliant.
My personal favorite was the herd or mad cows or the giant stone donkey. The mad cows rocked!
Hmm - I'm a little dissappointed in that Modding community article. For example, they discussed modding in RTS games as if it had never been done before - when Total Annihilation had several total conversions for it, and was designed for such things (where the TC's for the Blizzard games were hack jobs). TA had a huge modding community - the devs demonstrated the power of the modding system by publishing a new unit every month.
A good example of a new engine that people are going nuts to mod is UT2003. The game included a fully functional vehicle that is never used in the game just for modders to play with. DeathBall, one of the prominent mods, even got Epic to produce new announcer sounds just for their mod. For the UT gold edition, they included a handful of user-made mods on a second disk. As a UT player I've always been a bit bewildered at all the Half-Life die-hards when there are newer, more powerful and versitile engines to work with. For example, UT and Q3 mods are expected to include bot support in the mod. Imagine that. That being said, HL-Turbo is good fun.
UT is also unique as it has a new paradigm for gameplay mods - UT's "mutators" aren't mutually exclusive. You can run multiple mutators on one server, mixing and matching several weapon sets, player class mods, gameplay mods, and server control mods. All those are kept separate from the gametype (CTF/DM/BombRun) so that mods don't have to reinvent the wheel every time they want to include something done in someone elses mod.
FlyingLabs software is developing Delta Green, which may or may not be very good. But, after seeing Doom3 at E3, the dev team has created some stunning visuals; particularly with the normal mapping technique. Check out vids here. There's also a HomeLAN interview here.
What your next game needs isn't "huge strides in lighting, AI and game physics", it's an ending that doesn't suck. I would have been happier seeing an MPEG of the ending to Super Mario 3 than any of the lame sequences Deus Ex finished with.
whats the state of handheld porn?
I miss good ol' Digger and Prince of Persia. Soon after I updated my PC to 286, I lost Digger (cuz it was too fast on 286.) :-(
Hmmm... Ok.. Chivas on the rocks.
Granted, some games have been doing more with deformable terrain, but not enough. Red Faction had its GeoMod system, and some RTSs like C&C Tiberium Sun have things like rivers that freeze, but it really hasn't been taken to the extreme it should be. Especially in MMORPGs, I would be really intrigued if players could actually rearrange the face of the land. With really powerful spells or technology, it seems like one should be able to knock down mountains or carve out lakes. I think that, properly utilized, this would add a whole new dimension to strategy. Is the enemy's base at the bottom of a valley? Blast apart a nearby river and see if their base can survive underwater. Trigger a volcano on the area above them. Cause an avalanche to fall as they follow through a pass below a snowy slope. All sorts of things could be possible.
Also, it would be nice to see more of a system in games where players can create their own new parts of the game. Already some games are starting to do this as well, with players able to make more powerful weapons and items. However, I would also like to see players able to create pretty much anything in game that they might mod. It is perfectly possible in certain situations that players might even be able to influence the creation of a new race, of new spells or monsters. More of this should be available as a part of the world.
Yikes, getting kind of long winded here. Anyway, I hope in the future the CPU gets used more, as well as the GPU! Just my 2cents.
That's not xmath of 'Jade' noterity is it?
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Moderator's essentials
Attention fellow Geeks! Ever wanted to live 100ft underground in a ex British gov't nuclear bunker for three days and do nothing but geek at extreme levels and play LAN games?
NO!!! I really don't! I could think of hundreds of other things that sound more appealing than that! =P
Nintendo
The end. If Sega can't do it, about the only other competitor who would stand a chance would be (hate to say it) Microsoft. They are the only people who could stand to lose millions upon billions of dollars for five years to get a foothold in the handheld industry. Sony doesn't care. Palm/CE devices stink for gaming - too much dough. Phone gaming eats it.
Nintendo is all there is. Who knows how they are treating the developers due to this fuzzy monopoly - their handheld division might be the Nintendo of the late 80's.
A winner is you!
FFX-2 looks beautiful, personally I don't care if it's a sequel, I guess that's kinda cool, I'm just ready for the next one. Though it sucks to have to wait so long, we won't see it in the US until the end of '03 if not later. Thankfully I'm revisiting some of the past greats, ... FFIII, Chrono Trigger, Lufia II. By the time I've finished playing through the classic rpgs maybe X-2 will be released in the US.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
The people at Crawfish were great, and it's a real shame for Cameron and the others that this happened, despite them releasing world-beating games. I really wish them well for their next enterprises.
In Japan, the Wonderswan has been mounting some sort of challenge to the Gameboy for a while. But the GBA just about killed it, and it looks like Sony will pull it's support from the system soon - possibly in order to develop a handheld of it's own.
Shame too that the Wonderswan never made it here. It has an EXCELLENT library of upgrades of some classic early golden age RPG's.
