Of course, the genre hasn't had a timeless classic in a while. This year's Warlords Battlecry III will show up on All Time Best lists, but it's really just a very polished version of 2002's Warlords Battlecry II that already had a safe place on those lists.
Actually, it isn't as polished as most people would like it to be. There are some game balance issues and miscallenous bugs. (For example, the bottom panel's decoration covers part of the minimap in the top-right corner.) However, it is definatly considered very playable and better than most strategy games available.
1997's Total Annihilation is still the best RTS game of all time.
I would disagree there. While it may be an excellent game when playing on the Internet, the single player aspect isn't as strong as it could be. Major problems would be the fact that the default AI player does not build superweapons (Nuclear weapons, Krogoths, etc) without using a 3rd-party modification.
In fact, I'd say that there are very few strategy games which seem that good. In most strategy games, the AI player tends to fall to some common tactics: Massed frontal assault, Long range bombardment, or early rush. In either of these cases, the AI cannot counter since it wasn't designed for either of these two things in mind. (Note: Not even Starcraft could deal with an early rush - it's Zerg AI always falls victem to a 12 Zealot rush from a Protoss AI.)
1994's Civilization II 0wnZ.
Mabye... I've been in situations where an AI player was exploiting a flaw with the game, where it could break cease fire without penalty (and since I was playing as a Republic to maximize trade, the AI player generally forces such treaties fairly quickly.)
(I haven't tried Galactic Civilizations and Dominions II, but they are very highly thought of on Usenet.)
Galactic Civilizations was considered to be one of the best modern strategy games - at the initial release, the AI player was well defined enough to use the optimal path for gaining resources. In fact, a patch was released in order to cripple the AI player even further on the easy difficulty levels since it was a bit too difficult. Later, there was another patch released to help the AI players counter the Transport rush which was discovered soon after.
Stardock seems to be in contact with the community enough to help dispel the claims of a cheating AI. Out of all the complaints, there were very few that were actually credible - these credible complaints gathered actual information on how the AI cheated, such as an AI selecting a technology for research without the necessairy prerequisites. Once the proof was presented, Stardock proceeded to fix the problem when they could.
The fact that the game always forces the enemy side to be terrorists should be enough reason to ban this game.
Why should that be a problem?
The game only states that you are up against generic terrorists. There is no indication that these terrorists belong to any specific country or religion, aside from the fact that they use easily reproducable Russian weaponry (such as an AK-47, SVD Dragunov, and so on.) These terrorists wear what appears to be civilian clothing rather than any turban, scarf or whatever identifies them to be a stereotypical terrorist that appears 24/7 in the mainstream media.
Also, you should know that the term terrorist only appears in the map descriptions - as in they describe what happened. Whether or not they are terrorists is really another storyIn other cases, the term used is "OPFOR", which simply means Opposing Force. This could either be terrorists, or hired para-military mercenaries hired to defend Freedonia's military supply depot.
A Cobra maneuver is only impressive in an airshow. In a true combat situation it's beyond useless. While it looks extremely cool, it basically leaves you all but stationary. This is an rediculously vulnerable position to be in for a dogfight.
It is not completely useless. It can be used when an enemyaircraft is tailing you closely. When you activate it, the enemy plane will no longer be able to keep you in its sights and will fly past you - at which point, you have the enemy in your sights.
It is a special maneuver that is designed for this purpose only. Experienced pilots will know how to deal with it, but fresh recruits can be nailed by such a maneuver. There were even rumours that an experienced combat pilor was caught by suprise with the Cobra when it was used for the first time.
As my USAF father kept telling me, "Airspeed is life".
Speed as well as velocity can be measured in one of two ways:
1. By how much "ground distance" is travelled (absolute speed) 2. By how much distance changed from a moving point, such as yourself (relative speed.)
In the case of tailing an aircraft, the relative speed is effectivly zero. As soon as Cobra gets engaged, the relative speed increases as the target slows down (but decrases for anti-air batteries or aircraft on anther approach vector.)
I've played Daikatana in Co-op mode. Even if it isn't a complete stinker, it is quite close to one.
First off, you need to download and install a 1.2 patch. At the time, the 40MB download prevented many people from retrieveing it - there was not yet software commonly available that allowed resuming downloads, meaning that you had to have a connection running overnight to finish the download - and remember that we haven't exactly reached 56Kbps at this stage. Once you get past the downloading hurdle (or ignore it when you use modern broadband access), you have to wait at least 20 minutes for the patch to complete - sometimes even longer (the patch installer completely rewrites an entire file rather than creating a new one based on some of the contents of the larget one.)
Eventually, my friend created a manual installer of Daikatana - the contents of Daikatana version 1.2 dumped onto the CD. That allowed playing the game.
Now, onto the game itself. Normally, I don't notice the quality of graphics, but this was one of the few games where I got distracted by it. There was a bug in the graphics that gradually corrupted the wall textures within the game - whether it's the game itself or the video card drivers is yet to be determined, but I do suspect that it's the game (especially since its the "odd-man out".)
During the coop campaign, I was left wondering why I am going from one place to another. After killing Medusa, I suddenly enter a place filled with Zombies. After killing the boss within that snow area (whatever he was - can't remember offhand), I'm suddenly in Alcatraz for some reason. While there are cutscenes, they don't get shown in Co-op, and thus the setting distracts from the game itself.
The external animation for players using the Daikatana looks a bit strange as well.
It was a mediocre game, which was rightly ridiculed because of the hype it had built up and the hype surrounding its release. It wasn't dismal, though.
The rule is: Don't hype games unless you are damn sure they will succeed. It's a good short-term tactic, but customers will feel burned by the poor product, and might not return to the next releases by the company (e.g. Deus Ex took a while to catch on becuase people thought it would be just as bad.)
Think about the players that couldn't download the 1.1 or 1.2 patch - for them, the game is dismal since they can't get past the game stopping bugs. The only way to prevent this from happening is to ensure that the product is properly tested. (I've finished some games within 15 hours of play - testing shouldn't take much longer either.)
