How Steam Revived a Dead Game

Ask Stenum writes "Rock Paper Shotgun has an interesting write-up about how Unreal Tournament 3 has risen from the dead after Epic Games patched it, made a deal with Valve to put it on Steam and making it available for free for a weekend. It's interesting to see how a multiplayer game that's almost one and a half years old suddenly has become what it never could be; a game with multiple players. What other (maybe older?) online multiplayer games would you like to see make a comeback?" UT3's resurgence was mentioned here briefly last week as part of our discussion on the future of game pricing.

Comments

Advertising

[Kelbear]

Advertising is key for game sales. Great games have come and gone virtually unnoticed without sufficient marketing (ex. Beyond Good & Evil).

Good quality racks up great word-of-mouth(which takes time to circulate!), but these big bursts of sales only come when there's enough people aware of the game so that they can take time to consider it.

The free-weekend though was a fantastic idea. Getting to see exactly what you're paying for relieves a lot of the doubts that a potential buyer may have.

Re:Advertising

[Kelbear]

Further to the above, a lot of really mediocre games get great sales through advertising...

Re:Advertising

[Anenome]

Great game + great advertising = long-time sales. Great game + No, or inadequate advertising = Sleeper hit. Bad game + Great advertising = Over-hyped P.O.S. Bad game + Bad Advertising = Daikatana :P

Re:Advertising

[rootofevil]

wait, Daikatana was a game?

Re:Advertising

[AntiOrganic]

With all the hype surrounding Daikatana for years prior to its release, I don't understand how anyone could accuse it of being a game with bad advertising.

Re:Advertising

[Anenome]

You don't remember the full-page magazine ads for Daikatana which said, "John Romero wants to make you his bitch. Suck it down!"?

http://www.firingsquad.com/games/daikatana/

Re:Advertising

[Anenome]

Here, found a pict of the actual ad:

http://cache.kotaku.com/assets/resources/2008/01/Bitchadmikewilson.jpg

Re:Advertising

[Hadlock]

Actually it's just an internet meme of what would have happened if one of the id developers for doom had gone rouge and blown his entire fortune making a terrible game and blogging about it in a creatively named website named afterhimself. Fortunately that has never happened so we can all safely assume something that awful has never, and will never happen. And if it did happen, we'd never speak of it. Because you were joking when you replied to that guy, right?

Right?

Re:Advertising

[__aaclcg7560]

You forgot one: Non-existent game + years of hype = Duke Nukem Forever

Re:Advertising

[800DeadCCs]

I remember a while after Daikatana came out, we got a bunch of copies for prizes at our lan party.
Usually gave them out as the boobie prize.
A couple copies we took out back, put m-80's in the box, through the hole in the CD, doused with gas... it was tons of pyro fun.

Re:Advertising

[bonch]

HALOHALOHALOHALO
*cough*

Re:Advertising

[fractoid]

...if one of the id developers for doom had gone rouge and blown...

*blush*

Re:Advertising

[Anonymous Coward]

Daikatana was Old Man Murray's greatest hoax.

Re:Advertising

[Anonymous Coward]

History will repeat itself
http://www.idlethumbs.net/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=422&stc=1&d=1236112244

Re:Advertising

[xenolion]

You know whats sad to say i still have a copy of Daikatana in a box its become one of my odd items to have in my game collection right next to the old Bible games for NES lol.

Re:Advertising

[bigstrat2003]

Except, y'know, for the fact that Halo was actually a damned excellent game by any sane standard. You may not think it's good, but many people do (more than think it's lame), and you don't have any more authority on the matter than them.

Re:Advertising

[Cowmonaut]

No. Halo is really not a "damned excellent game". The story nor the gameplay compares to other games. Course I could be biased as I tend to think Half Life and System Shock are two of the bestests games ever. Halo was marketed to your stereotypical frat boy rather than 'hardcore' gamers. Really, its one of the big reasons gaming has taken off (expanded the player base) but it is a very, very mediocre game and this is coming from someone who had an okay time playing BREED for crying out loud.

Re:Advertising

[bigstrat2003]

The gameplay is meh, but the story far outstrips anything that came before it, including System Shock, and especially Half-Life.

My point is, though, that because so many people think it is an excellent game, and a game's excellence is purely subjective, it is an excellent game. End of story.

Re:Advertising

[Anonymous Coward]

It depends on the platform you're coming from.
As a dedicated PC player, Halo was "just another FPS". It was good, but hardly one of the greatest games ever made.

But on the console, where functional FPSs are rare, the attention it gets is more deserved.

Re:Advertising

[PaganRitual]

The gameplay is meh, but the story far outstrips anything that came before it, including System Shock, and especially Half-Life.

Give me a break. The story is trash sci-fi at best. And you can't possibly be standing around here protecting it if you don't have a hard-on for the 'gameplay', bad-example-of-a-console-FPS as it is.

Half-Life doesn't have a story, by the way, it has around about a sentence. System Shock doesn't necessarily have a proper story that plays out in cut scenes, but the events that occur provide quite the experience, and I believe it likely that you've never played it.

My point is, though, that because so many people think it is an excellent game, and a game's excellence is purely subjective, it is an excellent game. End of story.

This right here. This is the type of person that Halo was marketed to. If you read this and thought "yeah, this makes sense", then Halo is probably your game.

Re:Advertising

[Anonymous Coward]

Most people think the pop music they hear on a top 40 radio is excellent. But that's only due to ignorance. Once someone learn a bit more about music, then Justin Timberlake doesn't sound so interesting anymore.

Re:Advertising

[xenolion]

You have to remember the original Halo was a title release for Microsofts new console at the time. They put so much cash behind the first xbox that there was no way the one game built for the systems release would fail.

Re:Advertising

[bigstrat2003]

Give me a break. The story is trash sci-fi at best. And you can't possibly be standing around here protecting it if you don't have a hard-on for the 'gameplay', bad-example-of-a-console-FPS as it is.

You have no idea what you're talking about. I meant what I said: the gameplay is meh, but the story is goddamn exquisite. No story in an FPS has come CLOSE to sucking me in the way the Halo story did. You're welcome to disagree, I have no issue with that... but don't make yourself look stupid by insisting I'm lying because I have a hard-on for the gameplay. Why the hell would I waste my time lying about my opinion of a video game on an internet forum, anyway? I gain nothing from it.

This right here. This is the type of person that Halo was marketed to. If you read this and thought "yeah, this makes sense", then Halo is probably your game.

Say what you want, it's true. Or, if you're going to claim it's not, at least provide reasoning why it's not instead of a strawman like you just did. Fact: quality of a game is subjective, not objective. Fact: many, many people find Halo an excellent game (FAR more than detract from it). Since we have no objective way to measure if a game is good, the best approximation we can get is getting many people's opinions, and judging by that.

Re:Advertising

[somersault]

Wow, someone who sees through all the hype! :)

Halo sounded excellent to me when it was Mac only, but when MS got their grubby mitts on it I soon lost interest.. not to mention that's around the time I got my first Windows machine (my dad pointed out if I was going to be a developer I might as well develop for the most commonly used OS despite the fact I hated Windows) so I had Half-Life and Counter-Strike to keep me happy.

Re:Advertising

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait, since when was popularity a criterion for quality? Did I miss the memo? Does this mean Nickelback is suddenly awesome?

Re:Advertising

[neomunk]

I was going to disagree with your original quotation of "...any sane standard...", and I still disagree that it's excellent by ANY sane standard, but you did make a very good point about excellence being subjective, to which I concede Halo's excellence. Excellence isn't PURELY subjective though, as there is technical excellence (control setup, graphics, you know) too.

All that is just a side point to what I wanted to say. I REALLY liked the story in Return to Castle Wolfenstein (and Wolf3D for that matter). That may very well be that I'm biased in favor of Nazi slaying though (Hearts of Iron II FTW!). :-)

Re:Advertising

[jgtg32a]

You need to play Deus Ex the story in that game is incredible, much better than Halo.

But I did like Halo's lore, but it didn't come through as well as it should have, and defiantly not to the point were people can seriously consider it to be an excellent story, the games themselves spend too much time beating off the MC.

I've actually read all of the Halo books except for the most recent one, and they do an excellent job at describing how the conflict is going.
In all actuality the Covenant should have steam rolled humanity in short order but they don't have proper military discipline. The Covenant wins ground wars through attrition alone, the humans are much better fighters they just don't have the hyper advanced technology.

Re:Advertising

[Frigga's Ring]

Why the hell would I waste my time lying about my opinion of a video game on an internet forum, anyway? I gain nothing from it.

Internet Troll

I'm not claiming you are one. I'm just answering your question.

Re:Advertising

[plague3106]

In other words there's nothing wrong with the game, you just hate MS.

And your dad is right; you're wasting your time if you exclude Windows based applications.

Re:Advertising

[geekoid]

"...but the story is goddamn exquisite."
No, it isn't, however maybe you meant this:

"...but the story is goddamn exquisite compared to any other Sci-fi FPS story".

At least that's what I think your saying.
AS a story, in and of itself, no it is not exquisite.

You can measure aspect of a story to qualify it as good. There are some base line story telling rules that are followed.

AS far as Halo is concerned, I found it to be a fun game, but not really worth the hype. However, I ahve only played it on the PC. I just don't like FPS on consoles.

Re:Advertising

[snowraver1]

The masses say HALO 3 is awesome. This week it was #1 on xbox. I don't think that it has fallen further than #3 since release. Even when it falls, to slot 2 or 3, it comes back. This game has legs. I have provided evidence that Halo is a good game (Major Nelson posts xbox usage stats here) If you can provide evidence that Halo sucks, I'm all ears, but until then, you are a troll.

Re:Advertising

[CedgeS]

It took me forever to find a copy of Beyond Good and Evil. It was a great idea for a game, but unfortunately it wasn't actually playable. A couple hours in I reached a point with infinite enemy spawns and a way forward that had to be opened by the AI partner. Even if I killed all the present enemies and told the AI partner to open the way forward he would, instead, attack the next enemy to spawn.

Re:Advertising

[Anonymous Coward]

it was Tribes for the console with a single player campaign by PC FPS standards. By console standards however, it was a really good FPS.

Re:Advertising

[Golddess]

My point is, though, that because so many people think it is an excellent game, and a game's excellence is purely subjective, it is an excellent game. End of story.

But the question remains, would all those people have thought Halo was excellent without all the advertising surrounding it?

