It's like the Switcher Ad made by the Red vs. Blue guys. "Sure, we've got games. We've got Tetris. And Breakout. And, uh. Super Breakout."
Some of those are the same games I got bored of playing on DECstations in 1992. You won't win converts with half-assed public domain versions of games everyone has already been playing since the dawn of time. At the best it'll be a distraction between games of Counter-Strike and Half-Life 2.
C'mon, this is neat, but it makes the Mac gaming scene look really really good...
Yes, it'll probably be much easier if you just hash out a set of rules and style guidelines and then rewrite everything from scratch, to those guidelines.
You're going to end up rewriting everything along the way anyway, if you're doing a coding-style-level rewrite rather than just a bugfix, and it'll be a lot easier if you start from scratch.
If it took you only 3 days to beat it, you missed a _lot_ along the way. It's full of side-trips and random stuff. Beating the end is only a tiny fraction of the journey.
Josh
Ion Storm Austin actually used to be known as the Austion branch of a little game company called "Looking Glass." Yeah, that Looking Glass.
Warren Spector has come out and said this either on another forum I occasionally read (www.ttlg.com) or in a magazine article-- I forget which. Either way, it began as an entirely separate company from Ion Storm, and only became part of that because, I think, Eidos didn't know what else to do with them.
I've been playing Myst III for a week now (on and off-- I do have a job, after all). I've had no problems with it at all. None. Zero. I did download the update before even trying to run it, but still...
I've got a 1.2GHz Athlon, 256MB PC133 SDRAM, and a GeForce2 64MB DDR card. Myst3 runs beautifully. The graphics are smooth and fast, and the video is flawless.
Maybe you should be more surprised when you buy cheap hardware and it actually works. For that matter, would you give MS Minesweeper all 10/10 because it plays just fine on any hardware you can convince Windows 3.1 to run on?
Maybe this was supposed to be a troll. It's certainly not a review.
You should probably have called it more of a trouble report, or a news report or something. Calling it a "review" when you haven't even seen the game is stupid and a waste of your time and ours.
Who does he think he is, Winston Churchill?
"We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender..."
You miss the point. (Re:Banks -- love him)
on
Inversions
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· Score: 1
Iain Banks' books aren't about the science and technology he uses-- in fact, he willfully glosses over that in the pursuit of what is far more interesting to him: The story. His books, and especially the Culture novels, are about the possibilities inherent in the Culture, and in the possibilities inherent in the Culture's interactions with other societies, both as advanced and less advanced. He has readily admitted that techie hard-SF writing is not his forte.
The Culture, he admits, is a fairly dull place to live. The most interesting things he does involve looking at the Culture from outside, or from the point of view of people trying to get out of it, as in Use of Weapons. And yes, it does look like he likes to play with writing styles. This shouldn't be considered a bad thing-- it certainly keeps his books from blurring into one another.
But don't read Banks expecting Asimov-type science... He's not hard SF at all.
A 4-7 mile radius is actually quite a lot of people, if you live in an urban area. Even in a sparse sort of area like Worcester, MA, you could reach tens of thousands of people, depending on where you had your antenna. If you lived on one of the hills (hee hee. whatever might I be planning? 8), you could reach even more. And consider what someone in a building in, say, New York City might be able to do... It's more than just a neighborhood...
I'm looking forward to this. It should be interesting.
They're similar, but not the same. System Shock looks like it was designed as more of an RPG, where Marathon is definitely a shooter.
Also, the maps in Marathon are less crude than the System Shock maps. Shock's maps are all based on square grids. There are tilted floors, but they're sort of preset tilts. You can have a 45-degree floor that tilts from one side to the other, or a shallower tilt that takes two or three squares, but that's it. And it's all very griddy. Marathon didn't have tilted floors, but there was no grid, and walls could be pretty arbitrary.
Both Shock and Marathon have a good engaging plot, though, although Shock, true to the Looking Glass style, is much less of an action game. Marathon is definitely a shooter.
I've played pretty much every FPS to come along, but until Half-Life arrived (and then Thief and Shock 2 8), nothing was as engaging as the Marathon series. I have high hopes for Halo, too... And the Marathon references have already been surfacing.