If I recall correctly, Rainbow Six (which is a counter-terrorism tactical FPS), involved "domestic terrorists" (wacko environmentalists). Was a pretty fun game. Killed hundreds of hours of free time.
That only appears to be the case at the beginning.
SPOILER:Later on in the game, you learn that these terrorists aren't simple domestic players, but are funded by a corporation. The head of the corporation, along with a few other people, plan to create a world-wide epidemic of Ebola Brahama by spraying the virus at the closing Olympic ceremonies at Sydney. The leaders of the plot planned to hold up in a biological bomb shelter in Brazil.
The expansion pack, Eagle Watch, is simple domestic terrorism, with militant terrorists, Sikh terrorists, NOMAR terrorists, Kang revolutionaries, and the Red Sun Brigade.
Rogue Spear, the first sequel, involves an experienced international terrorist wing doing something with a stolen nuclear device, and Black Thorn has some sort of copycat character. Don't have the details in these two games.
Raven Shield, the third installment, involves political terrorists (linked to WWII) who have plans to disrupt festivities in Brazil in order to cause panic with oil stocks. At which point, inheritance from the mastermind will be used to purchase those oil rigs in order to help fund additional terrorism. Sequels Athena's Sword and Black Arrow probably will expand on this.
Of course, halfway through you see the light and join the terrorists. Again, though, I'd like to have had the choice to be the bad guy, to stay with UNATCO - eliminate my treasonous brother, hunt down his terrorist backers and maybe just get something going with the hot cyborg girl...
IIRC, there's a mod known as "UNATCO Reborn" that attempts to fill in this plotline. I haven't played it, and thus cannot make statements on its quality.
I think the entire country of South Korea would disagree with you there. Probably the entire Asain continent. Heck, to throw the racial jokes aside, just about every gamer on the face of the planet would disagree.
I would have said excellent multiplayer if it weren't for the fact that it is being compared to more advanced interfaces more suited for RTS games. My main gripe about Starcraft (which is not easily fixable) involve unit commanding - the fact that you can only select 12 units distracts the player from the fact that the easiest and most common tactic is massed assault.
In my opinion, Starcraft is still hanging around mainly because it is one of the two games that did not have a suitable replacement - most other games either have a different ruleset (e.g. Warcraft 3) or still make mistakes that were present in earlier games (e.g. standing still after a designated target is destroyed.)
It's one of the best balanced RTS *ever*.
The latest balance changes were in 1.08, meaning that it took a long time for game balance to reach an optimal state.
For players that know how the game works perfectly, it can be considered to be balanced. However, veterens that haven't learned how to harden their procedure in the deployment phase will have problems within the first few minutes where the opponents attack. That's why you see restrictions such as "nr10", or "no protoss".
RTS games of this type are only fun if it is possible to block an early rush. While I do know that it is possible to counter, I know people who are not capable of doing so. I also seen computer AI players get nailed by the same early rushes as well, where a Protoss AI sends 12 Zealots against a Zerg AI, before the defences are fully constructed.
I say that any game worth its salt will be equally good with any theme. For example, if you took super mario brothers and made mario a stick figure and replaced goomba's with circles, koopas with triangles, bricks with hashed squares, etc. The game would be equally as good gamewise. You wouldn't want to play that game, but the point is that you can imagine the game not losing anything from a lack of theme. The mechanic remains intact.
I'd agree, but the storyline of the game is considered an essential component - it provides a fairly tangiable goal for the player that is much more obvious than the simple "reach the other side of the map." The story/theme also helps to ease the memorization of game mechanics for the more "complex" games.
Tetris is easy to memorize - thus it doesn't need too much of a story. However, games like Warcraft III are a bit too complex to dump the player in directly and therefore require introducing characters/units one at a time in an appropriate manner.
Oh, one last thing. This system of game rating will find you raw game quality. I will now use one of my favoriate analogies. Citizen kane is the "best" movie ever. You may hate it. You may think its boring and stupid. But film-wise it is unbeatable. Zelda 1 is the same way. It is the Citizen Kane of video games. You may hate it, but that's how it is. Which games are most fun is completely independent of this. You may love to watch the Matrix #1 over and over, but film-wise it isn't great. Just as you may love to play Starcraft, it still isn't the objective best game.
Actually I'm starting to think that maybe Tetris is the citizen kane of video games.
Another factor that has to be considred with game mechanics is that singleplayer and multiplayer don't use the same processes - what could work for one doesn't always work for the other. This applies to even the most common games - for example, Starcraft has average mutliplayer (the interface isn't optimally designed), while has a great singleplayer component due to its relativly strong AI for its time without being too unfair.
On the other hand, there are various online-only games that are only good for multiplayer and are fairly boring when played alone. The most notable example would be Purge - this game doesn't have AI player support, meaning that you have to rely on the fact that there are still other players playing the game.
Hmmm, HIV is not transmitted by eating and doesn't survive long outside human body.
Most people don't know that.
The threat doesn't have to be 100% realistic - it just has to contain a minimum amount of buzzwords in order to incite fear in the subject, as most people do not think rationally when confronted with such a demand.
But what if they start using someone elses login, or they start sharing login information? Try detecting that easily.
That's the problem with the person "owning" the account. Like most other user accounts, the responsibility lies to exactly one person even if the password if given to other users.
If you don't fully trust the person, don't give out your username/password. Even better, get it changed immediatly after you get it unbanned.
Nice simple question. Who provides the network? If it is the college, then they have a right, and perhapse a duty to protect their infrustructure. If you disagree with their monitoring policy, don't jack in. As long as the college makes you aware of what they choose to monitor using their equipment, I cannot see a problem.
The college owns the network, not the invididual computers that get plugged into them.
The correct method of defending against those forms of viruses is to write a policy that the students sign where they state that they know that they must ensure that Windows and anti-virus software remains updated. If they fail to abide by the policy, terminate their net access.