Now I'm not saying it wouldn't have still been enjoyable to those people, but how many of them would be defending it to the degree that can be witnessed here? If Half Life had had the same massive advertising surrounding it, would more people be flocking to defend it?

Re:Advertising

[Lord Ender]

The only people who liked Halo were those who had never played any FPS on a PC. Nooblets.

Re:Advertising

[bigstrat2003]

Hi there. I've played FPS on a PC since Doom. How's that prejudice going for you?

Re:Advertising

[Bobfrankly1]

But the question remains, would all those people have thought Halo was excellent without all the advertising surrounding it?

I, for one, found out about the original through the aforementioned advertising: "word of mouth". I had not seen any advertising about it before then. It was the first time I found myself enjoying an FPS on a console. I enjoyed the story. I enjoyed the music. I enjoyed the art that they put into the game (with the exception of the endless repeating rooms mid-way through the level). I LOVED the co-op.

So maybe you didn't enjoy Halo. Big whoop. Don't play it. (which also raises the question, how many people here hate the game without having touched it?) Your dislike of the game doesn't make it any less excellent.

{/soapbox}

Re:Advertising

[superbus1929]

I think you're letting a historical view - propagated since the game's popularity has taken off - get in the way of perspective. The first Halo, for a console shooter, was very good. Furthermore, it wasn't presented to the fratboy crowd, it caught on with them. It was only after Halo's popularity jumped that the stupid shit started happening.

I'm not saying Halo is the bee's knees; it's above average when all is said and done, but not amazing. But I don't think it's the standard of mediocrity that everyone says it is, either.

Re:Advertising

[Kelbear]

Halo was the game I had in mind when I commented about "mediocre games selling well". It's the most obvious example. Halo 1 was merely decent compared the other FPS games available at the time. It stood out for being done on a console at a time when console FPSes weren't popular.

However, I don't lump Halo 3 in the same basket as Halo 1. It's not particularly new or different(it's the third in a trilogy after all), but the amount of polish that went into putting all the elements together should be recognized. Great art direction(They use colors!), solid audio, varied map design, well balanced gameplay, and terrific multiplayer options. And they made a bold move in integrating replays directly into the game itself(PC gamers had to use 3rd party programs to record such things, and only from the player's viewpoint).

Innovative games are welcome when they're done well, but it's not a make-or-break requirement. A particularly well-crafted game can be plenty of fun even if it doesn't try to do anything new. Improving on elements already seen in other games is still laudable.

Re:Advertising

[SCPRedMage]

Hi there. I've played FPS on a PC since Wolf3d. Halo is decent, at best, for a PC FPS.

The reason it became so popular is because console players hadn't seen an FPS of that quality before.

Re:Advertising

[JohnnyBGod]

It DOES exist: http://crackle.com/c/Jace_Hall/Jace_Hall_Ep_1_Duke_Nukem_Forever_SNEAK_PEEK_/2298717 2:30.
Doesn't mean any of us will probably ever see it, though...

Re:Advertising

[Anonymous Coward]

Say what you want, it's true.

All of what I say is true? Brilliant. Why are we even talking about this then.

Re:Advertising

[__aaclcg7560]

I'll believe it when I see it on Steam. ;)

Re:Advertising

[Fluffeh]

I do still find it simply amazing the number of people that can't spell that word. Nerds even, that grew up with games and the term. *boggle*

Re:Advertising

[bigstrat2003]

That's your opinion, and you're entitled to it. My point is that it's not just people who were inexperienced with FPSes that think Halo is a great game. I don't expect the people who dislike Halo to suddenly turn around and profess their love for it: I do expect them to let go of their rationalizations and stereotypes at some point and accept that it's just another perfectly good game that doesn't appeal to them. Nothing wrong with that.

Re:Advertising

[mollymoo]

Half-Life doesn't have a story, by the way, it has around about a sentence.

The fact that Half Life doesn't have cut scenes doesn't mean it doesn't have a story.

Re:Advertising

[SCPRedMage]

Like I said, it's a decent game. I like Halo. What I dislike is all the "OMFG HALO IZ BEST GAM EVAR!!!!!111one" I keep hearing.

Halo was decent. Decent game play, decent story, decent controls. What Halo WASN'T was revolutionary, in any real way. Halo presented NOTHING that wasn't seen years earlier in a PC game. Hell, the original Half-Life had a better story, because at least in HL you had an idea WTF was going on at the beginning of the game without having to read any extra material.

In the end, the only remarkable thing about Halo was that it was the best console FPS of its time.

Re:Advertising

[somersault]

Actually, I tried the game on PC to see if it was any good and I just found the single player extremely boring. It reminded me of the original Unreal single player somewhat. I know the big deal with Halo is meant to be multiplayer though, but after playing Halo 2 multiplayer on a friend's 360 I still don't "get it" - it certainly doesn't seem any better than other multiplayer games I've enjoyed like Quake 1, Counter-Strike, TFC, Tribes, Battlefield etc. I think people make a big deal out of it simply because it is (was? I don't follow games much these days) the only half decent FPS on the 360..

Indeed, I've developed a couple of Windows apps here at work, though all my latest projects have been good candidates for web applications and are therefore cross platform. I'm not so idealistic as I once was, but I'd still prefer not to tie the company down to any one OS or office suite where possible (our old timesheet system is intrinsically linked to Excel.. yuck).

Re:Advertising

[Anonymous Coward]

You know that was actually Tom Hall right?

http://rome.ro/smf/index.php/topic,3753.0.html

Re:Advertising

[Golddess]

how many people here hate the game without having touched it?

That is a good question. Personally, I'm indifferent towards it, towards most FPS actually. But both our questions can apply to any game really. I merely referenced Halo and Half Life in my post since the discussion was about Halo, and bigstrat2003 had referenced Half Life.

Re:Advertising

[hairyfeet]

Uuuuuhhh......not trying to flame here, just kinda confused. I was always under the impression that the reason Halo has such "legs" is that 14 yr old guys like to teabag their buddies in MP for the lulz. I mean nobody would say Quake 3 was awesome story wise, but it sold like crazy because you could run around like a chicken with its head cut off blowing shit up, which folks liked. But from what I have seen(never really cared for online MP shoot em ups) Halo has "legs" because teenage guys like to frag while saying "lol faggot!" and teabagging. Maybe I'm wrong, but I never got the impression that they gave a shit about the story.

Worms!

[Anonymous Coward]

I would love to play worms again! Valve doesn't have to come out with a crazy price like $9.99; I'd be willing to pay up to $24.99 to play again.

Re:Worms!

[erayd]

I second and third this - worms was (is) awesome!

Re:Worms!

[AKAImBatman]

I would love to play worms again!

They're still making Worms games, you know. There's even a downloadable version on XBox Live with online multiplayer.

Of course, us Wii users got SCREWED when multiplayer was removed from Worms: A Space Oddity shortly before hitting the shelves. I was really looking forward to that game! But noooo. Yet another developer takes a dump on Wii players. And then the megacorp game companies wonder why third parties can't sell Wii games. (Here's a hint guys: It helps to make games that people want to buy.)

Re:Worms!

[Archon-X]

Have a look out for Worms World Party.
I'm a die hard worms fan, and hated any of the '3D' versions they brought out.

WWP is the perfect combo, imo, of features, weapons, fun, while staying true to the sidescroller format.

More interesting to note, it's still played in reasonable numbers [10 - 50 people at once] on the servers - lag isn't a concern so much, so it's always fun.

Incidentally: With a combination of the ISO + a few no CD patches you CAN play online.
Took me about 2 hours of fiddling w/ patch files, but you can do it!

Re:Worms!

[Scuff]

You might want to check out the Worms: Open Warfare games for the DS, if you have one. The second one has online multiplayer and has more weapons and such than the XBox Live one.

Re:Worms!

[Anonymous Coward]

I recommend Worms Armageddon instead. Bigger online community and it's actively being upgraded by team17. It also has more mods, and it's possible to make it run on XP, Vista and Windows 7 (may have some problems on that last one). Other than that, it has the exact same engine, with all the same weapons and capabilities. WWP may have more missons and special modes, but these can be reproduced in WA.

Re:Worms!

[Inda]

Typical Team17. I bet they blamed the removal of online play on publishers again.

We told them time and time again that online play, with chat, was the best part of the game. Did they listen?

Now which game was it where you could only play against 'friends'? Great idea that was Team17.

I bought the XBOX360 version to show my support. We just need a version based on the W2/WA engine now. I'd pay real money Martin 'Spadge' Brown. I know you read Slashdot.

Re:Worms!

[AKAImBatman]

Here's the official "Spadge" reply. It was pretty much exactly as you suspected:

The decision was taken some time back in conjunction with our publishing partners, who are THQ.

Content is generally decided way before we get anywhere near finishing the game (for pretty bloody good reasons) and the integration and widespread testing of online does have major implications for any project, especially on Wii. It's not as simple as saying "oh delay it 3 months and it'll be ready", games are built to schedules and financed accordingly. I'd imagine that the long delays of Super Smash Bros 2 is partly due to online complications and there are many examples where online content causes huge delays - it pretty much always does. You can't really compare Nintendo 1st party titles to 3rd party ones in the main stream, it's a different league for a bunch of reasons.

The decision has little to do with actual technical feasibility (PSP, DS, 360 recent titles have all been online) and primarily more to do with where and whom the game is aimed at - to focus on social party play to a more casual marketplace that's still maturing. It was felt that online may compromise that focus and potentially long delays on a platform with little or no online titles at the time this was discussed (i.e. this isn't something that's just "dropped out" recently).

The Wii IS more casual and it IS a younger demographic, hard-core gamers might wish to argue about that, but here's a platform where they're right in the minority. The Wii is still relatively new and brings with it is a new audience - exactly who they are yet, is still not 100% clear. Given that, our title has been designed around the Wii rather than simply ported (I'm sure that would have ticked people off more - although someone always finds something to have a pop at).

As someone points out, there currently isn't a huge range of online Wii titles currently and there are fair reasons for that, especially as a 3rd party which I won't go into. I'm sure that this will be addressed in the fullness of time and I'd like to see more communication online otherwise you might as well be playing a CPU bot :-)

The Wii version is really aimed to played socially (up to 4 players) rather than online and make the most of gesture controls rather than simple gimmicks - it's not 'shovelware' by any means. Lack of online function hasn't prevented Worms titles from being either successful or popular in the past and in many cases ensures that it's a better environment to play the game than suffering online idiots who quit out when losing or abuse you whilst you're at it. It's almost a case of 'be careful what you wish for'.

