I still use a program called Cosmigo's Pro Motion today for pixel-accurate art. (Usually, icons on websites.) Pro Motion is basically Deluxe Paint (plus the features of EA's DOS port, Deluxe Paint Animation) for Windows.
At night, my living room looks like it harbors a bunch of green/blue/red one-eyed monsters.
Why the light? Are people so stupid they can't remember that a plugged in electrical appliance which instant-ons at a remote's beckoning still has active power?
Worse are the devices which only show a power light when they are off. (And they cleverly label it the "standby" light.)
Really the purpose of the two libraries are similiar, but go about it in different manners. Allegro intends to be an "all in one" gaming library, while SDL is more concerned with just giving you a framebuffer and ways to manipulate it. So, Allegro deals with sprites and manipulating them, where SDL is more low-level. Allegro also includes a bunch of extra stuff, such as the integrated DAT file format and so on.
Personally, I prefer Allegro, even though I have used SDL too. But maybe that's because I got used to doing it the "Allegro way" back in the days of DOS.:)
OS/platform compatible wise, I think SDL and Allegro are about on par. However, SDL has more market penetration so to say, and might be faster to resolve bugs.
Same thing with the CD version. I was pretty miffed about this too. From what I gathered reading on game sites, the Steam and [DVD|CD]-media installed version was supposed to be the same. I nabbed the CD version because I didn't want to wait ten hours for it to download, and besides in the future I want to have the media in case Steam goes away or whatnot -- I can still play HL2. But I'm saddled with yet another stupid CD to keep track of if I ever want to play the game.
Other than that, I am utterly trilled with the game. I'm not sure why people are seeing stuttering issues. My system is underpowered compared to some of the ones I've seen listed so far. (Athlon 1600+MP, Radeon 9800 Pro, 1G of RAM) Whenever I enter a new area and get the "LOADING..." screen, there is a brief stutter afterwards as it autosaves, but that's been about all the stuttering I've seen.
I did have to disable that Catalyst AI dealie though, to prevent corruption of some of the pixel shaders.
Being the roomie mentioned by the parent poster, I want to clarify -- I think it's a great CONCEPT of a game, but the game itself falls just short of being great. Which is why I played the hell out of it for about a week, and then grew tired of it.
The micromanagement mentioned in the review ended up getting in the way of my enjoyment. Especially later in the game, when super-agents will decimate your evil minions in a heartbeat on the world map. The ability to have your minions auto-hide when agents are present would help address this. While it wouldn't solve the excessive-clicky problem, it would allow me to concentrate on the base itself and not have to watch the world map like a caffeine-hyped hawk.
The tutorial is very expansive, but despite its reams of information and helpful vidoes, it manages to miss a few critical marks. For example, I had minions start to defect left and right. I had to crawl through the encyclopedia-like help interface in order to find the solution. I also wasted $100,000 on a hotel hub that I misplaced and was unable to add wings to. The tutorial isn't clear on how hotel hubs need to be placed in the game; Put it in the wrong spot, and it's useless. Finding that sweet spot amounts to a very expensive trial and error, or lots of save-and-reloading. Worse, you can't destroy hotel buildings and reclaim at least part of the cash...
This game reminds me a lot of Ghost Master. It's an off-the-wall sort of game that is very creative and fun to play, but quickly gets mired by a clumsy interface and execution. I haven't reached the second island yet, but I hear the tedious factor goes up several magitudes as the super-agents will constantly swarm your base.
With that said, I WOULD recommend this game to those who've always dreamed of running their own James Bond-like evil empire. I've put the game aside for now, but I will be returning to it.
Well, as already mentioned, there is that annoying endless klaxon. Plus, think about it. What's more supicious? A giant mountain fortress with a bunch of guards and scientify folks walking around? Or a giant mountain fortress with a bunch of ARMED guards and scientify folks walking around?
Keeping your staff armed at all time results in more suspicion, as tourists stumble around, find your guards and freak out about the weapons. They blab, and before you know it, one of those #%$@ super-agents is walking around on your turf...
It's easy to bash indie game developers because they don't have the latest graphics, or the most extensive content. Yet at the same time, people like to proclaim that they value gameplay over graphics. Well, okay, if that's the case, don't immediately bash new indie games just because they don't support per-pixel realtime radiosity gooberlicious jabberwonky buzztrendword. Lore was made by a dedicated but small team. I think they've done an awesome job with their available resources.
