Seconded for fucking truth. Nexuiz is the most fun I have had with an open source game in the history of ever. I had a LAN last October wherein we played Nexuiz for most of the night (amidst filesharing, Xbox games, and food and conversation) and it was an absolute blast. The couple of LANs before that, while great in their own right, weren't as cohesive when it came to everyone getting into one game.
I experimented with Cube, but found that it wasn't as seamless for LAN play as Nexuiz, and some of the levels (at least in SP and where bots are concerned) were sadistically difficult. As I described it in a forum post, "Here are 50 monsters. They want to kill you. Here are 5 bullets. You shoot things with them. Here's a rubber ducky. You can maybe try to use it as armor somehow if you're really creative. Have a nice day. Bye."
The great thing about Nexuiz is that it combines:
Variety (there are plenty of levels, weapons, and tactics to keep it interesting for arguably longer than even a UT session, and the grapple can make certain levels positively insane)
New/cutting-edge/recent/advanced/$SYNONYM_FOR_GO OD graphics tech (HDR, dynamic lighting, bloom, etc. for boxen that can handle it), and
Scalability (runs perfectly well on boxen that CAN'T handle the aforementioned glitz) to be playable by just about anyone on just about anything.
One of the problems we had in some of my LANs was that some people's computers, primarily the girls' laptops*, were underpowered for games like CoD, MOHAA, and the like. UT '99 ran fine, but you can only play an 8-year-old game for so long (stop throwing things at me, Starcraft fans, I know it's still awesome and I'm talking FPSes here....Stop throwing things at me, Deus Ex fans....Fine, you win) before you hunger for something new. Yet, when we played Nex, we had (among others):
My G5 Quad 2.5GHzx4, 2.5GB, GeForce 6600/256MB
My brother's AMD64 2.0GHz, 1GB, GeForce 6800/128MB
My AMD64 1.8GHz, 512MB, Mobility Radeon 9600/64MB
My Power Mac G4 867MHz, 1.5GB, Radeon 9800 Pro Mac Ed./128MB
My friend's Pentium M (slow)GHz, (meager)MB, (integrated)/(notenough)
A Macbook and a Compaq notebook, specs unknown to me
And my ancient test box: Pentium 2 400, 640MB, Radeon 9200/256MB in a PCI slot
With the exception of my test box, which lagged pretty severely, Nex ran without a hitch on everyone's system. One person had mouse troubles, but she had the same problem with UT at a previous LAN, and was using a wireless mouse, so I'm chalking that one up to hardware.
On top of that, it's cross-platform Win/Mac/Lin, so nobody's excluded. First person to say "I run BeOS you insensitive clod!" gets slapped with a large trout.
Aaaaanyway, give Nexuiz a shot. It's great. And the blood effects are, put simply, a little frightening for an OSS project where people presumably work on what they like.
* - Yes, I have girls at my LAN parties. Stop looking at me like that. You're creeping me out.
Hence the request for FLAC. My FLAC files average 20-30MB (far smaller than WAV/AIFF) and the tradeoff in CPU power for encoding/decoding is more than acceptable. Testing on an AMD64, encoding a 12-track album takes about 5 minutes or less. Encoding on a G5 Quad (albeit as a single-threaded process) takes even less time.
I was skeptical of "off" formats for a long time, sticking with MP3 for its playability and widespread compatibility. Once I discovered RockBox, though, along with Cog and Foobar2000 (though I'd known about the latter for quite some time due to its uber-lightweight reputation), I was just about an immediate convert to the Brotherhood of FLAC.
Even then, what a lot of people don't realize is that you don't have to play FLAC files as-is if you don't want to. It's great for archiving, thus eliminating the need to tote CDs around everywhere, and can be converted to a lossy (i.e. smaller) format for use on portables. I have a 60GB iPod with RockBox, but even then I don't always load it up with FLAC files to play back on the go. For the kind of headphones I have and am not afraid to take with me (i.e. not my good ones), MP3 sounds just fine. However, for my nice headphones and/or speaker systems at home, FLAC offers CD-perfect quality and still eats up less disk space than uncompressed WAV or AIFF.
Seriously, give FLAC a try. It's free so you have nothing to lose but a little of your time. If you decide it's not worth it, stick with MP3, at least you know that'll play everywhere.