I'm not sure where any comments about DLC have come about since everything that's being built for the Wii edition is being shipped with it, I'm not aware that the plan was to do anything other than that - so no one has lost anything nor are they being asked to fork out any more. We did do some DLC for 360 Worms, mostly due to the file limit being 50mb at the time (and we gave away the biggest bunch of DLC). I can't say that personally I'm a big fan of DLC although I'm currently busily availing myself of Guitar Hero & Singstar tunes... (the latter I already own for PS2).

All this certainly has nothing to do with any laziness on our part (whatever anyone might think) the Wii market is still maturing and everyone is still getting to grips with the play patterns and demographics of its users.

As for not running at 60fps (or 50fps), I'm not sure of any Worms game that has needed to do this (and few games do these days, 2d or 3d) in order to provide an entertaining experience. Talking about frame-rates is pretty hard-core when all said and done... and many people who are grumbling don't even have a wii yet :)

Worms titles have always attempted to offer good value, highly replayable entertainment wherever possible and this new Wii title is no different, with quite unique content based firml

Re:Worms!

[geekoid]

IO just blogged about this. Wii sells more then any other counsel, but developers and publishers poo-poo it.
I think it has to do with the age of most game developers. Many of them are out of college, still playing Playstaion 3/XBox 360 and don't thinking about that fact that the majority of people coming to console games are not heavy gamers. Basically they have it in there heads that the Wii isn't a real console.

Yes, pure speculation on my part.

Re:Worms!

[Enoxice]

Worms Armageddon is the pinnacle of Worms games by a wide margin. A huge community of players, mappers, soundpack makers, modders. Not to mention you can run your own private wormnet if you want.

But even after all these years of playing, I'm still only mediocre at rope-races.

Battlefield 1942

[Anonymous Coward]

Desert Combat Mod

Starcraft 1.08

[Anonymous Coward]

Not the first time it happened, and won't be the last.

http://starcraft.wikia.com/wiki/StarCraft_version_history#Patch_1.08

Re:Starcraft 1.08

[Mystra_x64]

You ruined 4 hours of my life with this link!

Epic needs to fire its marketing staff

[Aurisor]

I consider myself a pretty serious gamer, and I had no idea that UT3 was even out, until all this fuss started up with Steam. I remember playing the game at PAX, thinking it was a pre-release.

I don't mean to malign Steam; it's having a tremendous impact on gaming, and it's mostly for the better. That being said, though, I don't think the turnaround would be this dramatic if Epic hadn't *completely* failed to get the word out.

Re:Epic needs to fire its marketing staff

[Panzor]

Wait, this game was released over a year ago? I've been telling people that I've been getting a launch title for twelve bucks o_o. I'm with this guy *points to above post*

Re:Epic needs to fire its marketing staff

[Hadlock]

I only heard of UT3 in a forum two months ago (January 2009!) when one guy pointed out that he built his "rig" for UT3 and then that died so he went to TF2 instead. My response was "buh?". If anyone does a halfway competent study on video game advertising, they should figure out who they advertised with and through what mediums, and completely avoid those, because they're obviously flawed and people with actual money to buy games clearly don't read those magazines/websites. Whoever had the advertising portfolio for UT3 completely dropped the ball. Hell, valve was advertising L4D in NYC subways and did wacky promotions like the L4D 4 pack and all that. Valve is like the southwest airlines of the video game developers.

Re:Epic needs to fire its marketing staff

[Shin-LaC]

One problem with UT3 might be the name. I remembered playing the UT4 demo years ago, so when I first heard about the free weekend for 3 I thought "wow, that's a *really* old game!". It was only when I saw this slashdot entry mention "one and a half years ago" that I realized something was amiss. I checked wikipedia and sure enough, the game I remembered playing was UT 2004

Re:Epic needs to fire its marketing staff

[Tukz]

If you were a "serious" FPS gamer, you'd KNOW UT3 were being released.

Unless, you know, you didn't play the UT series.
Everyone who played UT series "seriously", knew about UT3. And quite frankly, most steered away from it purposely.

I agree, though, that regular gamers, had no idea this game came out. There was hardly any advertisement. The only real advertise I saw, was when the demo came out back in the days. After that, it became rather stall.

Re:Epic needs to fire its marketing staff

[PHPNerd]

I'd like to second this. I also consider myself a serious gamer and had no idea this game was even out. Wwhen UT3 hit Steam I told my friends "Hey, look! They finally released UT3!"

Re:Epic needs to fire its marketing staff

[mog007]

It gets worse, UT2004 is actually the THIRD UT game for the PC. The sequel to UT was UT2003, and it wasn't nearly as fun as the original. Instead of just bypassing that iteration of the Unreal Engine, Epic decided to remake UT2003 into the fun game that the original UT was, and they released UT2004. It had a lot of the same stuff from UT2003, but it was vastly improved.

UT3 is actually the FOURTH UT game.

Re:Epic needs to fire its marketing staff

[NorQue]

The sequel to UT was UT2003

So, there was no UT2? Wow. That's worse than Final Fantasy, at least that had a coherent naming scheme somewhere in the world.

Re:Epic needs to fire its marketing staff

[gid]

I played UT2k4 all the time. Mostly on assault mode. There was a great, but small community out there for this mode when UT3 came out. So I bought UT3, played for a bit and decided I hated the changes they made. The dropped both assault, and onslaught modes. Now there's a new warfare mode that's rather confusing, it's like onslaught, but allows one good/lucky player to basically remove any form of team work. Maybe I should give it another try, but with TF2 and L4D, I haven't had the desire to.

A game I'd love to see

[TornCityVenz]

Tribes 2. Those who played it know it was revolutionary, even to this day many games struggle to find the depth this game held. It's free now, and although Sierra shutdown the master servers a while back the community of die hard players stepped up and created several workarounds. I'm happy to report that on any given Friday night there is at least one server with close to (or up to ) 60 players picking teams and playing 3 maps. Friday Night Fights. The best part is gaming rigs have finally caught up to the task of running this game smoothly, when it first came out it was pushing the bleeding edge of machines to run it like it deserved.

Re:A game I'd love to see

[useless4321]

I'll second this, as long as they bring the original Tribes along for the ride.

Re:A game I'd love to see

[Anonymous Coward]

Sign me up I would play that game again.

The modding community was unlike any FPS I've every played.

Sometimes I just need to strap on a backpack that turns into a jet so I can go capture a flag game equivalent kilometers away from my base.

CS doesn't give me that.

Re:A game I'd love to see

[Anonymous Coward]

Tribes 2? It was terrible.

The reason it flopped was it lost everything that made Tribes 1 a great game.

Tribes 1 was fast paced, requires little skill to start, but incredible amounts to master, and was just plain stupidly fun. Queue Tribes 2: For starters, slow, too easy, skiing was nerfed considerably etc etc. Why would anyone leave T1?

Re:A game I'd love to see

[Anonymous Coward]

I completely agree with you on that count. T2 is hands down the most fun and challenging FPS I've ever played. Don't get me wrong, Quake 3 was a great FPS, but IMO, nothing compares to T2 (except maybe T1) because there is nothing quite like the satisfaction you get when you nail a guy 100 meters away in mid air with the spinfusor. Long live Tribes!

Re:A game I'd love to see

[Hadlock]

download it here: http://www.tribesnext.com/

play it here:
66.162.166.53
98.233.154.66

Re:A game I'd love to see

[Anonymous Coward]

Tribes 1 is coming back as a browser-based game.
http://kotaku.com/5171349/instantaction-brings-tribes-to-your-web-browser
Legions is good stuff too.

Re:A game I'd love to see

[Shin-LaC]

I thought of trying out Tribes 2 once, a while ago, when I heard fans recounting how great it was. But they also told me that everyone who still plays it is a master by now, and for a newbie to pick it up would be an exercise in pain. The fans actually explicitly advised me not to try their favorite game.

Re:A game I'd love to see

[Anonymous Coward]

Makes my heart warm - every good multiplayer memory of mine is in tribes universe somewhere. goooo jetpack

Re:A game I'd love to see

[SkeezerDoodle]

Tribes 2? It was terrible.

The reason it flopped was it lost everything that made Tribes 1 a great game.

Tribes 1 was fast paced, requires little skill to start, but incredible amounts to master, and was just plain stupidly fun. Cue Tribes 2: For starters, slow, too easy, skiing was nerfed considerably etc etc. Why would anyone leave T1?

There...fixed that for you. Not to be a grammar Nazi, but this is definitely a first for me...even on /.

Re:A game I'd love to see

[TornCityVenz]

There are still new players coming to this game all the time. And the learning curve has always been steep on this game, but in a friendly atmosphere I would encourage anyone who wants to try possibly the best FPS game ever made to give it a few games before giving up. YES you will die, but in tribes you get to re spawn so it's not like counterstrike where your going to be sitting out waiting for the round to end. Also there are a variety of roles to play, all of them important you may not start out as a flag grabber but in Tribes2 you can have a really good time even helping expand the sensor net.

Re:A game I'd love to see

[Anonymous Coward]

Tribes 2.

You know why that one failed? Because it was shit compared to the original. Didn't stand up at all.

Tribes 2 never existed.

Re:A game I'd love to see

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree tribes2! I loved being the drop off man! But come on people, BATTLEZONE2!!! A FPS that was also a strategy game!? You could build a base!!! Drive huge walking laser shooting badassers!? Command attack groups from the front line and get in on the action?! I just CAME!!!! I wish pandemic would release a third...

Oh and a little love for system shock 2.

Re:A game I'd love to see

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, great. So ... where's the Linux version?

Re:A game I'd love to see

[cthulu_mt]

Mucho Gracias.

Re:A game I'd love to see

[nappingcracker]

This might be the time to mention Tribal Wars.

It's a tribes mod for Enemy Territory: Quake Wars.

Tribes is easily my favorite game of all time. I'm very sad that I have not figured out how to play it in 64bit Ubuntu. This is why I'm very excited for this mod, I can get my Tribes on in linux with a modern engine! (I'd still take the 'old' game any time if I could get it to work)
It's still IMO the only shooter that really rewarded finesse. (I never played Starseige:Tribes, so T1 players can just eat blue disc).[VGTG]

Re:A game I'd love to see

[JCSoRocks]

Sadly, I once had someone spell Cue / Queue as "Que" in scrabble (I still don't know which one they were after). After some sad laughing to myself I got out the dictionary and told them they could take their fake word off of my board.