More often than not, such outbreaks are caused by used incompetence (i.e. using insecure software, or not installing the essential software to begin with.) I'm getting along just fine without a Virus scanner, and I haven't yet received any complaints about distributing viruses - even with.EXE files that I send to friends (legitimatly, since I own the copyright to those files).
(Although I should get one, I need to find one I'm strongly comfortable with. My previous experience with such virus scanners involved 20-seconds of wait when an application tried to download an additional chunk of a file, causing the internet connection to fail. Modern anti-virus scanners finally fixed the problem, but they currently do more than just scanning for viruses - and I don't really like that.)
This might be seen as a troll, but if someone lets a virus loose on the network I look after, I do not care who they are, I will do my utmost to look after the "common good".
The common good is best served by unplugging the offender for 1 week minimum, at which point you have a second signed copy of the policy in addition to the offender being warned about his actions. Once the offence happens again, disconnect the computer on a more permanent basis.
The only time that installing such software on the computers in question occurrs only if the college has ownership over them (as stated by other posters.) Until then, the college will have to find another way to deal with the problem.
You may find giving commands to individual units tedious,
Giving commands to individual units is not tedious - it's micromanaging, but not tedious. While there may be tedium from micromanagement, there is no causation between the two inspite of the strong correlation.
More often than not, the tedium from RTS games comes from flaws with how units act or behave when given orders. You know the very classic example - you order a unit to attack a target, and when it's destroyed, it stops in its tracks. The unit stops regardless of his or her position on the battlefiels, resulting in you having to reissue a move or attack order to advance further. (In the case of the move command, such units are vulnerable as they don't engage. In case of attack, some games treat clicking a point on the map to be force fire and therefore are vulnerable when they are just attacking one point.) This example is present in every single game other than ones based on the later C&C engines (Tiberiun Sun or later.)
A second classic example of micormanagement resulting in tedium would be focused fire. When you order a group of units to attack a target, they all fire their cannon at the one unit - they all hit, but 35 or so of those attacks would have been better spent damaging the other units rather than inflicting damage on an already destroyed unit. (Present in every RTS that I know of.)
Another example would be requiring to select exactly one unit to perform a special ability or "spell". Some games have made changes to counter this in one way or another - as a result, the game is slightly better in allowing players to use an attack that must be used very quickly.
Poor pathfinding is the most extreme example of tedium. The most obvious example would be Dominant Species, where units appear to want to run through buildings and other units to reach their destination (and therefore, requires you to slow the game down to manually navigate your units to attack from more than one side.)
Do you have trouble isolating one particular unit, and trying to move the camera to your base so that you can order him to a repar pad? Star Trek: Armada fixed this by implementing a repair command. Star Trek: Armada II improved on this by implementing Priority Repair where the unit ignores all other commands until it is fully repaired. (This feature is rare - I've seen it in only one other game, and even then it wasn't optimal.)
More often than not, the tedium in micromanagement is caused by a bad or obsolete game design. If you fix those problems, the tedium goes away. However, doing so will make the older RTS games harder to play, since they will lack an important feature that allows you to cleanly manage your units without having to do fancy camera work.
Some people enjoy having web pages download fully in 2 seconds rather than waiting 15 seconds for it to load.
Last time I checked, pages that take more than 15 seconds to load into a usable state on a dial-up connection will still take more than 15 seconds to load on broadband. This is primairly due to the annoying flash animations that almost always pop something up slowly when you move your mouse over the control, in addition to slowly removing the menu when you accidently move the mouse off the target area.
In fact, I tend to queue up mutliple multiple loading operations, and start reading the ones that have already loaded. Not only does it save time, but it helps me work on multiple things at once much more easily.
Unlimited NationalAccess/BroadbandAccess cannot be used (1) for uploading, downloading or streaming of movies, music or games, (2) with server devices or with host computer applications, including, without limitation, Web camera posts or broadcasts, automatic data feeds, telemetry applications, automated functions or any other machine-to-machine applications, (3) as a substitute or backup for private lines or dedicated data connections....
But essentially they don't want you using your connection to run a server, or to otherwise transfer anything that might end up hogging excessively high bandwidth compared with their regular customers. It doesn't rule out using the connection for general web browsing and email, which is probably all that 95% of their target market want anyway. In fact, the earlier parts of the terms of service (not quoted here) specifically state that those tasks are what it's intended for.
Not by how I read it. Item 2 results in the context stating "Unlimited NationalAccess/BroadbandAccess cannot be used with... any other machine-to-machine appliations." Last time I checked, the entire internet is build around machine-to-machine applications, where a web browser connects to a web server, where an FTP client connects to an FTP server, where a telnet client connects to a telnet server, and so on.
Even if the letter of the contract does not use this as it's officially sanctioned meaning, it does imply that the internet cannot be used using this service, and therefore appears to have customers pay $70 a month for absolutly no service. While the spirit of the contract may be only designed to cut out servers, it only takes one disgruntled employee or lawyer to "misinterpret" the spirit and disconnect every person under a fully legitimate reason (and receive a big black mark on their record.)
It's more like a contract that was written by a lawyer who does not have a sufficient understanding of the computer field. That's just as bad as having a computer expert writing a document that should have been written by a lawyer (or paralegal).
And then there was also the fact that Doom's enemies were actually able to navigate around corners, while Quake's monsters would just keep walking directly toward you, regardless of what was in the way.
From my experience with Quake and Doom, I noticed no difference between the AIs at that stage. The only thing that the Quake AI doesn't do is to spin in a random direction when it get snagged - it instead follows the wall that it suspects would minimize the distance between it and you. The removal of this isn't exactly a bad thing, as it doesn't truly help naviation around corners.
I tested the Quake's AI in E1M1, where a dog on the left hand side of the bridge ran across to attack. The grunt stayed there for a while, but could navigate around the bridge corner with "coaxing" by standing on the right-hand side of the bridge rather than the left.