Download Lore. Try it out. You might be surprised to find you really don't care about the "dated" graphics and enjoy playing it.
Sorry if this comes off to strong and upsets you, but being an indie, I am tired of being pigeonholed by people who want to have their cake and eat it too.
Perhaps you are thinking about Frederik Pohl's Homecoming, in which space exploration was halted due to a Reagan-like Star Wars satellite war. There was so much junk left over after the failed war that almost anything that was sent up later would be punctured -- Preventing human manned exploration. Of course, the aliens in the book liked this because it meant we were effectively isolated at the bottom of our gravity well...
Wait, now that I think about it, was that Homegoing or Homecoming? The other was a Heecee novel, IIRC.
Here, here. I feel like a moron for buying this game early. I guess for one brief moment, I insanely trusted a game company to actually release a worthy sequel.
I have hard-freezes on my box, whenever entering the level, using OpenGL or Direct3D. AND I do have a GeForce 2 card.
If Tribes 2: Linux uses even remotely the same code base, I wouldn't dare touch my penguin box with that game.
Oh well. Time to go back to playing Black and White and the original Tribes (HaVoC!)...
Why, in my day, when we wanted to play a game, we only had a joystick with ONE button! And a LOT of imagination! You needed it, to figure out that lumpy block humping across the screen was your hero out to save the galaxy!
Seriously, I wish games would stop trying to pretend they're something they aren't. I think R-Type said it best on its title screen: "BLAST OFF TO DESTROY THE EVIL BYDO EMPIRE!!" Didn't need a 30 minute long cinematic movie to tell me the same thing.
By the way, did you realize that even now, the majority of gay men are in the closet and married to women?
Having lived in the Deep South for most of my life, I can certainly attest to that. Shortly after I began to accept that I was gay (around in my early 20s -- I was a very later comer), I began to seek out the local gay community. Unfortunately, most of it consisted of a bunch of older married men who wanted to boff young guys on the weekends. It was all about sex, and doing 'forbidden things'. I very quickly distanced myself from that crowd, and realized that I was not likely ever going to be happy living in that location -- or ever feel safe. Anyway, the technical jobs (my fortre) sucked.
So, a few years later, I upped and moved to California. So far, I'm loving it out here. Very relaxed atmosphere towards people with alernate lifestyles. Though I still flinch sometimes when my boyfriend (a CA native) hugs me or otherwise touches me in an intimate manner in public -- 20 years of living in denial has given me a pretty strong 'oh shit someone might be watching!' gut reaction.
As the poster pointed out, sometimes it's hard for us gays who don't really 'act' gay in your stereotypical manner. I'm 'out' in regards to if you ask me bluntly, I will say I am gay, but to me sexual orientation is a personal manner. I don't feel I need to prove to anyone that I am gay or straight or bi. So people tend to assume that I am straight and I probably don't take as much effort as I could to correct them of that assumption -- I don't feel the need for it.
Yes, this caused me a lot of pain when I was living in the Deep South, but now I am here in CA it hasn't made much difference to me. My co-workers accept me as I am; If they've figuered out I'm gay, more power to them, if not, then I don't consider it my duty to advertise my sexual orientation.
So yes, maybe 'flamers' have a little easier time of it in regards to being immediately recognized as gay, and avoided, but I also think that some gays tend to over-emphasize their 'gayness' as a sort of 'Look at ME!' gut reaction to society's anti-gay overtones.
Therefore proving that candy-colored computers and Apple itself is Evil.;)
I loved this movie myself. I wasn't aware it was part of a trilogy -- that would explain the somewhat foreshortened ending. However, even if it ends up not being made into a trilogy, I still think it stands up very well on its own.
I think people who went to see it for some sort of 'superhero' story typical of Hollywood was deeply disappointed. My co-workers and I were the first to see it; I was the only one who liked it. The others bitched that there wasn't any action or dynamics to the movie, what they expect from a 'real life' comic book tale. I think I was the only one who got the delicious ending, Elijah in an 'insane asylum.' Come on. How many villians have ended up in there -- and escaped?:)
So I guess the hydrualic robot arm (capable of crushing a human's skull in its vicelike grip) which plugs into the USB port won't be such a hot seller...
