Umm Counterstrike is based on the Half Life engine, which came out before Quake III did. Counterstrike has much lower system requirements than Quake III does.
"I don't think you need to blatantly summarize your opinion in a pre-chewed paragraph of "this is good and that is bad" to make what you've written, analysis. Reading Turner's story about the emotions the game inspired is more than enough to give me a taste of the game and certainly a idea of what the writer thought of it."
The whole point of reading a review is to determine whether we will like a game or not if we buy it. Turner's review was useless in that regard, as it gave little basis for comparison with other games except on an emotional basis.
Even film has avoided these useless "narrative" reviews in lieu of more objective criteria - and there is much less to objectively criticise in films than there is in games. I imagine that vast majority of gamers do not want to consult the Delphic oracle regarding decisions involving $50.
Certainly, game reviews have problems - there's obviously pressure on reviewers to not give bad reviews or risk losing the steady supply of free games from the game maker, and there have been instances of reviewers being outright bribed not to give games shitty reviews. But I doubt many were complaining that existing game reviews were far too terse and lucid for the teenager's refined literary tastes.
I go to a small liberal-arts college, and I have an unsecured wireless access point hooked up to my network drop. The school has a campus-wide wireless network as well.
Why would I do such a thing?
Well, for one thing, being a dungeon, my dorm's walls are so damn thick that I can't get reception inside my dorm, and nobody can get reception from outside my door.
I'd secure it, but there's not really much of a point, considering that the dorm's in the middle of the campus, and the walls of my dorm are so thick that I can't even detect my router from 20 feet away outside the dorm. Anyone who wants to freeload off of it is welcome, if you're willing to squat outside my locked door praying to whatever gods that govern radio to allow you to surf.
Mr. Sinus and Mystery Science are one syllable and a slight intonation apart from each other - pronounce both names out loud, the names of the groups are almost identical.
If you're going to almost exactly steal someone's idea, don't do it like these guys did. If the guys who made Mister Sinus don't get their asses kicked in court, something's wrong with copyright law.
I have a really expensive laptop that hasn't gotten stolen yet. Here are some tips:
1. Brand-name computers are easier to sell. People buying fenced stuff will usually go "WTF is this crap" if it doesn't have the Dell logo on front.
2. LOCK YOUR DOOR.
3. WRITE DOWN YOUR MAC ADDRESS.
4. Get along with your roommate - if he parties, go out and party with him a couple of times, if he plays lan games, play a couple of lan games with him. If you're friends with your roommate, making compromises will be a lot easier - I mean, it's much less presumptious to stumble into your dorm at 4:30 AM after hours of drinking if your roommate's been out doing the same thing.
Fuck the video games - go party. There is a time and place for being a drunk asshole, and that place and time is college. Go hog-wild - get all that shit out of your system then.
This isn't that hard.
Filter MAC addresses. Don't broadcast your SSID. Enable 128-bit WEP encryption.
Voila, your wireless network is useless to a wardriver and a pain in the ass to anyone who wants to legitimately hack into it and steal your data in particular.
Phishing scams have no way to determine whether the password you enter is correct or incorrect.
If you enter in an incorrect password/username combo and the site redirects you to the real site's password and login prompt or does something other than telling you your username/password combo is incorrect, then you're definitely dealing with a phishing scam.
Of course, you can be clever and have the scam always return "wrong username/password." If the scam's set up to do that, the only way to tell that it's a scam is to enter... your correct password and username. Clever, eh?
So if your password "doesn't work" for an indefinite period, and then suddenly starts working again when you actually go to the site that requires your name/password via google, do yourself a favor and change your damn password.
I had this idea. I so had this idea. It was going to be great. I was going America my naked ass on national TV live at 7:00 PM next month. I'd already worked out my monologue and everything.
I leveled Monk up to 31, Paladin up to 43, Warrior up to 21 and Thief up to 14.
The game just sucks at the higher levels. You spend so often killing the same stupid bullshit that you become an expert - "[Warrior,] this is a crawler. Switch to 2-h axe and use shield break for the love of god." "Oh no, I'm going to use 2 axes because I'm an uber warrior yadda yadda yadda"
The main problem is that leveling in that game takes absolutely no skill at all. If you spend long enough playing that game, YOU WILL LEVEL. In fact, there's a guy on one server that is his own static party - he controls five characters using five keyboards, and pays for five accounts. Last time I played, he was up to level 43 on all his characters.
