I don't remember any technical problems at launch or anything of note during the 6 months I played AC1. The game itself was OK, but it wasn't as good as EQ, imo.
I've installed and tried to play launch day on UO, EQ, Dark Age OC, Asheron's Call1, Anarachy Online, and now Galaxies. Galaxies was the second to worst launch.
I was at work while trying to attach the SWG subscription to my sony station account. It took about 5 hours. I wasn't at it continously. I just kept the browser in the background and gave it shot during compiles or other downtime. A couple workmates and I then gave it a quick runthrough. Created a character, went through the tutorial, and then did a short delivery quest. Ignoring the registration problems, I was impressed and thought it was going to be a great night when I got home.
Well, they pulled the servers down by time I ate dinner, yakked with the wife, and got everything setup. I was disappointed, but to their credit, they at least pulled the servers down instead of letting everyone suffer through them crashing every few minutes. If I recall correctly, that was exactly my experience with Anarchy Online.
I'm still looking forward to playing... sometime. In the little bit I've seen of the game (I haven't been following it on the web) it seems to be a clone of Anarchy Online with licenced content... that's not a bad thing.
So, it wasn't a horrible experience, but I'd be pretty embrassed if any of these troubles fell under my responsibility at SOE.
I kinda hope one of these guys will succeed, but on the other hand, I'd like to see this sort of thing evolve on it's own.
5 years or so I remember there were a ton of these little virtual community type ventures using VRML.. nothing much really happened with them. Lately it seems that they're starting to crop up again. There.com, this thing, and there have a been a few others I've heard about.. activeworlds or something.
I don't think the open ended virtual community stuff (as opposed to something with a "purpose" like Everquest) is going to really take off until we can really "jack-in"
The idea has merit, and it WILL succeed one day, but I hope this isn't wholly sponsored by some commercial entity, but ends up being more like a 3d web (like vrml was supposed to do, right?).
A friend picked this up, started it and decided it sucked and gave it to me. Technically it seems to be about the quality of a homebrew mod or total conversion for the old Unreal engine. Collisions with the environment are weak... example being, some parked cars you can walk pretty far into and others the collision region is outside the object.. there is a bunch of stuff like this.
Once you past the engine stuff, I thought the story was OK. For me, it got insanely hard after the 2nd day and I had to cheat to get through it.. but the game was interesting enough for me to keep playing and eventually finish. For the most part, the humor was junivile and cliche, but there were a number of times I busted out laughing... waking up as the Gimp from Pulp Fiction was great.
Now, I wouldn't pay full price for this game, but when it hits the bargain bins it might be worth picking up or borrowing from someone else. It has 0 replay value though.
I don't know if it's true for all the sports franchises, but I think the naming has to do with what season the rosters in the game represent.
So, MLB 2004 has what is supposed to be the 2004 season rosters... for college basketball where the season wraps the new year, the season is referred to as the ending year.
It doesn't have anything to do with the year the game was released or developed in other than that's usually right before a season starts.
This has always been my assumption and maybe I'm the one that's wrong, but I really don't think the author of the article buys sports games and I don't see some conspiracy to dupe consumers into buying last year's titles.
why oh why did I click on that tubgirl link... I should have known it would be bad since it was associated with the goatse link. I now have another horrid image burned into my memory... forever.
The 80s would be the Ultima series, with 5 being my favorite.
The 90s, Civilization. That was the 90s right? or late 80s.
Today there's a lot to choose from, but I pick Everquest. Yea, muds have been around for a long time and EQ wasn't the first big commercial venture... but I think they're still the best.
Looking forward to Star Wars Galaxies and Everquest2.
My first real "coding" experience was on a trs80 color computer. It's amazing I ever ended up programmer.
In '81, I was 11 and my best's friend dad had just gotten him a trs80 color computer. He and I spent an entire saturday typing in wumpus out of a creative computing magazine. Those flat keys had to have made the keyboard the most ergonomically incorrect keyboard ever. We traded off pecking letters every hour or so.
In the end, wumpus didn't work and we couldn't figure out were the problem was. The few hundred lines of basic were just gibberish to us then. He also didn't have an external storage device yet.
I remember Merchant Prince was the game where they had the "delayed" copy protection. You could invest a good couple of days playing and then it would turn you into a "pirate" if it was determined that you were playing a bootlegged copy. That pretty much ended your game as you couldn't trade anymore.
One of my all time favorites. I've always been an rpg nut and at the time this came out, it was a nice change from the fantasy stuff. Wasteland and Mars Saga(apple2) rank pretty high up on my favorites list too.
I hate it when they do this, but NASA is announcing some new discovery on mars dec.7
I wish they'd just spit out the info now.
http://www.cnn.com/2000/TECH/space/12/01/mars.surp rise/
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I don't remember any technical problems at launch or anything of note during the 6 months I played AC1. The game itself was OK, but it wasn't as good as EQ, imo.
