One game not mentioned in the post is the student project I worked on last year, Toblo. Being a student project, it's totally free and is available for download right now. We're honored to be the only student project nominated in the main competition.
Portal is based on a game called Narbacular Drop that was developed by a group of seniors at the DigiPen Institute of Technology. Valve ended up contracting the entire programming team to work on Portal. It's interesting to see how a game school's relatively small-time project has become front-page news on dozens of gaming sites.
Well, my site is still suffering from a slashdotting from a few days ago, but check out CS-Nation's CS: Source info section for an FAQ and of course plenty of CS: Source media.
However, don't let anyone tell you how to play. Feel like sniping? Do it! Wanna have fun with pistols! Do so! Make CS fun to play for yourself. Just follow the objectives and from there you can find any niche.
Monopoly rents, basic capitalism; same difference. Duh.
Just to nitpick, Da Beers (or whatever) has a monopoly on diamonds and does control prices very well. Diamonds really aren't all that rare; certainly not worth what we pay for them.
First of all the article is just about Vice City and the controversy surrounding it. Warren Spector (Thief, Deus Ex) mentioned the freedom of choice (be good or be bad), but that's not really the main focus of the article.
The summary given in the submission is misleading. There is absolutely no way you can "win" the game without raising a gun. To complete the narrative (GTA does have a story, you know!), I have no doubt that there will be some murder here and there. If GTA3 was any indication, more often than not you will be killing someone.
In order to get 100% (which is separate from the main narrative) you must rob stores, complete "rampages" (killing as many as possible in a given time), and even collect hidden packages which I think are statues this time around.
Now, if you want to run around delivering Pizza, only killing criminals with police vehicles, drive people around in taxis, or sell ice cream, you are very welcome to do so. In fact, Vice City even lets you buy businesses to profit from and houses for you to live in.
While GTA: Vice City allows you to do basically anything, if you really wish to play the game you're going to kill a lot of people and you'll be a gangster.
NOLF2 and DooM III are single-player games. Counter-Strike: "Blue Zone" doesn't exist. I think you mean "Condition Zero," which is also a single-player game.
At the time of this post, CS has 85320 players (source). Medal of Honor: AA is in second place. With less than a tenth of the players that CS has.
Recent server data shows that this shift is reflected across most servers, as Counterstrike population is decreasing, RTCW is up a little, and MOH:AA is up dramatically.
You're probably not lying, you're just totally ignorant. I've been following HL for ever (see my site), and today is the first time I've seen the game break 100,000 players largely due to CS.
You can use your anecdotal evidence all you won't, but there is no "shift across most servers." You are absolutely wrong, I'm sorry.
You use a free ISP and got a free dsl modem. This is why MS should offer Xbox Live for free, not the over-price $50. Nevermind that it is in competition with the PS2 and nothing else; the PS2 charges $50 for the actual hardware: equivlancy.
Many ISPs offer free game servers. Except you just made that up, because I have yet to see an ISP market this fact unless we're talking about Speakeasy.net (which doesn't even give out the IPs to their servers, they're mostly clan servers). Apparently ISPs do mind doing this, because they don't do it. Let's pretend we live in a fantasy world where there are free servers by ISPs; they're not very free if you're paying your ISP. With your logic, we could say that Xbox Live's servers are free. Of course, that would be a fair comparison which you simply wouldn't use.
Localized servers. So instead of putting Xbox Live in the hands of Microsoft, you want to bet that your ISP will throw up free Xbox servers for you to play NFL on? We're talking broadband here, you can realistically get a 100ms travel time from your Xbox to MS to another Xbox. Replace realistically with almost always.
So you're saying when Xbox 2 comes out, MS will stop accepting money? You're cynical in all the wrong places. It's also likely that Xbox 2 will play Xbox games like the PS2 does with PSOne games, I see no reason why Xbox Live wouldn't do the same. Otherwise they'd lose money/customers the instant Xbox 2 came out, and Microsoft doesn't like that.
Even though the author seems to dismiss this as "ok", most ppl don't like paying $50 for an online game and getting their A$$ kicked 99% of the time.
You have a perfect idea. That has never been successfully implemented anywhere and magically it's Microsoft's fault. I don't know how long you've been playing games (maybe you're more casual than I), but there is no way you can possibly improve by playing with people who are at the same skill level as you. If there's more than one super-duper player on the server, then you either really suck (which is okay, everyone gets better with time) or for some reason that's a "hardcore" server and you should try another one. Also, some games are team games where certain skills are more focused than others.