Or does FFX-2 give off the appearance of square catering (more than usual I know) to the 15 year old set? First direct sequel. Features the eye candy female charachters. Wearing skimpier than ever clothing...
No, Squares not juvenile... not at all... They haven't lost their ability to be affecting and innovative. They'd never sell out like those BMX XXX guys.
Maybe I'll just wander over into this corner and cry for my broken memories.
One thing that hanheld forgot to mention (glossing over the N-gage and cellphones), is that if written in J2ME according to the m-gaming portability specs, handheld developers should be able to port a single game to as many different products as they want as long as they don't tie themselves down to an API, like Qualcomm's BREW. While this still isn't as significant a market as GBA is, you can take a moment to consider that this means that a J2ME game can have a viable presence on cell-phones, the N-gage, Palm/PDA, the PC (under VM or not), and can even be presented as a fully featured demo on the companies home site for perusal before purchase. While this may not be enough to shrug off the dominance of Nintendo wholly, it should suggest that this alternate handheld market is more open to small developers, fan developers, etc. Try writing a J2ME game and then porting it to GBA... see what I mean? Additionally, many of these cell companies are so hungry for apps that they will actually go out of their way to encourage companies to write for them. Try finding a "Developers" section on the Nintendo site!
Voodoo Girl is the bomb!
Since when is Mirc a new program?!!?
(xchat is better anyway)
Besides the look at the devlopers, why bother having an article at all. Nintendo has owned the handheld market from the get go, and there has been noone to stop it, even though the TurboExpress and NeoGeo pocket were my favorite stabs at it. The fact that Nintendo owns that market is fine with me, it's a last salvation for those who grew up on 2d graphics, and still love side scrollers, the developers trying to push
3D on it is a nice attemp, but I'll always prefer 2D on my handheld thanks.
Ubuntu- Linux for human beings.
I agree....Deus Ex sucked. I could not get into it at all.
I am just glad that the industry got over the "multimedia" crap they were dishing out. Remember? They would take a game, add a little extra sound, and throw in some short videos that you got to see over and over.
Remember that game Critical Path? You could finish the whole thing in about 10 minutes.
...All I can say is that my life is pretty strange...
Knowing Gamespy, they will prolly encourage modding some more. hosting projects for various games and eventually "aqquiring" said mods, rebuild them to make them backwards incompatible and make them part of the Gamespy hive. That said, I'm convinced that Gamespy is a blight on the gaming community. Gamespy Arcade is a digital deathtrap, the Gamespy fileservers where demos are hosted require (free) registration at the cost of Gamespy opting you in on 10+ (spam/commercial email)* lists. The whole Gamespy play-online network absolutely sucks and the whole thing just reeks "monopolize" all over it.
* = Choose your poison. Furthermore, if they want me to go to Gamespy to download a demo at 5KB/s while suffering huge ammounts of spam from signing up, then they can go straight to hell. I'm not going to buy a game anymore which involves GameSpy any way whatsoever. *kicks his BF 1942 cds*
Hate me!
This story comes just hours after slashdotters look down their noses at MMORPG players.
The state of handhelds article states: "Nintendo has never seen a major competitor for their handheld systems. Nobody has ever has come close to the Game Boy series. Sega's Game Gear was much more powerful than the original Game Boy -- including the color games -- but the higher quality and quantity of the Game Boy games just crushed Sega's hopes in the 90's."
The Atari Lynx color handheld was released around the same time as the gameboy & competed with it. It had several games that are still fun today.
"but the higher quality and quantity of the Game Boy games"
It was quantity, not quality.
With their N-Gage, which will is a fully featured mobile phone in a similar form factor to the gameboy advance. You say that phone gaming eats it, but that's because ordinary phones are unsuitable for gaming. The N-Gage will be like a GBA with mobile gaming built in.
In other gaming news, I just read over at Linuxgames that there is now a Linux version public beta of Serious Sam the First Encounter. It will even install the game from the cd for you. I tried it, and it runs with no hitches on my AthlonXP 1800+ with a GeForce 4 Ti 4200.
Project Steve
IMHO this is very cool, I didn't care much about Half-Life but spent many hours messing with it's level editor :)
For "creative gamers" on nearly any computer platform there is Blender, which is licenced under the GPL. You can find both standalone and browser plugin based games at www.blender3d.org
>> Capcom mentioned that Gun Survivor 4: Biohazard will support USB mouse, in addition to the GunCon 2 controller
BioHazard == Resident Evil == I thought this was a gamecube 'exclusive'?
I guess it's as exclusive to gamecube as Code Veronica was to Dreamcast.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Lynx ate batteries. GameGear ate batteries. Luckily technology has improved since then - batteries seem cheaper and colour screens are less hungry.
is it just me, or does it look like some tomfoolery was happening in the men's bunker?
or maybe that's not a high-heel on the floor.
hoping your rules and wisdom choke you, since 1976
Which promptly brought the game down to "He who shoots first wins".
