Gobs Of Gaming Goodies

Warrior-GS writes "The final part of the Future of PC Gaming is up at GameSpy. This one deals with the future of user-created games and talks to developers and mod makers, as well as identifying tools that can assist them. There is also a Q&A with Warren Spector on where he thinks PC gaming is headed in the next several years." John Scabadone points to a "nice article featuring an update on the state of the handheld gaming industry along with a roundtable of some of the premier developers." Read on below for several more gaming updates, too.

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 ....

Users of all systems welcome, Linux, BSD, Windows, Mac, anything, the more diverse the better. The bunker is located in Essex (UK) near the town of Brentwood. Details about booking places and prices are on our site."

Comments

Scorched Earth

[Poppa_joe]

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.

Worms arguably better. Argument to follow.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Oooooh! Shiny!

[hosebee]

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.

Memo to Warren Spector

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Memo to Warren Spector

[sciion]

OK, possible spoilers below -

I actually was pleased with the ending. If you didn't like the ending of Deus Ex, you probably didn't like the ending for Half Life, both end with a bit of a cliff-hanger, the need to make a choice, and the knowledge that this choice is basically an intimation of the content of the sequel.

I loved Deus Ex, played it in it's entirety three times or more to try things different ways so far as upgrading different abilities went, to better explore the environment, and to find out how the plot would change if I made different choices.

A little OT here but...I thought the game was excellent. It was long, absorbing, intelligent, and had a lot of replay value. The ending was excellent, because although it didn't offer up all of the answers on a platter, you achieve a major objective you had been working towards, it gave one a lot of food for thought, and it made me aware that a sequel was in the works before any sequel had been announced...more Deus Ex = good thing!

Digger....

[Annoyed Coward]

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.) :-(

Re:Digger....

[stratjakt]

MAME's sister project, MESS, emulates consoles and computers, one of which being older PC-XT and AT class machines.

Works great for all that old-timey code that used the mhz rating of the machine as its timing, and emulates common old hardware where need be (gravis ultrasound, adlib, MCGA adaptors)

Handheld gaming industry?

[alexmogil]

What's there to report on the handheld gaming industry? There's:

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.

Re:Scorched Earth 2k

[ultraexactzz]

You might give Moonbase Commander a look. It's decidedly New-School, but it really has a classic strategy feel.

Actually, there is competition.

[CaptainPsyko]

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.

Handheld + Java

[failrate]

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!

Re:The Mod article.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm more than a little disappointed - it reads to me like something written by someone who has been given a few pages worth of notes on modding communities withought actually seeing one. If anything mods are becoming more and more ambitious and complex, rather than simply focusing on simple things. Take the throw-away mention of GTA3 mods for example - the reason that so few big mods have been made for it so far is simply because the mod community have have to build all the tools. From scratch. As in reverse engineering everything by hand (even the bytecode compiled scripting engine) and then using that knowledge to make editors. They have had virtually no help from Rockstar, yet there are now people working on whole new cities (if you look at the datafiles for Vice City you'll find that they even used some of the editors make by the mod community for making VC). IMO that's as impressive, if not more so, than people making mods for an engine that is well documented and supported by the developer like Half-Life or Unreal.

Gamespy.

[Dark Lord Seth]

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*