No nethack or other rogue-like? No classic Sierra adventure games listed at all? That list goes back a ways, but it in no ways captures the best games of all time (Doom is #1 on it BTW). Silly lists, it would have been different a few years ago, or before the FPS/3D infestation/invasion (Not everything has to be 3D and/or an FPS).
Did you play the original Legend of Zelda? Got the manual for it? Pull it out and look through the cartoons in the manual. Windwalker is like playing that.
Or an updated version of Link to the Past. It's the next step in the target games used to have. Cartoon-level realism!
Animal Crossing. Okay, it's hard to explain why it's fun, it just is... You fish, and live a real alternate life and stuff, and it's kinda like a real life. And you can send notes to your friends and things..... in game! And modify the environment by planting trees. It has decades of events in it, and everything is real time. You can visit your friends' houses and see how they've done stuff, and you can play NES games in it.
Play it, for 1 hour, and if you don't get it, you won't. If you do, it's incredibly addictive, and it drags out the addiction for months-years.
Animal Crossing probably gets the most play out of any game I've ever seen. I actually have friends come over simply to get 15 minutes in on it (I have two towns on my GB). It's ridiculous.
People who don't like Zelda's look, haven't played Zelda. Graphically, Zelda is awe-inspiring. Yes, it looks like a cartoon, it looks like the cartoony graphics from the original's manual, it looks like the graphics from some of the older adventure games, it has the type of graphics that "hold" their impressiveness for a long time. FFX, that's already being degraded, and once Doom 3 comes out, you're going to look at FFX and go ehhh.... Like you look at FF8/7 now(go replay them... just look at the graphics). Cartoons hold up well, attempting photo-realistic CG generally doesn't. Now personally, I dislike Zelda, because it's not the type of Zelda I like (pre-ocarina, Link to the Past/Original style, I liked), but I also hated Ocarina of time, which it is a direct sequel to, so... that's no surprise. Zelda is about the thrown, flaming sword and like-likes stealing my magic shield as I steal old men's rupees. It's supposed to be dark, but oh well.
Should be some good games hitting the Gamecube this year. Square/Enix together, on a Nintendo Platform, the last time this happened, we got Chrono Trigger.
With the X-Box you get that warm, fuzzy feeling that every dollar you spend on it goes to a convicted monopolist that is only producing something of any quality so they can dominate the market and then get away with making crap. You can't put a price on that. Besides, there aren't enough good games to justify it costing more than the GameCube! You think an X-Box has as wide a selection as a PS2? HAH! Hope you guys enjoy your lack of principles and your Halo.
Yes, and damn them for selling out. Damn them for firing the two guys from Andromeda and damn them for stopping actually making software.
Oh well, the whole industry has changed. It's not only the "intellectual elite" who own computers anymore, it's a lot of luddites who didn't know the internet existed prior to 1995/96, and who bought typing programs to learn how to type properly around the same time. They've completely changed the environment. Look at IRC now compared to 7 years ago. "Ripper is hardcore!" Perfect example of what I'm talking about. That incident signaled to me loud and clear that the common man really had entered the internet in full force.
Gamers who think that playing FF7(and being one of the first to 'discover' that series... at number 7...) on the PS1 makes them oldschool. People like that don't have the necessary tastes or sophistication to get a space shooter, or adventure game, or why someone would find the original Zelda still fun to this day. They don't want real plot, they want the relatively shallow plots of the modern Final Fantasy (admit it, if you can't figure out the twists before they happen in a square game, you haven't been paying attention). It's the same type of person who doesn't read, they watch TV. Sigh.
RPGs/FPSs are not and will never be adventure games. I'm sorry, but, when Gordan Freeman shouts out from atop the corpses of dozens of aliens, "I love the smell of victory in the morning. It smells like salt, no, oregano, no, victory!" then we can talk.
They all treat themselves wayyy to seriously, and while this can be fun, it's not the same spirit. That seperates the two genres, IMO.
There were two powerhouses in later-day adventure gaming. Sierra and LucasArts. When Sierra was bought out (or when they "sold out" depending on how you look at it), they started their long plunge into mediocrity. Most of the good staff was eliminated (including the two guys from Andromeda), and the emphasis of the company was shifted to distribution rather than development (Does Sierra even make games themselves anymore?). No more adventure titles from Sierra, leaving LucasArts. But, hey, we got Tribes 2!