It was boring bullshit - for every party full of decent people I got into, there'd be five that were barely passable, and three that'd flat out sucked. And considering that sometimes I could log on for hours and not get a party...
Even at the lower levels the game's not all that fun. You're just impelled to keep going by thinking that if you quit, you'll have wasted all the time you spent playing in the first place. I really didn't do ANYTHING for months during my senior year of high school but play this game, and I'm much worse off for it.
Just say no to MMORPGS. It's like having a gambling addiction that doesn't cost money - you waste so much more time because you DON'T hit a bottoming out point for that much longer.
The reason why Apple avoided licensing the OS to other companies are because its primary revenue generator is its hardware division: when Apple licensed its OS to PowerComputing and Umac and company, its hardware sales declined, so the company started losing money. Apple's software sales were and are essentially meaningless to its bottom line because it is selling an OS that can only be used by computers that Apple itself is selling.
Apple was and is really a hardware company, not a software company. The motorola platform would have had to supplant the x86 platform in order for it to be successful, and indeed, there's a rumor that there was such a port created at one point in Apple's history, but Apple simply wasn't willing to lose its hardware revenue.
If you have a processor that supports NX, SP2 will not be compatible with some programs, especially dynamic recompilers.
As R. Belmont pointed out to me on a different message board, dynamic recompilers allocate memory, fill it with x86 instructions, and then jump to it. NX specifically prohibits executing allocated memory, so dynamic recompilers should crash in SP2 on processors that support NX.
Expect this feature to break many current emulators (Mame will be fine.) The feature supposedly can be turned off in Windows, but since I don't have a processor that supports NX, I don't know where one would do so in the interface. The newer Athlon chips - specifically, the Athlon 64's, and future Pentium 4s, support NX, so keep that in mind when upgrading to SP2.
There's a reason why people don't usually use Raid-0 past 2 drives:
If one drive fails - THEY ALL FAIL. Your data is gone, deceased. It will be ex-data.
All the time you save having windows boot up in 3 seconds instead of 6 (which can be solved easily by never turning the computer off ever) will be nuked by having to re-install it later when one of the hard drives fails.
And seriously, what the hell are you going to do with 480 gb of space, anyway?
Seriously - what the hell is up with Computer equipment prices in England? Is their economy so strong that $5519.37 is a reasonable price for a 3.6 ghz P4 with a Radeon X800?
This isn't the first time I've noticed this absurdity - I've read reviews of English kit before, and it's always ludicriously overpriced. Hardware sellers are making a killing off of the lot of you.
English slashdotters, is there some sort of law or something that says you HAVE to buy computer stuff in the UK? Seriously, just buy all your computer stuff from the US, but buy an English AC adapter and an English keyboard that actually has the pound key on it. You'll save a ton of money.
I mean the Pentium-M in the above post. No point in going past a 1.7 ghz Pentium-M with a Radeon 9700, all games will be GPU bound using any faster processor.
For whatever amount of money you spend on your laptop, a desktop built with the same amount of money will be roughly 1.5x - 2x as powerful, no contest.
However, you can still have a very decent gaming experience with a laptop.
First decision - Screen Size.
If you get a laptop that has a widescreen, some games will support it natively - but MOST WON'T. Either your game will be distorted, or you'll have vertical bars on the side of your game. Look for the W in front of the description to figure out whether a laptop is widescreen or not.
Widescreen IS actually better for playing DVDs and actually doing real work though. The best screen I've ever seen on a computer, ever, was on a widescreen SONY VAIO with that weird reflective technology. Look around in CompUSA or Circuit City for one of those, it's really amazing looking.
Second decision - Screen resolution:
If you play games at the native resolution of the laptop, they will look sharper. This is a warning for you folks looking at laptops with a screen resolution of 1450 x 1050 - not many games support that resolution natively. The lower the native resolution of the screen, the better your framerate will be, but the games will look worse - but not as bad on a laptop that's actually high res, but displaying in low-res.
Third decision - CPU.
Basically, you have three choices - you spend a lot of money on a Pentium 4-M that's super-fast, but chews up batteries in mere minutes, you spend some money on an AMD Athlon 64 laptop that gets good performance and "decent" battery life, or you spend a lot of money on a Pentium-M that gets good performance and excellent battery life.
