What's preventing you from playing UT? I still occasionaly fire it up for a round of CTF on Hydro-16 or the priceless assault mode. No integrated voice bullshit, and most 14 year olds would have no idea what UT99 is anyway. Q3-DM is great fun too, and ther's no need for VoIP there at all. The last time I played it there were still plenty of active servers.
Basically, I think this has to do with the type of games you play. I finally picked up Quake Wars after numerous recommendations (on/. and elsewhere) and 49 logged hours later, I recall only hearing a whiny bitching voice once. The game has integrated VoIP, but it's thankfully usually used as little as possible, probably because of the rather nice canned message system which lets players quickly inform their team of the situation or ask for something.
Either by binding keys (which is easy if you're using the correct input device), or through an interactive menu you can choose the message to be sent/read to the players, such as informing them of incoming enemy armor at your location (which is specified in the message) or requesting something. This way, ther's no "WHAAA I NEED A MEDICK HERE!!! YOU ASSHOLES IM WAITING!!!!" but simple "I need a medic" followed by the player's location. Of course, playing on European servers also helps, as it's much easier to use the above feature than to repeat the same order in several languages and still have half of your team not understand it:D
And this is not to say that the teamplay suffers somehow. In my experience, when there are good team players on your team they'll read the situation and do what's necessary at each stage of the game, and, if the situation really requires it, someone will quickly inform you of an enemy camping by the objective or whatever's the problem. On the other hand, if they're all idiots, well they'll just all play as infiltrators and camp somewhere with sniper rifles when you desperately need another engineer to disarm an explosive, and there's nothing you can do to convince them to switch anyway.
By now I've written way too much considering I have to get up in less than five hours and I still wanted to finish a small app for my smartphone, so I'll conclude here: if you insist on playing Halo, then remember that whiny idiots are part of the deal. It doesn't have to be that way though, just choose a better game.
> 4. You're standing on a teleport pad roughly where you want to be, get off, and someone else probably arrives soon after you.
4b. Alternatively, due to a slight miscalculation of departure times somebody is teleported to your location while you are still on the teleport pad, instantly accelerating the atoms formerly known as "your body" into all directions away from their former positions in a bloody explosion.
Unless it's somehow significantly crippled compared to HTC's WM devices (scarily enough, this is possible), you should be able to either download the software through the browser and install it, or set up the USB connection so that the phone is recognized as a mass storage device, and then copy whatever you need to. As for syncing software, it looks like google's interested in keeping you locked in to their online apps.
Resources are still quite limited. Have you played Supreme Commander? There is a population cap, but it can be set to between 200 and 1000 in skirmishes or multiplayer. With a 1000 unit cap just 4-5 CPU players are enough to grind the game to a crawl once the armies start to grow. I don't think it's necessary for every army to actually reach that size, either. And no, I'm not playing it on an Eee, but on a Q6600@2.8 + 8800GT pc. As for gameplay considerations, well I'm sure it's also an issue.
You know what's an infinitely better game than R6 Vegas? Rainbow Six: Raven Shield.
No medkits there. And, for that matter, no regenerative health bullshit either. To balance things out you had up to seven heavily armed doodz coming with you to take down a few dozen terrorists. Again, in contrast to Vegas where they send 3 guys to kill hundreds of bad guys. Oh, and terrorists did not spawn in empty dead-end rooms by the side of your travel route once triggered.
Goddamn I could rant about this for hours. How about the classic "We need you three to save the country/planet. Take anything you need, except the FN-FNC. You're not good enough."? I'll stop now, although I'm sure there's something I'm forgetting. The point is that it all comes down to retarded design choices. Or rather, good choices for retards.
Obviously, they can't have the players thinking too much or having to (the horror!) create a detailed assault plan in advance. Forcing the enemy into situations where your team outnumbers them is, of course, mostly out of the question too thankfully. Once you remove this and make the changes from the previous two paragraphs, the player needs infinite regenerating health (as well as resurrectable teammates) to get anything done. But now you can take the stairs here or rappel down there! And if you grind terrorist hunt long enough, you can unlock a wacky clown mask! Apparently it's working, as there's a post somewhere above this one admitting to play Battlefield for/due to the unlocked crap.