I'd like to see Berst write one article in which he doesn't go out of his way to bash Apple. "The new Intel chip is fast, and Apple sucks." "The economy is great, and Apple sucks." "I make a living spotting trends, and Apple sucks." It's annoying.
Slashdot Mirror
It's like the Switcher Ad made by the Red vs. Blue guys. "Sure, we've got games. We've got Tetris. And Breakout. And, uh. Super Breakout."
Some of those are the same games I got bored of playing on DECstations in 1992. You won't win converts with half-assed public domain versions of games everyone has already been playing since the dawn of time. At the best it'll be a distraction between games of Counter-Strike and Half-Life 2.
C'mon, this is neat, but it makes the Mac gaming scene look really really good...
Yes, it'll probably be much easier if you just hash out a set of rules and style guidelines and then rewrite everything from scratch, to those guidelines.
You're going to end up rewriting everything along the way anyway, if you're doing a coding-style-level rewrite rather than just a bugfix, and it'll be a lot easier if you start from scratch.
Josh
I heard that system administration was the job to get to meet HOT CHYX!
If it took you only 3 days to beat it, you missed a _lot_ along the way. It's full of side-trips and random stuff. Beating the end is only a tiny fraction of the journey. Josh
Ion Storm Austin actually used to be known as the Austion branch of a little game company called "Looking Glass." Yeah, that Looking Glass. Warren Spector has come out and said this either on another forum I occasionally read (www.ttlg.com) or in a magazine article-- I forget which. Either way, it began as an entirely separate company from Ion Storm, and only became part of that because, I think, Eidos didn't know what else to do with them.
I've been playing Myst III for a week now (on and off-- I do have a job, after all). I've had no problems with it at all. None. Zero. I did download the update before even trying to run it, but still...
I've got a 1.2GHz Athlon, 256MB PC133 SDRAM, and a GeForce2 64MB DDR card. Myst3 runs beautifully. The graphics are smooth and fast, and the video is flawless.
Maybe you should be more surprised when you buy cheap hardware and it actually works. For that matter, would you give MS Minesweeper all 10/10 because it plays just fine on any hardware you can convince Windows 3.1 to run on?
Maybe this was supposed to be a troll. It's certainly not a review.
You should probably have called it more of a trouble report, or a news report or something. Calling it a "review" when you haven't even seen the game is stupid and a waste of your time and ours.
What a beautiful hack.
Who does he think he is, Winston Churchill? "We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender..."
Iain Banks' books aren't about the science and technology he uses-- in fact, he willfully glosses over that in the pursuit of what is far more interesting to him: The story. His books, and especially the Culture novels, are about the possibilities inherent in the Culture, and in the possibilities inherent in the Culture's interactions with other societies, both as advanced and less advanced. He has readily admitted that techie hard-SF writing is not his forte.
The Culture, he admits, is a fairly dull place to live. The most interesting things he does involve looking at the Culture from outside, or from the point of view of people trying to get out of it, as in Use of Weapons. And yes, it does look like he likes to play with writing styles. This shouldn't be considered a bad thing-- it certainly keeps his books from blurring into one another.
But don't read Banks expecting Asimov-type science... He's not hard SF at all.
Josh
I'm looking forward to this. It should be interesting.
Josh
Also, the maps in Marathon are less crude than the System Shock maps. Shock's maps are all based on square grids. There are tilted floors, but they're sort of preset tilts. You can have a 45-degree floor that tilts from one side to the other, or a shallower tilt that takes two or three squares, but that's it. And it's all very griddy. Marathon didn't have tilted floors, but there was no grid, and walls could be pretty arbitrary.
Both Shock and Marathon have a good engaging plot, though, although Shock, true to the Looking Glass style, is much less of an action game. Marathon is definitely a shooter.
I've played pretty much every FPS to come along, but until Half-Life arrived (and then Thief and Shock 2 8), nothing was as engaging as the Marathon series. I have high hopes for Halo, too... And the Marathon references have already been surfacing.
Josh
Unimog.
I'd like to see Berst write one article in which he doesn't go out of his way to bash Apple. "The new Intel chip is fast, and Apple sucks." "The economy is great, and Apple sucks." "I make a living spotting trends, and Apple sucks." It's annoying.
Ah, I see that you too have realized that alcohol will be a valuable trade good in the upcoming Empire of the Beast-Lord. Josh
A quick hack is not commercial-quality software.