Most games aren't CPU dependant these days - if you get a mobility Radeon 9700, there's no earthly reason to get a processor that's faster than a Pentium-M at 1.7 ghz.
Fourth decision: GPU
If possible, get a Mobility Radeon 9800 when that comes out. That thing is based off of the desktop Radeon X800, and is almost 80% faster than the Mobility Radeon 9700, which is basically a Radeon 9600 XT, and the best mobile gpu you can get right now. Don't bother with Nvidia - it can't compete performance-wise with ATI chipsets on laptops.
Fifth decision: RAM size. 512 mb is sufficient for most purposes, and you really won't notice the difference much by going higher. 1 gig is probably overkill, but if it's cheap enough, then why not?
Regarding hard drives, I would go for slower-but-bigger over faster-but-smaller. Sure, the load times will be longer, but a faster hard drive will chew up batteries. Don't get a RAID array on your laptop, that's a really, really bad idea.
For 2k, go with a Pentium at 1.7 ghz with a mobility radeon 9700 with 512 mb of RAM, a 15-inch SXGA+ screen, and a Radeon 9700 card - I know someone who's played through Doom III on one of those using only a touchpad. It should play all currently released games very well.
Frankly, I think typing's more important than basic application skills because basic applications are pretty easy to pick up. My first computer was an ancient pre-windows monstrosity that was a left-over from my dad's office - hell, I don't think it was even using MS-DOS.
The most interesting thing about it was that it pretty much prepared me entirely for HTML, because you had to enter in tags for every single text style there was.
Remember, this was an ancient, pre-windows word processor with no mouse and no manual - despite that, I managed to get it to print, to spellcheck, and I also figured out how to use all the tages, and I'd never even seen the OS before - hell, the only previous computer experience I had was playing games on the Apple II at school.
Frankly, I don't even remember a time when I had to sit down and "learn how to use Word." The program goes out of its way to tell you how to use its features, and if you don't like its help, it tells you how to turn the help off. What kind of idiots are we raising that can't figure out "saving and loading" and "changing font sizes" WITH A COMPUTER MANUAL PRESENT?
Seriously, it's not that damn hard - you read the manual from cover to cover, you know how to use the program. This isn't a brilliant or novel concept - a bright third grader could figure this all out.
The amount of Doom III piracy going on is absolutely sickening.
A DAY BEFORE THE OFFICIAL LAUNCH, between the three torrents on suprnova there were 60,000 people downloading Doom III. This is ignoring the people who will dupe CDs and sell them on the streets of Hong Kong, the people who copy them off friends, and the people who get Doom III off of IRC/Kazaa/Hotline/Gnutella.
If you search Doom III in google, Suprnova comes up on the right side as an affiliate link "download Doom III from this link." If nothing else, if suprnova were an open secret in the g**k community before, it's about to go fucking mainstream.
This is fucking disgusting. More people will have pirated Doom III by Friday than many PC games even ever SELL in total.
I will admit that part of the problem is that ID hasn't released a demo, so no one has any way of knowing whether the game will run on their systems or not. And all the news coverage going "Sure, this game runs just fine on an Alienware 3.0 ghz P4 with a Radeon 9800 pro, although it does make my machine feel a little mediocre" (gamespy) really honestly is scaring the fuck out of me.
I'm buying this game though. I'll be fucked if the sales of this game make the beancounters realize that the only games that sell are the ones with secure multiplayer-only play. If piracy continues at the current rate, companies will start neglecting single player play and concentrating entirely on multiplayer play, simply because single player games are a million times easier to steal.
Piracy could easily kill entire genres. We might not get another Max Payne 2 or a Painkiller if the rate of piracy keeps increasing.
Don't pull that "I always buy games after I download them, so piracy doesn't really matter" bullshit. I've never done it before, I don't know anyone who does it, and it makes no rational sense to do so anyway. Pirates usually only actually purchase MMORPGS or games with secure online play - that's why you see City of Heroes and Final Fantasy XI and Evercrack and Counterstrike and such at the top of the sales charts, since everyone who would ordinarily "download and try the game first" simply is forced to buy the damn game if they want to play it.
Go ahead, keep on bittorrenting Doom III, you wankers. You're killing gaming as we know it. A few more years and there will BE no more Splinter Cells or Painkillers or Max Paynes or Far Crys any other games with godly single player modes but no online play.