Pretty much the same goes for Ghost Recon vs GRAW, and in spirit, Deus Ex vs IW, even if the details don't match. I'm sorry if this post comes off bitter or angry, it's just that I am both.
There haven't been many reviews recently because not many games are released during the summer. Whether or not Spore deserves 4/5 I don't know, I'm yet to unrar it (hint to EA, it doesn't work).
There are plenty of games where you can look down to see your own body. Of the most recent games, Crysis is one. You can see your legs or shoulders if you down or to the sides. If seeing parts of your character's body is such a big deal, look around and you'll be able to find many more games. IIRC even DOOM3 works like that, although I don't have it installer right now to check.
There's lag in real life, it's called "reaction time". Most regular people have at least 150 milliseconds of this lag and probably a good deal more. Yet, REALITY somehow works.
The only way to get network latency that bad nowadays is to use a dial up connection or a heavily congested link to a location on the opposite side of the world. The non-zero latency is of course something that has to be accounted for, but it's not a guarantee of failure.
>1. The Tiberium Dawn link does not render correctly in Webkit. (Read: Google Chrome)
Renders perfectly in Opera, so who cares. Maybe you'll think twice before using the fruity browser next time;)
>2. The Red Alert download link uses HTTP transfers rather than Bittorrent for 2x500MB files. And it was just posted on Slashdot.
Thankfully. This way I don't have to double the traffic through my slow DSL+WiFi link.
>3. I just purchased the C&C Collection Pack, you insensitive clods!
The First Decade includes pretty much every C&C game ever, so I guess you could say that your purchase just lost some value. However, you still get the game so the difference is negligible.
I've played most of the the Tiberium C&C games soon after they were released, but somehow missed the first Red Alert game, only starting with RA2. I've gone back the to it with the First Decade, and aside from some frustrations with the controls, it was a fun experience. Giving old games away for free is a great idea, even if it was not started by EA. At the cost of perhaps some additional compatibility coding and hosting, they get lots of good publicity (see this story above) and talk about their games (these comments), while gamers get to play the old games they loved to play or wanted to pay but missed, from a safe source.
I'm not a native speaker either, but it actually took me a while to recognize what the OP was complaining about. While I'm not an expert on all the world's languages, in the few that I'm fluent in, one can say something like "bad marks", "poor evaluations", and even "mediocre reviews" and it will mean exactly what it means in this headline, and not that there's something wrong with the reviews.
They'll just probably roll one of these up to the hospital parking lot and volunteer somebody from the passers by if they don't have one already processed.
Well it does seem to be about as fast as the original Q3, thankfully. I like the slower paced tactical FPS about as much as the fast twitchy ones, but the recent FPS trends seriously piss me off. The tactical games are dumbed down (see all Tom Clancy games) while the others are slowed down and overloaded with unnecessary "experience" and "ranks" bullshit. Why yes I'd love to grind XP points for a month just to be able to use the AK-47! It's nice to see that they didn't fuck around with what worked (and actually still works) so well.
What I don't get is why they don't just update Q3 and release it for free, like it's done with some multiplayer-only games. In any case, hopefully the netcode is compatible with the normal Q3:A so I could play the regular version against more opponents.
I vote for Stevie'sSpanking, and possibly Tittis and beer. Not that it really matters, since my hobbies do not intersect with tiny plastic guitars, but if it did that would be my choice.
I slept through middle school, high school, undergrad chemistry and physics, slept through my masters, and am sleeping on the job at my university environmental research gig.
Slashdot Mirror
What's preventing you from playing UT? I still occasionaly fire it up for a round of CTF on Hydro-16 or the priceless assault mode. No integrated voice bullshit, and most 14 year olds would have no idea what UT99 is anyway. Q3-DM is great fun too, and ther's no need for VoIP there at all. The last time I played it there were still plenty of active servers.
