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.
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.
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!