Doom also exhibits this behaviour in E2M9 - the cyberdemon occassionally gets snagged in the small rooms containing rockets and other supplies. It also gets snagged in the corners, and has trouble nagivating around the structure.
Quake 1 really had some of the worst AI ever. Good thing they fixed that for Quake 2 (the best game in the series, imho.)
The problems with the Quake 1 AIs were not fixed - it was still possible for them to get snagged on corners in Quake 2. IIRC, the first game to be released where enemies could navigate around the map would be Unreal - they understood lifts, corners, doors, and many other environmental stuff by using a waypoint system from within the map. They could still be fooled or evaded, but not as easily as most other games.
What's with all the hating on Quake? I view it as *far* more atmospheric than Doom ever was.
Mabye, but when I play games, I tend to look for gameplay more than eye candy. As a result, I hate games that tend to be dead simple on the hardest difficulty, as well as games that are impossible on easy. With Quake, the third dimention was a bonus - however, the monsters effectivly has the same AI as Doom - move towards player, but walk alonside a "wall" if you bump into one (where a wall indicates a high vertical slope up or down.)
The first time around, it felt like they cut out the use command - didn't affect me to a degree, but I had a feeling that certain situations could arise where you accidently touch a button of certain death.
After beating it on Hard, I tried nightmare mode - that difficulty option was hidden from view mainly because it is considered too hard for most players. However, there was really not much difference from Hard - the only changes would be the monsters firing or re-firing more frequenrly and the Shambler inflicting 10 more points of damage per shock. This is not much of a difference, since you can still dodge most attacks (they either don't have lead-ahead, or have predictable lead-ahead.)
Mutliplayer was acceptable, provided that you knew that you should switch to W-A-S-D and to type "+mlook" in the console. Otherwise, you'll encounter situations where you will get creamed by other players even before you should even know that mouse looking is even possible.
Only ways I could see how this could be combated _really_ are that the server shouldn't be sending the coordinates of all the players to the client, just the one's the particular client sees(heavy, unless there's so many players this needs to be done for preservign bandwith anyways)
Actually, that's not too much of a CPU load. HL usually only sends player coordinates if there is a chance a player is going to be spotted.
A mod known as HLGuard fixes a this problem by cutting down significantly on how players get displayed. The players are still shown when they are around corners, but it does cut down on cheating. (It also does heuristic aimbot detection - it works best if 4 warnings or so are detected within 10 minutes. )
Suing them and somehow magically hoping that the problem goes away is just plain idiotic though, especially when they have bigger problems to fix like the problem of buying a brand new copy of half-life only to notice that the key is already taken and in play(needing you to send it).
This is actually relativly minor in the current stage - you can still play on Won for a bit, use the single player campaign, or download bots to practice with while you are sending in the CD-key. After the 2-4 weeks have finished turning around, you should have a general feeling on how the maps work for multiplayer. (Bots aren't the best opponents, especially in games like Counter-Strike, but they are good enough for newcomers.)
I have the right to (up to the noise laws limit) stand at the border of your property and scream at your home, install video cameras pointing at you and take your picture.
No you don't. Criminal Harassment is not considered speech, but is instend considered an attempt to prevent an individual from public participation. If it were considered speech, such acts would be guarenteed to be legal by now - you can ask a lawyer on why it is not the case.
Most properly written criminal codes include harassment as a criminal activity. At the very least, you should be familiar with what is and what is not permitted under the Criminal Code - ignorance is no excuse for breaking the law.
The only applications I encounter that "require" admin are primarily developer tools.
Many games, including those released by Microsoft, require Administrator privilages to install. This is inspite of the fact that the Windows Installer is supposed to have elevated system privilages, and inspite of the fact that the application's installer does not need to write to the areas of the hard drive that require such access, and inspite of the fact that the user has "FULL CONTROL" over all areas of "C:\" other than the Windows system directory, as well as FULL CONTROL over the HKLM registry tree.
The only reason Administrator privilages should be requires is if you are installing a new system service or driver, such as DirectX (not a "service" according to windows, but close enough). Even so, there should be either a prompt stating that it won't work without Administrator privilages, or fail at the moment the service/driver installation is attempted.
Such hard-coded checkes in the executable are generally too rigid to be considered accurrate, and contains limited information on how to correct this aside from doing a permanent boost to Administrator. At the very least, it should explain why Administrator privilages is required. (e.g. Shockwave's Collapse II states that administrator privilages are required for the first run in order to set up DRM licenses, but can run on any account after the licenses are set up. In addition, it doesn't do the rigid check, as I've successfully run it first time around from a user account.)
These applications aren't designed with Win98 in mind - they were developed with knowledge that the WinNT/2000/XP security system exists, and is a simple (and stupid) lockout of the requirements aren't met. It's also the reason why the Microsoft Compatability Tooklit includes the shim "ForceAdminAccess" to tell the installers/applications that permissions exist when they really don't.
(Even then, Microsoft Compatability Toolkit required Admin access in order to use that shim. Go figure.)
Although beyond overstating the need, you are also overstating the risk. Being logged on as local admin to a desktop really isn't that big of a security risk. You risk destroying your desktop install, but that's it, the impact is contained.
Actually, the risk is much greater than a simple desktop install being trashed. A significnat number of computers are home-installations, where personal data is kept all in one place, including personal programming projects that took months to develop.
In fact, I have seen some such projects terminate permanently because of a hard-drive crash. The end result was an applicaiton in development intended to be released as open source resulted in the final release being binary only for one platform. While fixable with backups, most personal users don't do them because of the time involved.
Yes we should. I'm sick and tired of companies that decide to push their products out the door early and force us all to be beta testers.
You know, you can always create your own game company, write your own product, test to ensure that there are absolutly zero bugs in the game, and then ship it. Imagine all the sales you could get based on the fact that you have absolutly no bugs in the game.