Now, LucasArts has released an adventure game or two over the years. Grim Fandago being the last IIRC. But, they're not done yet, Sam and Max is getting a sequel, so is Full Throttle. The genre is far from dead, and it is still viable. It's just really damn hard to come up with something new as amusing and humorous as Maniac Mansion, Sam n Max, Leasure Suit Larry, or Space Quest. Not to mention Quest for Glory (or Hero's Quest depending on when you got your copy).
Quest for Glory series, ahh, now there was an innovative game!
We have ways of doing this already, what you just described is similar to making a map or scenario for any number of games. The problem is, most are too complicated and involved, or insufficient to do what you need them to. I don't run windows, so I can't check this program out and I'm assuming it follows the same trends as all previous programs of it's nature (and from what I can tell from the site as well). Someone care to confirm or deny that?
There's probably a MOO or MUSH out there that does simulate/take place in a jail, with you as an inmate.
[sarcasm] What's with you kids and your requirement for graphics? Back in the day we used to bugger people in prison in plain text, and we liked it! [/sarcasm]
And, if you figure out how to turn on no-clipping mode in real life, please, please let us all know.
It really has gotten harder to get in, hasn't it? And that nasty programming bug likes to first bite people with the desire to make games (I know that's why me and most of my other software engineer friends REALLY first got into it to do).
I remember programming simple games in BASIC (and a few in C once one of my friend's bearded dad plus one of my dad's coworkers agreed to teach me how to[respectively, I bugged the hell out of both with questions], but I never really got pointers until years later) back in the 80's and selling them at school for media costs (to those lucky enough to have computers). I've played some of them recently on an old IBM PC and an old 286, "Dragon Knights of The Square Table", a text adventure full of bad grammar, child stories, and some HP-based D&D style combat in a choose your own adventure style format! I was such a geeky, dorky little kid. Good for a laugh and a nostalgia trip though, especially reading source code (well, BASIC, but it counts! Ask the VB people!) I wrote when I was 9 and comparing it to the "art" I did in school at the same time.
Then later, came the Bards Tale Construction Kit, and even later, Unlimited Adventures. I was older then, though, and they never did what I wanted them too completely. Plus my stupid little brother refused to learn how to read well enough to play them.
My greatest achievement was a rogue-like engine! Man, was I proud of moving that little 'o' around the screen. It flickered, I never got combat or much of anything else working, but it moved! I can still bring up the feelings of pride and accomplishment I felt at that when I finished up and first run it.
Anyway, now that I've sufficiently bored everyone, I'm sure, I don't think having a catch all library available will really service young programmers/developers. They'll be bound into someone else's manner of thinking, which could be good or bad, but most likely bad. It's good to understand things completely, and piece them together. I'm sure someone could bang out an FAQ or online book on how to write an engine like this that would service them better.
It's not the same environment anymore, we keep pushing for better graphics, better physics... I bet it's a lot harder to feel a sense of accomplishment at doing simple things anymore. And it's that sense of accomplishment that drove me into this field, plus the feeling of godhood you can get when something you wrote causes a physical action as designed.
I think I still have a disk (3.5", no less) somewhere of the original door versions of LORD and Planets signed by Seth Able (Thanks, Seth Able) from back when I ran a BBS. In fact I should go digging for that box of disks with all my old registered doors on it and set a BBS back up in my area. Not like I use the voice line anyway.
Anyway, the games I'd like to see in one place are: LOD (Lands of Devastation), OOII (operation overkill II), BRE (Baron Realms Elite!), LORD, Tradewars, and Planets. BRE + Tradewars = Excellent.....
So you could do a clean implementation of it without possibly being tainted by viewing the source, and without having to liscense your implementation under the GPL.
Then again most people who liscense their code under the GPL are more than reasonable about this type of thing, but if you wanted to be sure...
In case you can't tell, I prefer the BSD liscense for all of my stuff.