BTW, I believe the author was joking. His wombat coordination skills wouldn't really hurt him that much in a football game.
Now sorry if this sounded like a flame, but I just think far too many people treat MS unfairly in every single instance possible. Not only is Xbox Live a far more organized online platform compared to the PS2 (which has already launched, did you notice?), it'll increase the amount of people who have broadband (even by a slim margin), and it had some exciting titles in the future (unlike the PS2, which has a pretty clear calendar for 2003).
But I will tell you that the PS2 is still the better system, and Xbox Live certainly won't get my money until Halo 2. Cheers.
Are you saying that you wouldn't know the album title to the songs you haven't heard in a world without mp3's? Or was your post just bragging about how you steal music?
That you think nerds who follow Slashdot are the mass of the populace?
That a teenager who wants to blatently steal his favorite artist's music doesn't consider the political ramifications of the RIAA?
I believe much of the quality comes from 64/128-bit floating point precision. I gathered as much from the ATI 9700 launch video, which was also quite impressive.
Before getting hyped too much, you should really read Carmack's comment. Any game that has true support of "CineFX" will need to be ran on at least a third-generation NV30.
As much as I think NVIDIA is an honest, good company, I'll hold onto my GF4 Ti4400 until "NV30" 2.
I'm no longer eating up tech demos. Even if they're damn impressive, they're far too future-oriented to seriously invest in.
Free Software is powerful in many ways, but the idea that you, yourself, can go in and fix decay is kind of silly.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but all OSes rely on abstraction. Abstraction relies on a bit of bloat.
Any OS is going to decay over time without micromanagment. Windows will probably decay even if you're the strictest of system operators because it tries to hide everything from the user. Even if we did have the source to Windows, the FIX would be not including so many useless programs.
Slashdot Mirror
Five finalists have pulled out in protest.
One game not mentioned in the post is the student project I worked on last year, Toblo. Being a student project, it's totally free and is available for download right now. We're honored to be the only student project nominated in the main competition.
Portal is based on a game called Narbacular Drop that was developed by a group of seniors at the DigiPen Institute of Technology. Valve ended up contracting the entire programming team to work on Portal. It's interesting to see how a game school's relatively small-time project has become front-page news on dozens of gaming sites.
Well, my site is still suffering from a slashdotting from a few days ago, but check out CS-Nation's CS: Source info section for an FAQ and of course plenty of CS: Source media.
Shameless enough? Heh.
However, don't let anyone tell you how to play. Feel like sniping? Do it! Wanna have fun with pistols! Do so! Make CS fun to play for yourself. Just follow the objectives and from there you can find any niche.
Crazy liberal extravaganza!
Monopoly rents, basic capitalism; same difference. Duh. Just to nitpick, Da Beers (or whatever) has a monopoly on diamonds and does control prices very well. Diamonds really aren't all that rare; certainly not worth what we pay for them.
The summary given in the submission is misleading. There is absolutely no way you can "win" the game without raising a gun. To complete the narrative (GTA does have a story, you know!), I have no doubt that there will be some murder here and there. If GTA3 was any indication, more often than not you will be killing someone.
In order to get 100% (which is separate from the main narrative) you must rob stores, complete "rampages" (killing as many as possible in a given time), and even collect hidden packages which I think are statues this time around.
Now, if you want to run around delivering Pizza, only killing criminals with police vehicles, drive people around in taxis, or sell ice cream, you are very welcome to do so. In fact, Vice City even lets you buy businesses to profit from and houses for you to live in.
While GTA: Vice City allows you to do basically anything, if you really wish to play the game you're going to kill a lot of people and you'll be a gangster.
My copy comes Tuesday.
NOLF2 and DooM III are single-player games. Counter-Strike: "Blue Zone" doesn't exist. I think you mean "Condition Zero," which is also a single-player game.
At the time of this post, CS has 85320 players (source). Medal of Honor: AA is in second place. With less than a tenth of the players that CS has.
Recent server data shows that this shift is reflected across most servers, as Counterstrike population is decreasing, RTCW is up a little, and MOH:AA is up dramatically.
