Supposedly Microsoft had interest in acquiring Nintendo but Hiroshi Yamauchi former president of Nintendo and also the largest shareholder of Nintendo refused any offers. This could just been a rumor of course, but judging a few old news articles Microsoft seemed to have the interest.
I think it's unlikely Nintendo gets bought up by anyone. Judging by the last few years successes (even if they had it a little slow lately), it's more likely they buy someone else up.
And indeed. The best way for the blog to prove itself would be to post something that would only be known in Valve internally. Now the blog could have made by someone who had a dispute with Icefrog in the past, but I doubt it's by someone in Valve.
Other might not necessarily be desktop operating systems. Infact, I have a feeling it's various smartphone devices, consoles, etc. Infact I'm curious how large part of other is Android, which is based on the Linux kernel (but is unlike any other Linux distro, and did fork the kernel...).
Considering the amount of computers around, I actually find 0.77% impressive since by those stats Mac is only "seven" times bigger than Linux. And Macintosh is widely advertised and have the whole brand thing, while there isn't much the case for Linux.
5. It was SO frustrating that you could not preview how far a ranged unit could fire. The reason it was so frustrating is that some units require you to set them up (i.e. before they fire, you have to use one of their moves). Apparently it is affected by mountains and other terrain. So it's really hard to tell. It doesn't even tell you the range in the tooltip. (BTW, I may be wrong about this).
On the left there is a ranged attack command. If you click on it, you can see the range that your unit can do. Yes, I didn't realize this right away either, but it helped a lot as soon I found out about it.
There is also an promotion that makes you able to shoot over otherwise blocking targets, which helps a lot.:)
Some micromanagement before Civ IV was quite annoying. There was no overflow mechanics, so if you had a building that had 78 out of 80 production done, and you gain ten hammers, you lose eight of them. And to get around this, players micromanaged out of the wazoo. Same was true for income and beakers (science progress). Thankfully Freeciv added the Civ IV style overflow to at least production, which is why i tend to prefer Freeciv when I want to go for Civ II gameplay style.:)
Civ IV and V also keeps track of "cents" in the money system I believe, just isn't shown to the player.
And not to even mention, the "trade" system in Civ II. Which was removed cause of excessive (unfun) micromanagement. Moving those caravans all over the place wasn't fun. It's in Freeciv too annoyingly, but at least they removed the supply/demand system (which lead to even more micro).
Civ IV and Civ V have their micromanagment, but they feel honestly more productive in terms of tradeoffs. While in the older games, you would lose anything that overflowed or didn't round off right.
Civilization II is like Simcity 2000. Both games are heralded as being the best in the series by many people, but most fans I meet (that have tried out the newer games, and learned them) seems to prefer the fourth game in the series.
Simultaneous turns are pretty much obligatory if you're playing multiplayer, especially with more than two players involved, FreeCiv always been biased towards multiplayer, unlike the commercial games which all mostly focused on singleplayer (and I play both Freeciv, Civ IV, and Civ V:) ) which is why it's on default too. I think infact Freeciv was orginally meant to clone CivNet, which apparently introduced simultaneous turns.
The Freeciv AI seems to move all their units immediately too, so Freeciv feels turnbased when only AI opponents are involved.
Simultaneous turns are used on Civ IV and V multiplayer as well. Making it wholly turnbased can make the games take awhile, but on the other hand, it's perfect for play by e-mail games. See Freeciv longturn games.
Freeciv gameplay is pretty much Civ I/II, expect more balanced for multiplayer but I honestly prefer Civ IV/V for their depth.
There is also a registry value you can change to fix a drive (CD or HD, usually CD drives) that is stuck in PIO mode. Didn't even require a restart! This is just some "override" bitmask that Windows sets after enough reading errors, which can only be changed back with regedit (idiotic).
Loose cables or a bad disc, and Windows insists on using the slow reading/writing mode.
Reinstalling the disk controller helps too since you're basically removing the troubling registry values and let Windows recreate them from scratch. Probably the easier way out for most people too.:)
Atari made the orginal Marble Madness, I think Rare ported it over to NES.