And of course, the type of game that I enjoy more than any other, two-dimensional shoot-em-ups, are a very rare thing these days. I have a Genesis and all of the Thunder Force series of games for it, and still play those games.
Thunder Force V, for the Saturn/PSX, while it was a fun game, lacked a lot of the rich visual detail that its 2D cousins had. I've yet to see a polygon-based game that can contain the level of artistic detail in a 2D world -- simply because current levels of polys/s can't equal the detail of a flat bitmapped image. We're getting there, but still not quite close.
Unfortunately, there's a large concentration on the FPS aspect of 3D games. So the type of game that I like is very hard to find, at least in the US, though I understand in Japan (and Europe to some extent) they are still alive and kicking.
I have been saying this for a while: Authur's "Rendevous with Rama" would make a kick-butt Hollywood movie. The book has all the ear-marks for a silver-screen shift. They could go nuts with the special effects, especially if you make it a merge of the first and second novel in that series.
Yeah, stop picking on DOS! I mean, it was pretty good for its time! Sure, there was the whole 12-bit filesystem fiasco and the little mixup over protected mode, but hey... It's been a good operating system!
Now now, don't cry, DOS, nobody really meant what they said...
The same thing happened to me, except it was Wing Commander Academy and Silpheed. Both are games that I paid money for, a long time ago, and both are games that I lost. (WCA, lent to a friend who then moved off, and S to a bad #2 disk.)
I think abandonware is a godsend to people like me, who want to find old copies of games they used to own but either due to bad media or circumstances over the ages, can no longer get. I mean, I can see me asking GameArts for a copy of Silpheed just because I 'had the disks and they went bad a long time ago'.
Hmm, and I'm reminded of sf novels where future descendants of environmentalists complain about how mining the Kupier belt or Jupiter's hydrogen will be violating their worth...
Makes you wonder if there's some n-th dimensional being thinking, "Hmm, nobody's really using those first three dimensions. Maybe a hyperspatial bypass would be a good use...":)
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I still use a program called Cosmigo's Pro Motion today for pixel-accurate art. (Usually, icons on websites.) Pro Motion is basically Deluxe Paint (plus the features of EA's DOS port, Deluxe Paint Animation) for Windows.
Great stuff.
Holy god, yes.
At night, my living room looks like it harbors a bunch of green/blue/red one-eyed monsters.
Why the light? Are people so stupid they can't remember that a plugged in electrical appliance which instant-ons at a remote's beckoning still has active power?
Worse are the devices which only show a power light when they are off. (And they cleverly label it the "standby" light.)
Really the purpose of the two libraries are similiar, but go about it in different manners. Allegro intends to be an "all in one" gaming library, while SDL is more concerned with just giving you a framebuffer and ways to manipulate it. So, Allegro deals with sprites and manipulating them, where SDL is more low-level. Allegro also includes a bunch of extra stuff, such as the integrated DAT file format and so on.
:)
Personally, I prefer Allegro, even though I have used SDL too. But maybe that's because I got used to doing it the "Allegro way" back in the days of DOS.
OS/platform compatible wise, I think SDL and Allegro are about on par. However, SDL has more market penetration so to say, and might be faster to resolve bugs.
Don't worry! There's Blue Meanies From Outer Space for the PC now!
Yeah. So, one weekend I was really bored, wanted to do an oldie game remake and remembered the BMFO game I used to have on cassette...
Same thing with the CD version. I was pretty miffed about this too. From what I gathered reading on game sites, the Steam and [DVD|CD]-media installed version was supposed to be the same. I nabbed the CD version because I didn't want to wait ten hours for it to download, and besides in the future I want to have the media in case Steam goes away or whatnot -- I can still play HL2. But I'm saddled with yet another stupid CD to keep track of if I ever want to play the game.
Other than that, I am utterly trilled with the game. I'm not sure why people are seeing stuttering issues. My system is underpowered compared to some of the ones I've seen listed so far. (Athlon 1600+MP, Radeon 9800 Pro, 1G of RAM) Whenever I enter a new area and get the "LOADING..." screen, there is a brief stutter afterwards as it autosaves, but that's been about all the stuttering I've seen.