I've never had a kernel panic in 6 years, the problems were in openSSL (which affected services on several OSes, including Windows, Linux, etc.), and anyone who still runs sendmail is an idiot (I mean with it's track record, why? It's the *nix equivalent of IIS). SAMBA is more secure than say Win98's filesharing holes (none of which have been fixed).
But, that's not the point, and I'm not going to muddle in vague fandom here and make some kind of definition of "the Linux OS" so that I can compare it to a version of Windows. Suffice it to say that Windows is unlikely to ever be as secure as a Linux system because of how much is irremovably included in a vanilla Windows Operating System install. Whatever you tack on to those base OSes, well that's not the fault of the operating system, that's the fault of bad software (which inflicts itself on all OSes equally).
Besides that, aren't all these OSS tools and programs the work of a bunch of amateurs and hobbyists who should be less skilled than their proffessional betters? It should be inferior, right? Disappointed that it's not, are we?
I believe the future of games as we think of them now is consoles. There was a huge gap between console games and PC games for a while, and there is still currently a gap, but it's shrinking.
How many people own a PS2 versus and up to date capable of running Doom 3 PC?
I'm sick of FPSes (which I hate on consoles due to lack of mouse for aiming) and that's about all that gets released for the PC of any caliber anymore (with some exceptions) or rehashes of older games and genres that don't add much (Diablo vs Nethack) except for fancy graphics that I don't care about and won't until we hit photorealism.
I don't even touch my PC for gaming anymore, which is why I run single-boot Linux on everything in the house. My PC is for work, coding, hobbyist stuff, and tinkering. I can do anything with it, modify software to suit my needs, etc. My consoles are for gaming (PS2 and a Gamecube). I don't need to install stuff, I don't need to worry about it working or not working, or even check the box for hardware requirements. I don't need to buy a $300 video card to eek more performance out of it or to run the latest games (I got both consoles w/memory cards used for about the cost of a new Nvidia or ATI card!).
Running Windows XP of course, which has yet to be optimized for the Opteron (and is going to be). If your workstation runs WindowsXP, then yea, it may apply, but unlikely.
In other words, this review was meaningless. When the chip and OS to match actually coexist, then maybe a benchmark will be possible.
Tom's Hardware, your mileage may vary, mine's been in the negative.
Well, I had all that and more, my old box with some spare hardware I had lying around.
I had an old Matrox Marvel G400 (outdated a bit, but well supported under linux if not Win2k), an Athlon 1.4 GhZ w/ 1GB of PC2100, Promise Fasttrak IDE RAID card, 3 40GB 7200RPM Maxtor HDDs, DVD, CD-RW, SB-Live, Gig-E card, etc.
Loaded it to the gills, bought a DVD-R for it and now I can record compilation DVDs of futurama from a bash prompt at work.
A little soldering and tinkering and I got lIRC working as a remote control with no problems.
It was well worth it, but if you don't have that kind of hardware lying around, and your idea of a fun weekend doesn't involve hacking around on linux, you're probably best off going the TIVO route.
I had a horrible experience with freevo, and it's in python, one of the few languages I don't know and have no desire to learn. Namely, I could get it about 90% working, but streaming TV to it was impossible. XawTV would access my Matrox video capture fine, but I couldn't get to it through mplayer. Maybe this has changed since I last messed with freevo and V4L + mplayer, but I ended up using perl scripts, xmltv and XawTV instead, with lIRC as the remote control. I intended to code something for it in C with the Perl as glue between the components, but I never got around to it.
If you have a hauppage card though, your experience will probably be better. For gods sakes tho, wtf would you use python for something that should be very fast and very efficient?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm gonna sound like Red Mage of 8-Bit theatre fame here for a minute (If you downmod me, I shall break out the febreeze cliche!).
Temple of Elemental Evil! Man, I remember running through that... if I wasn't ever near death I got very, very nervous. Hope they pull it off.
VtM though... well I despise WoD... so... I won't be firing up the Windows partition for that one....
No nethack or other rogue-like? No classic Sierra adventure games listed at all? That list goes back a ways, but it in no ways captures the best games of all time (Doom is #1 on it BTW). Silly lists, it would have been different a few years ago, or before the FPS/3D infestation/invasion (Not everything has to be 3D and/or an FPS).