Basically, I think this has to do with the type of games you play. I finally picked up Quake Wars after numerous recommendations (on /. and elsewhere) and 49 logged hours later, I recall only hearing a whiny bitching voice once. The game has integrated VoIP, but it's thankfully usually used as little as possible, probably because of the rather nice canned message system which lets players quickly inform their team of the situation or ask for something.
Either by binding keys (which is easy if you're using the correct input device), or through an interactive menu you can choose the message to be sent/read to the players, such as informing them of incoming enemy armor at your location (which is specified in the message) or requesting something. This way, ther's no "WHAAA I NEED A MEDICK HERE!!! YOU ASSHOLES IM WAITING!!!!" but simple "I need a medic" followed by the player's location. Of course, playing on European servers also helps, as it's much easier to use the above feature than to repeat the same order in several languages and still have half of your team not understand it :D
And this is not to say that the teamplay suffers somehow. In my experience, when there are good team players on your team they'll read the situation and do what's necessary at each stage of the game, and, if the situation really requires it, someone will quickly inform you of an enemy camping by the objective or whatever's the problem. On the other hand, if they're all idiots, well they'll just all play as infiltrators and camp somewhere with sniper rifles when you desperately need another engineer to disarm an explosive, and there's nothing you can do to convince them to switch anyway.
By now I've written way too much considering I have to get up in less than five hours and I still wanted to finish a small app for my smartphone, so I'll conclude here: if you insist on playing Halo, then remember that whiny idiots are part of the deal. It doesn't have to be that way though, just choose a better game.
> 4. You're standing on a teleport pad roughly where you want to be, get off, and someone else probably arrives soon after you.
4b. Alternatively, due to a slight miscalculation of departure times somebody is teleported to your location while you are still on the teleport pad, instantly accelerating the atoms formerly known as "your body" into all directions away from their former positions in a bloody explosion.
What, are you disputing the fact that anal dildos are fun?
Unless it's somehow significantly crippled compared to HTC's WM devices (scarily enough, this is possible), you should be able to either download the software through the browser and install it, or set up the USB connection so that the phone is recognized as a mass storage device, and then copy whatever you need to. As for syncing software, it looks like google's interested in keeping you locked in to their online apps.
Resources are still quite limited. Have you played Supreme Commander? There is a population cap, but it can be set to between 200 and 1000 in skirmishes or multiplayer. With a 1000 unit cap just 4-5 CPU players are enough to grind the game to a crawl once the armies start to grow. I don't think it's necessary for every army to actually reach that size, either. And no, I'm not playing it on an Eee, but on a Q6600@2.8 + 8800GT pc. As for gameplay considerations, well I'm sure it's also an issue.
You know what's an infinitely better game than R6 Vegas? Rainbow Six: Raven Shield.
No medkits there. And, for that matter, no regenerative health bullshit either. To balance things out you had up to seven heavily armed doodz coming with you to take down a few dozen terrorists. Again, in contrast to Vegas where they send 3 guys to kill hundreds of bad guys. Oh, and terrorists did not spawn in empty dead-end rooms by the side of your travel route once triggered.
Goddamn I could rant about this for hours. How about the classic "We need you three to save the country/planet. Take anything you need, except the FN-FNC. You're not good enough."? I'll stop now, although I'm sure there's something I'm forgetting. The point is that it all comes down to retarded design choices. Or rather, good choices for retards.
Obviously, they can't have the players thinking too much or having to (the horror!) create a detailed assault plan in advance. Forcing the enemy into situations where your team outnumbers them is, of course, mostly out of the question too thankfully. Once you remove this and make the changes from the previous two paragraphs, the player needs infinite regenerating health (as well as resurrectable teammates) to get anything done. But now you can take the stairs here or rappel down there! And if you grind terrorist hunt long enough, you can unlock a wacky clown mask! Apparently it's working, as there's a post somewhere above this one admitting to play Battlefield for/due to the unlocked crap.
Pretty much the same goes for Ghost Recon vs GRAW, and in spirit, Deus Ex vs IW, even if the details don't match. I'm sorry if this post comes off bitter or angry, it's just that I am both.