I did have to disable that Catalyst AI dealie though, to prevent corruption of some of the pixel shaders.
Being the roomie mentioned by the parent poster, I want to clarify -- I think it's a great CONCEPT of a game, but the game itself falls just short of being great. Which is why I played the hell out of it for about a week, and then grew tired of it.
The micromanagement mentioned in the review ended up getting in the way of my enjoyment. Especially later in the game, when super-agents will decimate your evil minions in a heartbeat on the world map. The ability to have your minions auto-hide when agents are present would help address this. While it wouldn't solve the excessive-clicky problem, it would allow me to concentrate on the base itself and not have to watch the world map like a caffeine-hyped hawk.
The tutorial is very expansive, but despite its reams of information and helpful vidoes, it manages to miss a few critical marks. For example, I had minions start to defect left and right. I had to crawl through the encyclopedia-like help interface in order to find the solution. I also wasted $100,000 on a hotel hub that I misplaced and was unable to add wings to. The tutorial isn't clear on how hotel hubs need to be placed in the game; Put it in the wrong spot, and it's useless. Finding that sweet spot amounts to a very expensive trial and error, or lots of save-and-reloading. Worse, you can't destroy hotel buildings and reclaim at least part of the cash...
This game reminds me a lot of Ghost Master. It's an off-the-wall sort of game that is very creative and fun to play, but quickly gets mired by a clumsy interface and execution. I haven't reached the second island yet, but I hear the tedious factor goes up several magitudes as the super-agents will constantly swarm your base.
With that said, I WOULD recommend this game to those who've always dreamed of running their own James Bond-like evil empire. I've put the game aside for now, but I will be returning to it.
Well, as already mentioned, there is that annoying endless klaxon. Plus, think about it. What's more supicious? A giant mountain fortress with a bunch of guards and scientify folks walking around? Or a giant mountain fortress with a bunch of ARMED guards and scientify folks walking around?
Keeping your staff armed at all time results in more suspicion, as tourists stumble around, find your guards and freak out about the weapons. They blab, and before you know it, one of those #%$@ super-agents is walking around on your turf...
Have you actually played the game?
It's easy to bash indie game developers because they don't have the latest graphics, or the most extensive content. Yet at the same time, people like to proclaim that they value gameplay over graphics. Well, okay, if that's the case, don't immediately bash new indie games just because they don't support per-pixel realtime radiosity gooberlicious jabberwonky buzztrendword. Lore was made by a dedicated but small team. I think they've done an awesome job with their available resources.
Download Lore. Try it out. You might be surprised to find you really don't care about the "dated" graphics and enjoy playing it.
Sorry if this comes off to strong and upsets you, but being an indie, I am tired of being pigeonholed by people who want to have their cake and eat it too.
Perhaps you are thinking about Frederik Pohl's Homecoming, in which space exploration was halted due to a Reagan-like Star Wars satellite war. There was so much junk left over after the failed war that almost anything that was sent up later would be punctured -- Preventing human manned exploration. Of course, the aliens in the book liked this because it meant we were effectively isolated at the bottom of our gravity well...
Wait, now that I think about it, was that Homegoing or Homecoming? The other was a Heecee novel, IIRC.
I actually prefer StatBuilder. It's got a lot more stats!
- signed, a lvl 154 statbuilder character -- you cannot comprehend how high my tree-climbing stat is!
Here, here. I feel like a moron for buying this game early. I guess for one brief moment, I insanely trusted a game company to actually release a worthy sequel. I have hard-freezes on my box, whenever entering the level, using OpenGL or Direct3D. AND I do have a GeForce 2 card. If Tribes 2: Linux uses even remotely the same code base, I wouldn't dare touch my penguin box with that game. Oh well. Time to go back to playing Black and White and the original Tribes (HaVoC!)...
Read the sig.
Why, in my day, when we wanted to play a game, we only had a joystick with ONE button! And a LOT of imagination! You needed it, to figure out that lumpy block humping across the screen was your hero out to save the galaxy!
Seriously, I wish games would stop trying to pretend they're something they aren't. I think R-Type said it best on its title screen: "BLAST OFF TO DESTROY THE EVIL BYDO EMPIRE!!" Didn't need a 30 minute long cinematic movie to tell me the same thing.