I hate to be the wet blanket here, but what's the deal with this trend toward "versioning" things that don't need to be versioned or for which version numbers make no sense? "Web 2.0?" "Games 3.0?" Especially since as far as I can tell, there's no good goddamn reason to assign arbitrary version numbers to entities which are constantly changing and evolving as it is.
Maybe I'm a curmudgeon or maybe I slept through "Marketroid Bullshit 101," but I fail to see any point in taking something like the web, which is simply a term used to refer to the (arguably) most human-readable facet of the Internet, or games, which come in all shapes and sizes as it is (much like websites) and slap a version number on them. It reeks of "hey, Jim, wanna inflate our stock prices overnight and take that Tahiti vacation we've been eyeing for the past 6 months? Or hey, we could use a few new espresso machines in the managers' lounge"
A game or a website can have a version number. Just keep the damn things off of categories, classes, genres, and other intangible/abstract/nebulous concepts or entities that have no clean-cut and intelligent basis for versioning.
Pretty much off-topic, and I do apologize, but I'm probably not the only one who's curious: what song was it? I've been in your shoes plenty of times, as have many others. Congrats on finally tracking the little bugger down--it's a really great feeling when you find it.
The problem is that in this case, upholding it is actually doing it a disservice as he attempts to stage his ideological attacks against it.
If I were to stand on a soapbox in town square and proclaim that video games are immoral and anti-christian and the spawn of the devil and blah blah blah, the alternate-universe me sitting here and reading/. would agree with you that I'm just exercising my right to free speech.
However, if I were to stand on a soapbox and say all these things about videogames being bad and blah blah blah and so let's ban them, that would be a slightly different story, as where do you draw the line between my right to free speech and/or expression and that of the video game creators? It's kind of a variant of the adage that "your right to swing your fist ends where my face begins." My right to game-bashing ends where the rights of the creators begin. Same with Thompson.
Still, kudos to you for keeping perspective and realizing that yes, there is some greater good in being offended. We need more folks like you who are actually able to grow thicker skin and realize that life entails being offended sometimes.
So then what's the control all about? Yep, you guessed it: money. Money in the long run, money in the short run, it's still all about money in the end.
On a related note, can we also have one for the 10,000,000 corporate logos that appear before every game now? Has anyone else noticed that while in the old (Genesis/SNES/Playstation 1) days pressing Select or Start would easily skip them, they're becoming less and less "Startable?"
Seriously, I do not CARE that a game was "Produced by or under license" from so-and-so corporation. I don't CARE that it includes "MPEG Sofdec" technology. Game booting used to be a 5-second affair, tops. "Nintendo" screen, title screen, press A/Start, and start playing. Now we're lucky if we get to some kind of selectable option inside 30 seconds. Of course, once that's finally done and over with, we have the problem you mentioned. Boring, drawn-out, badly-voiced snore-fests of "storyline" that are so frequently cliche-ridden and forced in that half the time I can't take the game seriously anymore.
What's worse, though, is the fact that the damn logos can't be skipped. At least the story scenes can be skipped by some combination or another of buttons (usually), but if you absolutely HAVE to credit every last programmer, manager, consulting firm, decoding library, function call, line of source code, variable, and the letter J that went into your game, do us one bit of common decency and make the logos skippable. Please? It's getting as bad as UOPed ads on DVDs.
Not technically a Nintendo song, but since the series was on N systems for so long...
Castlevania? I mean, how many titles have found their way to NES, Super NES, Gameboy(Pocket|Color|Pocket Color|Advance|Pocket Advance Color SP|Pocket Color SP Advance Kosher Edition), and the DS? Some of Castlevania's songs would translate fantastically into guitar rock. Hell, some of them already have. "Tragic Prince," anyone?
Sorry to reply to my own post, but it also merits mentioning that the boss is EXTREMELY talkative and, to my knowledge, there is no way to shut off character voice-overs. Couple the repeated loss of the battle with having to hear the boss taunt your character and the battle gets really old, really fast.
Let me start by saying that I played and LOVED the first ZOE, and have finished and LOVE MOST OF the 2nd. Gameplay-wise, the 2nd is a vast improvement, or perhaps refinement, over the first and just plain shines.
Until you reach a certain boss. Those of you who have played the game probably know where I'm going with this.