I suspect the Marble Madness engine was either reused (very uncommon back in those days), or experience from it was reused in the Snake Rattle n Roll game later on.
If it's even meant to backfire, if there was a group I wanted to discredit I would spread a virus in the name of said group instead of the group I take part.
I don't believe it's the case in the situation though. Experience tells me that most people don't realize that protesting through destructive means rarely works well...
Valve never said that the game was "open source", just that the source code for the "game logic" is available, similar to how it is with HL2. At some point, people (and press?) got confused and keep calling it open source, despite that it's not really different from the other moddable Source engine games that you can use as base. The intent being opening up avenues of modding, but the game still depends on large binary blobs to compile and is releases under a restricted license.
Valve probably didn't intend to mislead people, unlike the whole "Shared source" crap by Microsoft.
Bit funny that you use "Steam-junkie gamer buddy" as a example since Steam is apparently going to be officially released on Linux within a few months. Of course, time still have to prove whenever it's good or not (GPU drivers is still somewhat problematic for Linux).
But I have to agree that you need to introduce Linux (and OSS) where it makes sense to.
I like Nethack, thank you very much. It's steep learning curve is part of the charm, and the fact that lots of things can kill you. It's not a game for the impatient.
You might want to check out the Diablo series. Blizzard themselves admitted that they were inspired by Nethack (and Angband) when they made Diablo, AFAIK people still play it and is very hyped for Diablo III.
If you want to see popular games with awful UI, you might want to check Dwarf Fortress. Manages to be way worse than Nethack (with even steeper learning curve), but is very popular. Not open source however.
I don't try to claim that the average open source is innovative, rather I was trying to point out a huge exception (innovative dosen't mean it have to be mainstream friendly). I have a feeling it's much easier to get developers together to make a clone of a already loved game (which then can be improved upon), than something new and original.
For innovation, I'd personally rather look amongst what the indie developers offer.
What about Nethack? It's probably still one of the more original Roguelikes out there, with a long legacy.:) I believe some "original commercial" games was actually inspired by Nethack.
Indeed. After you been spoiled with various custom trainsets (UKRS, NARS, 2CC, the upcoming PJ1K) industries (FIRS is very promising), aircraft (AV8), ships (FISH) and road vehicles (eGRVTS), it's really hard to go back to the original vehicles. Most of the custom stuff feels more balanced (Aircrafts/trains are somewhat less profitable, road/ships are more profitable) and more interesting (with the default vehicles you always just pick the fastest vehicle for your line...).
The only bad thing with those sets is that they generally make the game a bit harder, so I help newbies to learn with the default stuff.
You have to keep in mind of the system requirements at the time too. Originally Transport Tycoon was coded to run on 486 computers. While they vastly improved the pathfinding of both networks and AI's with A*, I'm not even sure if it would work as well on the old 486 computers the game was originally made for (Amusingly, some of the largest rail networks in openTTD slows even down the fastest computers).
I don't know the computational powers needed for A* (other than it majorily increased openTTD system requirements when it was introduced), or if it could been simplified to run better for the hardware at the time.
Freeciv 1.0 was released 1996, so no this is not the first "open source clone" to reach 1.0.
And then you have games like Nethack that's been worked on since the 80's and is a timeless jewel and that nice turnbased medieval strategy game I forgot the name of. I am a huge gamer and I mostly play commercial games (Team Fortress 2 being my current favorite), but I wouldn't sneeze at the open source games.
Keep in mind that generally, open source projects only reach version 1.0 when a major milestone have been reached. It doesn't mean that 0.x versions are unusable or buggy/unplayable, openTTD have been rock solid throughout it's history as far I know (the only bugs I stumbled upon was in the nightlies... which is to be expected).
I remember back in 1994 or so on my first computer when I got a demo of Transport Tycoon from some British UK magazine we imported. You were only limited to few (five?) years of building and I had no idea what to do. I later got the very first original version of Transport Tycoon, the one with the real vehicle names, I honestly don't remember much what I did with that version.
