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 ....
I just had to recommend this. Great gameplay over network.
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.
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.
I see your point and it actually is valid. Witha a big "However".
Console (action) games right now are more advanced than their PC equivalents IMO.
However, I remember when the Amiga games was many years in front of PC games but that is no longer the case. Also, when the first Playstation came out, games like NHL, MicroMachines and Wipeout surely beat PC games easy!
Then came a period with incredible PC games with no real challenge from the console market, like Starcraft, Counterstrike and Quake.
Now, a new set of consoles are making their way and we might see a migration from PC gaming to console gaming.... But my intuition says that we have not likely seen the last of PC gaming as the PC is always developing in the background while the consoles takes a couple of years between their generations.
True ravers don't need drugs
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.
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!
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.
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!
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!
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