I've installed and tried to play launch day on UO, EQ, Dark Age OC, Asheron's Call1, Anarachy Online, and now Galaxies. Galaxies was the second to worst launch.
I was at work while trying to attach the SWG subscription to my sony station account. It took about 5 hours. I wasn't at it continously. I just kept the browser in the background and gave it shot during compiles or other downtime. A couple workmates and I then gave it a quick runthrough. Created a character, went through the tutorial, and then did a short delivery quest. Ignoring the registration problems, I was impressed and thought it was going to be a great night when I got home.
Well, they pulled the servers down by time I ate dinner, yakked with the wife, and got everything setup. I was disappointed, but to their credit, they at least pulled the servers down instead of letting everyone suffer through them crashing every few minutes. If I recall correctly, that was exactly my experience with Anarchy Online.
I'm still looking forward to playing
So, it wasn't a horrible experience, but I'd be pretty embrassed if any of these troubles fell under my responsibility at SOE.
I kinda hope one of these guys will succeed, but on the other hand, I'd like to see this sort of thing evolve on it's own.
5 years or so I remember there were a ton of these little virtual community type ventures using VRML.. nothing much really happened with them. Lately it seems that they're starting to crop up again. There.com, this thing, and there have a been a few others I've heard about.. activeworlds or something.
I don't think the open ended virtual community stuff (as opposed to something with a "purpose" like Everquest) is going to really take off until we can really "jack-in"
The idea has merit, and it WILL succeed one day, but I hope this isn't wholly sponsored by some commercial entity, but ends up being more like a 3d web (like vrml was supposed to do, right?).
A friend picked this up, started it and decided it sucked and gave it to me. Technically it seems to be about the quality of a homebrew mod or total conversion for the old Unreal engine. Collisions with the environment are weak... example being, some parked cars you can walk pretty far into and others the collision region is outside the object.. there is a bunch of stuff like this.
Once you past the engine stuff, I thought the story was OK. For me, it got insanely hard after the 2nd day and I had to cheat to get through it.. but the game was interesting enough for me to keep playing and eventually finish. For the most part, the humor was junivile and cliche, but there were a number of times I busted out laughing... waking up as the Gimp from Pulp Fiction was great.
Now, I wouldn't pay full price for this game, but when it hits the bargain bins it might be worth picking up or borrowing from someone else. It has 0 replay value though.
I don't know if it's true for all the sports franchises, but I think the naming has to do with what season the rosters in the game represent.
So, MLB 2004 has what is supposed to be the 2004 season rosters... for college basketball where the season wraps the new year, the season is referred to as the ending year.
It doesn't have anything to do with the year the game was released or developed in other than that's usually right before a season starts.
This has always been my assumption and maybe I'm the one that's wrong, but I really don't think the author of the article buys sports games and I don't see some conspiracy to dupe consumers into buying last year's titles.
Oh Gawd,
why oh why did I click on that tubgirl link... I should have known it would be bad since it was associated with the goatse link. I now have another horrid image burned into my memory... forever.
Remember the game "Creatures" from a few years ago? They had kinda their own DNA and would take on traits from their parents.
The 80s would be the Ultima series, with 5 being my favorite.
The 90s, Civilization. That was the 90s right? or late 80s.
Today there's a lot to choose from, but I pick Everquest. Yea, muds have been around for a long time and EQ wasn't the first big commercial venture... but I think they're still the best.
Looking forward to Star Wars Galaxies and Everquest2.
My first real "coding" experience was on a trs80 color computer. It's amazing I ever ended up programmer. In '81, I was 11 and my best's friend dad had just gotten him a trs80 color computer. He and I spent an entire saturday typing in wumpus out of a creative computing magazine. Those flat keys had to have made the keyboard the most ergonomically incorrect keyboard ever. We traded off pecking letters every hour or so. In the end, wumpus didn't work and we couldn't figure out were the problem was. The few hundred lines of basic were just gibberish to us then. He also didn't have an external storage device yet.
I remember Merchant Prince was the game where they had the "delayed" copy protection. You could invest a good couple of days playing and then it would turn you into a "pirate" if it was determined that you were playing a bootlegged copy. That pretty much ended your game as you couldn't trade anymore.
One of my all time favorites. I've always been an rpg nut and at the time this came out, it was a nice change from the fantasy stuff. Wasteland and Mars Saga(apple2) rank pretty high up on my favorites list too.
article here
I hate it when they do this, but NASA is announcing some new discovery on mars dec.7 I wish they'd just spit out the info now. http://www.cnn.com/2000/TECH/space/12/01/mars.surp rise/