Take the proper time to test your products before you release them.
You can test as long as you want to - however, something like this won't get fixed unless:
It is within the test plan.
There is a tangible difference caused by the bug.
The tangible difference can be measured in a way that indicates that the difficulty level has been reset.
The enemies are rigidly designed so that the tangible difference can be isolated without having random attributes affecting the measurements.
And finally, that there is a suspicion that the difficulty level could change when writing the test plan. Most test cases don't include this, but rather simply check that the game is usable immediatly after a saved game.
It's difficult to predict which bugs can potentialy occurr in a game, let alone find all of them. The amount of time required to guarentee that there is absolutly no bugs would be astronomical - there needs to be a comprimise somewhere in order for games to be released.
(in fact your charecter would loose against individual opponents quite easily),
Actually, combat is quite easy to perform in Thief when you know what you're doing. Against the inexperienced guards, you can easily cut them down with a few sword hits.
The only problem would be with Wraiths and other enemies with an ability to perform rapid attacks - those opponents can hit you twice in succession before yuou can even land your first blow. However, I did finally manage to take out those opponents by exploiting a weakness in the AI (they can't attack unless they're in melee range.)
They are very good games, and thief three represents what could possibly represent a resurection of the 'thief type' engine, allowing for more 'thinking FPS' games.
Thief 1 and 2 were good when they were released - even though I recall quickly discovering that blackjacking every single enemy on the level makes thngs very easy. I wouldn't recommend them in this day for a good experience, but they do represent the better games that were released in the past - a good nostalgic experience.
It would be interesting to see what happened if moderation was available for the moderations (the current "meta-moderation" is too simple for this, it's just approve/ignore/disapprove and I'd like to see how many rated this moderation "Insightful", how may rated it "Funny" and how many rated it "Troll".
When I look at the message, I simply see it as either Flamebait/Troll where the moderator simply selected the wrong option, or as a posting that add absolutly no new content other than the ones already posted by the initial reply.
MOO 3 is the bane of all things good. Any game where you can click NEXT 127 times in a row and win has some serious issues.
I'm not sure how your game was set up, but I've been in cases where I would lose if I only did that.
In particular, a bug with the game causes the election of a new orion president to be an instant defeat for all players, even those outside of the senate. This is a problem if you are playing with the Ikthul (Harvesters), as you must rely on either brute force, or acquisition of the five X-es - diplomacy is an impossible victory condition, unless there are other human players.
What finally did it in was one of the authors wrote a bit on their user forum on "how to enjoy this game". If I need instructions on how to enjoy a game, it's not worth it.
You need instructions to enjoy any game - they are called tutorials. Otherwise, you'll become frustrated with other games such as UT2004 because your teammates won't heal the power core.
The case with MOO3 was that the intructions were there with the game, but described everything at once rather than one thing at a time. This will turn off most players because of a steep initial learning curve. While those who have played the game know how to use development plans to encourage the AI to build specific improvements first, this is generally considered one of the more advanced topics of the game and therefore avoided by most players until they know the ropes even more.
I'd say that that forum posting is one of the best forms of documentation that I've bookmarked when I want to go back to that game later on. From what I could tell, it was organized into sections and described only the very critical stuff that you need to worry about. (Either that, or I bookmared a page on how to maximize production from my empire - doesn't matter since it is a high-quality reference.)
I don't know if this fits the bill but Master of Orion 3 has TONS of micromanagement you can do.
This is true, and I would agree fully with you.
However, there's a major implementation problem with Master of Orion 3. While allowing you to manage your empire completely is find, the interface was not designed for that in mind. As a result, I find myself checking every individual build queue to detemine if there is something else to produce, or if the planetary AI is not building correctly.
MOO 2 has a much better interface for micromanagement - the building Queues are much larger, and it is fairly easy to tell which ones need new production orders (mainly because it brings you to each planet that completed building.) In addition, unused production is immediatly applied to the next thing you want to build.
These features from Moo2 were not carried over to Moo3, resulting in very low ratings for the game. If only...
Perhaps it's "undervalued" because you can still play a game with the sound turned off but you cannot play the game without a monitor. It's undervalued simply because it is of little value for the gameplay.
Actually, I'd have to disagree with you there.
As shown on Deaf Gamers, there's a significant amount of games that omit features that make it possible to play without sound. In particular:
Critical announcements - ceratin RTS games only have an audio announcement that you are under attack.
Speech - some modern FPS games rely on in-game speech, and forget to include the subtitles.
Cutscenes - as with speech, some cutscenes are not subtitled.
Directions - some games (e.g. Counterstrike) use audio to indicate where action is occurring. If you accidently reverse the audio channels (e.g. by afaulty driver or because you placed the earbuds in the wrong ear), you will be disoriented. The only game that countered this problem to an extent would be Ghost Recon. Most other games only alert you to the direction of an attack after you are hit.
Voice Chat - it's much faster than typing in text (and in most games, you can't defend yourself while typing. The only one where it was possible would be Rise of the Triad.)
Mandatory system requirements - some games, require a sound card to be present in the system, regardless of whether it is actually useful or not. Two examples would be X-Wing (Win95 Collectors Edition) from LucasArts (program will quit if it cannot initialize audio), and Machines from Acclaim (program will crash to Desktop if it cannot find a sound card.)
Of course, the amount of information gained from audio is being messed up in some aspects - in some cases, the noise is too low to be certain, while in others, it's being overshadowed by my CPU/Powersupply fan. (And I'm still looking for an easy way to quiet it down and take care of the heat problem as well. I have heard something that takes care of sound, but the heat problem still remains. )
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I would disagree there. While it may be an excellent game when playing on the Internet, the single player aspect isn't as strong as it could be. Major problems would be the fact that the default AI player does not build superweapons (Nuclear weapons, Krogoths, etc) without using a 3rd-party modification.