Did you play the original Legend of Zelda? Got the manual for it? Pull it out and look through the cartoons in the manual. Windwalker is like playing that.
Or an updated version of Link to the Past. It's the next step in the target games used to have. Cartoon-level realism!
Animal Crossing. Okay, it's hard to explain why it's fun, it just is... You fish, and live a real alternate life and stuff, and it's kinda like a real life. And you can send notes to your friends and things..... in game! And modify the environment by planting trees. It has decades of events in it, and everything is real time. You can visit your friends' houses and see how they've done stuff, and you can play NES games in it.
Play it, for 1 hour, and if you don't get it, you won't. If you do, it's incredibly addictive, and it drags out the addiction for months-years.
Animal Crossing probably gets the most play out of any game I've ever seen. I actually have friends come over simply to get 15 minutes in on it (I have two towns on my GB). It's ridiculous.
People who don't like Zelda's look, haven't played Zelda. Graphically, Zelda is awe-inspiring. Yes, it looks like a cartoon, it looks like the cartoony graphics from the original's manual, it looks like the graphics from some of the older adventure games, it has the type of graphics that "hold" their impressiveness for a long time. FFX, that's already being degraded, and once Doom 3 comes out, you're going to look at FFX and go ehhh.... Like you look at FF8/7 now(go replay them... just look at the graphics). Cartoons hold up well, attempting photo-realistic CG generally doesn't. Now personally, I dislike Zelda, because it's not the type of Zelda I like (pre-ocarina, Link to the Past/Original style, I liked), but I also hated Ocarina of time, which it is a direct sequel to, so... that's no surprise. Zelda is about the thrown, flaming sword and like-likes stealing my magic shield as I steal old men's rupees. It's supposed to be dark, but oh well.
Should be some good games hitting the Gamecube this year. Square/Enix together, on a Nintendo Platform, the last time this happened, we got Chrono Trigger.
With the X-Box you get that warm, fuzzy feeling that every dollar you spend on it goes to a convicted monopolist that is only producing something of any quality so they can dominate the market and then get away with making crap. You can't put a price on that. Besides, there aren't enough good games to justify it costing more than the GameCube! You think an X-Box has as wide a selection as a PS2? HAH! Hope you guys enjoy your lack of principles and your Halo.
Yes, and damn them for selling out. Damn them for firing the two guys from Andromeda and damn them for stopping actually making software.
Oh well, the whole industry has changed. It's not only the "intellectual elite" who own computers anymore, it's a lot of luddites who didn't know the internet existed prior to 1995/96, and who bought typing programs to learn how to type properly around the same time. They've completely changed the environment. Look at IRC now compared to 7 years ago. "Ripper is hardcore!" Perfect example of what I'm talking about. That incident signaled to me loud and clear that the common man really had entered the internet in full force.
Gamers who think that playing FF7(and being one of the first to 'discover' that series... at number 7...) on the PS1 makes them oldschool. People like that don't have the necessary tastes or sophistication to get a space shooter, or adventure game, or why someone would find the original Zelda still fun to this day. They don't want real plot, they want the relatively shallow plots of the modern Final Fantasy (admit it, if you can't figure out the twists before they happen in a square game, you haven't been paying attention). It's the same type of person who doesn't read, they watch TV. Sigh.
And yea, I was mocking that kids death.
RPGs/FPSs are not and will never be adventure games. I'm sorry, but, when Gordan Freeman shouts out from atop the corpses of dozens of aliens, "I love the smell of victory in the morning. It smells like salt, no, oregano, no, victory!" then we can talk.
They all treat themselves wayyy to seriously, and while this can be fun, it's not the same spirit. That seperates the two genres, IMO.
There were two powerhouses in later-day adventure gaming. Sierra and LucasArts. When Sierra was bought out (or when they "sold out" depending on how you look at it), they started their long plunge into mediocrity. Most of the good staff was eliminated (including the two guys from Andromeda), and the emphasis of the company was shifted to distribution rather than development (Does Sierra even make games themselves anymore?). No more adventure titles from Sierra, leaving LucasArts. But, hey, we got Tribes 2!