I'm buying Doom III tomorrow when it finally comes out in my area. Good riddence to those whom this is addressed.
Deus Ex's system requirements were unreasonable when the game came out, but the GOTY edition on just about any modern hardware runs great - same with Morrowind, that game on highest settings can still tax a pretty strong computer.
Serious Sam and Serious Sam II don't seem to have aged at all, and run spectacularly well on modern hardware.
a. A screenshot wouldn't have convincing drop-down toolbars.
b. More importantly, look at the bottom with the security certificate. I've seen much, much less convincing phishing schemes work than this one.
If it were just a screenshot the menus and security certificate dealee wouldn't work at all - but they look and work virtually identical to the firefox config now. Click on the security panel and watch as a window with a TABBED INTERFACE IDENTICAL TO FIREFOX'S comes up.
True, you can disable some stuff in javascript to make this completely ineffective, but it's damn scary.
I can't name a single worthwhile site that's IE only other than windows update. Most sites that fail do so because Firefox is honestly reporting that it is, in fact, Mozilla Firefox - set it to tell the site that it's IE and there's no problem.
Most modern PC games use engines bought from another company - for example:
Lineage 2 Unreal 2 Postal 2 Deus Ex 2 Thief 3 and probably a whole bunch of others all just used modified versions of the Unreal Warfare Engine.
The companies that make 3d engines from scratch usually are either the people selling the other game-makers those particular 3d engines, or companies that have the necessary expertise to make a game engine and don't want to have to pay an ungodly sum of money to licence someone else's engine. Companies reuse all the code they can - their old game code usually a. works, and b. has already been debugged, so it's predictable.
As for open sourcing game engines, games are pretty much the worst case scenario for open-source development - to begin with, even assuming that your complex real-time 3d engine's code is written in perfect coding style and is commented profusely and the developers have meticulously documented every single feature, it still requires an extremely uncommon amount of expertise to modify usefully - it's too easy to attempt an optimization and have it suddenly break every other system you're trying to run the damn game on but the one you're making the changes on. It's difficult enough to get the damn thing to run faster even if it's your goddamn full time job.
Plus, open sourcing a game engine by definition means it's impossible to sell - and the makers of the various Unreal engines have made untold amounts of money selling Unreal engines to people. Again, there are open-source game-kits out there, but I don't know of any commercial games that have been released using open source game-kits.
PC games aren't optimized any less than console games are - the problem is that there are an almost infinite number of PC hardware combinations, whereas all versions of a specific console are usually completely compatible with each other. You need to get your game to play nice with all the various ATI and NVIDIA cards, you need to see whether optimizing the game for a p4 screws up compatibility with other processors - fun fact, the Unreal Engine has a known bug with the Pentium-M. The Pentium-M has this speed-step feature where when the processor isn't under load, the processor slows down to 600 mhz, but when the processor is under load, it speeds up to 1.x ghz. Well, Unreal adjusts its timing based on the CURRENT speed of the processor, not the actual speed, and so if you play Splinter Cell or Deus Ex on a Centrino laptop, the game will run overclocked, meaning the games will play up to 3.3% as fast as the game designers intended.
This also leads into why "bedroom programming" has fallen by the wayside. Sure, there are some good freeware games, but computer systems simply have gotten a lot more complicated. 3d games are a lot harder to make than 2d games if you start from scratch. Sure, 3d games became popular because companies realized making a game in 3d could be a lot cheaper because you didn't have to pay an artist to draw every frame by hand. Don't get me wrong - you can still make a fun, arcade-style 2d shooter or whatever and have it be awesome and release it to the world as shareware, but still, consider that the odds of you being the one person who can code, draw, write music, make sound effects, and be competent at designing the whole package is very, very slim. The commodore 64 and such were all extremely low res (comparatively) in terms of graphics and sound, so you could get away with inexpert production then - but hell, from today's perpective most of those games look like crap.
The best way to get good games is not to simply walk into the store and pick whatever's cover looks best - just go to gamerankings or metacritic or whatever and get a general feel for how the game reviewers have received the game, and make your decision based upon that. So many good games have come out in the past few years that it's practically impossible to play them all.
As for open source, I'd be inclined to think open s
Slashdot Mirror
Umm Counterstrike is based on the Half Life engine, which came out before Quake III did. Counterstrike has much lower system requirements than Quake III does.
