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Top 20 Gaming Lows of 2004
An anonymous reader writes "Gamepro has posted a story about the gaming lows in 2004 -- a fair roundup of all the junk that's happened this past year. Those poor smugglers..."
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the lowest point in gaming happened when the 50th release of the same wargame genre which has even crappier gameplay than the predicessors that it tried to copy off of. And yes I am talking about shellshocked nam 67 or whatever the hell it was. Oh and dont forget about [insert random wwII refrence], man that game sucked compared to call of duty. All these should teach game producers to at least pass a test run with a retarded monkey before giving us the game, but every day a new war era game is released.
I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. - Catcher in the Rye
I don't think you read all the way through. First of all, "smugglers" is a reference to the Star Wars MMORPG and the shafting that profession is getting.
The DNF reference refers to the news (from this year!) that they have selected a company to produce the physics engine for DNF. So, there you are - shameful news from this year.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Um, you don't notice this trend? My 5200FX [which runs doom3/ut2k4/etc decently, sure not 300FPS but it's still good enough] doesn't even have a fan
;-)
For the curious it's the MSI brand of 5200 with 128MB of ram and 8x AGP interface. It has a massive [but short so it doesn't hit neighbouring cards] heatsink and that's it. The thing gets a bit warm during play but that's about it.
I'm sure the same calibre GPU two years ago would have required a fan + more power. I'm sure 2 years from now the 6800FX will be a "moderate" card by the newer standards.
So if you don't need excessive GPU power right now get a 5200FX series card. They're good bang for buck. I mean for 100$ [cdn] I got
1. nvidia GPU [e.g. works in linux with good 3d in x86_64 mode]
2. 128MB of DDR 400 memory
3. AGP 8x interface [sounds impressive]
4. Capable DX and GL support
5. Card that can play modern games, specially UT2k4
6. Drives a 1280x1024 LCD monitor at 75Hz
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
The ATI requires nearly the same. The reason for the second molex connector is stability. Under most conditions you can get away without it, however the AGP power is not always completely clean and if the molex is putting out a smaller amount, there can still be issues.
X-bit Labs did tests to show this. These tests show there is not a difference that is significant in power consumption throughout, although the new XT cards are improving with their heat loss and power consumption.
That's scary.
Go back to playing FPS with controllers.
Deus Ex: Invisible War was (by far) the biggest thing that went wrong in 2004. The only reason it didn't make this list was because GamePro (and most of the other critics) gave it ridiculously positive reviews.
All the "video games are bad" items torn from the pages of mainstream newspapers should never have made it to this list. When damn near everyone plays or has a friend who plays video games the journalists and politicians behind these stories are pissing in the wind (and most of them know it).
Yea, I've got to say, Steam makes a lot of sense to me.
I just bought my first PC for work (having been an avid Mac user for 15+ years) and decided, while I was at it, to get some nice games to go with it. The HL franchise never registered with me, having been a Mac user, but I downloaded Steam one night and made a total impulse buy of the Silver HL2 package about a week before HL2 was released.
For me, Steam worked out slicker then dog snot. I paid like $60 and got all sorts of good content at that price; the original HL, CounterStrike, Day of Defeat etc. It all just magically showed up on my box and within a couple of hours, I was playing pretty much the entire Valve catalogue.
Having wetted my appetite, I was eagerly anticipating HL2 and at midnight on it's launch, it took 5 minutes for my pre-downloaded copy to authenticate and I played the hell out of it for the next 20 hours of so and loved every minute of it. HL2 is a mindblowing game...
In my book, the Steam system deserves to be the future of how video games are distributed. Yea, there were some big time bugs- since I am not a dedicated HL fan, I feel really sorry for the guys who pre-ordered boxed copies and waited for years only to have authentication problems while I, an HL noob was playing by 12:05. Publishers are adding less and less value these days while they still take huge chunks of profit off of the work of the actual developers. This needs to end and I think Steam (both better incarnations of Valve's and different versions for different publishers) is the way this industry is gonna cut out the useless middlemen.
You could probably make it fun if you had a chain saw, a rocket launcher and a plasma gun.
It was rated M because it contains two Mortal Kombat arcade titles, along with NARC. These were the games that kicked off this whole violence in games uproar -- wasn't it a Genesis copy of Mortal Kombat that Leiberman shook in the middle of Congress back in the 90's?
Half-Life 2 Cookie Edition.
Deltron 3030 - Virus (music video)
That is not the reason that Lucas Arts gave.
Here is what Steve Purcell, the creator of Sam and Max had to say about the cancelation.
The Lucas Arts press release (which you obviously never read) gave the reason of the cancelation as "it was not the right time to release a graphic adventure". In other words, they could not figure out how to sell anything that was not a Star Wars game.
Quality (or lack thereof) had nothing to do with it.
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
Yeah, I had to wonder about that. If they wanted to rip into an actual lame MMORPG release, they could have gone with Square's worthless Chains of Promathia expansion for FFXI.
To give you an idea, Chains of Promathia was an expansion pack that added a bunch of new areas to the game - that was it. (Someone will probably get on my ass and point out that the areas included new items, enemies, quests, etc., but that's completely missing the point, as the only new content involves the new areas.)
Anyway, access to some 90% or so of these areas is only gained through a quest. Well, actually, a quest split into three parts. Each part is essentially identical. But anyway, it involved three dungeons, each with a boss at the end. These dungeons were divided into floors that you teleport across by defeating these mini-boss like things. Because "fucking waste of time" and "MMORPG" must go together, there were like four of these mini-bosses on two of the four floors. Only one of them would teleport you down a floor when killed, chosen randomly. (The attempt I made before quitting involved killing six of them before finding the real one - yes, that would involve two of them respawning and the first one not being chosen.)
To top it all off, the areas were level capped at 30 (max level is 75). The enemies in the area were, of course, too tough for a normal party of six level 30s, so instead an alliance (think "half-assed raid") of three parties was required, or a total of 18 people. Once you got to the end, of course, only six people can attempt the boss at a time. To make this even more annoying, only three or so of the fifteen jobs (think classes) were actually useful in these dungeons. All the other classes were totally ineffective. So finding a collection of people who could actually complete the quest was next to impossible.
Keep in mind that you must do this THREE TIMES to gain access to 90% of the expansion pack.
Needless to say, most people just said "fuck this," got pissed off at spending $30 on an expansion pack that requires nine hours or more of effort to unlock 90% of the content, and quit. (Like I did.)
There's no way the EQ2 release can come close to that.
L2, on the other hand had more variety, although it was impossibly tough in places (I became so bored trying to finish the prison section where you must set up 3 sentry guns and survive against an entire fucking army at close range that I just switched on the God mode).
Here's a tip to survive that spot without taking any damage:
Take out each sentry gun, turn it around, and then put it back in its storage slot. (You might want to make sure a sentry gun is in a slot on the outside of the little corridor.) Place yourself in the empty inner slot. Now the sentry guns will mow down the soldiers and can't be knocked over. If any soldiers do make into that little corridor you can kill them with the double-shot from the shotgun. If you stay back in your spot you may never see a soldier or take any damage.
Some of the areas in HL2 are tough if you try to go toe to toe with the enemy. If you thing defensively you can make it through quite easily.
Not that HL2 is perfect (or even the best game ever) I wish Valve had put a manual in the game (lamest collectors edition ever!). I never realized until recently that you can roll a grenade on the floor (right click). There's an area in the game where that would have been nice to know about the first time around.
"All the darkness in the world can not quench the light of one small candle."