Now, LucasArts has released an adventure game or two over the years. Grim Fandago being the last IIRC. But, they're not done yet, Sam and Max is getting a sequel, so is Full Throttle. The genre is far from dead, and it is still viable. It's just really damn hard to come up with something new as amusing and humorous as Maniac Mansion, Sam n Max, Leasure Suit Larry, or Space Quest. Not to mention Quest for Glory (or Hero's Quest depending on when you got your copy).
Quest for Glory series, ahh, now there was an innovative game!
We have ways of doing this already, what you just described is similar to making a map or scenario for any number of games. The problem is, most are too complicated and involved, or insufficient to do what you need them to. I don't run windows, so I can't check this program out and I'm assuming it follows the same trends as all previous programs of it's nature (and from what I can tell from the site as well). Someone care to confirm or deny that?
There's probably a MOO or MUSH out there that does simulate/take place in a jail, with you as an inmate.
[sarcasm] What's with you kids and your requirement for graphics? Back in the day we used to bugger people in prison in plain text, and we liked it! [/sarcasm]
And, if you figure out how to turn on no-clipping mode in real life, please, please let us all know.
It really has gotten harder to get in, hasn't it? And that nasty programming bug likes to first bite people with the desire to make games (I know that's why me and most of my other software engineer friends REALLY first got into it to do).
I remember programming simple games in BASIC (and a few in C once one of my friend's bearded dad plus one of my dad's coworkers agreed to teach me how to[respectively, I bugged the hell out of both with questions], but I never really got pointers until years later) back in the 80's and selling them at school for media costs (to those lucky enough to have computers). I've played some of them recently on an old IBM PC and an old 286, "Dragon Knights of The Square Table", a text adventure full of bad grammar, child stories, and some HP-based D&D style combat in a choose your own adventure style format! I was such a geeky, dorky little kid. Good for a laugh and a nostalgia trip though, especially reading source code (well, BASIC, but it counts! Ask the VB people!) I wrote when I was 9 and comparing it to the "art" I did in school at the same time.
Then later, came the Bards Tale Construction Kit, and even later, Unlimited Adventures. I was older then, though, and they never did what I wanted them too completely. Plus my stupid little brother refused to learn how to read well enough to play them.
My greatest achievement was a rogue-like engine! Man, was I proud of moving that little 'o' around the screen. It flickered, I never got combat or much of anything else working, but it moved! I can still bring up the feelings of pride and accomplishment I felt at that when I finished up and first run it.
Anyway, now that I've sufficiently bored everyone, I'm sure, I don't think having a catch all library available will really service young programmers/developers. They'll be bound into someone else's manner of thinking, which could be good or bad, but most likely bad. It's good to understand things completely, and piece them together. I'm sure someone could bang out an FAQ or online book on how to write an engine like this that would service them better.
It's not the same environment anymore, we keep pushing for better graphics, better physics... I bet it's a lot harder to feel a sense of accomplishment at doing simple things anymore. And it's that sense of accomplishment that drove me into this field, plus the feeling of godhood you can get when something you wrote causes a physical action as designed.
The dependencies and install order really help out when you're installing these things. X isn't bad, but Gnome is a pain in the ass.
LFS and BLFS will still kill a good day of your time though.
Yes, I remember it, I liked Lands of Devastation better, myself though.
I think I still have a disk (3.5", no less) somewhere of the original door versions of LORD and Planets signed by Seth Able (Thanks, Seth Able) from back when I ran a BBS. In fact I should go digging for that box of disks with all my old registered doors on it and set a BBS back up in my area. Not like I use the voice line anyway.
Anyway, the games I'd like to see in one place are: LOD (Lands of Devastation), OOII (operation overkill II), BRE (Baron Realms Elite!), LORD, Tradewars, and Planets. BRE + Tradewars = Excellent.....
When games are delayed and/or waited for this long, I always think of one game....
Daikatana.
Yes, I said it. I appologize for my vulgarity.
There's real news on here now?
Come on now, it's amusing, you felt the need to comment, you felt the need to RTFA, you found at least one aspect of it amusing.
So you could do a clean implementation of it without possibly being tainted by viewing the source, and without having to liscense your implementation under the GPL.
