Re:Today only, free access courtesy of Slashdot
on
Orwellian Tech Support
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I believe that punter referred to the American context of punting - that is, in football, when the ball is kicked back to the other team because they do not believe they can score a touchdown in this down, so instead will so instead will simply let the other team have the ball as far away as possible.
Its a good analogy - "I can't do anything with this, so you take it and get it as far away from me as possible".
Give them a decade - once they round up all the orphans and lost friends from the recent carnage, they'll come back a hundredfold and convert the entire middle east into Taliban-style fundamentalist warlords, and then you can really see what happens when you blow up a country.
Doesn't matter how neatly you do it - conquest involves killing many people. There is no way that doesn't have bad aftereffects. Put yourself in their shoes - even if you didn't like your ruler, if the ruler didn't actually kill anyone you know or opress anyone you know, and in fact most of your poverty was caused by trade embargoes, and then someone comes along and blows up your family because some other country pissed them off and they had a vendetta against your ruler, what would you do? You can't deny that's how it would look to an average Iraqi right now. Whether its true or not is beside the point.
That would be it. I don't know, maybe its 'cause I'm older now, but it read like one of the fantasy books I read when I was a kid (like Ursula LeGuin's work) except with something missing. I couldn't put my finger on it, but it felt like it was made out of neat ideas, not actual substance. I have that problem a lot with Gaiman's work. It took Pratchett's ability to flesh ideas into substance to make Good Omens work - and even he often mucks this up (some of the later Discworld books are full of nifty ideas about the hypothetical nature of magic and little else).
At first, I thought he was cool... but the novelty of his work is quickly wearing off. American Gods didn't turn my crank, and his much lauded "American from a British perspective" was bull, even a Canuck like me can see that. The fairy tale about Star and Wall (I forget the name) came out pretty bland. Maybe I'm just not a fantasy person, but IMHO he should stick to comic books. Still, Good Omens was wonderful, easily topping much of Pratchett's solo work.
Ugh - I saw that myself. Shows how many people can cling to something out of loyalty and lose their objectivity. The show hurt. Bad. While it jumped the shark earlier than this, I think the point I like most is the one where the writers basically admitted they'd fucked it up hardcore....
Hm - TA is my all time fave, but I found the sequel to be ho hum and poorly balanced. I never tried the expansion pack though - maybe that's what im missing.
I think I had some of their warez back in the day (considering posting anon now... fuck it). Still, I can see how the whole "posing as reviewers" thing could be crossing the line.
Sucks to be 'em. Still, seems kinda harsh - what's Ken Lay getting again?
Actually, I think Microsoft's feature is much more amicable. After all, any other browser could do the same - hell, the moz project could raise funds by makign the default search engine and the host-not-found search engine a contract to the highest bidder. Not that we'd like that, but they could.
The big thing is that the MS search-integration features don't break anything. They might interfere with their users seeing certain errors, but nothing's busted. SiteFinder breaks shite left right and center.
I agree - UT had some serious issues, and of course was popular with players who liked to abuse those issues. Many of the CTF maps were unplayable due to the sniper action, and obsurd due to the teleporting action. I think the UT2k3 fixed that. IMHO, the weapon and gametype changes in UT2k3 were excellent.
IMHO, the problem with 2k3 was that they decided to get the Quake players - they made it faster, louder, more "hardcore" - and lost all those nice gamer girls who liked the easy, fuzzy FPS. I used to be able to use UT to convert women into gamers.
Plus, I just find the whole "adrenaline" thing just silly. It adds an unnecessary and uncomfortable complication to the game.
I was reading about the mapping problems - apparently the devs decided to complete the maps before testing them, producing maps that were not much fun but so much work put in already they couldn't tweak them very much.
Still, I wasn't disappointed with 2k3. I thought UT had a better style to it (sleek and fun) but it was still a worthy successory. Its not like the real tragic sequels (AvsP 2, Tribes 2, Total Annihilation Kingdoms, Star Control 3) that completely destroyed a good game.
IMHO, that's a problem with the game, not the players. I get angry when I hop into a multiplayer map that I haven't played before and find out that I am given no fucking clue what to do. I'm here for fun - not to study, and certainly not to waste my teammates' time standing around reading objectives. UT started this bad trend in their Assault mode (Assault was a race, and you had to waste race time to read objectives) and few people fix it.
For those who say "play the map offline" - that sounds like studying and work. If I'm going to learn, I'm going to do it having fun with other players.