I don't want to be a dick but your error per sentence rate is over 1.
The Gameboy Advance is perfectly capable of playing NES games at full speed, as is the DS.
"I don't think you need to blatantly summarize your opinion in a pre-chewed paragraph of "this is good and that is bad" to make what you've written, analysis. Reading Turner's story about the emotions the game inspired is more than enough to give me a taste of the game and certainly a idea of what the writer thought of it."
The whole point of reading a review is to determine whether we will like a game or not if we buy it. Turner's review was useless in that regard, as it gave little basis for comparison with other games except on an emotional basis.
Even film has avoided these useless "narrative" reviews in lieu of more objective criteria - and there is much less to objectively criticise in films than there is in games. I imagine that vast majority of gamers do not want to consult the Delphic oracle regarding decisions involving $50.
Certainly, game reviews have problems - there's obviously pressure on reviewers to not give bad reviews or risk losing the steady supply of free games from the game maker, and there have been instances of reviewers being outright bribed not to give games shitty reviews. But I doubt many were complaining that existing game reviews were far too terse and lucid for the teenager's refined literary tastes.
Umm... Aren't you thinking of Halo?
I go to a small liberal-arts college, and I have an unsecured wireless access point hooked up to my network drop. The school has a campus-wide wireless network as well. Why would I do such a thing? Well, for one thing, being a dungeon, my dorm's walls are so damn thick that I can't get reception inside my dorm, and nobody can get reception from outside my door. I'd secure it, but there's not really much of a point, considering that the dorm's in the middle of the campus, and the walls of my dorm are so thick that I can't even detect my router from 20 feet away outside the dorm. Anyone who wants to freeload off of it is welcome, if you're willing to squat outside my locked door praying to whatever gods that govern radio to allow you to surf.
Mr. Sinus and Mystery Science are one syllable and a slight intonation apart from each other - pronounce both names out loud, the names of the groups are almost identical. If you're going to almost exactly steal someone's idea, don't do it like these guys did. If the guys who made Mister Sinus don't get their asses kicked in court, something's wrong with copyright law.
I have a really expensive laptop that hasn't gotten stolen yet. Here are some tips: 1. Brand-name computers are easier to sell. People buying fenced stuff will usually go "WTF is this crap" if it doesn't have the Dell logo on front. 2. LOCK YOUR DOOR. 3. WRITE DOWN YOUR MAC ADDRESS. 4. Get along with your roommate - if he parties, go out and party with him a couple of times, if he plays lan games, play a couple of lan games with him. If you're friends with your roommate, making compromises will be a lot easier - I mean, it's much less presumptious to stumble into your dorm at 4:30 AM after hours of drinking if your roommate's been out doing the same thing. Fuck the video games - go party. There is a time and place for being a drunk asshole, and that place and time is college. Go hog-wild - get all that shit out of your system then.
This isn't that hard. Filter MAC addresses. Don't broadcast your SSID. Enable 128-bit WEP encryption. Voila, your wireless network is useless to a wardriver and a pain in the ass to anyone who wants to legitimately hack into it and steal your data in particular.
Phishing scams have no way to determine whether the password you enter is correct or incorrect.
If you enter in an incorrect password/username combo and the site redirects you to the real site's password and login prompt or does something other than telling you your username/password combo is incorrect, then you're definitely dealing with a phishing scam.
Of course, you can be clever and have the scam always return "wrong username/password." If the scam's set up to do that, the only way to tell that it's a scam is to enter... your correct password and username. Clever, eh?
So if your password "doesn't work" for an indefinite period, and then suddenly starts working again when you actually go to the site that requires your name/password via google, do yourself a favor and change your damn password.
I had this idea. I so had this idea. It was going to be great. I was going America my naked ass on national TV live at 7:00 PM next month. I'd already worked out my monologue and everything.
Bastards.
I played FFXI for months.
I leveled Monk up to 31, Paladin up to 43, Warrior up to 21 and Thief up to 14.
The game just sucks at the higher levels. You spend so often killing the same stupid bullshit that you become an expert -
"[Warrior,] this is a crawler. Switch to 2-h axe and use shield break for the love of god." "Oh no, I'm going to use 2 axes because I'm an uber warrior yadda yadda yadda"
The main problem is that leveling in that game takes absolutely no skill at all. If you spend long enough playing that game, YOU WILL LEVEL. In fact, there's a guy on one server that is his own static party - he controls five characters using five keyboards, and pays for five accounts. Last time I played, he was up to level 43 on all his characters.