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
The handheld article seemed a bit one-sided to me. I think that it's the cell phones that Nintendo needs to worry about the most. So many people (kids included) already carry a cell phone 24/7, why not use it for gaming too? Cell phones also have the multi-player advantage. With airtime getting cheaper (slowly) multi-player games over the cell should become more common. As long as it won't eat the batteries or wear down the phone, why not. At home it's PS2 all the way.
the 3d version mentioned in the article is still working.
The reason I appreciate Half-Life mods so much is that they don't require frequent hardware and software purchases. In effect, the Half-Life engine is a virtual console such that I can guarantee that if I can run it, I can run any new mod that comes out. UT and Quake are constantly competing for the mod community's attention, all while coming out with a new version every few years.
I'm more interested in game-play than chrome and stability over features. (Great example of a sequal that failed on both: Tribes 2.) What I'd love more than anything is a scalable or modular game engine so that hardware fanatics can keep upgrading to get more polygons, but I can play happily with my wireframes. I don't think this is an unreasonable request considering that game makes don't seem to be as deep in bed with video card mfg. as Microsoft is with Intel.
The zip-file version of Scorched3D works in non-fullscreen (didn't test fs) under wine-20021031 (Debian/testing) however the fonts are unreadable. I'd do further testing, but trying to quit froze my Xwindows, so I've had enough of that. :)
I really want to believe, because I am of the philosophy that my workstation should not be sullied by games. However I just don't see it: it'll be years before online console gaming matures to the point where online PC gaming is now. And as we all know: if you're playing with yourself, it's called "masturbation".
How about a few more classics:
The old apogee/ID/etc games (Commander Keen and others). By today's standards crappy graphics but really fun and amusing at their time.
Old sierra games: Why don't they bring back "Space Quest?" Those were the best
SQ5: (WD-40, a garbage scow enterprise, a parody of kirk...)
As for the final fantasy sequals... why not remake the old ones in 3d or better graphics. I've often thought that, if I could acquire permission from Square, I'd like to get a team together and remake FF2/FF3 (awesome plots) with modern graphics, instead of just a few new cinematics.
As gaming increases in visual (although clearly not in psychological) complexity, it's only to be expected that the production payroll will increase considerably, too. Even famously tiny id software isn't exactly a garage outfit any more. At worst, this is a case of advancing technology promising a retreat on profits; better looking games raise the bar, requiring developers to stay in the race, which necessitates hiring... Sad, I'm sure, but nobody said game publishers are supposed to be as rich as they are. ;-)
Two questions for Warren:
1) How or why should this increased management challenge be any greater a burden for game developers than it is for Hollywood?
2) Why would anyone want automated content, assuming, of course, that most of the gaming industry's currently human-generated output can be considered better than Xeroxed cliche?
There.
*** SPOILER WARNING ***
While not fully rendered, DVD-quality mini movies, I felt that the endings in Deus Ex were the most thought-provoking I've ever seen in a video game. I've *never* come away from a game pondering the philosophical and moral implications of my decisions and how they affected the ending before DX (and in a first-person shooter, no less!).
I spent a lot of time afterward pondering which of the three options I would choose in real life, as well as debating them with friends who had also completed the game.
The three options boil down to
a) Anarchy- Maximum personal freedom, at the expense of a total societal collapse (and the misery that would be almost certain to result)
b) Technological Totalitarianism- An efficient and peaceful outcome, but one where the human race effectively becomes subjugated by a benevolent AI
c) Illuminati- Continuation of the status-quo, where personal freedom is an illusion and none of the world's societal ills are rectified, but where there is no disruption of anyone's life (except Bob Page, of course!)
None are clearly better than any of the others. I think that the DX team did a magnificent job of crafting an intelligent ending worthy of the rest of the game. They'll have a tough time making the sequel live up to the original, and I can't wait to see what they come up with.
-Cybrex
Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Dynamic Optimism, Intelligent Technology, Spontaneous Order- BEST DO IT SO!
My message is not that biological determinists were bad scientists or
even that they were always wrong. Rather, I believe that science must be
understood as a social phenomenon, a gutsy, human enterprise, not the work of
robots programmed to collect pure information. I also present this view as
an upbeat for science, not as a gloomy epitaph for a noble hope sacrificed on
the alter of human limitations.
I believe that a factual reality exists and that science, though often
in an obtuse and erratic manner, can learn about it. Galileo was not shown
the instruments of torture in an abstract debate about lunar motion. He had
threatened the Church's conventional argument for social and doctrinal
stability: the static world order with planets circling about a central
earth, priests subordinate to the Pope and serfs to their lord. But the
Church soon made its peace with Galileo's cosmology. They had no choice; the
earth really does revolve about the sun.
-- S.J. Gould, "The Mismeasure of Man"
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