Poor documentation I'd expect from an indy game like Cube or a mod like Natural Selection. Not a game from a real software company.
Remember Team Fortress Classic? That game had signs all over the place. If you couldn't find the flag, it was because you couldn't read. Maps were simple and easy to understand.
Gaming is fun, learning is work. If learning is required, make it part of the fun.
For a similar game, but with only one human player per army, play the Battlezone games. Oldies but goodies. Also, because they're hover vehicles and not humans, the action is slow enough for FPS n00bs to stand a chance.
Calling DC a mod is like calling your winamp skin a new mp3 player. The thing hardly changes the gameplay at all. Its just out there for all the realism nuts who masturbate at the thought of shooting people with an m16 or whatever other modern pseudo realism crap is popular. Kudos for funnelling the counterstrike players away from real games.
Amen - not only that, but with LANs you can run all the most obscure mods you want. Before you say "who has a home LAN" - think it through, most geeks out there have a few old P166 boxen around. Anything above that level can run HL or Q2 - Voodoo2 cards are like $20 if you hunt for them. Just from keeping old computers around when they get replaced, I've got a 7-PC lan of computers faster than 166 at my family's house.
If its an older lan (p133 and up) get Quake 2 for Superheros Q2, Weapons Factory, Transformers Quake 2, and Action Quake 2. And get BattleZone. Half Life if you've got Voodoos. If you get HL, don't be afraid to hunt for the more obscure mods - my fave mod for HL is an obscure little action/racing hybrid named Turbo. Very fast, very violent, very cheap.
Good introductory games:
UT - easiest deathmatch FPS ever. An endless supply of good mods exist, and unlike in HL you can mix and match them.
Nerf ArenaBlast - UT for the kiddies!
Cube - simple, but painfully fast. wouter.fov120.com/cube
Serious Sam - easiest FPS to learn, no getting lost, no thinking - just shooting.
The newer FPS games I've played have all been harder, faster games. UT2k3 lost the whole "Quake for newbs/girls" appeal that the old UT had.
Oh, and BattleZone 1 is the greatest RTS/FPS hybrid ever.
IANAA (I am not an admin) but shouldn't bandwidth capping be handled at the ISP's end, through a transparent proxy? Not through the cable modem? At the very least couldn't they just have the system automagically cut off service when the packets start flowing too fast, rather than getting into the legal minefields? Then they could say "I'm sorry, our system does not support uncapping" when someone tries and finds their machine not getting anything. Seems a more elegant solution than simply hoping nobody will try and then hosing lawyer hours at them when they do.
Oh, the bitter irony - I notice that right wingers tend to be those who tell how they should spend their money, and yet are also the ones who object when governments (through taxation) tell them how to spend their own money.
Okay, first things first - any gamer geek must read Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game. Easily one of the greatest sci-fis ever.
Now, for more info, depends what you're after. Personally, I think Niven's short story anthologies are a great place to start for slightly oddball, thought-provoking hard sci-fi. Be wary of his novels, as he has a tendency to work with a feudalistic lunatic named Jerry Pournelle who's acidic political views have soured many novels (but they've also conglomerated on some freaking spectacular ones too). Good Niven/Pournelle pairings
- Footfall (classic alien invasion epic)
- The Mote in God's Eye and The Gripping Hand (2-part telling of the ultimate alien first-contact story that knocks the socks off of the average Star Trek treatment)
- Lucifer's Hammer (the old "asteroid wipes out civilization" except it follows a cast of characters all the way from first sighting of the comet through to the start of a new civlization).
Brin's Uplift series is spectacular, but start with the second book (Startide Rising). The first book is ignorable.
Read Gibson. The original Cyberpunk is Neuromancer, and its superior but oft-ignored sequel, Count Zero. For more Cyberpunk in a cynical, comic-book style (and very relevant for our consumeristic new millenium) is Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash.
Honestly, if you have to pick 2 books and are looking for a good mix of a wild ride and intelligent story, I'd suggest Snow Crash and Ender's Game. If you want a short novel series, then Brin's Uplift is where its at. If you want good shorts, go for Niven.
All of these books are just old enough to be piling up at your used bookstore, so you can just hop there on the cheap.
On that - does it require any additional hardware or hacking on the Cube? I'm too lazy to RTFA - but if it doesn't, then this thing could be handy - gamecubes are cheap as hell. The old Dreamcast design required the broadband adaptor that costs more than a DC does.
Hah - I call bullshit now. Now for some severe Karma burn.