In fact, I'd say that there are very few strategy games which seem that good. In most strategy games, the AI player tends to fall to some common tactics: Massed frontal assault, Long range bombardment, or early rush. In either of these cases, the AI cannot counter since it wasn't designed for either of these two things in mind. (Note: Not even Starcraft could deal with an early rush - it's Zerg AI always falls victem to a 12 Zealot rush from a Protoss AI.)
Mabye... I've been in situations where an AI player was exploiting a flaw with the game, where it could break cease fire without penalty (and since I was playing as a Republic to maximize trade, the AI player generally forces such treaties fairly quickly.)
Galactic Civilizations was considered to be one of the best modern strategy games - at the initial release, the AI player was well defined enough to use the optimal path for gaining resources. In fact, a patch was released in order to cripple the AI player even further on the easy difficulty levels since it was a bit too difficult. Later, there was another patch released to help the AI players counter the Transport rush which was discovered soon after.
Stardock seems to be in contact with the community enough to help dispel the claims of a cheating AI. Out of all the complaints, there were very few that were actually credible - these credible complaints gathered actual information on how the AI cheated, such as an AI selecting a technology for research without the necessairy prerequisites. Once the proof was presented, Stardock proceeded to fix the problem when they could.
The game only states that you are up against generic terrorists. There is no indication that these terrorists belong to any specific country or religion, aside from the fact that they use easily reproducable Russian weaponry (such as an AK-47, SVD Dragunov, and so on.) These terrorists wear what appears to be civilian clothing rather than any turban, scarf or whatever identifies them to be a stereotypical terrorist that appears 24/7 in the mainstream media.
Also, you should know that the term terrorist only appears in the map descriptions - as in they describe what happened. Whether or not they are terrorists is really another storyIn other cases, the term used is "OPFOR", which simply means Opposing Force. This could either be terrorists, or hired para-military mercenaries hired to defend Freedonia's military supply depot.
It is a special maneuver that is designed for this purpose only. Experienced pilots will know how to deal with it, but fresh recruits can be nailed by such a maneuver. There were even rumours that an experienced combat pilor was caught by suprise with the Cobra when it was used for the first time.
Speed as well as velocity can be measured in one of two ways:
1. By how much "ground distance" is travelled (absolute speed)
2. By how much distance changed from a moving point, such as yourself (relative speed.)
In the case of tailing an aircraft, the relative speed is effectivly zero. As soon as Cobra gets engaged, the relative speed increases as the target slows down (but decrases for anti-air batteries or aircraft on anther approach vector.)
First off, you need to download and install a 1.2 patch. At the time, the 40MB download prevented many people from retrieveing it - there was not yet software commonly available that allowed resuming downloads, meaning that you had to have a connection running overnight to finish the download - and remember that we haven't exactly reached 56Kbps at this stage. Once you get past the downloading hurdle (or ignore it when you use modern broadband access), you have to wait at least 20 minutes for the patch to complete - sometimes even longer (the patch installer completely rewrites an entire file rather than creating a new one based on some of the contents of the larget one.)
Eventually, my friend created a manual installer of Daikatana - the contents of Daikatana version 1.2 dumped onto the CD. That allowed playing the game.
Now, onto the game itself. Normally, I don't notice the quality of graphics, but this was one of the few games where I got distracted by it. There was a bug in the graphics that gradually corrupted the wall textures within the game - whether it's the game itself or the video card drivers is yet to be determined, but I do suspect that it's the game (especially since its the "odd-man out".)
During the coop campaign, I was left wondering why I am going from one place to another. After killing Medusa, I suddenly enter a place filled with Zombies. After killing the boss within that snow area (whatever he was - can't remember offhand), I'm suddenly in Alcatraz for some reason. While there are cutscenes, they don't get shown in Co-op, and thus the setting distracts from the game itself.
The external animation for players using the Daikatana looks a bit strange as well.
The rule is: Don't hype games unless you are damn sure they will succeed. It's a good short-term tactic, but customers will feel burned by the poor product, and might not return to the next releases by the company (e.g. Deus Ex took a while to catch on becuase people thought it would be just as bad.)
Think about the players that couldn't download the 1.1 or 1.2 patch - for them, the game is dismal since they can't get past the game stopping bugs. The only way to prevent this from happening is to ensure that the product is properly tested. (I've finished some games within 15 hours of play - testing shouldn't take much longer either.)
SPOILER:Later on in the game, you learn that these terrorists aren't simple domestic players, but are funded by a corporation. The head of the corporation, along with a few other people, plan to create a world-wide epidemic of Ebola Brahama by spraying the virus at the closing Olympic ceremonies at Sydney. The leaders of the plot planned to hold up in a biological bomb shelter in Brazil.
The expansion pack, Eagle Watch, is simple domestic terrorism, with militant terrorists, Sikh terrorists, NOMAR terrorists, Kang revolutionaries, and the Red Sun Brigade.
Rogue Spear, the first sequel, involves an experienced international terrorist wing doing something with a stolen nuclear device, and Black Thorn has some sort of copycat character. Don't have the details in these two games.
Raven Shield, the third installment, involves political terrorists (linked to WWII) who have plans to disrupt festivities in Brazil in order to cause panic with oil stocks. At which point, inheritance from the mastermind will be used to purchase those oil rigs in order to help fund additional terrorism. Sequels Athena's Sword and Black Arrow probably will expand on this.
In my opinion, Starcraft is still hanging around mainly because it is one of the two games that did not have a suitable replacement - most other games either have a different ruleset (e.g. Warcraft 3) or still make mistakes that were present in earlier games (e.g. standing still after a designated target is destroyed.)
The latest balance changes were in 1.08, meaning that it took a long time for game balance to reach an optimal state.
For players that know how the game works perfectly, it can be considered to be balanced. However, veterens that haven't learned how to harden their procedure in the deployment phase will have problems within the first few minutes where the opponents attack. That's why you see restrictions such as "nr10", or "no protoss".
