Well, me and my "crew" have been playing multiplayer games for quite a while.. starting in fact with Doom and Doom 2.
IMHO the true classics for LAN party gaming are Counter-Strike and Starcraft. Starcraft in particular is very well balanced and offers three distinct races for you to master. C-S of course everyone has played, and is a great game.
Older games also worth mentioning include Age of Empires 2: Age of Kings, Diablo/Diablo 2, Team Fortress for Quake (I dislike TFC), Total Annihilation and Warcraft 2. All worth picking up and probably available on the cheap.
Lately though, me and my friends have been getting pretty bored of the old staples and for a while stopped meeting up as much to get our Frag on. However, just recently we started playing Kohan: Immortal Soverigns, and I must say its a pretty excellent RTS. Kohan's multiplayer game is mainly focused on city expansion and finding the right combination between front line and support troops and really cuts down on the tedium of managing peons and micromanaging armies (by treating groups of units as a company). Also it features Experience Points and Ranks/Levels for its troops and heroes, so it actually pays not to just mindlessly send your troops to their deaths over and over. A great game any LANer should definitely give a shot. (Unfortunately it doesn't support spawning, but you can get it pretty cheap now as there is a newer prequel for Kohan out)
Also I must mention that if you and your friends have MMORPG characters around the same level (such as in Dark Age of Camelot, Everquest, Ultima Online, or even on a MUD) and a fairly speedy internet connection, playing together online with all of your party in the same room is hilarious, especially if you are PKing.
Not sure if anyone's mentioned this yet, but TechWeb is reporting that Micron PC is holding off on introducing Pentium IV systems with Rambus but will be shipping Athlon DDR systems immediately...
Interesting as their parent company is heavily supportive of DDR-SDRAM and are currently being sued by Rambus...
AFAIK, the Sony Playstation 2 cannot encode 5.1 Dolby in hardware, making the optical outputs primarily for passing along 5.1 mixes in FMV sequences or DVD movies (or Pro Logic mixes).
OTOH, NVIDIA's newly announced sound chip for the Xbox will feature Dolby Digital 5.1 encoding, hopefully allowing for true surround sound in games.
you might want to try www.Elingo.com.. they have a somewhat functional japanese-english web page translator... of course their site is slow as is without the/. effect;)
also the register reports that sony's Palm PDA has sold out on its first day in Japan already:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/1/13182.htm l
AFAIK, not much of note happened at ECTS this year.. no real unveiling of games, except the surprise announcement of Daytona 2 for the Dreamcast and _maybe_ the new trailer for Metal Gear Solid 2...
The real gaming news today is of course the launch of Sega Sports' NFL2K1 and Sega's online gaming network, SegaNet!
are out there.. Linksys has the EtherFast DSL/Cable Router which has a built in 10/100 switch, does NAT, DHCP, port forwarding and can login to PPPoE for about $150
Wow, the playstation 2 looks so retro cool! But there are some problems I have with it...
a) the high high price. Consider the Dreamcast is selling for about $160 in japan and $200 here. The PSY is still gonna be quite a chunk of change by the time it hits these shores. Does it really need DVD playback? Looking at the items listed, it will play its own "Playstation2 CD-ROMs".. probably much like Sega's GD-ROMs (sega's propreitary format have proved very effective against the rampant piracy seen on the previous console generation). could it have been cheaper without the touted dvd playback? i think sony got into trouble when they promised dvd too early before they saw that sega's way was a better solution for their storage and anti piracy needs
b) No out of the box internet connectivity. Sure you could buy a USB modem or PCMCIA ethernet card, but consoles addons have a long history of being total busts.
c) Where's the Sony memory stick??
Besides those points however, it looks like a cool system. Hopefully they'll concentrate on gaming and not trying to do too many things at the same time (shoulda thrown a DTV tuner in while they're at it;)
apparently to reset the Dreamcast's internal memory, hit and hold X+B on your controller with the Worldnet disc inside (while booting up) until you get to the sign up page. on gamesages they say the controller has to be on port 'B'
Slashdot Mirror
Well, me and my "crew" have been playing multiplayer games for quite a while.. starting in fact with Doom and Doom 2.
IMHO the true classics for LAN party gaming are Counter-Strike and Starcraft. Starcraft in particular is very well balanced and offers three distinct races for you to master. C-S of course everyone has played, and is a great game.
Older games also worth mentioning include Age of Empires 2: Age of Kings, Diablo/Diablo 2, Team Fortress for Quake (I dislike TFC), Total Annihilation and Warcraft 2. All worth picking up and probably available on the cheap.