I've been an armchair Linux fan for a while now - but recently, I've had to experience something outright painful: the Linux desktop machine. Our TA required that we use the math-geek standards of LaTeX and Grace for our reports - and let me tell you, it hurt. Bad. LaTeX was fine - I was a little disappointed that after decades of popularity there was still not even the simplest wysiwyg apps for it, and decent documentation was rare as diamonds, but it was still a very nice system for what it was. The painful truth was this: Excel beats the ever-loving crap out of Kspread.
The problem is interoperability. None of the software works well together - Mozilla and Konq have no idea what software to launch when you download a file. Kspread has no useful bindings to graphing software besides its inadequate internal system. For an OS that is based on using many small apps in the place of a few oversized ones, not nearly enough attention has been paid to interconnectivity - more than just foreign filetype support, but in-app transferral of information. When I click a Grace file on Konq, I expect it to open in Grace, not a text editor. Firebird feels like a dream on Win32, where it feels clunky on windows due to poor haptic feedback to loading and menu navigation. And why do I need to be root to burn a disk? Or to install the simplest apps?
Oh, and all the IM's pale in comparison to Miranda.
Yes, the Linux community has done some spectacular stuff - but it just doesn't hold a candle to what the retail world has done in the same time.
Well fuck you too. I meant for playing against my friends, some of who are non gamers. They use my LAN. Oh, but you're an antisocial twat, so you don't know what friends are.
I'm betting the two screens will be for versatility of controls - the bottom screen will be a touchscreen, allowing for reconfigurable controls. They're probably basing this on the success of the GBA+GC combination games - designers have gotten to like the two screens thing.
Look at it this way - want traditional game? Draw traditional control pad on the touchscreen. Want an RPG? draw a menu on the touchscreen. Want an analogue control for a racing game? Make a bar for an analogue throttle, and leave the rest of the space open for steering. And so on. The display screen remains free for use.
Woulnd't be so good for RTS games though - the RTS games would require that both screens be touched - one for pointer and one for menu. I'm sure the 2-screen approach is so you don't get your grubby fingerprints all over the pretty display screen, only the little control screen. RTS or other pointing-device based games coudl ruin that. Alternately, they could just make a laptop style "pointing pad" for the pointing device on the touchscreen.
Anyhow, I'd put money that this is why there are two screen.
Yes, UT - the first one. It has all the ingredients for non-gamers. The fact is that many non-gamers would be gamers if they had gotten into it early - so don't write of the hardcore genre of FPS. If you have access to a home-LAN, cooperative Assault is awesome for teaching and fun.
Reasons UT is good: Easy (people move slower than most FPS games, so aiming is not impossible) Polished & Friendly (heroic-looking characters and techno music, not loud heavy metal and psychopathic characters - good for getting girls into the game). Multiplayer (that is why you want more players isn't it?) Simplistic maps (learning to navigate an artificial world takes a lot of learning - I know many newbs get lost so easily even in DOOM). Cathartic weapons (watch as your players squeal with glee at their first HEAD SHOT).
That, and mods like U4E only extend the longevity of the game.
Well, it could be good - near as I can tell, it with the exception of breaking rank, the rest of it (firing once every 30 seconds and sitting out when you die) describes CounterStrike (another game that compromised on realism just enough to be both convincing and reasonably fun). Hell, half of the CS players love it when it decays into a knife fight anyways. And you can block with a musket, so it might be a little better than "stab, stab, stab" in a bayonette fight. And lets not forget the officers and cavalry with their horses and revolvers and sabres.
Besides, naval combat of the era could be fun too - with cannons and boarding actions and landing and suchlike. Good bloody fun.
Battlefield: 1812 might actually make for a good game. Personally, I wouldn't like it, as I don't like CS, but others do. Depending on what era you set it, you get different options on gameplay - earlier means more focus on horses, swordplay and cannons (cool) - later means more focus on rifle muskets, revolvers, and early machine guns (also cool). And there are no shortages of wars to choose from - Napoleonic, Revolutionary, 1812, French Revolution, etc. A whole era of underrepresented warfare - we basically ignore everything from between the invention of the musket and the invention of the assault rifle.
BTW, WWI is also sorely underrepresented. I'd like a WWI game as you could do the early war where there was more than just 2 factions and finally have something more then axis vs allies.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe that punter referred to the American context of punting - that is, in football, when the ball is kicked back to the other team because they do not believe they can score a touchdown in this down, so instead will so instead will simply let the other team have the ball as far away as possible.