RTS games of this type are only fun if it is possible to block an early rush. While I do know that it is possible to counter, I know people who are not capable of doing so. I also seen computer AI players get nailed by the same early rushes as well, where a Protoss AI sends 12 Zealots against a Zerg AI, before the defences are fully constructed.
Tetris is easy to memorize - thus it doesn't need too much of a story. However, games like Warcraft III are a bit too complex to dump the player in directly and therefore require introducing characters/units one at a time in an appropriate manner.
Another factor that has to be considred with game mechanics is that singleplayer and multiplayer don't use the same processes - what could work for one doesn't always work for the other. This applies to even the most common games - for example, Starcraft has average mutliplayer (the interface isn't optimally designed), while has a great singleplayer component due to its relativly strong AI for its time without being too unfair.
On the other hand, there are various online-only games that are only good for multiplayer and are fairly boring when played alone. The most notable example would be Purge - this game doesn't have AI player support, meaning that you have to rely on the fact that there are still other players playing the game.
The threat doesn't have to be 100% realistic - it just has to contain a minimum amount of buzzwords in order to incite fear in the subject, as most people do not think rationally when confronted with such a demand.
If you don't fully trust the person, don't give out your username/password. Even better, get it changed immediatly after you get it unbanned.
The correct method of defending against those forms of viruses is to write a policy that the students sign where they state that they know that they must ensure that Windows and anti-virus software remains updated. If they fail to abide by the policy, terminate their net access.
More often than not, such outbreaks are caused by used incompetence (i.e. using insecure software, or not installing the essential software to begin with.) I'm getting along just fine without a Virus scanner, and I haven't yet received any complaints about distributing viruses - even with
(Although I should get one, I need to find one I'm strongly comfortable with. My previous experience with such virus scanners involved 20-seconds of wait when an application tried to download an additional chunk of a file, causing the internet connection to fail. Modern anti-virus scanners finally fixed the problem, but they currently do more than just scanning for viruses - and I don't really like that.)
The common good is best served by unplugging the offender for 1 week minimum, at which point you have a second signed copy of the policy in addition to the offender being warned about his actions. Once the offence happens again, disconnect the computer on a more permanent basis.
The only time that installing such software on the computers in question occurrs only if the college has ownership over them (as stated by other posters.) Until then, the college will have to find another way to deal with the problem.
More often than not, the tedium from RTS games comes from flaws with how units act or behave when given orders. You know the very classic example - you order a unit to attack a target, and when it's destroyed, it stops in its tracks. The unit stops regardless of his or her position on the battlefiels, resulting in you having to reissue a move or attack order to advance further. (In the case of the move command, such units are vulnerable as they don't engage. In case of attack, some games treat clicking a point on the map to be force fire and therefore are vulnerable when they are just attacking one point.) This example is present in every single game other than ones based on the later C&C engines (Tiberiun Sun or later.)
A second classic example of micormanagement resulting in tedium would be focused fire. When you order a group of units to attack a target, they all fire their cannon at the one unit - they all hit, but 35 or so of those attacks would have been better spent damaging the other units rather than inflicting damage on an already destroyed unit. (Present in every RTS that I know of.)
Another example would be requiring to select exactly one unit to perform a special ability or "spell". Some games have made changes to counter this in one way or another - as a result, the game is slightly better in allowing players to use an attack that must be used very quickly.
Poor pathfinding is the most extreme example of tedium. The most obvious example would be Dominant Species, where units appear to want to run through buildings and other units to reach their destination (and therefore, requires you to slow the game down to manually navigate your units to attack from more than one side.)
Do you have trouble isolating one particular unit, and trying to move the camera to your base so that you can order him to a repar pad? Star Trek: Armada fixed this by implementing a repair command. Star Trek: Armada II improved on this by implementing Priority Repair where the unit ignores all other commands until it is fully repaired. (This feature is rare - I've seen it in only one other game, and even then it wasn't optimal.)
More often than not, the tedium in micromanagement is caused by a bad or obsolete game design. If you fix those problems, the tedium goes away. However, doing so will make the older RTS games harder to play, since they will lack an important feature that allows you to cleanly manage your units without having to do fancy camera work.
Last time I checked, pages that take more than 15 seconds to load into a usable state on a dial-up connection will still take more than 15 seconds to load on broadband. This is primairly due to the annoying flash animations that almost always pop something up slowly when you move your mouse over the control, in addition to slowly removing the menu when you accidently move the mouse off the target area.
In fact, I tend to queue up mutliple multiple loading operations, and start reading the ones that have already loaded. Not only does it save time, but it helps me work on multiple things at once much more easily.
Not by how I read it. Item 2 results in the context stating "Unlimited NationalAccess/BroadbandAccess cannot be used with
Even if the letter of the contract does not use this as it's officially sanctioned meaning, it does imply that the internet cannot be used using this service, and therefore appears to have customers pay $70 a month for absolutly no service. While the spirit of the contract may be only designed to cut out servers, it only takes one disgruntled employee or lawyer to "misinterpret" the spirit and disconnect every person under a fully legitimate reason (and receive a big black mark on their record.)
It's more like a contract that was written by a lawyer who does not have a sufficient understanding of the computer field. That's just as bad as having a computer expert writing a document that should have been written by a lawyer (or paralegal).
I tested the Quake's AI in E1M1, where a dog on the left hand side of the bridge ran across to attack. The grunt stayed there for a while, but could navigate around the bridge corner with "coaxing" by standing on the right-hand side of the bridge rather than the left.
Doom also exhibits this behaviour in E2M9 - the cyberdemon occassionally gets snagged in the small rooms containing rockets and other supplies. It also gets snagged in the corners, and has trouble nagivating around the structure.
The problems with the Quake 1 AIs were not fixed - it was still possible for them to get snagged on corners in Quake 2. IIRC, the first game to be released where enemies could navigate around the map would be Unreal - they understood lifts, corners, doors, and many other environmental stuff by using a waypoint system from within the map. They could still be fooled or evaded, but not as easily as most other games.