Re:A game I'd love to see

[AKAImBatman]

As I recall, Que was a tech-book publisher. Not sure if they're still around or not.

In defense of your friend, I once spelled segue as segway. :-P

(But not in Scrabble.)

Re:A game I'd love to see

[Anonymous Coward]

...snip...skiing was nerfed considerably...snip...

I think that's because in Starsiege:Tribes skiing was done by exploiting an engine bug, and in Tribes 2 skiing was an added *feature* because nearly all of the players were using the skiing exploit in Starsiege:Tribes anyway that people thought it was something you were meant to be able to do.

The price sealed the deal

[RichPowers]

UT3 is worth $12 and not a cent more, IMHO. I'll probably play it for a few weeks and move on (I purchased it during Steam's holiday sale and finally installed it to check out the update). So the cost/entertainment ratio is pretty good.

Truthfully, most games aren't worth $20, let alone $50. I was browsing Steam the other day and noticed that EndWar -- a months-old console port with an attractive 67/100 Metacritic rating -- is being sold for the same price as Empire Total War and Dawn of War II. Hell, you can buy World in Conflict Gold for $30. So why on earth should I pay $50 for EndWar? Don't get me wrong, EndWar could provide a few days of stupid RTS fun, but it's simply not worth the asking price.

Anyway, thanks to Steam, Impulse, Gamersgate and GOG, I can buy 5 (maybe more) games for the same price as a new one. Good games are always good, ya know? So not only are publishers competing with current games, they're competing with dirt cheap oldies, too.

Enough with the arbitrary $50 price point. Some games are absolutely worth $50; most are not.

Re:The price sealed the deal

[Razalhague]

If games cost half of what they do now, I'd buy more than twice the amount I do now.

Re:The price sealed the deal

[Anonymous Coward]

If games cost half of what they do now, I'd buy more than twice the amount I do now.

You would have to buy them more than twice the number of games for them to make the same profit. Halving the MSRP doesn't halve the costs per unit.

I guess that is why steam is such a good method of distribution; It minimizes per unit costs.

Re:The price sealed the deal

[KDR_11k]

Well but many publishers seem to believe their 50$ games are worth 50$ to enough people. They'll use advertising just to make sure. Meanwhile cheaper games get developed for their final price (e.g. Serious Sam was released at half the regular PC game price initially) and badly selling games get pricedrops (on the PC it happens to well-selling games too as evidenced by the pile of old GOTY contenders on the 10€ pile, console games don't drop in price nearly as fast despite having used game sales to deal with). Sometimes games get lower prices in other regions after failing to perform in one (Castlevania Judgment, for example, is getting released at half price in the PAL regions after getting panned by critics who hated the game for its art style and occassionally even made up complaints just to give it a 1/10 score). However, the situation on the consoles is generally pretty bad when you're hunting for cheaper games, especially on the 360. Games start out at 70€ (PC and Wii use 45€ as the base price) and pricedrops are rare. I spent less on the games for my 360 than the system itself so far and I got the system when it was pricedropped to 200€ for the Pro simply because the number of really interesting games is very low and the lesser interesting games (pretty much anything that's gray-brown and gritty so about 99% of the non-sports games) never reach the acceptable price region for lesser interesting games.

Me, I think I'll pick UT3 up at the 12€ price now, I spent a LOT of time on UT200X and it's really not much money so I guess I can take the risk of ending up with a terrible framerate (then again minimum settings in most games seem to run fine on my system even though I upgraded to it back when Doom 3 was still the pinnacle of gaming tech).

Re:The price sealed the deal

[Racemaniac]

wasn't that probably his point?
i don't know how much the overhead costs are with steam (maintaining it/bandwidth costs), but if they are small enough, sales would just have to increase a bit more than double when you offer things at half the price to get the same revenue

Re:The price sealed the deal

[FlyveHest]

How come that 50$ for "a few days of stupid RTS fun" is unreasonable, but 10-12$ for two hours of cinema-fun is ok?

Or 20$ for 30 minutes of eating-out fun?

I really don't know where this opposition to paying for games comes from, a 50$ game that provides 10 hours of gaming, equals to 5$/hr for a fun ride, which really isn't all that expensive. (And most games provide more than 10 hours of entertainment)

Re:The price sealed the deal

[Anonymous Coward]

I pick up most games in the bargain bin, so I'm usually a year behind. The games are cheaper, hardware to run them is cheaper, patches and addons give even more value for money and DRM is usually relaxed. The only thing I miss out on is the initial crowd of players in multiplayer, which isn't an issue for single player games.

I guess I've gotten patient and conditioned to waiting 6-12 months for console ports. After waiting that long for a game, why not wait a bit longer and buy 2 or 3 games for the price of one?

Re:The price sealed the deal

[Turiko]

some games are worth it, but i hardly ever buy anything off steam. reason? 50 dollars is worth 50 euros to them, and that on top of the fact that most games only get their first price lowerign after 2 years or so.

Re:The price sealed the deal

[geekoid]

So if the sold them at a loss, you would buy more?
Well, at least they will make up for it in volume~

Re:The price sealed the deal

[Razalhague]

How much does a DVD and the case cost, hm? I doubt it's $25. I doubt it's even $5.

Loss is when manufacturing costs are more than what you make selling it. The funny thing about software (well, any IP product) is that most of the price does not come from manufacturing the physical product. Most of it is to cover the initial costs (ie. development). Halving the price and more than doubling the sales would in many cases give more profit to the company, especially if they're being sold over the internet (like on Steam), meaning that the cost per product sold is pretty damn low.

Re:The price sealed the deal

[Anonymous Coward]

20$ for 30 minutes of eating-out fun

Seriously man, this is a thread about VIDEOGAMES, not about you and your prostution solicitation!

Re:The price sealed the deal

[Chosen Reject]

First, I think you missed his point. $50 for "a few days of stupid RTS fun" is fine if there is no other option. However, that same $50 could get you a whole lot more than just a few days with the other games the GP mentioned. Even by the price/hour metric, the GP was saying that EndWar would be a stupid purchase since he could get a better price/hour with Empire Total War or Dawn of War II, and an even better price/hour with World in Conflict Gold.

Second, price/hour is a fine objective metric. Unfortunately you are talking about price/hour of entertainment, which is a subjective thing, and not all entertainment is created equal. Are you going to claim that all forms of entertainment provide the same level of entertainment for each hour? That would be absurd. You can't even claim that each form of entertainment provides the same level within that form, as if any movie was equally as enjoyable as any other movie, or any game is as fun as any other game. It doesn't even work for specific genres within a specific form of entertainment, or will you claim that all fantasy books are equally entertaining as any other fantasy book, or that any comedian is just as funny as any other comedian. In fact, you couldn't even claim that any given specific instance of a specific form of entertainment will be as enjoyable as that exact same thing in different hours or at different times. For example, the second half of a movie might be much more entertaining than the first half, or the second watching of that same movie might be less entertaining than the first. Another example, two nights ago playing Warcraft III on battle.net might have been a real drag compared to last night, etc.

Price/hour is a really stupid metric for a price point. How would you even begin to base it on anything meaningful? Does that mean that a 3 minute song for $0.99 is the baseline. $0.33/minute equals $20/hour. A 10 hour game should now be $200? Or should we use a $50 forty hour game? So prices should be $1.25 per hour, and thus the 3 minute song should be $0.06? And how would that even translate into dinner? You pay $30 and get 30 minutes and you can eat whatever you want in that time be it steak and lobster or just salad, and when 30 minutes comes the waiter kicks you out or asks for your credit card for another 30 minutes?

I'm having fun with these examples. Let's use a theater as the baseline. Let's say $10 for 2 hour movie or $5/hour. Most people play WoW at least 5 hours per week, at 4 weeks per month that's $100/month for Blizzard. You should let them know they could be getting 6 0r 7 times what they currently are. Or using those numbers, $15 for 20 hours each month, entertainment ought to cost $0.75/hour, meaning I can now go to Six Flags Magic Mountain for a whole 11.5 hour day and pay only $8.625. I could go for that. Or better yet, let's use the Magic Mountain Park pass as the baseline. $60 for unlimited use for the entire season. They're open at least 8 hours every weekend, plus about 6 months every day, plus holidays, but they're open on all major holidays, and the season pass gets you 4 free tickets on certain days, and it gets you other discounts in the park. I can't even begin to calculate it, but it looks like we're talking either pennies or fractions thereof per hour. Sweet, all games should now be maybe a $1 or less even. I like you're way of thinking.

Re:The price sealed the deal

[bjorniac]

Check out steam then. They have some pretty awesome sales (Bioshock $5, original HL games 99c etc), and normally the valve games are pretty good value. I got the orange box at $50 and was blown away by the price - now it's around $30. If you wait for the holidays some stuff comes down so far that its really worth it - I wouldn't have gone for Bioshock normally, but for 5 bucks it was pretty much worth it.

Re:The price sealed the deal

[bckrispi]

Another example, two nights ago playing Warcraft III on battle.net might have been a real drag compared to last night, etc.

No, last night was amateur night. Idiots putting seven workers on a gold mine, squatting on 3300 gold, dropping after the first skirmish. Game after game. Last night was probably the worst WC3 night I can remember...

Re:The price sealed the deal

[MBraynard]

Try QuakeLive. 100% free

XvT ported to Linux!

[erroneus]

I want that game back!!! All time most favorite and addicting game ever. I found myself calling in sick to work so I could finish a mission.

Re:XvT ported to Linux!

[The_Myth]

Or just Xwing Vs Tie Fighter on any format that is playable. I had a copy and have moved and been unable to find it.

I know they tacked part of this onto SWG and called it Jump to Light Speed but it just wasnt the same. I miss being able to go head to head at a lan party with different fighter configurations.

Re:XvT ported to Linux!

[DJNephilim]

Oh, I would *so* be there.

It is my firm belief that they should re-release all the original X-Wing/TIE Fighter games with updated graphics, etc. I would buy them again in a heartbeat.

Re:XvT ported to Linux!

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want a bit free of Xwing/TIE fighter - like fun, try This!

Free Battlestar Galactica sim. Very XvsT And amazing considering its cost (Did I say it was free?)

Re:XvT ported to Linux!

[Rennt]

I just discovered the FreeSpace Open project, its not Starwars, but with the beam weapons and laser fire and HEAPS of shit going on at once it often reminds me of the epic Reaver space battle in Serenity

Get the original game files from GOG for $5.95 then upgrade to the open-sourced engine with modern resolutions and stunning effects.