Its a good analogy - "I can't do anything with this, so you take it and get it as far away from me as possible".
Give them a decade - once they round up all the orphans and lost friends from the recent carnage, they'll come back a hundredfold and convert the entire middle east into Taliban-style fundamentalist warlords, and then you can really see what happens when you blow up a country.
Doesn't matter how neatly you do it - conquest involves killing many people. There is no way that doesn't have bad aftereffects. Put yourself in their shoes - even if you didn't like your ruler, if the ruler didn't actually kill anyone you know or opress anyone you know, and in fact most of your poverty was caused by trade embargoes, and then someone comes along and blows up your family because some other country pissed them off and they had a vendetta against your ruler, what would you do? You can't deny that's how it would look to an average Iraqi right now. Whether its true or not is beside the point.
As I easily use hundreds of CD's for legal uses, I wonder where I sign up to get my $50 back? Oh, wait, I can't? Who's a thief?
That would be it. I don't know, maybe its 'cause I'm older now, but it read like one of the fantasy books I read when I was a kid (like Ursula LeGuin's work) except with something missing. I couldn't put my finger on it, but it felt like it was made out of neat ideas, not actual substance. I have that problem a lot with Gaiman's work. It took Pratchett's ability to flesh ideas into substance to make Good Omens work - and even he often mucks this up (some of the later Discworld books are full of nifty ideas about the hypothetical nature of magic and little else).
At first, I thought he was cool... but the novelty of his work is quickly wearing off. American Gods didn't turn my crank, and his much lauded "American from a British perspective" was bull, even a Canuck like me can see that. The fairy tale about Star and Wall (I forget the name) came out pretty bland. Maybe I'm just not a fantasy person, but IMHO he should stick to comic books. Still, Good Omens was wonderful, easily topping much of Pratchett's solo work.
Oh well, YMMV.
Ugh - I saw that myself. Shows how many people can cling to something out of loyalty and lose their objectivity. The show hurt. Bad. While it jumped the shark earlier than this, I think the point I like most is the one where the writers basically admitted they'd fucked it up hardcore....
"Worst Episode Ever."
Hm - TA is my all time fave, but I found the sequel to be ho hum and poorly balanced. I never tried the expansion pack though - maybe that's what im missing.
I think I had some of their warez back in the day (considering posting anon now... fuck it). Still, I can see how the whole "posing as reviewers" thing could be crossing the line.
Sucks to be 'em. Still, seems kinda harsh - what's Ken Lay getting again?
Actually, I think Microsoft's feature is much more amicable. After all, any other browser could do the same - hell, the moz project could raise funds by makign the default search engine and the host-not-found search engine a contract to the highest bidder. Not that we'd like that, but they could.
The big thing is that the MS search-integration features don't break anything. They might interfere with their users seeing certain errors, but nothing's busted. SiteFinder breaks shite left right and center.
I agree - UT had some serious issues, and of course was popular with players who liked to abuse those issues. Many of the CTF maps were unplayable due to the sniper action, and obsurd due to the teleporting action. I think the UT2k3 fixed that. IMHO, the weapon and gametype changes in UT2k3 were excellent.
IMHO, the problem with 2k3 was that they decided to get the Quake players - they made it faster, louder, more "hardcore" - and lost all those nice gamer girls who liked the easy, fuzzy FPS. I used to be able to use UT to convert women into gamers.
Plus, I just find the whole "adrenaline" thing just silly. It adds an unnecessary and uncomfortable complication to the game.
I was reading about the mapping problems - apparently the devs decided to complete the maps before testing them, producing maps that were not much fun but so much work put in already they couldn't tweak them very much.
Still, I wasn't disappointed with 2k3. I thought UT had a better style to it (sleek and fun) but it was still a worthy successory. Its not like the real tragic sequels (AvsP 2, Tribes 2, Total Annihilation Kingdoms, Star Control 3) that completely destroyed a good game.
There is never a category for "does the prof speak english?". That one needs to be there at my school.
IMHO, that's a problem with the game, not the players. I get angry when I hop into a multiplayer map that I haven't played before and find out that I am given no fucking clue what to do. I'm here for fun - not to study, and certainly not to waste my teammates' time standing around reading objectives. UT started this bad trend in their Assault mode (Assault was a race, and you had to waste race time to read objectives) and few people fix it.
For those who say "play the map offline" - that sounds like studying and work. If I'm going to learn, I'm going to do it having fun with other players.