Lately though, me and my friends have been getting pretty bored of the old staples and for a while stopped meeting up as much to get our Frag on. However, just recently we started playing Kohan: Immortal Soverigns, and I must say its a pretty excellent RTS. Kohan's multiplayer game is mainly focused on city expansion and finding the right combination between front line and support troops and really cuts down on the tedium of managing peons and micromanaging armies (by treating groups of units as a company). Also it features Experience Points and Ranks/Levels for its troops and heroes, so it actually pays not to just mindlessly send your troops to their deaths over and over. A great game any LANer should definitely give a shot. (Unfortunately it doesn't support spawning, but you can get it pretty cheap now as there is a newer prequel for Kohan out)
Also I must mention that if you and your friends have MMORPG characters around the same level (such as in Dark Age of Camelot, Everquest, Ultima Online, or even on a MUD) and a fairly speedy internet connection, playing together online with all of your party in the same room is hilarious, especially if you are PKing.
golem@playonLAN.com
VFX, why not just call it Virtua Fighter 4? (note that Konami's Metal Gear Solid 2 for Xbox is named MGSX and Silent Hill 2 for Xbox is SHX)
The Xbox controller looks amazingly similar to the Dreamcast's.
Sega has announced a PC addon card that enables Dreamcast game playing (probably easy to integrate in the Xbox).
Yu Suzuki mentioned he wanted to release Shenmue 2 before the Xbox came out. How does the release of a new console affect the release of his game?
There has long been rumblings out of MS employees of a startling and huge announcement re: Xbox at TGS.
Gamers.com reports Bill Gates mentioning a bit of missing technology in the Xbox.
Gamers.com also reports that Famitsu mentions a huge developer going Xbox at the TGS (previously assumed to be Square...)
Sega has admitted to having talks with Microsoft earlier last year.
Of course, Microsoft provided a version of WindowsCE for the DC console..
Not sure if anyone's mentioned this yet, but TechWeb is reporting that Micron PC is holding off on introducing Pentium IV systems with Rambus but will be shipping Athlon DDR systems immediately...
Interesting as their parent company is heavily supportive of DDR-SDRAM and are currently being sued by Rambus...
AFAIK, the Sony Playstation 2 cannot encode 5.1 Dolby in hardware, making the optical outputs primarily for passing along 5.1 mixes in FMV sequences or DVD movies (or Pro Logic mixes).
OTOH, NVIDIA's newly announced sound chip for the Xbox will feature Dolby Digital 5.1 encoding, hopefully allowing for true surround sound in games.
you might want to try www.Elingo.com .. they have a somewhat functional japanese-english web page translator... of course their site is slow as is without the /. effect ;)
m l
also the register reports that sony's Palm PDA has sold out on its first day in Japan already:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/1/13182.ht
AFAIK, not much of note happened at ECTS this year.. no real unveiling of games, except the surprise announcement of Daytona 2 for the Dreamcast and _maybe_ the new trailer for Metal Gear Solid 2...
The real gaming news today is of course the launch of Sega Sports' NFL2K1 and Sega's online gaming network, SegaNet!
are out there.. Linksys has the EtherFast DSL/Cable Router which has a built in 10/100 switch, does NAT, DHCP, port forwarding and can login to PPPoE for about $150
t =befsr41
t 311
http://www.linksys.com/scripts/features.asp?par
Netgear has a similar product, the RT311
http://www.netgear.com/products/routers.shtml#r
saw this over at Dark Horizons..
www.mutantwatch.com
pretty cool! even looks like a cheesy political / government website!
Wow, the playstation 2 looks so retro cool! But there are some problems I have with it...
;)
a) the high high price. Consider the Dreamcast is selling for about $160 in japan and $200 here. The PSY is still gonna be quite a chunk of change by the time it hits these shores. Does it really need DVD playback? Looking at the items listed, it will play its own "Playstation2 CD-ROMs".. probably much like Sega's GD-ROMs (sega's propreitary format have proved very effective against the rampant piracy seen on the previous console generation). could it have been cheaper without the touted dvd playback? i think sony got into trouble when they promised dvd too early before they saw that sega's way was a better solution for their storage and anti piracy needs
b) No out of the box internet connectivity. Sure you could buy a USB modem or PCMCIA ethernet card, but consoles addons have a long history of being total busts.
c) Where's the Sony memory stick??
Besides those points however, it looks like a cool system. Hopefully they'll concentrate on gaming and not trying to do too many things at the same time (shoulda thrown a DTV tuner in while they're at it
apparently to reset the Dreamcast's internal memory, hit and hold X+B on your controller with the Worldnet disc inside (while booting up) until you get to the sign up page. on gamesages they say the controller has to be on port 'B'
the inspiron line is their laptop line