There is even a Starwars full conversion in progress. The models being created look amazing - they could almost be used to make a film - and one of the aims is to make it "look and play like the Battle of Endor" how cool it that!

Re:XvT ported to Linux!

[drinkypoo]

You can get the original game files for free from HOTU. Personally I'd like a SW:Battlefront clone. I've been playing SWBF2 on Xbox and finally got SWBF, which has like ten times as many maps and such, but doesn't allow the same ease of control that SWBF2 does. I'd like to be able to have all the maps and all the goings-on with the newer control scheme. Might as well just have something genuinely good with KB+Mouse support, on my PC :)

Re:XvT ported to Linux!

[Rennt]

HOTU? Isn't that defunct now? Regardless, I would rather support GOG. Their releases are a massive improvement over the original, DRM free and a highly streamlined install process. Shits all over Steam and is actually a pleasure to use.

In the last few months I have bought more games from them then I have bought going back 8-10 years. I encourage everyone who talks the talk on /. to walk the walk and support this company. I hope they do well and have a real impact on the industry.

[I am just a happy customer, and not in anyway affiliated with GOG]

Re:XvT ported to Linux!

[Binestar]

I still have my Disks for Xwing, Tie Fighter, XvT, and XWing: Alliance. None work on Vista64 (I tried last week actually). I don't game in linux, but I suppose I can try them under wine.

Tie Fighter is the best of the bunch though.

Freespace

[xiromez]

Space sims FTW.

Re:Freespace

[WiiVault]

Heck yeah, that game an its expansions were amazing!

Re:Freespace

[AKAImBatman]

Believe it or not, you can still purchase it:

http://www.gog.com/en/search/sort/search/freespace

$5.99 for the game + expansions. Same for FreeSpace 2.

Re:Freespace

[Anonymous Coward]

*ahem* On that note, let me direct you to http://scp.indiegames.us/ - the Freespace Source Code project. It's a revamp and update of the FS engine, models, and textures. It requires the original Freespace 2, though. FS1 can be played with the FS1 port mod.
  Here's an excellent vid from 2006: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6VhyMzu12c

  It's progressed since then. Here's a more recent, but less explodey and more trailerish video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZuA9zvxs0Q

There are other space sims under development using the engine, too, including the excellent Battlestar Galactica game, Beyond the Red Line:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzyTT-OjeSA

Re:Freespace

[quanticle]

Best of all, Good Old Games sells their games completely DRM unencumbered, so its easy to play them with Wine on Linux.

Ultima Online circa 1998

[Robopath]

Simply put, a revival of the 1997-1998 version of the game offered for free download and a very low monthly fee would make this the greatest revival in gaming history. It was the first time I ever saw a game developer patch a winner into a looser.

Re:Ultima Online circa 1998

[AKAImBatman]

If you purchase the Unreal Deal Pack on Steam for $39.99 you get the following:

Unreal 2: The Awakening (Reg. $9.99)
Unreal Gold (Reg. $9.99)
Unreal Tournament 2004: Editor's Choice Edition (Reg. $14.99)
Unreal Tournament 3 Black (Reg. $11.99)
Unreal Tournament: Game of the Year Edition (Reg. $9.99)

That's all 5 Unreal games for $16.96 less than you'd pay for them at the normal Steam price (total $56.95), which is already heavily discounted. Of course, if you just want Unreal or Unreal Tournament, you can get it for $9.99 and be happy. No monthly fees!

Re:Ultima Online circa 1998

[Bieeanda]

Honestly, I think that's unlikely. There's no shortage of emulated shards, most of which are designed to simulate the halcyon days of free-range stealing, pre-Trammel and precasting... and the total number of users across all of them probably counts in the low thousands at best. Simply put, the vast majority of people who were kicking back and kicking ass in early UO have busy lives now. Even the youngest would be college age now, and the rest have families.

UO changed because the carebears were a more lucrative audience. UO kept getting expansions, filled with virgin land ready for people to plop houses down on, because so many of them are so crazy about their loot that they'll pay for four or five separate accounts to store it all (and to plop down more houses to store it all).

Re:Ultima Online circa 1998

[Tukz]

Oh hell yeah. Please re-release UO pre-Second Age.
oh, if you could, pre-PK patch too.

Setting up a macro program, to walk around a chair as a ghost for 6 hours per kill to avoid skill loss, was just so... fun?

Re:Ultima Online circa 1998

[Anonymous Coward]

That package was available for 15$ during the holiday sale, was an amazing deal.

Re:Ultima Online circa 1998

[Gaian-Orlanthii]

That probably wouldn't work. Why not? Because fan-made free-to-play Shards (server worlds for the non UO savvy) were huge from about 2001 to 2005 and yes, there were several 'back to basics' shards but for all their custom rulesets and content (which was often better than the crap EA was making) the official game still lurches on and most of those fan-made shards are gone. Right now UO suffers from assinine rulesets (Age Of Shadows, come on down!) and almost total disinterest from the developers. What keeps it alive for now are the old veteran players and the people who want to play a game with genuine history and unrivalled depth. But to get back on topic here..... I bought Unreal Tournament 3 THE DAY my local game shop got it in and I paid 80 for the collector's box too. After realising how badly I needed to upgrade my PC just to get it running I played it for about a month, tolerating the apalling bugs (like having the game reset all your config. options every time you exit) and waiting for the anticipated patch. By three months later, it was obvious CliffyB and friends were more interested in 'quarter-term profit margins' and 'market sector penetration realisations' (someone make a joke about that) than they were in making great games anymore. Fuck it, they wouldn't even release Gears Of War 2 for PC because of 'piracy concerns'! Yesterday I reinstalled UT3 for the first time in a year only because I got the v2.0 Patch. It's a good game, and with the editor, it could be like Unreal Tournament all over again. But it took the v2.0 patch to get to where we should have been in November 2007.

Not exactly looking good in the MP arena.

[nedwidek]

Still looks moribund.

http://www.game-monitor.com/search.php?game=ut3

700 servers and 361 players right now.

BF2 has over 5000 people playing right now.
CoD4 over 8000.
L4D over 6000.
TF2 7001.

And how is this for insult to injury. UT2004 currently has 641 players. Almost double UT3. UT3 just seemed like a tech demo. More to sell the engine to other game makers.

Re:Not exactly looking good in the MP arena.

[Endymion]

UT3 was just at tech demo.

They completely failed to stay with the feature that made UT2004 a joy to play: pacing. UT2004 is manic. You run fast, the game-flow is fast. There's no room for error, and you get the feeling that standing still for even a second is a fatal mistake. When I first played UT3, though, it felt like everything was slowed way down. They lost the frantic twitch aspect, and therefor lost the feature that make their franchise distinctive.

It's something that started with DOOM/Quake1, really - the "throw realism to the wind, let's just make it fast and fun" theory. UT seemed to be following in that style - doom3 certainly wasn't - but that's over now it seems.

Hell, if they just remade the UT2004 gameplay straight into the UT3 engine, that could be a major win right there. Maybe they'll figure it out from the slow-sales of UT3. Well, one can hope...

Re:Not exactly looking good in the MP arena.

[darkwhite]

The funny thing about UT3 is that everyone agrees that it failed to live up to UT2004's awesomeness, but nobody can agree on the reasons for it.

Beyond the excellent onslaught mode and all the good stuff it succeeded in carrying over from UT, there was something ephemeral to UT2004's success. A lot of people say that UT3's fault is that it was developed for the PS3. I'm not sure how true that is. But UT2004 was a reboot of UT2003; maybe the Titan Pack can serve as the same kind of reboot for UT3, maybe not. I hope it will, or that Epic will make something unreal again to return it to popularity, because the Unreal series rocks.

Re:Not exactly looking good in the MP arena.

[hedwards]

That might have to do with the fact that UT 2004 has been available for some time from gog.com. I'm sure there were places where one could get it more or less continuously.

Re:Not exactly looking good in the MP arena.

[Endymion]

UT2004 was a perfect mix of many things.

- The graphics hit a point where things no longer looked blatantly texture-mapped (the DOOM/early-quake problem)
- The pacing was incredible
- The weapons were surprisingly balanced. It's not like Q1 where it's "rockets or nothing"; every weapon is useful at some point.
- Very customizable. (lots of FPS games have that, but it's still a point in UT2004's favor)
- A variety of modes, that were generally well done. Ok, "double dominate" blows, but I still find myself playing a Bombing Run match and such just because it's crazy and different.
- Very gameplay-oriented level design. Sure, some of the maps look totally absurd, but the look that way because they have specific choke-points, carefully designed flow, etc.
- An extra level of polish across the board. I never really found myself saying "if it only had this feature, it'd be perfect". Even the little stuff like settings to change the crosshairs on a per-weapon basis - it showed a level of caring about the gameplay (the "fun"!) that most games skimp on.

I can't speak to how customizable UT3 is, but it(and many other games sense then) skimped on many of these features. The engine is there, though. It is potentially something that could be solved by simply adding a bunch of polish, little features, and playtesting a LOT to get the pacing/balance/etc right.

Maybe we'll get lucky and see a "UT3.5" remake where they get it right... they did show they can "reboot" things once before.

Re:Not exactly looking good in the MP arena.

[Anonymous Coward]

Counter-strike 1.6:

servers: 42715
Players: 76,726

Long live gameplay and short live graphics

Re:Not exactly looking good in the MP arena.

[KDR_11k]

UT2004 might have been so good because they had the chance to collect experience with 2003 what works and what doesn't, after all people complained to no end about 2003. They could also reuse a ton of material from 2003, freeing up more dev time for polish and additions rather than groundwork.

Re:Not exactly looking good in the MP arena.

[apoc.famine]

Isn't amazing that Epic was able to take nearly ALL of the good things about the game and ruin them? I've been a rabid fan of UT from the start. We've run a little UT clan for 9 years now.
 
And after UT3, I don't know that I'll buy another UT game. It would take a very, VERY large amount of positive press for me to send Epic another cent. I truly don't understand how anyone familiar with previous UT versions could have released UT3.

Re:Not exactly looking good in the MP arena.

[ifrag]

The weapons were surprisingly balanced. It's not like Q1 where it's "rockets or nothing"; every weapon is useful at some point.

Aww, the lightning gun was at least somewhat useful. Particularly in the pool on DM3. *evil grin*

Re:Not exactly looking good in the MP arena.