The first time around, it felt like they cut out the use command - didn't affect me to a degree, but I had a feeling that certain situations could arise where you accidently touch a button of certain death.
After beating it on Hard, I tried nightmare mode - that difficulty option was hidden from view mainly because it is considered too hard for most players. However, there was really not much difference from Hard - the only changes would be the monsters firing or re-firing more frequenrly and the Shambler inflicting 10 more points of damage per shock. This is not much of a difference, since you can still dodge most attacks (they either don't have lead-ahead, or have predictable lead-ahead.)
Mutliplayer was acceptable, provided that you knew that you should switch to W-A-S-D and to type "+mlook" in the console. Otherwise, you'll encounter situations where you will get creamed by other players even before you should even know that mouse looking is even possible.
Actually, that's not too much of a CPU load. HL usually only sends player coordinates if there is a chance a player is going to be spotted.
A mod known as HLGuard fixes a this problem by cutting down significantly on how players get displayed. The players are still shown when they are around corners, but it does cut down on cheating. (It also does heuristic aimbot detection - it works best if 4 warnings or so are detected within 10 minutes. )
This is actually relativly minor in the current stage - you can still play on Won for a bit, use the single player campaign, or download bots to practice with while you are sending in the CD-key. After the 2-4 weeks have finished turning around, you should have a general feeling on how the maps work for multiplayer. (Bots aren't the best opponents, especially in games like Counter-Strike, but they are good enough for newcomers.)
Most properly written criminal codes include harassment as a criminal activity. At the very least, you should be familiar with what is and what is not permitted under the Criminal Code - ignorance is no excuse for breaking the law.
The only reason Administrator privilages should be requires is if you are installing a new system service or driver, such as DirectX (not a "service" according to windows, but close enough). Even so, there should be either a prompt stating that it won't work without Administrator privilages, or fail at the moment the service/driver installation is attempted.
Such hard-coded checkes in the executable are generally too rigid to be considered accurrate, and contains limited information on how to correct this aside from doing a permanent boost to Administrator. At the very least, it should explain why Administrator privilages is required. (e.g. Shockwave's Collapse II states that administrator privilages are required for the first run in order to set up DRM licenses, but can run on any account after the licenses are set up. In addition, it doesn't do the rigid check, as I've successfully run it first time around from a user account.)
These applications aren't designed with Win98 in mind - they were developed with knowledge that the WinNT/2000/XP security system exists, and is a simple (and stupid) lockout of the requirements aren't met. It's also the reason why the Microsoft Compatability Tooklit includes the shim "ForceAdminAccess" to tell the installers/applications that permissions exist when they really don't.
(Even then, Microsoft Compatability Toolkit required Admin access in order to use that shim. Go figure.)
Actually, the risk is much greater than a simple desktop install being trashed. A significnat number of computers are home-installations, where personal data is kept all in one place, including personal programming projects that took months to develop.
In fact, I have seen some such projects terminate permanently because of a hard-drive crash. The end result was an applicaiton in development intended to be released as open source resulted in the final release being binary only for one platform. While fixable with backups, most personal users don't do them because of the time involved.
You can test as long as you want to - however, something like this won't get fixed unless:
It's difficult to predict which bugs can potentialy occurr in a game, let alone find all of them. The amount of time required to guarentee that there is absolutly no bugs would be astronomical - there needs to be a comprimise somewhere in order for games to be released.
The only problem would be with Wraiths and other enemies with an ability to perform rapid attacks - those opponents can hit you twice in succession before yuou can even land your first blow. However, I did finally manage to take out those opponents by exploiting a weakness in the AI (they can't attack unless they're in melee range.)
Thief 1 and 2 were good when they were released - even though I recall quickly discovering that blackjacking every single enemy on the level makes thngs very easy. I wouldn't recommend them in this day for a good experience, but they do represent the better games that were released in the past - a good nostalgic experience.
In either case, the moderation is acceptable.
In particular, a bug with the game causes the election of a new orion president to be an instant defeat for all players, even those outside of the senate. This is a problem if you are playing with the Ikthul (Harvesters), as you must rely on either brute force, or acquisition of the five X-es - diplomacy is an impossible victory condition, unless there are other human players.
You need instructions to enjoy any game - they are called tutorials. Otherwise, you'll become frustrated with other games such as UT2004 because your teammates won't heal the power core.
The case with MOO3 was that the intructions were there with the game, but described everything at once rather than one thing at a time. This will turn off most players because of a steep initial learning curve. While those who have played the game know how to use development plans to encourage the AI to build specific improvements first, this is generally considered one of the more advanced topics of the game and therefore avoided by most players until they know the ropes even more.
I'd say that that forum posting is one of the best forms of documentation that I've bookmarked when I want to go back to that game later on. From what I could tell, it was organized into sections and described only the very critical stuff that you need to worry about. (Either that, or I bookmared a page on how to maximize production from my empire - doesn't matter since it is a high-quality reference.)
However, there's a major implementation problem with Master of Orion 3. While allowing you to manage your empire completely is find, the interface was not designed for that in mind. As a result, I find myself checking every individual build queue to detemine if there is something else to produce, or if the planetary AI is not building correctly.
MOO 2 has a much better interface for micromanagement - the building Queues are much larger, and it is fairly easy to tell which ones need new production orders (mainly because it brings you to each planet that completed building.) In addition, unused production is immediatly applied to the next thing you want to build.
These features from Moo2 were not carried over to Moo3, resulting in very low ratings for the game. If only...
As shown on Deaf Gamers, there's a significant amount of games that omit features that make it possible to play without sound. In particular:
Of course, the amount of information gained from audio is being messed up in some aspects - in some cases, the noise is too low to be certain, while in others, it's being overshadowed by my CPU/Powersupply fan. (And I'm still looking for an easy way to quiet it down and take care of the heat problem as well. I have heard something that takes care of sound, but the heat problem still remains. )