The boss battle basically consists of fighting against a possessed ally whom you must cure, but CANNOT KILL lest you lose the fight and have to start over. It's essentially a battle of timing, as you have to attack the boss at the same time the boss attacks you, repeat 2-3 times, and then grab hold of it to cure your ally of the virus infecting their ship ("frame" as they're called in the game).
This battle is next to impossible in all but the initial playthrough of the game, and even then it's no picnic. The reason it actually gets harder as you replay the game is that you start over from round 1 with a maxed-out character. This means all special abilities/weapons, max damage, near invulnerability to enemy attacks, etc.
Problem is, when you reach this boss, the boss will die in 2-3 direct hits due to your superpowered ship, yet you're still required to line up the same 9-10 "perfectly timed" hits as in the first time through so you can grab the boss and cure the possession. Add to that the fact that the timing required is ridiculously precise and that the game really, truly seems to cheat half the time (properly-timed attacks wind up hurting the boss instead of opening the window to grab) just to get an edge over you, and all semblance of fun and enjoyment go straight out the window.
Adding insult to injury is the fact that the most fun parts of the game (the 2nd half or a little less), including a couple of amazing battles, are AFTER this maddening boss fight.
I've gotten to the point where I consider the level immediately before the boss (a nifty train chase) to be the de-facto end of the game, and I just turn it off after that. The battle is so horrible it quite effectively ruins--completely and utterly ruins--what is otherwise a great action/adventure title.
I still advocate the use of the term "Defective Restricted Media." Substitute "Music" or "Movie" in place of "Media" if your situation requires that specificity.
Sure, it's far more inflammatory against the purveyors of DRM-infected "product," but I say if they're willing to pull out all the stops then we should be too.
Slashdot Mirror
Seconded for fucking truth. Nexuiz is the most fun I have had with an open source game in the history of ever. I had a LAN last October wherein we played Nexuiz for most of the night (amidst filesharing, Xbox games, and food and conversation) and it was an absolute blast. The couple of LANs before that, while great in their own right, weren't as cohesive when it came to everyone getting into one game.
I experimented with Cube, but found that it wasn't as seamless for LAN play as Nexuiz, and some of the levels (at least in SP and where bots are concerned) were sadistically difficult. As I described it in a forum post, "Here are 50 monsters. They want to kill you. Here are 5 bullets. You shoot things with them. Here's a rubber ducky. You can maybe try to use it as armor somehow if you're really creative. Have a nice day. Bye."
The great thing about Nexuiz is that it combines:
One of the problems we had in some of my LANs was that some people's computers, primarily the girls' laptops*, were underpowered for games like CoD, MOHAA, and the like. UT '99 ran fine, but you can only play an 8-year-old game for so long (stop throwing things at me, Starcraft fans, I know it's still awesome and I'm talking FPSes here. ...Stop throwing things at me, Deus Ex fans. ...Fine, you win) before you hunger for something new. Yet, when we played Nex, we had (among others):
With the exception of my test box, which lagged pretty severely, Nex ran without a hitch on everyone's system. One person had mouse troubles, but she had the same problem with UT at a previous LAN, and was using a wireless mouse, so I'm chalking that one up to hardware.
On top of that, it's cross-platform Win/Mac/Lin, so nobody's excluded. First person to say "I run BeOS you insensitive clod!" gets slapped with a large trout.
Aaaaanyway, give Nexuiz a shot. It's great. And the blood effects are, put simply, a little frightening for an OSS project where people presumably work on what they like.
* - Yes, I have girls at my LAN parties. Stop looking at me like that. You're creeping me out.
Hence the request for FLAC. My FLAC files average 20-30MB (far smaller than WAV/AIFF) and the tradeoff in CPU power for encoding/decoding is more than acceptable. Testing on an AMD64, encoding a 12-track album takes about 5 minutes or less. Encoding on a G5 Quad (albeit as a single-threaded process) takes even less time.
I was skeptical of "off" formats for a long time, sticking with MP3 for its playability and widespread compatibility. Once I discovered RockBox, though, along with Cog and Foobar2000 (though I'd known about the latter for quite some time due to its uber-lightweight reputation), I was just about an immediate convert to the Brotherhood of FLAC.