Poor documentation I'd expect from an indy game like Cube or a mod like Natural Selection. Not a game from a real software company.
Remember Team Fortress Classic? That game had signs all over the place. If you couldn't find the flag, it was because you couldn't read. Maps were simple and easy to understand.
Gaming is fun, learning is work. If learning is required, make it part of the fun.
For a similar game, but with only one human player per army, play the Battlezone games. Oldies but goodies. Also, because they're hover vehicles and not humans, the action is slow enough for FPS n00bs to stand a chance.
Calling DC a mod is like calling your winamp skin a new mp3 player. The thing hardly changes the gameplay at all. Its just out there for all the realism nuts who masturbate at the thought of shooting people with an m16 or whatever other modern pseudo realism crap is popular. Kudos for funnelling the counterstrike players away from real games.
Amen - not only that, but with LANs you can run all the most obscure mods you want. Before you say "who has a home LAN" - think it through, most geeks out there have a few old P166 boxen around. Anything above that level can run HL or Q2 - Voodoo2 cards are like $20 if you hunt for them. Just from keeping old computers around when they get replaced, I've got a 7-PC lan of computers faster than 166 at my family's house.
If its an older lan (p133 and up) get Quake 2 for Superheros Q2, Weapons Factory, Transformers Quake 2, and Action Quake 2. And get BattleZone. Half Life if you've got Voodoos. If you get HL, don't be afraid to hunt for the more obscure mods - my fave mod for HL is an obscure little action/racing hybrid named Turbo. Very fast, very violent, very cheap.
Good introductory games:
UT - easiest deathmatch FPS ever. An endless supply of good mods exist, and unlike in HL you can mix and match them.
Nerf ArenaBlast - UT for the kiddies!
Cube - simple, but painfully fast. wouter.fov120.com/cube
Serious Sam - easiest FPS to learn, no getting lost, no thinking - just shooting.
The newer FPS games I've played have all been harder, faster games. UT2k3 lost the whole "Quake for newbs/girls" appeal that the old UT had.
Oh, and BattleZone 1 is the greatest RTS/FPS hybrid ever.
IANAA (I am not an admin) but shouldn't bandwidth capping be handled at the ISP's end, through a transparent proxy? Not through the cable modem? At the very least couldn't they just have the system automagically cut off service when the packets start flowing too fast, rather than getting into the legal minefields? Then they could say "I'm sorry, our system does not support uncapping" when someone tries and finds their machine not getting anything. Seems a more elegant solution than simply hoping nobody will try and then hosing lawyer hours at them when they do.
Oh, the bitter irony - I notice that right wingers tend to be those who tell how they should spend their money, and yet are also the ones who object when governments (through taxation) tell them how to spend their own money.
Okay, first things first - any gamer geek must read Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game. Easily one of the greatest sci-fis ever.
Now, for more info, depends what you're after. Personally, I think Niven's short story anthologies are a great place to start for slightly oddball, thought-provoking hard sci-fi. Be wary of his novels, as he has a tendency to work with a feudalistic lunatic named Jerry Pournelle who's acidic political views have soured many novels (but they've also conglomerated on some freaking spectacular ones too). Good Niven/Pournelle pairings
- Footfall (classic alien invasion epic)
- The Mote in God's Eye and The Gripping Hand (2-part telling of the ultimate alien first-contact story that knocks the socks off of the average Star Trek treatment)
- Lucifer's Hammer (the old "asteroid wipes out civilization" except it follows a cast of characters all the way from first sighting of the comet through to the start of a new civlization).
Brin's Uplift series is spectacular, but start with the second book (Startide Rising). The first book is ignorable.
Read Gibson. The original Cyberpunk is Neuromancer, and its superior but oft-ignored sequel, Count Zero. For more Cyberpunk in a cynical, comic-book style (and very relevant for our consumeristic new millenium) is Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash.
Honestly, if you have to pick 2 books and are looking for a good mix of a wild ride and intelligent story, I'd suggest Snow Crash and Ender's Game. If you want a short novel series, then Brin's Uplift is where its at. If you want good shorts, go for Niven.
All of these books are just old enough to be piling up at your used bookstore, so you can just hop there on the cheap.
On that - does it require any additional hardware or hacking on the Cube? I'm too lazy to RTFA - but if it doesn't, then this thing could be handy - gamecubes are cheap as hell. The old Dreamcast design required the broadband adaptor that costs more than a DC does.