It was boring bullshit - for every party full of decent people I got into, there'd be five that were barely passable, and three that'd flat out sucked. And considering that sometimes I could log on for hours and not get a party...
Even at the lower levels the game's not all that fun. You're just impelled to keep going by thinking that if you quit, you'll have wasted all the time you spent playing in the first place. I really didn't do ANYTHING for months during my senior year of high school but play this game, and I'm much worse off for it.
Just say no to MMORPGS. It's like having a gambling addiction that doesn't cost money - you waste so much more time because you DON'T hit a bottoming out point for that much longer.
The reason why Apple avoided licensing the OS to other companies are because its primary revenue generator is its hardware division: when Apple licensed its OS to PowerComputing and Umac and company, its hardware sales declined, so the company started losing money. Apple's software sales were and are essentially meaningless to its bottom line because it is selling an OS that can only be used by computers that Apple itself is selling.
Apple was and is really a hardware company, not a software company. The motorola platform would have had to supplant the x86 platform in order for it to be successful, and indeed, there's a rumor that there was such a port created at one point in Apple's history, but Apple simply wasn't willing to lose its hardware revenue.
One of MAME's authors works at Microsoft, so he's been able to test it against the new service pack.
If you have a processor that supports NX, SP2 will not be compatible with some programs, especially dynamic recompilers.
As R. Belmont pointed out to me on a different message board, dynamic recompilers allocate memory, fill it with x86 instructions, and then jump to it. NX specifically prohibits executing allocated memory, so dynamic recompilers should crash in SP2 on processors that support NX.
Expect this feature to break many current emulators (Mame will be fine.) The feature supposedly can be turned off in Windows, but since I don't have a processor that supports NX, I don't know where one would do so in the interface. The newer Athlon chips - specifically, the Athlon 64's, and future Pentium 4s, support NX, so keep that in mind when upgrading to SP2.
There's a reason why people don't usually use Raid-0 past 2 drives:
If one drive fails - THEY ALL FAIL. Your data is gone, deceased. It will be ex-data.
All the time you save having windows boot up in 3 seconds instead of 6 (which can be solved easily by never turning the computer off ever) will be nuked by having to re-install it later when one of the hard drives fails.
And seriously, what the hell are you going to do with 480 gb of space, anyway?
Seriously - what the hell is up with Computer equipment prices in England? Is their economy so strong that $5519.37 is a reasonable price for a 3.6 ghz P4 with a Radeon X800?
This isn't the first time I've noticed this absurdity - I've read reviews of English kit before, and it's always ludicriously overpriced. Hardware sellers are making a killing off of the lot of you.
English slashdotters, is there some sort of law or something that says you HAVE to buy computer stuff in the UK? Seriously, just buy all your computer stuff from the US, but buy an English AC adapter and an English keyboard that actually has the pound key on it. You'll save a ton of money.
I mean the Pentium-M in the above post. No point in going past a 1.7 ghz Pentium-M with a Radeon 9700, all games will be GPU bound using any faster processor.
First, understand this -
For whatever amount of money you spend on your laptop, a desktop built with the same amount of money will be roughly 1.5x - 2x as powerful, no contest.
However, you can still have a very decent gaming experience with a laptop.
First decision - Screen Size.
If you get a laptop that has a widescreen, some games will support it natively - but MOST WON'T. Either your game will be distorted, or you'll have vertical bars on the side of your game. Look for the W in front of the description to figure out whether a laptop is widescreen or not.
Widescreen IS actually better for playing DVDs and actually doing real work though. The best screen I've ever seen on a computer, ever, was on a widescreen SONY VAIO with that weird reflective technology. Look around in CompUSA or Circuit City for one of those, it's really amazing looking.
Second decision - Screen resolution:
If you play games at the native resolution of the laptop, they will look sharper. This is a warning for you folks looking at laptops with a screen resolution of 1450 x 1050 - not many games support that resolution natively. The lower the native resolution of the screen, the better your framerate will be, but the games will look worse - but not as bad on a laptop that's actually high res, but displaying in low-res.
Third decision - CPU.