Even then, what a lot of people don't realize is that you don't have to play FLAC files as-is if you don't want to. It's great for archiving, thus eliminating the need to tote CDs around everywhere, and can be converted to a lossy (i.e. smaller) format for use on portables. I have a 60GB iPod with RockBox, but even then I don't always load it up with FLAC files to play back on the go. For the kind of headphones I have and am not afraid to take with me (i.e. not my good ones), MP3 sounds just fine. However, for my nice headphones and/or speaker systems at home, FLAC offers CD-perfect quality and still eats up less disk space than uncompressed WAV or AIFF.
Seriously, give FLAC a try. It's free so you have nothing to lose but a little of your time. If you decide it's not worth it, stick with MP3, at least you know that'll play everywhere.
I hate to be the wet blanket here, but what's the deal with this trend toward "versioning" things that don't need to be versioned or for which version numbers make no sense? "Web 2.0?" "Games 3.0?" Especially since as far as I can tell, there's no good goddamn reason to assign arbitrary version numbers to entities which are constantly changing and evolving as it is.
Maybe I'm a curmudgeon or maybe I slept through "Marketroid Bullshit 101," but I fail to see any point in taking something like the web, which is simply a term used to refer to the (arguably) most human-readable facet of the Internet, or games, which come in all shapes and sizes as it is (much like websites) and slap a version number on them. It reeks of "hey, Jim, wanna inflate our stock prices overnight and take that Tahiti vacation we've been eyeing for the past 6 months? Or hey, we could use a few new espresso machines in the managers' lounge"
A game or a website can have a version number. Just keep the damn things off of categories, classes, genres, and other intangible/abstract/nebulous concepts or entities that have no clean-cut and intelligent basis for versioning.
Better tell Shelley to brew up some more of that damn fine coffee. And some cherry pie, while they're at it.
Problem is you don't have to respect robots.txt. It's optional, and while it's considered good form to comply a crawler can still say "nope."
Hate to break it to the GP poster, but it probably is a matter of configuring a server to out-and-out block them. Can't say "no" to iptables.
DISC? How very fitting.
Pretty much off-topic, and I do apologize, but I'm probably not the only one who's curious: what song was it? I've been in your shoes plenty of times, as have many others. Congrats on finally tracking the little bugger down--it's a really great feeling when you find it.
The problem is that in this case, upholding it is actually doing it a disservice as he attempts to stage his ideological attacks against it.
If I were to stand on a soapbox in town square and proclaim that video games are immoral and anti-christian and the spawn of the devil and blah blah blah, the alternate-universe me sitting here and reading /. would agree with you that I'm just exercising my right to free speech.
However, if I were to stand on a soapbox and say all these things about videogames being bad and blah blah blah and so let's ban them, that would be a slightly different story, as where do you draw the line between my right to free speech and/or expression and that of the video game creators? It's kind of a variant of the adage that "your right to swing your fist ends where my face begins." My right to game-bashing ends where the rights of the creators begin. Same with Thompson.
Still, kudos to you for keeping perspective and realizing that yes, there is some greater good in being offended. We need more folks like you who are actually able to grow thicker skin and realize that life entails being offended sometimes.
Hey now, Ballmer already speaks out of his ass. Just you wait, 2008 will see the Beta release of Windows Live AssNet.
Well, duh. Why do you think they used to call them Fireballs?
Scientology?
*shrug*
Just a thought. It's not really a religion (scam is more like it) but it's certainly done its share of damage.
So then what's the control all about? Yep, you guessed it: money. Money in the long run, money in the short run, it's still all about money in the end.
I've always used and favoured the (perhaps more accurate, definitely more inflammatory)
Defective
Restricted (or restrictive)
Media
You can substitute "Music" or "Movie" for "Media" where suitable as well.
SOrry, wroNg answer. Please trY again.
Well, one could say this adds a whole new level of meaning to "Playing with your Wii."
Okay, there, the joke's been made. On with the serious discussion!
Or not.
Yeah... now long would it take to pencil a screen full of data vs. cut/paste?
Wrong question. The correct question is:
How much is it worth to them to pencil a whole screen full of data?
When we're talking about trade secrets worth (m|b|tr)illions of $CURRENCYUNITs, a little writer's cramp is a small price to pay.