Better calm down, or...
WAR WAS BEGINNING !!
Teehee! Sorry, I actually remember that game, so I had to laugh when I saw the references. It's a sort of cult thing now, I guess.
Having lived in the Deep South for most of my life, I can certainly attest to that. Shortly after I began to accept that I was gay (around in my early 20s -- I was a very later comer), I began to seek out the local gay community. Unfortunately, most of it consisted of a bunch of older married men who wanted to boff young guys on the weekends. It was all about sex, and doing 'forbidden things'. I very quickly distanced myself from that crowd, and realized that I was not likely ever going to be happy living in that location -- or ever feel safe. Anyway, the technical jobs (my fortre) sucked.
So, a few years later, I upped and moved to California. So far, I'm loving it out here. Very relaxed atmosphere towards people with alernate lifestyles. Though I still flinch sometimes when my boyfriend (a CA native) hugs me or otherwise touches me in an intimate manner in public -- 20 years of living in denial has given me a pretty strong 'oh shit someone might be watching!' gut reaction.
As the poster pointed out, sometimes it's hard for us gays who don't really 'act' gay in your stereotypical manner. I'm 'out' in regards to if you ask me bluntly, I will say I am gay, but to me sexual orientation is a personal manner. I don't feel I need to prove to anyone that I am gay or straight or bi. So people tend to assume that I am straight and I probably don't take as much effort as I could to correct them of that assumption -- I don't feel the need for it.
Yes, this caused me a lot of pain when I was living in the Deep South, but now I am here in CA it hasn't made much difference to me. My co-workers accept me as I am; If they've figuered out I'm gay, more power to them, if not, then I don't consider it my duty to advertise my sexual orientation.
So yes, maybe 'flamers' have a little easier time of it in regards to being immediately recognized as gay, and avoided, but I also think that some gays tend to over-emphasize their 'gayness' as a sort of 'Look at ME!' gut reaction to society's anti-gay overtones.
I loved this movie myself. I wasn't aware it was part of a trilogy -- that would explain the somewhat foreshortened ending. However, even if it ends up not being made into a trilogy, I still think it stands up very well on its own.
I think people who went to see it for some sort of 'superhero' story typical of Hollywood was deeply disappointed. My co-workers and I were the first to see it; I was the only one who liked it. The others bitched that there wasn't any action or dynamics to the movie, what they expect from a 'real life' comic book tale. I think I was the only one who got the delicious ending, Elijah in an 'insane asylum.' Come on. How many villians have ended up in there -- and escaped? :)
This stuff is worse than what can be found in the Newgrounds portal! Argh! Why was this posted?
So I guess the hydrualic robot arm (capable of crushing a human's skull in its vicelike grip) which plugs into the USB port won't be such a hot seller...
The Machiner's Helpers will arrive shortly.
Afterwards, when you have recovered from your minor but mandatory brain operation, you will come to love and relish the Machine.
End of line.
Thunder Force V, for the Saturn/PSX, while it was a fun game, lacked a lot of the rich visual detail that its 2D cousins had. I've yet to see a polygon-based game that can contain the level of artistic detail in a 2D world -- simply because current levels of polys/s can't equal the detail of a flat bitmapped image. We're getting there, but still not quite close.
Unfortunately, there's a large concentration on the FPS aspect of 3D games. So the type of game that I like is very hard to find, at least in the US, though I understand in Japan (and Europe to some extent) they are still alive and kicking.
For more info, go to The Shmups! Site.
I have been saying this for a while: Authur's "Rendevous with Rama" would make a kick-butt Hollywood movie. The book has all the ear-marks for a silver-screen shift. They could go nuts with the special effects, especially if you make it a merge of the first and second novel in that series.
Now now, don't cry, DOS, nobody really meant what they said...
I think abandonware is a godsend to people like me, who want to find old copies of games they used to own but either due to bad media or circumstances over the ages, can no longer get. I mean, I can see me asking GameArts for a copy of Silpheed just because I 'had the disks and they went bad a long time ago'.
Makes you wonder if there's some n-th dimensional being thinking, "Hmm, nobody's really using those first three dimensions. Maybe a hyperspatial bypass would be a good use..." :)
So when is this expansion back coming out?!??!?! ;-)