Basically, you have three choices - you spend a lot of money on a Pentium 4-M that's super-fast, but chews up batteries in mere minutes, you spend some money on an AMD Athlon 64 laptop that gets good performance and "decent" battery life, or you spend a lot of money on a Pentium-M that gets good performance and excellent battery life.
Most games aren't CPU dependant these days - if you get a mobility Radeon 9700, there's no earthly reason to get a processor that's faster than a Pentium-M at 1.7 ghz.
Fourth decision: GPU
If possible, get a Mobility Radeon 9800 when that comes out. That thing is based off of the desktop Radeon X800, and is almost 80% faster than the Mobility Radeon 9700, which is basically a Radeon 9600 XT, and the best mobile gpu you can get right now. Don't bother with Nvidia - it can't compete performance-wise with ATI chipsets on laptops.
Fifth decision: RAM size. 512 mb is sufficient for most purposes, and you really won't notice the difference much by going higher. 1 gig is probably overkill, but if it's cheap enough, then why not?
Regarding hard drives, I would go for slower-but-bigger over faster-but-smaller. Sure, the load times will be longer, but a faster hard drive will chew up batteries. Don't get a RAID array on your laptop, that's a really, really bad idea.
For 2k, go with a Pentium at 1.7 ghz with a mobility radeon 9700 with 512 mb of RAM, a 15-inch SXGA+ screen, and a Radeon 9700 card - I know someone who's played through Doom III on one of those using only a touchpad. It should play all currently released games very well.
Frankly, I think typing's more important than basic application skills because basic applications are pretty easy to pick up. My first computer was an ancient pre-windows monstrosity that was a left-over from my dad's office - hell, I don't think it was even using MS-DOS.
The most interesting thing about it was that it pretty much prepared me entirely for HTML, because you had to enter in tags for every single text style there was.
Remember, this was an ancient, pre-windows word processor with no mouse and no manual - despite that, I managed to get it to print, to spellcheck, and I also figured out how to use all the tages, and I'd never even seen the OS before - hell, the only previous computer experience I had was playing games on the Apple II at school.
Frankly, I don't even remember a time when I had to sit down and "learn how to use Word." The program goes out of its way to tell you how to use its features, and if you don't like its help, it tells you how to turn the help off. What kind of idiots are we raising that can't figure out "saving and loading" and "changing font sizes" WITH A COMPUTER MANUAL PRESENT?
Seriously, it's not that damn hard - you read the manual from cover to cover, you know how to use the program. This isn't a brilliant or novel concept - a bright third grader could figure this all out.
The amount of Doom III piracy going on is absolutely sickening.
A DAY BEFORE THE OFFICIAL LAUNCH, between the three torrents on suprnova there were 60,000 people downloading Doom III. This is ignoring the people who will dupe CDs and sell them on the streets of Hong Kong, the people who copy them off friends, and the people who get Doom III off of IRC/Kazaa/Hotline/Gnutella.
If you search Doom III in google, Suprnova comes up on the right side as an affiliate link "download Doom III from this link." If nothing else, if suprnova were an open secret in the g**k community before, it's about to go fucking mainstream.
This is fucking disgusting. More people will have pirated Doom III by Friday than many PC games even ever SELL in total.
I will admit that part of the problem is that ID hasn't released a demo, so no one has any way of knowing whether the game will run on their systems or not. And all the news coverage going "Sure, this game runs just fine on an Alienware 3.0 ghz P4 with a Radeon 9800 pro, although it does make my machine feel a little mediocre" (gamespy) really honestly is scaring the fuck out of me.
I'm buying this game though. I'll be fucked if the sales of this game make the beancounters realize that the only games that sell are the ones with secure multiplayer-only play. If piracy continues at the current rate, companies will start neglecting single player play and concentrating entirely on multiplayer play, simply because single player games are a million times easier to steal.
Piracy could easily kill entire genres. We might not get another Max Payne 2 or a Painkiller if the rate of piracy keeps increasing.
Don't pull that "I always buy games after I download them, so piracy doesn't really matter" bullshit. I've never done it before, I don't know anyone who does it, and it makes no rational sense to do so anyway. Pirates usually only actually purchase MMORPGS or games with secure online play - that's why you see City of Heroes and Final Fantasy XI and Evercrack and Counterstrike and such at the top of the sales charts, since everyone who would ordinarily "download and try the game first" simply is forced to buy the damn game if they want to play it.