> I swear to you, it works much better in practice than a holocaust.
Well if you only gave holocaust a chance...
There haven't been many reviews recently because not many games are released during the summer. Whether or not Spore deserves 4/5 I don't know, I'm yet to unrar it (hint to EA, it doesn't work).
Reloaded takes care of you
There are plenty of games where you can look down to see your own body. Of the most recent games, Crysis is one. You can see your legs or shoulders if you down or to the sides. If seeing parts of your character's body is such a big deal, look around and you'll be able to find many more games. IIRC even DOOM3 works like that, although I don't have it installer right now to check.
There's lag in real life, it's called "reaction time". Most regular people have at least 150 milliseconds of this lag and probably a good deal more. Yet, REALITY somehow works.
The only way to get network latency that bad nowadays is to use a dial up connection or a heavily congested link to a location on the opposite side of the world. The non-zero latency is of course something that has to be accounted for, but it's not a guarantee of failure.
>1. The Tiberium Dawn link does not render correctly in Webkit. (Read: Google Chrome)
Renders perfectly in Opera, so who cares. Maybe you'll think twice before using the fruity browser next time ;)
>2. The Red Alert download link uses HTTP transfers rather than Bittorrent for 2x500MB files. And it was just posted on Slashdot.
Thankfully. This way I don't have to double the traffic through my slow DSL+WiFi link.
>3. I just purchased the C&C Collection Pack, you insensitive clods!
The First Decade includes pretty much every C&C game ever, so I guess you could say that your purchase just lost some value. However, you still get the game so the difference is negligible.
I've played most of the the Tiberium C&C games soon after they were released, but somehow missed the first Red Alert game, only starting with RA2. I've gone back the to it with the First Decade, and aside from some frustrations with the controls, it was a fun experience. Giving old games away for free is a great idea, even if it was not started by EA. At the cost of perhaps some additional compatibility coding and hosting, they get lots of good publicity (see this story above) and talk about their games (these comments), while gamers get to play the old games they loved to play or wanted to pay but missed, from a safe source.
> Or it might go corkscrewing off towards the nearest building and everyone will be all "9/11!!!eleventy!!!"
Or they just might, you know, hold the races somewhere where there aren't any buildings to crash into.
I'm not a native speaker either, but it actually took me a while to recognize what the OP was complaining about. While I'm not an expert on all the world's languages, in the few that I'm fluent in, one can say something like "bad marks", "poor evaluations", and even "mediocre reviews" and it will mean exactly what it means in this headline, and not that there's something wrong with the reviews.
They'll just probably roll one of these up to the hospital parking lot and volunteer somebody from the passers by if they don't have one already processed.
I thought it was because nobody actually cares enough to watch.
Well it does seem to be about as fast as the original Q3, thankfully. I like the slower paced tactical FPS about as much as the fast twitchy ones, but the recent FPS trends seriously piss me off. The tactical games are dumbed down (see all Tom Clancy games) while the others are slowed down and overloaded with unnecessary "experience" and "ranks" bullshit. Why yes I'd love to grind XP points for a month just to be able to use the AK-47! It's nice to see that they didn't fuck around with what worked (and actually still works) so well.
What I don't get is why they don't just update Q3 and release it for free, like it's done with some multiplayer-only games. In any case, hopefully the netcode is compatible with the normal Q3:A so I could play the regular version against more opponents.
I can see this tool becoming very popular with the Myspace crowd once they realize the limitations of the current "hold camera above head level" method.
I vote for Stevie's Spanking, and possibly Tittis and beer. Not that it really matters, since my hobbies do not intersect with tiny plastic guitars, but if it did that would be my choice.
Yeah, and they've already taken Vienna (the real one). Looks like the Iron Curtain will cover most of Europe again.
> What do you have against penguins?
They're fat, lazy, and the bastards can't even fly. Screw them.
Yes, how can I be more like you?
In the light of recent events, I'd rather not ride their bus at all.
> Exercise never hurt anyone.
Except that guy who died while jogging.
> A girlfriend of my sister once ...
Please do tell us more.