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Gears Sells a Million
Gamespot reports that Gears of War has sold a million units in two weeks. This has made it the fastest-selling 360 game to date, beating out GRAW and CoD2 for the honor. From the article: "Microsoft dropped some other statistics as well, saying 'more than 850,000 unique gamers have engaged in 10 million [Gears of War] gameplay sessions while unlocking an impressive 7 million achievements.' Since the game went on sale November 7, the rate of Xbox Live Gold subscriptions, which are required for online play, has increased more than 50 percent. According to Microsoft, the impressive subscription rate is because more than 85 percent of Gears players play one of the game's various multiplayer modes, which include full campaign co-op." The GamerScore Blog wants you to know that rumours you have heard about Gears for Windows were mistaken. For the time being, anyway.
Unreal Tournament is a pretty big name title and that, as the Wikipedia page states, is where he was made famous.
again, it's not an FPS, it's a third person shooter. Secondly, quake didn't use sprites because it was not 2D based (i.e. it wasen't using the BUILD engine) and third, for the same reason that people will watch a horror movie after seeing the original phantom of the opera from waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay back when...different experiences.
Living With a Nerd
I hate the state-based motion controls on Gears, though. You know, when you're behind the wall, the controls are of a different state than when running freely. It really does distract from an active firefight. They should have left it free-flowing while adapting to walls automatcially. Instead of pressing a button to get into 'cover' state when approaching a wall, then pressing another button to jump over the wall or dive or what not, they should have just kept it as automatic cover whenever a person approached a wall, and automatic jump-over-the-wall whenever the person moves forward still. The manual state-changes ruin a lot of the freedoms.
Halo had it right. CoD2 had it right. GRAW had it wrong.
Having some sort of toggle setting (Auto/Manual cover?) might have made sense though. I can see why some people get irritated with the manual state changes. Of course, that means potentially designing the game/level for two play modes instead of one
-- jchenx
They aren't easy, and they're not impossible. You get one for each act (and another for full game completion) on each difficulty. On casual difficulty, they are only worth 10 points. More on the harder difficulties. There is one for 100 Live kills for each weapon (that would take some work).
Most notably, there is one called "A Series Of Tubes" for hosting enough games, and Ted Stevens is credited for the inspiration in the ending credits. Also Ted Nugent ("The Nuge" Torque Bow 100 kills).
Anyway, here is the actual list.
He was involved in Unreal Tournament and was one of the more vocal web presences for the company(Epic). He did a lot of "blogging" (before it was called blogging) about the early versions of UT as they were being developed and did quite a bit of online interaction with the mod community.