Then again most people who liscense their code under the GPL are more than reasonable about this type of thing, but if you wanted to be sure...
In case you can't tell, I prefer the BSD liscense for all of my stuff.
Depends on my needs. Generally qmail, but occassionally postfix.
I don't do much admin work anymore, but both can handle mid-sized ISP level mail traffic quite well.
You mean they don't have a pet Senator ask:
Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Open Source Movement?
I've never had a kernel panic in 6 years, the problems were in openSSL (which affected services on several OSes, including Windows, Linux, etc.), and anyone who still runs sendmail is an idiot (I mean with it's track record, why? It's the *nix equivalent of IIS). SAMBA is more secure than say Win98's filesharing holes (none of which have been fixed).
But, that's not the point, and I'm not going to muddle in vague fandom here and make some kind of definition of "the Linux OS" so that I can compare it to a version of Windows. Suffice it to say that Windows is unlikely to ever be as secure as a Linux system because of how much is irremovably included in a vanilla Windows Operating System install. Whatever you tack on to those base OSes, well that's not the fault of the operating system, that's the fault of bad software (which inflicts itself on all OSes equally).
Besides that, aren't all these OSS tools and programs the work of a bunch of amateurs and hobbyists who should be less skilled than their proffessional betters? It should be inferior, right? Disappointed that it's not, are we?
For a long time, DVDs were cheaper priced for rental (can't copy them easily). I would expect that to remain true.
I believe the future of games as we think of them now is consoles. There was a huge gap between console games and PC games for a while, and there is still currently a gap, but it's shrinking.
How many people own a PS2 versus and up to date capable of running Doom 3 PC?
I'm sick of FPSes (which I hate on consoles due to lack of mouse for aiming) and that's about all that gets released for the PC of any caliber anymore (with some exceptions) or rehashes of older games and genres that don't add much (Diablo vs Nethack) except for fancy graphics that I don't care about and won't until we hit photorealism.
I don't even touch my PC for gaming anymore, which is why I run single-boot Linux on everything in the house. My PC is for work, coding, hobbyist stuff, and tinkering. I can do anything with it, modify software to suit my needs, etc. My consoles are for gaming (PS2 and a Gamecube). I don't need to install stuff, I don't need to worry about it working or not working, or even check the box for hardware requirements. I don't need to buy a $300 video card to eek more performance out of it or to run the latest games (I got both consoles w/memory cards used for about the cost of a new Nvidia or ATI card!).
Running Windows XP of course, which has yet to be optimized for the Opteron (and is going to be). If your workstation runs WindowsXP, then yea, it may apply, but unlikely.
In other words, this review was meaningless. When the chip and OS to match actually coexist, then maybe a benchmark will be possible.
Tom's Hardware, your mileage may vary, mine's been in the negative.
Well, I had all that and more, my old box with some spare hardware I had lying around.
I had an old Matrox Marvel G400 (outdated a bit, but well supported under linux if not Win2k), an Athlon 1.4 GhZ w/ 1GB of PC2100, Promise Fasttrak IDE RAID card, 3 40GB 7200RPM Maxtor HDDs, DVD, CD-RW, SB-Live, Gig-E card, etc.
Loaded it to the gills, bought a DVD-R for it and now I can record compilation DVDs of futurama from a bash prompt at work.
A little soldering and tinkering and I got lIRC working as a remote control with no problems.
It was well worth it, but if you don't have that kind of hardware lying around, and your idea of a fun weekend doesn't involve hacking around on linux, you're probably best off going the TIVO route.
I had a horrible experience with freevo, and it's in python, one of the few languages I don't know and have no desire to learn. Namely, I could get it about 90% working, but streaming TV to it was impossible. XawTV would access my Matrox video capture fine, but I couldn't get to it through mplayer. Maybe this has changed since I last messed with freevo and V4L + mplayer, but I ended up using perl scripts, xmltv and XawTV instead, with lIRC as the remote control. I intended to code something for it in C with the Perl as glue between the components, but I never got around to it.
If you have a hauppage card though, your experience will probably be better. For gods sakes tho, wtf would you use python for something that should be very fast and very efficient?