[Turiko]

or perhaps the mod community will want to make it a good game and do epic's work... the engine is there, and it can all be used. If people really want this to be good, it WILL be good. but everyone just forgets UT3 and goes back to ut 2k4 where everythign is already perfect, save for graphics :).

Re:Not exactly looking good in the MP arena.

[tecnico.hitos]

servers: 42715
Players: 76,726

Less than two players per server.
Select your comment:

1. It's quiet, too quiet...
2. Bot wins.
3. Suicide, yeah!

Re:Not exactly looking good in the MP arena.

[Anonymous Coward]

Halo 3 - 17,540 at the time of this post.
People give the Halo series a bad rap sometimes because it doesn't have anything new or groundbreaking, but the fact is it's a fun, polished game and a lot of people like it.

Re:Not exactly looking good in the MP arena.

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with pretty much everybody in this thread and still play UT2004 because it's just a blast. I've just been wondering about this:

the excellent onslaught mode

Isn't it a pretty direct rip-off from Tribes? (Not that it isn't excellently implemented in UT2004, it is, but I never see any credit given to Tribes and just wonder if it deserves some. In the same way Doom/Quake is credited for kickstarting a genre, that perhaps Unreal Tournament first really got "just right", and so on.)

Re:Not exactly looking good in the MP arena.

[FictionPimp]

I know I will never buy another UT game. Why? Because I was lied too. I was told there was a linux version and it would be released.

I'm still waiting.

Re:Not exactly looking good in the MP arena.

[Anonymous Coward]

Amen to that. I played UT back in my college days and loved it. I even went to the trouble of installing a Voodoo3 card in a Mac to play it! Eventually I started making maps and really getting into the community.

Then UT2003 came out. It sucked. I made a map for it but just the one. I quit playing.

Then UT2004 came out and added the fun back in. It wasn't UT, but it was good enough. Good times were had. Eventually I lost interest, but it took a while.

Then UT3 came out. I was long out of the UT scene by then and decided to give it a shot. Plus, I had discovered that Steam wasn't crap anymore and they had just released UT3 on Steam (a bit late, but whatever). I bought it with the Unreal Gold/UT2004 GOTY pack (just so I didn't have to hunt down my old disks to install the old games). $60 for 5 games and a retail expansion is a pretty good deal. Except that UT3 is ass. I should've just gone looking for the Unreal Gold disks and not cluttered my Steam games list. UT3 should be free. Hell, I fired up classic UT and there were far more people playing it. UT2004 still has a moderately healthy player base. UT3 has nothing. It's pretty, but the lag makes it unplayable. Pressing "fire" and your weapon firing are two events that are only slightly related. There's a good half-second delay between them at best.

Re:Not exactly looking good in the MP arena.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hell, they also said there would be Mac and linux ports of the Editor. That doesn't look like it will ever happen.
 
To not even have a linux SERVER port at launch was asinine. We still don't have one fully patched! That was pretty much the death-knell. With most of the major server hosts running linux, the launch was crippled with "local server on my desktop" servers as the primary servers. With such a poor gaming experience due to that, I bet they lost a ton of players. Add in the lies and general crappiness, and it's no wonder that UT2k4 has 2x the players still.

Re:Not exactly looking good in the MP arena.

[Draek]

- The graphics hit a point where things no longer looked blatantly texture-mapped (the DOOM/early-quake problem)
- The pacing was incredible
- The weapons were surprisingly balanced. It's not like Q1 where it's "rockets or nothing"; every weapon is useful at some point.
- Very customizable. (lots of FPS games have that, but it's still a point in UT2004's favor)

All of which also apply to UT3. Yes, it's slower than UT2004, but so was the original one and while I enjoyed UT2004's Quake-ness, it's good to be back.

- A variety of modes, that were generally well done. Ok, "double dominate" blows, but I still find myself playing a Bombing Run match and such just because it's crazy and different.

"Double Domination" blows, "Bombing Run" generally blows, and while Assault's loss was sad (though that kind of game mode is much better on something like Red Orchestra IMHO), UT3's Greed and Betrayal modes more than make up for it. Greed, specially is a stroke of genius, bringing DM-style action to a CTF-style game.

- Very gameplay-oriented level design. Sure, some of the maps look totally absurd, but the look that way because they have specific choke-points, carefully designed flow, etc.

And UT3 doesn't? fsck, I'd consider that a key feature of the whole UT series, brilliantly-designed maps. Specially the way they've rebalanced famous old maps for the newer installments, and UT3 only continues that trend.

- An extra level of polish across the board. I never really found myself saying "if it only had this feature, it'd be perfect". Even the little stuff like settings to change the crosshairs on a per-weapon basis - it showed a level of caring about the gameplay (the "fun"!) that most games skimp on.

Polish is exactly what keeps me in UT3 now. All that customizability is great, sure, but the rebalancing of the more 'common' stuff is even moreso to me. A sniper rifle that doesn't blow, an improved Link Gun, I miss those playing UT2004 more than I do the per-weapon crosshairs playing UT3.

Seriously, if you haven't tried UT3 with the newly-released Titan pack, then do so. It solves the main problem most people had with it: lack of content, and does so in a very spectacular way. It is, in many respects, what UT2004 was to UT2003, except you don't have to pay for it yet *again*.

Re:Not exactly looking good in the MP arena.

[Walkingshark]

The funny thing about UT3 is that everyone agrees that it failed to live up to UT2004's awesomeness, but nobody can agree on the reasons for it.

Thats easy, the UT series apparently suffers from the same curse as the Star Trek franchise. Only the even numbered games are any good.

Re:Not exactly looking good in the MP arena.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention in 2K4 if you really wanted a feature...it was incredibly easy to add with unrealscript and there's a HUGE active dev community, still huge actually to this day.

Of course UT3 has modding capability too, but it fails in comparison, and the initial release was so botched there was realistically no way to even play with the modding for over 6 months, about when they finally released a dedicated server that ran on linux.

Re:Not exactly looking good in the MP arena.

[Anonymous Coward]

UT3 Plays like a console shooter with PC controls if you've never played the PC version. It's slow and the hitboxes are HUGE.

Don't worry though, they made it harder to hit people by making everything in the levels almost the same color and making the players blend into everything.

What? That's not obvious?

[Anonymous Coward]

Starcraft of course. Though "comeback" would be a gross misapplication of the English language.

Hans (because I'm lazier than I am anonymous)

Master Servers Pulled

[TypoNAM]

Sierra / Vivendi Games pulled the Tribes 2 master servers and various other classic Sierra Online games last November. Sad thing is that Tribes 2 never had a patch released to make it possible to play online without the authentication system through Sierra's master servers. Sure there are currently a few workarounds, but none are realistic. So basically once Sierra killed the master server I lost my ability to play Tribes 2 online that I paid for six years ago. Hell I even bought the Linux port from tuxgames additional to the Windows release because I enjoyed playing it both on my Linux and Windows machines.

Sierra has pretty much written off the Tribes franchise since the major failure of Tribes Vengeance. There was a rumor a few years back that Sierra was willing to hand over the entire franchise to anybody around $100,000 or so I heard. Apparently its considered worthless to them. Not only would I like to see Tribes 2 return, but also an upgraded Descent 2. Sure there's the D2X and variants projects, but I want a true completely redone Descent 2 for current hardware. I personally didn't care for Descent 3 at all. I always thought that a Descent game for xbox 360 arcade might bring back popularity for the game and give it a chance for current generation of gamers. But of course I'd prefer a PC version (Linux especially ;).

Re:Master Servers Pulled

[rsmith-mac]

There was a rumor a few years back that Sierra was willing to hand over the entire franchise to anybody around $100,000 or so I heard. Apparently its considered worthless to them.

It's no longer a rumor, InterActiveCorp/GarageGames bought the entire Starsiege IP from Activision late last year at what I can only assume was a fire sale price. They're going to be relaunching Tribes 1 as a browser game.

Re:Master Servers Pulled

[TornCityVenz]

The work around really are not hat hard. If you want to play on Friday night fights it consists of registering your nick on a website, loading the game in LAN mode and then when listing the servers hitting "insert" and the valid IP of a server running it.(hint)208.101.7.64:28000 Complete Instructions can be found at http://www.elitewarriorsonline.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=137:t2-bouncer-authentication-via-lan

Quakelive??

[1 (smarterThanYou)]

Quake 3 Arena is like 8 years old and is alive, well, and growing again thanks to id's free beta. Looks like Epic's strategy of copying everything id does is finally paying off...(kidding, mostly)

Re:Quakelive??

[DRAGONWEEZEL]

"Looks like Epic's strategy of copying everything id does is finally paying off...(kidding, mostly)"

Totally baited me there, and you got me. Going from Quake to UT was like going from a nice but cheap couch to a leather recliner. Yeah you can sleep in both, but one of those PUTS you to sleep, while the other lets you sleep.

I mean w/ quake, You got to really enjoy every frag count, and pretty much have to memorize every level. With UT3, I can jump in a map I've never seen before and be "led" to where I need to be. Also, UT brought vehichles to the game. So did Q IV, unfortunately no one plays either game.

My perspective is this, there are too many good classic games out there, and UT3 got killed by Crysis.

Epics stance has allways been similar to Blizz in that it'll release products "when ready" and it's UT series has allways been a way to sell the engine. The UT3 engine is AWESOME, the CryTek engine is AWESOME. It's just that Epic now has a new competitor other than ID, and it showed them both up. Look for a HUGE comback from ID and Epic in the upcoming year or so. If they don't, they'll die like bloated american auto industry.

Well, having a better product also helps

[Draek]

Consider what happened to S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadows of Chernobyl, also available on Steam. When it came out, reviews were universally panning the game for its huge amount of bugs, yet by the time I bought it for $5 during one of Steam's weekend deals, the game was already on its fifth patch and with barely a bug to be found so I found instead one of the best FPSs of this decade, IMHO.

With UT3 something similar happened. I got it during Steam's X-Mas sale and, while fun and very polished, the relative lack of game modes made many go back to UT2004, myself included. Yet with the latest patch Epic not only added achievements but also two new modes that take UT3's focus on fast-paced action and push it even further, making it even more visceral and enjoyable than its predecessors were. Of course, it also helped that in the year-and-half since its original release, the number of people with computers capable of running it has increased tenfold, too.

As for other games I'd like to see revived, how about Medieval II: Total War? largely ignored by players and critics alike after being squeezed in between the critically-acclaimed Rome and Empire, yet so far my favorite from the series, it'd be nice to see it gather attention, and more than a handful of servers online.

