Have you ever played Painkiller? Much more fun than SS2 IMHO.
It's faster, has really great feeling weapons (the stake gun is *fun*) and varied levels. You should be able to pick it up for next to nothing now too.
Multiplayer was a bit buggy when I tried it, but otherwise highly recommended.
Re:Sorry, I quit FPSs when they wanted me to jump
on
Review: Serious Sam II
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I know what you're getting at, but in fairness there are hundreds of FPS' out there that are at the realistic end of the market. You can always play one of those if you'd rather be crawling on your belly just to get an accurate shot.;)
To me the main thing that makes UT and the like *fun* is that they're unrealistically fast, and that skill-wise they're not all just about aim. Learning and getting good at the movement (including jumping!) gives you an extra way to get better and better. Cunning movement tricks have really added an extra dimension to a bunch of the classic multiplayer FPS - strafe running in doom, strafe/curve jumping in quake2, boost jumping in UT2003, etc
Take these things out of arcade FPS titles and you're left with games that can feel pretty shallow and have less of a learning curve and therefore typically less incentive to keep playing month after month. In UT2003 I was learning new ways to get across maps 2 years after I started playing because of the flexibility of the movement.
In Serious Sam, Halo (and most 'realistic' titles also) I feel like my feet are glued to the floor or I'm running through syrup. After playing quake and ut for so many years it's a pretty frustrating feeling. The controls/movement just don't have any flexibility or feel.
It's just a shame that there aren't many fast arcade FPS' coming out any more, but it looks like everyone else would prefer to have another WWII 'sim' shooter.
While I agree with the rest of your comments it's not really true to say that ASP/PHP/etc won't scale to the size of a site like cnn.com. They may not always be your best choice of language, but they do fit certain niches rather well. In general, for a website to scale well, the overall system/software design is much more important than choice of language/environment. (Though it's true that j2ee app servers give you a big headstart here)
Whether a website will scale to cnn like levels is dependent on quite a few factors... two of the main ones that come to mind are:
a) How much work the site has to do to build a page (think basic marketing website vs an online banking site)
b) Sensible overall design (both code and network/hardware).
A well built PHP site (i.e many servers load balanced, well cached page content, intelligently coded to scale from the outset) will scale to whatever you like, at least for cnn type content which is easily cached.
I worked on one of the very few major news websites that coped with Sept11th traffic, and that website was developed using Linux/Apache/PHP/MySQL. (we only just coped mind you!;)
I remember reading a while back that yahoo use PHP for various bits and pieces too..
Slashdot Mirror
Have you ever played Painkiller? Much more fun than SS2 IMHO.
It's faster, has really great feeling weapons (the stake gun is *fun*) and varied levels. You should be able to pick it up for next to nothing now too.
Multiplayer was a bit buggy when I tried it, but otherwise highly recommended.
I know what you're getting at, but in fairness there are hundreds of FPS' out there that are at the realistic end of the market. You can always play one of those if you'd rather be crawling on your belly just to get an accurate shot. ;)
To me the main thing that makes UT and the like *fun* is that they're unrealistically fast, and that skill-wise they're not all just about aim. Learning and getting good at the movement (including jumping!) gives you an extra way to get better and better. Cunning movement tricks have really added an extra dimension to a bunch of the classic multiplayer FPS - strafe running in doom, strafe/curve jumping in quake2, boost jumping in UT2003, etc
Take these things out of arcade FPS titles and you're left with games that can feel pretty shallow and have less of a learning curve and therefore typically less incentive to keep playing month after month. In UT2003 I was learning new ways to get across maps 2 years after I started playing because of the flexibility of the movement.
In Serious Sam, Halo (and most 'realistic' titles also) I feel like my feet are glued to the floor or I'm running through syrup. After playing quake and ut for so many years it's a pretty frustrating feeling. The controls/movement just don't have any flexibility or feel.
It's just a shame that there aren't many fast arcade FPS' coming out any more, but it looks like everyone else would prefer to have another WWII 'sim' shooter.
Nice little puzzle
...
Take a different number of coins out of each bag, eg:
1 from the 1st bag
2 from the 2nd bag
6 from the 6th bag
Then stick all of these loose coins on the scale together, remembering how many you took from each bag
The overall weight will tell you how many coins are heavier and from that you know which bag was made up of fake coins.
eg if the scale says 21.2 ounces, you know that the second bag is full of fake coins. If it says 21.6 ounces you know it's the sixth bag.
\o/
Money would be better spent on RAID, rather than dual core or dual processor.
S ingleDriveVsRaid0 has this to say:
:)
Actually RAID doesn't noticeably speed most things up in a desktop environment in my experience.
http://faq.storagereview.com/tiki-index.php?page=
Dont assume RAID 0 offers increased performance for all or even most applications... and dont assume that transfer rates reflect application-level performance.
Perhaps the money is better spent on more RAM?
While I agree with the rest of your comments it's not really true to say that ASP/PHP/etc won't scale to the size of a site like cnn.com. They may not always be your best choice of language, but they do fit certain niches rather well. In general, for a website to scale well, the overall system/software design is much more important than choice of language/environment. (Though it's true that j2ee app servers give you a big headstart here)
;)
Whether a website will scale to cnn like levels is dependent on quite a few factors... two of the main ones that come to mind are:
a) How much work the site has to do to build a page (think basic marketing website vs an online banking site)
b) Sensible overall design (both code and network/hardware).
A well built PHP site (i.e many servers load balanced, well cached page content, intelligently coded to scale from the outset) will scale to whatever you like, at least for cnn type content which is easily cached.
I worked on one of the very few major news websites that coped with Sept11th traffic, and that website was developed using Linux/Apache/PHP/MySQL. (we only just coped mind you!
I remember reading a while back that yahoo use PHP for various bits and pieces too..