Hah - I call bullshit now. Now for some severe Karma burn.
I've been an armchair Linux fan for a while now - but recently, I've had to experience something outright painful: the Linux desktop machine. Our TA required that we use the math-geek standards of LaTeX and Grace for our reports - and let me tell you, it hurt. Bad. LaTeX was fine - I was a little disappointed that after decades of popularity there was still not even the simplest wysiwyg apps for it, and decent documentation was rare as diamonds, but it was still a very nice system for what it was. The painful truth was this: Excel beats the ever-loving crap out of Kspread.
The problem is interoperability. None of the software works well together - Mozilla and Konq have no idea what software to launch when you download a file. Kspread has no useful bindings to graphing software besides its inadequate internal system. For an OS that is based on using many small apps in the place of a few oversized ones, not nearly enough attention has been paid to interconnectivity - more than just foreign filetype support, but in-app transferral of information. When I click a Grace file on Konq, I expect it to open in Grace, not a text editor. Firebird feels like a dream on Win32, where it feels clunky on windows due to poor haptic feedback to loading and menu navigation. And why do I need to be root to burn a disk? Or to install the simplest apps?
Oh, and all the IM's pale in comparison to Miranda.
Yes, the Linux community has done some spectacular stuff - but it just doesn't hold a candle to what the retail world has done in the same time.
No - the best browser for the MS platform is Arachne... oh, you meant Windows.
Well fuck you too. I meant for playing against my friends, some of who are non gamers. They use my LAN. Oh, but you're an antisocial twat, so you don't know what friends are.
GBA-SP has backlighting.
I'm betting the two screens will be for versatility of controls - the bottom screen will be a touchscreen, allowing for reconfigurable controls. They're probably basing this on the success of the GBA+GC combination games - designers have gotten to like the two screens thing.
Look at it this way - want traditional game? Draw traditional control pad on the touchscreen. Want an RPG? draw a menu on the touchscreen. Want an analogue control for a racing game? Make a bar for an analogue throttle, and leave the rest of the space open for steering. And so on. The display screen remains free for use.
Woulnd't be so good for RTS games though - the RTS games would require that both screens be touched - one for pointer and one for menu. I'm sure the 2-screen approach is so you don't get your grubby fingerprints all over the pretty display screen, only the little control screen. RTS or other pointing-device based games coudl ruin that. Alternately, they could just make a laptop style "pointing pad" for the pointing device on the touchscreen.
Anyhow, I'd put money that this is why there are two screen.
Yes, UT - the first one. It has all the ingredients for non-gamers. The fact is that many non-gamers would be gamers if they had gotten into it early - so don't write of the hardcore genre of FPS. If you have access to a home-LAN, cooperative Assault is awesome for teaching and fun.
Reasons UT is good:
Easy (people move slower than most FPS games, so aiming is not impossible)
Polished & Friendly (heroic-looking characters and techno music, not loud heavy metal and psychopathic characters - good for getting girls into the game).
Multiplayer (that is why you want more players isn't it?)
Simplistic maps (learning to navigate an artificial world takes a lot of learning - I know many newbs get lost so easily even in DOOM).
Cathartic weapons (watch as your players squeal with glee at their first HEAD SHOT).
That, and mods like U4E only extend the longevity of the game.
Well, it could be good - near as I can tell, it with the exception of breaking rank, the rest of it (firing once every 30 seconds and sitting out when you die) describes CounterStrike (another game that compromised on realism just enough to be both convincing and reasonably fun). Hell, half of the CS players love it when it decays into a knife fight anyways. And you can block with a musket, so it might be a little better than "stab, stab, stab" in a bayonette fight. And lets not forget the officers and cavalry with their horses and revolvers and sabres.
Besides, naval combat of the era could be fun too - with cannons and boarding actions and landing and suchlike. Good bloody fun.
Battlefield: 1812 might actually make for a good game. Personally, I wouldn't like it, as I don't like CS, but others do. Depending on what era you set it, you get different options on gameplay - earlier means more focus on horses, swordplay and cannons (cool) - later means more focus on rifle muskets, revolvers, and early machine guns (also cool). And there are no shortages of wars to choose from - Napoleonic, Revolutionary, 1812, French Revolution, etc. A whole era of underrepresented warfare - we basically ignore everything from between the invention of the musket and the invention of the assault rifle.
BTW, WWI is also sorely underrepresented. I'd like a WWI game as you could do the early war where there was more than just 2 factions and finally have something more then axis vs allies.