Re:Well, having a better product also helps

[YouWantFriesWithThat]

Stalker was one of the best games i have ever played. unfortunately i didn't know about the need to patch it and there is probably still a firefight going on at the junkyard. that said, i recommend it to everyone i know with a PC. when i finally upgrade my dusty P4 i am going to replay it again with a system that can actually run the graphics above low. that should be fun.

Re:Well, having a better product also helps

[jgtg32a]

STALKER is great but you really need to Download the mod Oblivion Lost to really get the most out of the game

UT: ToG

[Anonymous Coward]

They need to use the same music they used in the original game on Coret, Face, et cetera. The tempo on Coret was perfect for racing from flag to flag while leaving a path of destruction in one's wake.

quake

[koutbo6]

will we need a 56kbps modem though?

Return to Castle Wolfenstein

[Peter Cooper]

Definitely RTCW. Best online game I've played bar none - I got hooked into it for about a month solid. Sadly when I went back after several more months, it'd pretty much died. I've not found anything to come close to the gameplay (well, except Battlefield 2) and the way you get teamwork even from random folks on a public server.

Re:Return to Castle Wolfenstein

[cadu]

RTCW: Enemy Territory is still pretty alive in certain countries, here in Japan we have 2 servers that are almost always full after 12:00pm.....one has a 42 player limit and the other, 30....you have to FIGHT or come earlier and spectate several games if you wanna play when you're free...

also we have here a bunch of not-so-crowded but fun TRICK JUMP servers in which you challenge yourself in leaping over several nice places, or climbing places which seem impossible...fun!

Re:Return to Castle Wolfenstein

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have HL2, you might want to try the mod Fortress Forever(www.fortress-forever.com) (assuming your like Team Fortress type games), which is a more true successor to TFC then TF2 is imo. A lot of people I knew in TFC also loved ET, though I haven't played ET myself.

It's extremely fast-paced twitchy game, with several fun gamemodes and relatively easy to start with, but if you want to master everything it'll take some time although they have put in a lot of work to make it easier to master. In a game with decent players the people doing the offense will get upto 70 deaths in half an hour. :)

Re:Return to Castle Wolfenstein

[Anonymous Coward]

RTCW still alive and kicking, this month crossfire.nu is doing a online cup with some old glories of RTCW.
And also, you have Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory (NOT QUAKE WARS) as one of the top xfire games list.
The only game i play is Wolfenstein: Enemy territory, almost all days at night. (pubs are full and you can easily find ppl to scrim with)

Re:Return to Castle Wolfenstein

[mollymoo]

Wow, it's good to hear ET is still going. It was about the only FPS I played on the PC and I played it a lot. A hell of a lot. Haven't touched it in three years or more though. I might have to get the old Windows box running again and fire it up.

FUCK developers, and FUCK their rights!

[bonch]

I hear you, brother! FUCK the developers at Epic who worked on the games to make a living! FUCK their rights! Artists are our slaves.

Re:FUCK developers, and FUCK their rights!

[troll8901]

Be careful! The mods may be humor-impared.

Re:FUCK developers, and FUCK their rights!

[theclaw1]

You forgot to post as Anonymous Coward, bonch.

Re:FUCK developers, and FUCK their rights!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm glad you see it my way.

Re:FUCK developers, and FUCK their rights!

[drinkypoo]

I hear you, brother! FUCK the developers at Epic who worked on the games to make a living!

You fuck 'em, I've seen 'em.

Re:FUCK developers, and FUCK their rights!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah because everything is art these days.

Re:FUCK developers, and FUCK their rights!

[geekoid]

They got paid.

You do realize the poster is offering a different venue to download a game being offered for FREE, right?

Yes I know, you are trying to be funny..or maybe sarcastic.

Re:FUCK developers, and FUCK their rights!

[LiquidFire_HK]

No, UT3 was only free for a couple of weekends, only through Steam. You can't continue to play it for free after the weekends have passed; you have to buy it (though it is quite discounted at the moment).

Re:FUCK developers, and FUCK their rights!

[geekoid]

What's that, the free software is only free for a weekend and then it costs? whu..that's not free.

Thanks for the info. I thought it was free, not free for a limited time.

Really, the word they were looking for is 'Demo'.

Re:FUCK developers, and FUCK their rights!

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you don't get it, but not everyone likes steam. Some due to bad experiences, some due to principles, some due to still being disgusted at how they have (on numerous occasions, might I add) charged more for a downloaded version than you can get boxed, unencumbered by steam and with an honest-to-god dead-tree edition manual.

Re:FUCK developers, and FUCK their rights!

[Creepy Crawler]

No. Im actually against anti-ownership.

Originally, I'd go in and buy a game at whatever_shop. Id go and install the game and play it. Once im done with it (well, if i am) I could resell it to somebody else. We do this all the time on DVDs and CDs. They're called pawn shops and resale shops. Perfectly legit and in the clear.

Now, STEAM comes in, with the prices equal to (Retail - packaging) HOWEVER your rights are not retained. That's the sadistic part. And of course, if whoever owns STEAM decides that its cheaper to shut it down, or double the prices, they have all the power.

In that course, we have geeks who love STEAM as it allows their games to be accessed from anywhere they have internet access. As long as they have no want to add 3rd party games they may have purchased from someone else, or want these games for purely offline (say, a LAN with internet being a phone line), they're out of luck.

Quake Expansion Pack...

[__aaclcg7560]

I loved how Steam brought back the Quake expansion packs since I never played them when they first came. After recently reinstalling Quake with an open source engine, I remembered why I loved the mouse view in Quake II. Alas, I'm passing on the expansion packs.

Re:Quake Expansion Pack...

[mobby_6kl]

+mlook

No need to thank me.

Re:Quake Expansion Pack...

[__aaclcg7560]

*cough* I knew that. *cough*

I had to use the DarkPlaces Quake 1 engine to get proper video and mouse look support. Playing nightmare mode has never been so sweet.

Goldeneye!!

[mcarmstrong14]

I would love to get Goldeneye 64 on Steam to be played as an online multiplayer game. There was a mod for Counter Strike that enabled people to play a Golden Eye styled game but it wasnt the same.

Re:Goldeneye!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure Valve have any immediate plans to port Steam to the N64, but you never know. Maybe once Nintendo release some kind of addon to let you connect your 13-year-old console to the internet.

Re:Goldeneye!!

[KDR_11k]

Nintendo is already re-releasing N64 games on the Wii and could theoretically add online multiplayer. However the dev studio that made it and owns at least some of the rights got sold to Microsoft and the James Bond license is in someone else's hands too.

Re:Goldeneye!!

[Kneo24]

There's a Source mod instead: http://goldeneyesource.net/

Re:Goldeneye!!

[Sage Gaspar]

The problem with a Goldeneye port, as the Source mod demonstrates, is that when you're playing with a very responsive mouse and keyboard it completely changes the game. Half of the challenge in the original is just wrestling with the controls. Being able to swivel instantly and aim precisely means you're dead before you have a chance to react most of the time.

One word :

[Anonymous Coward]

MAGESTORM.

http://www.onlinegamesinn.com/showgame/1786/Magestorm/

Open Hover

[Anonymous Coward]

Open Hover is the latest remake of an online hover craft racing game. You can race people from all over the world in this 3d game. The networking in the game needs fixed because it was written before most homes had routers.

Pacwars and Duke Nukem

[Anonymous Coward]

Heyup

Pacwars just because you could hack the maps, that was the whole point. Make better secret hiding places than your nmes and not just a map with no artifacts, that was lame.

http://pw2.sourceforge.net/screenshots.php

Duke Nukem 3D (DN3D)

Simply because of the bug jumps, collecting them was gaming at its finest, knowing you could get one over and planning your attack just because of them, although I miss the jet pack too.

http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/duke-nukem-3d/screenshots

rgds
tmy

Bah, FUD

[icsx]

Now after the weekend is over and it has been more than a week already, the players count has dropped rapidly. Nice warmping up for old game but it just didnt last. It should be updated regularely to keep people's interest on it. http://store.steampowered.com/stats/ (Click link view stats per game)

How Verizon Killed Steam

[teridon]

Every time I see a story mentioning Steam, I'm reminded how my Verizon-provided Actiontec router can't handle the Steam server browser. My only option appears to be to replace the provided router with my own.

I haven't tried fighting with Verizon about how their router sucks. I guess I have the feeling they're not going to do anything about it no matter what I do.

That said, they are still better than Comcast :-/

Re:How Verizon Killed Steam

[xenolion]

Im going to have to look into this more, but it just might be a firmware update to fix the issue. thanks for the heads up now to dig around more.

Re:How Verizon Killed Steam

[ice-nine]

You've probably seen this before but this helps a lot:

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r17679150-Howto-make-ActionTec-MI424WR-a-network-bridge

You can use a $50 Linksys WRT-G series router with hacked firmware that will do anything and everything you want it to.

Re:How Verizon Killed Steam

[garylian]

I have Steam, and I have FIOS, with the Actiontec router, and I never had problems in the past. Granted, I don't use Steam a ton, but it connected, and I was able to list and enter TF2 games when I tried it out.

The Actiontec is not a great router, and it's a pain to open ports at times, but you can eventually work your way around things.

Re:How Verizon Killed Steam

[geekoid]

Odd. I have a Verizon router(actiontec) and Steam works great. Every test I ahve thrown at it has been handles exceptionally.
I have only had fios for about 4 months, so maybe I have a different version.

Which router and firmware are you using?

Re:How Verizon Killed Steam

[teridon]

I have an Actiontec MI424WR, with firmware version 4.0.16.1.56.0.10.11.6 (I have no idea why the version string is so long!)

Re:How Verizon Killed Steam

[geekoid]

I'll check mine when I get home.

Re:How Verizon Killed Steam

[Anonymous Coward]

I have this exact issue. What exactly is the problem?

M.U.L.E.

[Anonymous Coward]

There's definite need to release M.U.L.E. to this generation.. It was the best multiplayer games on 8-bit era. Unfortunately game designer died years ago, but I'm sure someone could give permission to do it officially.

in that case it's the reverse

[emj]

Halo sold to mediocre gamers

</anti:ms>

This is great!

[MassiveForces]

Thanks mate. I have never laughed as hard or as much as I have playing Tribes 1 Annhilation though. That was the best mod ever... proper base building, character classes, and all in a mad fast fps. Just unreal.

Re:This is great!