You're probably not lying, you're just totally ignorant. I've been following HL for ever (see my site), and today is the first time I've seen the game break 100,000 players largely due to CS.
You can use your anecdotal evidence all you won't, but there is no "shift across most servers." You are absolutely wrong, I'm sorry.
You use a free ISP and got a free dsl modem. This is why MS should offer Xbox Live for free, not the over-price $50. Nevermind that it is in competition with the PS2 and nothing else; the PS2 charges $50 for the actual hardware: equivlancy.
Many ISPs offer free game servers. Except you just made that up, because I have yet to see an ISP market this fact unless we're talking about Speakeasy.net (which doesn't even give out the IPs to their servers, they're mostly clan servers). Apparently ISPs do mind doing this, because they don't do it. Let's pretend we live in a fantasy world where there are free servers by ISPs; they're not very free if you're paying your ISP. With your logic, we could say that Xbox Live's servers are free. Of course, that would be a fair comparison which you simply wouldn't use.
Localized servers. So instead of putting Xbox Live in the hands of Microsoft, you want to bet that your ISP will throw up free Xbox servers for you to play NFL on? We're talking broadband here, you can realistically get a 100ms travel time from your Xbox to MS to another Xbox. Replace realistically with almost always.
So you're saying when Xbox 2 comes out, MS will stop accepting money? You're cynical in all the wrong places. It's also likely that Xbox 2 will play Xbox games like the PS2 does with PSOne games, I see no reason why Xbox Live wouldn't do the same. Otherwise they'd lose money/customers the instant Xbox 2 came out, and Microsoft doesn't like that.
Even though the author seems to dismiss this as "ok", most ppl don't like paying $50 for an online game and getting their A$$ kicked 99% of the time.
You have a perfect idea. That has never been successfully implemented anywhere and magically it's Microsoft's fault. I don't know how long you've been playing games (maybe you're more casual than I), but there is no way you can possibly improve by playing with people who are at the same skill level as you. If there's more than one super-duper player on the server, then you either really suck (which is okay, everyone gets better with time) or for some reason that's a "hardcore" server and you should try another one. Also, some games are team games where certain skills are more focused than others.
BTW, I believe the author was joking. His wombat coordination skills wouldn't really hurt him that much in a football game.
Now sorry if this sounded like a flame, but I just think far too many people treat MS unfairly in every single instance possible. Not only is Xbox Live a far more organized online platform compared to the PS2 (which has already launched, did you notice?), it'll increase the amount of people who have broadband (even by a slim margin), and it had some exciting titles in the future (unlike the PS2, which has a pretty clear calendar for 2003).
But I will tell you that the PS2 is still the better system, and Xbox Live certainly won't get my money until Halo 2. Cheers.
How about the fact that MGS created the genre that this game is a part of? Does that bring up relevance?
Are you saying that you wouldn't know the album title to the songs you haven't heard in a world without mp3's? Or was your post just bragging about how you steal music?
I commend you, and the millions of others!
How To Be An Economist In 24 Days
That you think nerds who follow Slashdot are the mass of the populace? That a teenager who wants to blatently steal his favorite artist's music doesn't consider the political ramifications of the RIAA?
I dislike off-topic bashing like the best of us, but might as well get it out of the way so someone else doesn't try it!
NET, ISS [sic], delays, problems?
PHP has a separate NEWS and CHANGELOG file. News highlights the changes in human-readable format. Changelog, as with any project, doesn't.
I believe much of the quality comes from 64/128-bit floating point precision. I gathered as much from the ATI 9700 launch video, which was also quite impressive.
As much as I think NVIDIA is an honest, good company, I'll hold onto my GF4 Ti4400 until "NV30" 2.
I'm no longer eating up tech demos. Even if they're damn impressive, they're far too future-oriented to seriously invest in.
I hate this news just as much as anyone else, but your example is fairly poor in light of their company profile.
A good example, however, is Linux, which was made from word of mouth and its own merits.
Really! Dude, we've like never heard this before!
Free Software is powerful in many ways, but the idea that you, yourself, can go in and fix decay is kind of silly.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but all OSes rely on abstraction. Abstraction relies on a bit of bloat.
Any OS is going to decay over time without micromanagment. Windows will probably decay even if you're the strictest of system operators because it tries to hide everything from the user. Even if we did have the source to Windows, the FIX would be not including so many useless programs.
Open Source code doesn't solve everything.