I liked Cloud (from FFVII) a lot more back when it was unclear what he was
You mean when you could conceivably imagine that he was, in fact, a man?
rather than now, when he has been remade into a more clearly japanese appearance.
Oh.
On a related note, can we also have one for the 10,000,000 corporate logos that appear before every game now? Has anyone else noticed that while in the old (Genesis/SNES/Playstation 1) days pressing Select or Start would easily skip them, they're becoming less and less "Startable?"
Seriously, I do not CARE that a game was "Produced by or under license" from so-and-so corporation. I don't CARE that it includes "MPEG Sofdec" technology. Game booting used to be a 5-second affair, tops. "Nintendo" screen, title screen, press A/Start, and start playing. Now we're lucky if we get to some kind of selectable option inside 30 seconds. Of course, once that's finally done and over with, we have the problem you mentioned. Boring, drawn-out, badly-voiced snore-fests of "storyline" that are so frequently cliche-ridden and forced in that half the time I can't take the game seriously anymore.
What's worse, though, is the fact that the damn logos can't be skipped. At least the story scenes can be skipped by some combination or another of buttons (usually), but if you absolutely HAVE to credit every last programmer, manager, consulting firm, decoding library, function call, line of source code, variable, and the letter J that went into your game, do us one bit of common decency and make the logos skippable. Please? It's getting as bad as UOPed ads on DVDs.
Not technically a Nintendo song, but since the series was on N systems for so long... Castlevania? I mean, how many titles have found their way to NES, Super NES, Gameboy(Pocket|Color|Pocket Color|Advance|Pocket Advance Color SP|Pocket Color SP Advance Kosher Edition), and the DS? Some of Castlevania's songs would translate fantastically into guitar rock. Hell, some of them already have. "Tragic Prince," anyone?
-1 Morrowind will work just as well.
Sorry to reply to my own post, but it also merits mentioning that the boss is EXTREMELY talkative and, to my knowledge, there is no way to shut off character voice-overs. Couple the repeated loss of the battle with having to hear the boss taunt your character and the battle gets really old, really fast.
Let me start by saying that I played and LOVED the first ZOE, and have finished and LOVE MOST OF the 2nd. Gameplay-wise, the 2nd is a vast improvement, or perhaps refinement, over the first and just plain shines.
Until you reach a certain boss. Those of you who have played the game probably know where I'm going with this.
The boss battle basically consists of fighting against a possessed ally whom you must cure, but CANNOT KILL lest you lose the fight and have to start over. It's essentially a battle of timing, as you have to attack the boss at the same time the boss attacks you, repeat 2-3 times, and then grab hold of it to cure your ally of the virus infecting their ship ("frame" as they're called in the game).
This battle is next to impossible in all but the initial playthrough of the game, and even then it's no picnic. The reason it actually gets harder as you replay the game is that you start over from round 1 with a maxed-out character. This means all special abilities/weapons, max damage, near invulnerability to enemy attacks, etc.
Problem is, when you reach this boss, the boss will die in 2-3 direct hits due to your superpowered ship, yet you're still required to line up the same 9-10 "perfectly timed" hits as in the first time through so you can grab the boss and cure the possession. Add to that the fact that the timing required is ridiculously precise and that the game really, truly seems to cheat half the time (properly-timed attacks wind up hurting the boss instead of opening the window to grab) just to get an edge over you, and all semblance of fun and enjoyment go straight out the window.
Adding insult to injury is the fact that the most fun parts of the game (the 2nd half or a little less), including a couple of amazing battles, are AFTER this maddening boss fight.
I've gotten to the point where I consider the level immediately before the boss (a nifty train chase) to be the de-facto end of the game, and I just turn it off after that. The battle is so horrible it quite effectively ruins--completely and utterly ruins--what is otherwise a great action/adventure title.
They have no chance to hide make their time.
With titles like:
-Rondo of Blood
-Dawn of Sorrow
-Portait of Ruin
-Lament of Innocence
-Curse of Darkness
I'm just waiting for them to cut to the chase and release Castlevania: Bad Things of General Unpleasantness.
I still advocate the use of the term "Defective Restricted Media." Substitute "Music" or "Movie" in place of "Media" if your situation requires that specificity.
Sure, it's far more inflammatory against the purveyors of DRM-infected "product," but I say if they're willing to pull out all the stops then we should be too.