[HellProphet]

Tribes Havoc was imho the best mod. Annhilation had to many unbalanced weapon setups. Havoc, had great armor suites, the best turrets and other offensive/defensive placements. The missle control center was soooo bad ass. Load up missles into a control center and fire it then directly control from the view of a rocket where it goes and what it destroys.

I fell for it

[ez151]

Recently I have gotten bit( $50.00 for the Force Underwhelmed) by the high retail price for games and i swore them off for good. Now in the bargin bin for under $10 I played Prey, Overlord, GalCiv2(I know, I know its FREE) and a couple of others. For the price they were all excellent and I had a great time playing them. I still play GalCiv2. Now Steam has a free weekend of the franchise I grew up with, cut my teeth building and upgrading my pc in the neverending quest of higher frame rates and spent years of enjoyment with. I did not get it when it came out cuz it was simply to expensive for me. I played it over the weekend, had a great time and here is the kicker.....they had it on SALE FOR $11.99. SOLD and I am having a great fun time AND it does not hurt the wallet. Soo I am sold on mu new game purchasing theory, I will wait until it is around $10.00 and buy it. I do a quick review search when I am in the store and if it is over a 7 I get it. I can get 5 game for the price of 1 New A list, that is worth it.

Tribes 1 speed & gameplay with new graphics

[Hecatonchires]

I loved Tribes so much

AVP2

[Anonymous Coward]

Aliens vs Predator 2, what a blast. Sadly, Monolith/GT never gave out the source, or at least the source to the maps for this game (or Blood 2, the chosen), ruling out coop play, or netcode better than their botched version. Two great games that should have been DESGINED for coop, yet flopped (Blood 2 even advertised coop on the box, but never implemented it, despite several promises they would in future patches)

They should patch Vampire

[sesshomaru]

The fix for Vampire is trivially easy: Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines

Someone should make a patch for it that isn't unofficial, and patch the Steam version. People aren't going to buy it when it says, "* Does not support Windows XP 64" and since it does with the amateur patch above they are losing sales.

I mean, I've seen it sold as a promotion before (on Halloween weekend, I think), but it has always had this trivial GlobalMemoryStatus() bug that causes it to crash in 64 bit. (By the way, I'm not underestimating Iain here, he did solid work finding the bug... but now that we know what it is we know how easy it is to fix!)

Heck, kick some money Iain's way for it and use his patch, Valve, it works!

Re:They should patch Vampire

[gnarlyhotep]

Who's going to patch it? The development company went out of business back in '05, and only lasted the last year becasue they laid off all their staff. None of the companies involved in UT had anything to do with it. Valve sold the engine (or liscensed it) to Troika, and doesn't have any financial incentive to patch it. The amature patch is the best you will ever get.

But I can't buy it

[Anonymous Coward]

The funny thing is, since I've built my computer I've been wanting to buy UT3 for weeks, but I can't find any local stores with it in stock. Of course a game will be dead when you can't buy it. (No, Steam is *NOT* an option.)

QUAKE Live

[DarthVain]

Speaking of Zombie games, QUAKE Live was launched by Id a couple of weeks ago.

Supposedly funded with in game ads.

Runs in your frickin' web broswer!

Played it myself. Basically Quake 3 in your browser, runs ultra smooth also. I personally had some punkbuster issues however.

Steam for really old games

[swarsron]

I would like to have a system like steam for really old games. I just bought the extension cd for battle isle 2 for 20 euros which is from 1994. The only reason i had to pay that much is because it isn't produced anymore and the few people who still have it either want to keep it to play it or are collectors. With a distribution system like steam it would be no problem to offer something like this for =5 euros.

But since we don't have something like this i'll create a torrent to spare others the effort i had to go through to get the game

Re:Steam for really old games

[GMFTatsujin]

Good Old Games might be just the haven you're looking for: http://gog.com/

Not a shill, just a fan.

Old School NWN (AOL)

[Sprouticus]

If I had my druthers, it would be fun to revive the old Gold box Neverwinter Nights. The guys over @ http://www.forgottenworld.com/ have faithfully recreated it, and while it only runs on windows, the main thing holding me back is the lack of any player base.

Tribes

[HellProphet]

Starsiege Tribes 1. enough said.

Fallout Tactics FOT

[osopolar]

As a fan of the Fallout story line I found and loaded up my old FOT disks 1-3 and even gamespy and wooops! Only one other person online and they were not playing. I am a fan of the 2K Character Limit as it is more about strategy and not character purely character level. Anyone want to start playing once a month or something? PEACE!

Re:Fallout Tactics FOT

[Anonymous Coward]

What? Tactics was a pos game and a disgrace to the Fallout franchise. It had NOTHING in common with the series. I rather see the original Fallout games (1 & 2) on Steam than a shitty excuse for a game.

Tribes 2

[Anonymous Coward]

This game is from 2000, and way ahead of its time. I highly recommend it to any FPD buff - don't get disheartened by its steep learning curve, it's one of the pioneers to next-gen FPS - in my opinion no game has ever come close, but UT is it's closest cousin.

Available for FREE (don't forget the patch!) at TribesNext.com

Game makers

[geekoid]

fix popular game and release it for free sees uptick in downloads.

Well

[Sycraft-fu]

I think part of that depends on your perspective on it. From a console standpoint, it was pretty amazing. From the standpoint of someone who'd been playing games like Quake and UT, it wasn't nearly so amazing. I remember all the console gamers I knew carrying on about how revolutionary the multiplayer was and all I could think was "I saw this years ago." It's not a bad game, don't get me wrong, just had it been a PC game I don't think it would have made all that big a splash.

Re:Well

[Supurcell]

Halo did quite a few things that PC shooters weren't doing 8 years ago(and some they still aren't doing). Dual wielding two pistols, and not just having two desert eagles at once, but being able to mix and match guns and fire separately has not caught on with PC only FPSs. Being able to carry no more than 2 weapons at once made you think about what you were picking up and not just grabbing everything. Automatic recharging health is now the standard. Having quick access to a melee attack(and one that was actually useful) that didn't make you switch weapons made so much sense that almost every other FPS has one now.

Goldeneye 64 was a game that was extremely popular that didn't do anything new with the FPS formula. Halo was an exceptional game that added new features to the genre that aren't going away any time soon.

And where is the Linux client?!

[Anonymous Coward]

The damn thing was promised on release and the port is apparently finished. So why can't we have the Linux client like all the other UT releases dammit?!

I hate booting to Windows just to play games. UT is one of the few that I don't have to do that and is probably the game I play most. I want UT3 too! It has been collecting dust on my shelf.

Interstate '76

[Aragorn DeLunar]

Never get out of the car. I'm looking at you, Interstate '82.

Re:Interstate '76

[opieum]

Seconded. That has to be one of my alltime faves. If they overhauled the engine and physics but kept the gameplay exactly the same. Oh and obviously a game browser. For its day you had to know the SPX/IPX or TCP/IP address of the machine you were connecting to. Still be a cool feature. but a game browser would be awesome :D

Re:Interstate '76

[slaker]

I bought Interstate '76, but it wouldn't work on any PC that had more than one optical drive, something that was never corrected. I loved the Mechwarrior games and I probably still have the disc.

Hm. Wonder if it'll run in a VM.

game i'd like to see come back...

[Anonymous Coward]

RTCW!

Tribes 2 was an amazing game.

[DRAGONWEEZEL]

I played it for my first time last year at infernalLan. was truly amazed by the fact that, I could play w/ as few or as many keys as I wanted. It had the number of binds as WoW, but like wow, you could drop down to just the mouse and movement keys and be O.K. (not good, but O.K.)

Graphics are junk on todays standards, but FPS wasn't all that high if IRC. (But I do have crap hardware so take that w/ a grain of sodium chloride) It seemed to me to be an FPS version of Sonic the SciFi hedgehog on crack. I'm holding out for a new version.

Re:Steam astroturfing

[Anonymous Coward]

Recently, posts about Steam are filled with sound-alike postings all singing its praises in similar ways, or then, this type of gushing post.

Yet Steam still sucks.

Did Valve read all the bad press Steam was getting on Slashdot, and send astroturfers out in force?

Because nothing about Steam has changed. Only the postings.

What about it NEEDS changing, I've been using Steam since the first day of the public beta, and I have never had anything even close to what I would call a "negative experience" with it.

UT3 on Linux?

[bucketoftruth]

Since I abandoned Windows 2 years ago I haven't really played any games. Does UT3 run on Linux or do I need Cedega?

Re:UT3 on Linux?

[notanatheist]

Don't worry, they promised to port it 18 months ago. Can you say "Epic FAIL!!"? Supposedly it works in Cedega but why pay a monthly fee to play a game or even a handful of games. If they can't port I don't play. Oh, and the reason it isn't ported.. some sort of crappy legal mumbo jumbo. Flippin' politics. I want UT3 on Linux LAST YEAR.

Re:UT3 on Linux?

[mollymoo]

Buy a console for gaming. They are about as non-free as you can get, but as a black box which plays games they work great. FPS with a controller works just fine once you get used to it. You can even play UT3 on the PS3 with keyboard and mouse.

PlanetSide!

[haywire7]

If they could fix the silly Vista issues PlanetSide ( http://www.planetside.com/ )would be a great game to go on Steam. UT3 just lacks something for me, UT2004 I still play.

CnC Gold

[skintigh2]

OMG someone please revive the original Command and Conquer. That game was so much fun, and such a good strategy game, and not complicated by 2700 possible upgrades like current RTS games. Just guile and strategy by the players.

Interstate 76

[opieum]

If they overhaul the graphics and physics as well as add a gamebrowser but keep the gameplay intact...I will be very happy and so will many gamers. Hell it could ressurrect the genre of carmageddon games again.

Re:Steam astroturfing

[slaker]

Try being a dial up user with a retail packaged copy of Half Life 2 that, according to the installer, would require 10 days of continuous, uninterrupted downloading through Steam before it could actually install and play.

Yes, really.

I'm sure it's much better now but just the fact that Steam installs and wants to be resident full-time on a PC is enough to keep me away from it, let alone the hilarity that is trying to have a LAN party when Steam's authentication servers are down.

I really do wish there were a way to enjoy some of Valve's titles on a PC without having to deal with their distribution shit. I've still never played Half Life 2.

StarCraft

[RsJtSu]

Long live the Zerg!

Tribes 2

[crusher-1]

One of the funnest games I've ever played! Had various modes, vehicles, various turrets and sensors - and sniping was very fun! HELLO STEAM???

Duke Nukem

[Anonymous Coward]

Duke 3D mmm build engine