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A Gamer's Manifesto
Krimszon writes "The top 20 things you always knew were wrong about games, but were afraid to talk about, since you thought that was just the way is was."
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You walk into a room full of traps and puzzles to disarm them... you are well on your way to getting through the room.. when suddenly.. BAM! You have just stepped on a tile that locks the way out. What do you do now? Leave the way you came in... and PRESTO! all the traps are reset and everything is back to how it was before you entered earlier.... that always gives me a chuckle or two...
- Your stupidity got you into this mess, why can't it get you out? -Will Rogers
DECAF!
"Plans are for fools! Oglethorpe, the plutonian (Aqua Teen Hunger Force)
I must agree. Command and Concur was a great game. It is always nice when you give an order, and units agree to follow it. ^_^
Rhapsody in Numbers
I concur!
Measure once, cut twice
FUCK YOU XEN! FUCK YOU AND DIE AND GO TO HELL! Yeah, the entire end world of that game was one big jumping puzzle.
I have a friend, who in playing the UT2k4 campaign, was in a 1 on 1 deathmatch with a bot. He stayed one or two ahead of the bot the entire match, up until he was one kill away. The bot then owned his soul, up until the point where he was just one ahead of my friend.
:)
The bot then hid for the entire rest of the round, and waited for the time to expire.
It ran away from him, and waited out the clock, causing it to expire.
They also say that UT2k7, they're completly revamping the AI, to be much, much, much harder. That's perfectly okay with me, I could use a good challenge
Gamer's Desiderata
If you're seriously bored with the lack of AI and realism in current games, have I got the solution for you!
It's called US-Soldier. What a wild game! You don't have to buy it. Just sign up. You start by running around endlessly and having some guy yell at you for trival things. This goes on for weeks while you learn the rules of the game.
Then, the playing action begins. You get physically relocated to some hot-dry shithole on the other side of the world. Surrounded by thousands of the enemy. You can't tell them apart from ordinary people, but it doesn't matter because everyone hates you just for being there. The enemy has hundreds of years experience fighting new gamers like you. They know all the tricks. They communicate in a special language that you or anyone on your game team can't understand. But they know how you think from watching your television shows and movies. They have a secret religion that enables them to kill anyone without remorse and to accept their own and their fellow gamers deaths without hesitation.
Such incredible realism in this game. And your enemy's gaming stategy is based on the experience of a permanent hot war that has been going on there since you were born. They were gaining combat experience while you were watching cartoons. They've already made all the mistakes in this combat game and they won't make them again, but you will.
Just like an arcade game, when you're done playing, you get sent right back to begin again.
And just like every other video game, no matter how good you get, in the end, you always lose.
Sign up now!
The inability of my character to make fatal plunges off cliffs doesn't spoil my game at all.
Who ordered that?
I can't count the number of times I've caught a Harvester in C&C gazing longingly across a river at a tiny little patch of timberium that it can't possibly get to, or getting so drunk after filling itself that it decides to wander over to an enemy base get a really close look at an enemy turret.
:-) :-)
Stupid, stupid, stupid!!!
Damn things need a babysitter.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
You don't think real life makes a good video game? I have to disagree. I mean, I thought "Overweight Pimply-Faced Virgin Living in his Mom's Basement" was a blast. The graphics are wicked- you can see every little button on the remote as you're watching "Star Trek: The Next Generation" reruns. And the AI is really tough- no matter how you try to get away from them, those junior high school kids track you down and beat you up and steal all your comic books.
Excellent comment, sir, although the game was called Commend and Concur. It was the corporate office brown-nosing game, sir, but I'm sure in your vast experience and knowledge you already knew that, sir.
It was a simulation of sitting in long bored-room [sic] meetings where you lose points for falling asleep, but gain points and status for being agreeable to the lecturer's ideas, hence the name of the game.
I rank this game as follows:
Addictiveness: 10 out of 10. At my current job I play this game for 8 hours a day in lieu of my real responsibilities, only breaking long enough to eat a 30 minute lunch. Every single day.
Interface: 10 out of 10. Commend and Concur forgoes the traditional controller setup and makes use of verbal commands and body language to play the game. Certain system functions, like pausing, must be executing with undocumented verbal commands such as "I need to use the bathroom", but you cannot pause indefinitely.
Immersion: 10 out of 10. Creepily realistic graphics - I couldn't tell the difference between this and real life.
A.I.: 2 out of 10. The other humans in the meeting room are often devoid of life and anything creative to say. Programmers, please remedy this in the sequel.
Playability: 10 out of 10. You can play this game without thinking-... wait! I am playing this game without thinking! In fact, I'm typing up this Slashdot comment while I'm playing this game.
Solomon Kevin Chang
"Twice half-assed makes an ass whole." --Solomon K. Chang
When they die, the guys who came up with these puzzles will go to their own personal hell. This hell will consist of a sea of molten, red-hot lava a hundred miles across which they must cross. To get to the other side, they must jump across moving platforms, elevators, and little tiny ledges. The tiniest mistake will cause them to fall into the boiling lava, and then they will have to go right back to the beginning where the last save point was. And they'll be forced to do this for all eternity.
The AI in OF isn't what I would call genious.
Intentional or unintentional -- it works both ways.
they're a bunch of babies or something, requiring constant attention, and can't make it to the bathroom without getting blown to hell, let alone to a flag
;)
Sounds like the Sims.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
Sounds like the bot skill was set to a low level and auto-adjust off. UT2k4's AI has a number of problems. At high skill levels the bots break off fighting each other and attack non-bots simultaneously during a frag, their aim becomes riduculously accurate with the most basic weapons and they detect your presence from a distance and fire headshots faster than any human could. They become a teaming clan of 12 year olds with wall hacks and aimbots.
Real Life, a huge MMRPG, got a great review from Gamespot! Life sounds like a cool MMRPG, we should check it out!!
It's called US-Soldier. What a wild game! You don't have to buy it
In *real life* people attack you like that?
Wow. You must be on edge all the time.
For me, real life is filled with people who come up behind me, and then *don't do anything*. They sit down on the bus, or stand in line at the cinema, or whatever. The lack of sudden, lethal attacks is (for me) one of those things that distinguishes real life from the game world.
Good luck against those ninjas though. I hear they're pretty bad this time of year.
I would sign up, but I heard there's no respawn points. I mean, fuck that - what if I get lag?
~Will
sig?
I mean, if a cockroach, who has no more than six brain cells, can figure out how to hide if you're chasing it, then it should be no problem for a programmer to figure out how to make an NPC do it.
You're right! All we have to do is shrink all the NPCs down to a few centimeters and let them hide in the wall cracks! Problem solved!
Sooooooo true, and well thought out. I think the next generation game systems will do nothing but try to convince us that they are great and beautiful (I call this the Paris Hilton Effect: no substance, full of crap) and give us a big fat dent in our kids wallets. There's no way I'm shelling out money on one of these things.