Go ahead, keep on bittorrenting Doom III, you wankers. You're killing gaming as we know it. A few more years and there will BE no more Splinter Cells or Painkillers or Max Paynes or Far Crys any other games with godly single player modes but no online play.
I'm buying Doom III tomorrow when it finally comes out in my area. Good riddence to those whom this is addressed.
Deus Ex's system requirements were unreasonable when the game came out, but the GOTY edition on just about any modern hardware runs great - same with Morrowind, that game on highest settings can still tax a pretty strong computer.
Serious Sam and Serious Sam II don't seem to have aged at all, and run spectacularly well on modern hardware.
You're not being observant.
a. A screenshot wouldn't have convincing drop-down toolbars.
b. More importantly, look at the bottom with the security certificate. I've seen much, much less convincing phishing schemes work than this one.
If it were just a screenshot the menus and security certificate dealee wouldn't work at all - but they look and work virtually identical to the firefox config now. Click on the security panel and watch as a window with a TABBED INTERFACE IDENTICAL TO FIREFOX'S comes up.
True, you can disable some stuff in javascript to make this completely ineffective, but it's damn scary.
I can't name a single worthwhile site that's IE only other than windows update. Most sites that fail do so because Firefox is honestly reporting that it is, in fact, Mozilla Firefox - set it to tell the site that it's IE and there's no problem.
Most modern PC games use engines bought from another company - for example:
Lineage 2
Unreal 2
Postal 2
Deus Ex 2
Thief 3
and probably a whole bunch of others all just used modified versions of the Unreal Warfare Engine.
The companies that make 3d engines from scratch usually are either the people selling the other game-makers those particular 3d engines, or companies that have the necessary expertise to make a game engine and don't want to have to pay an ungodly sum of money to licence someone else's engine. Companies reuse all the code they can - their old game code usually a. works, and b. has already been debugged, so it's predictable.
As for open sourcing game engines, games are pretty much the worst case scenario for open-source development - to begin with, even assuming that your complex real-time 3d engine's code is written in perfect coding style and is commented profusely and the developers have meticulously documented every single feature, it still requires an extremely uncommon amount of expertise to modify usefully - it's too easy to attempt an optimization and have it suddenly break every other system you're trying to run the damn game on but the one you're making the changes on. It's difficult enough to get the damn thing to run faster even if it's your goddamn full time job.
Plus, open sourcing a game engine by definition means it's impossible to sell - and the makers of the various Unreal engines have made untold amounts of money selling Unreal engines to people. Again, there are open-source game-kits out there, but I don't know of any commercial games that have been released using open source game-kits.
PC games aren't optimized any less than console games are - the problem is that there are an almost infinite number of PC hardware combinations, whereas all versions of a specific console are usually completely compatible with each other. You need to get your game to play nice with all the various ATI and NVIDIA cards, you need to see whether optimizing the game for a p4 screws up compatibility with other processors - fun fact, the Unreal Engine has a known bug with the Pentium-M. The Pentium-M has this speed-step feature where when the processor isn't under load, the processor slows down to 600 mhz, but when the processor is under load, it speeds up to 1.x ghz. Well, Unreal adjusts its timing based on the CURRENT speed of the processor, not the actual speed, and so if you play Splinter Cell or Deus Ex on a Centrino laptop, the game will run overclocked, meaning the games will play up to 3.3% as fast as the game designers intended.
This also leads into why "bedroom programming" has fallen by the wayside. Sure, there are some good freeware games, but computer systems simply have gotten a lot more complicated. 3d games are a lot harder to make than 2d games if you start from scratch. Sure, 3d games became popular because companies realized making a game in 3d could be a lot cheaper because you didn't have to pay an artist to draw every frame by hand. Don't get me wrong - you can still make a fun, arcade-style 2d shooter or whatever and have it be awesome and release it to the world as shareware, but still, consider that the odds of you being the one person who can code, draw, write music, make sound effects, and be competent at designing the whole package is very, very slim. The commodore 64 and such were all extremely low res (comparatively) in terms of graphics and sound, so you could get away with inexpert production then - but hell, from today's perpective most of those games look like crap.
The best way to get good games is not to simply walk into the store and pick whatever's cover looks best - just go to gamerankings or metacritic or whatever and get a general feel for how the game reviewers have received the game, and make your decision based upon that. So many good games have come out in the past few years that it's practically impossible to play them all.
As for open source, I'd be inclined to think open s