I then got the Transport Tycoon Plus version, the one with the "mars terrain" as alternate graphics. I remember spending most of my childhood with that version, looking at envy at the "Deluxe" version which had maglev and one-way signals. You can bet I was happy when I eventually got the deluxe version, and I thought anything was possible with one-way signals... I had no idea about pre-signals or path signals yet.;) I used TTDPatch to run Windows TTD under Win XP, then later got openTTD 0.3.x. That's when I was hooked again. One of the best things with openTTD compared to TTD or even TTDPatch is a fully working multiplayer. In both TTD and orginal transport tycoon, you were lucky if the game went past thirty years as it desynced very easily. OpenTTD is much more stable in that degree, and fails more gracefully if it does desyncs (which is rare, and the orginal versions would just crash or glitch up).
openTTD supports custom AI's written in the scripting language Squirrel. See http://wiki.openttd.org/Noai . There's a quite few AI's to download, of varying quality and personality.
The original (now removed) AI did indeed suck badly, but it's stupidity did provide players with some amusement at the same time.;)
Just keep in mind that Civ IV is different from earlier Civilization games. Especially when it comes to terraforming, it's way more varied and requires more thinking than "irrigate all grass/plains".
There's some silly but cute effects like the battle animations, but those can be turned off if you prefer seeing the results right away.:)
Before Alpha Centauri there wasn't any notable differences between the different civilizations. With Alpha centauri they wanted to have different factions with way different strategies and "beliefs". I thought this was intresting, especially seeing how people picked a diffrent faction depending on their playstyle.
The backstory of Alpha Centauri tries to explain why there's different factions. Perhaps Alpha Centauri is a little campy, but I always thought most of the technologies in the tech tree seemed rather realistic for me (although some of them are probably in a odd order).
Slashdot Mirror
Supposedly Microsoft had interest in acquiring Nintendo but Hiroshi Yamauchi former president of Nintendo and also the largest shareholder of Nintendo refused any offers. This could just been a rumor of course, but judging a few old news articles Microsoft seemed to have the interest.
I think it's unlikely Nintendo gets bought up by anyone. Judging by the last few years successes (even if they had it a little slow lately), it's more likely they buy someone else up.
As much using acronyms in situations like this annoys me, the acronym is more known than the full name.
Or you insist calling it "Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation"? ;)
http://twitter.com/georgeb3dr/status/27283945396
And indeed. The best way for the blog to prove itself would be to post something that would only be known in Valve internally. Now the blog could have made by someone who had a dispute with Icefrog in the past, but I doubt it's by someone in Valve.
Other might not necessarily be desktop operating systems. Infact, I have a feeling it's various smartphone devices, consoles, etc. Infact I'm curious how large part of other is Android, which is based on the Linux kernel (but is unlike any other Linux distro, and did fork the kernel...).
Considering the amount of computers around, I actually find 0.77% impressive since by those stats Mac is only "seven" times bigger than Linux. And Macintosh is widely advertised and have the whole brand thing, while there isn't much the case for Linux.
5. It was SO frustrating that you could not preview how far a ranged unit could fire. The reason it was so frustrating is that some units require you to set them up (i.e. before they fire, you have to use one of their moves). Apparently it is affected by mountains and other terrain. So it's really hard to tell. It doesn't even tell you the range in the tooltip. (BTW, I may be wrong about this).
On the left there is a ranged attack command. If you click on it, you can see the range that your unit can do. Yes, I didn't realize this right away either, but it helped a lot as soon I found out about it.
There is also an promotion that makes you able to shoot over otherwise blocking targets, which helps a lot. :)
Some micromanagement before Civ IV was quite annoying. There was no overflow mechanics, so if you had a building that had 78 out of 80 production done, and you gain ten hammers, you lose eight of them. And to get around this, players micromanaged out of the wazoo. Same was true for income and beakers (science progress). Thankfully Freeciv added the Civ IV style overflow to at least production, which is why i tend to prefer Freeciv when I want to go for Civ II gameplay style. :)
Civ IV and V also keeps track of "cents" in the money system I believe, just isn't shown to the player.
And not to even mention, the "trade" system in Civ II. Which was removed cause of excessive (unfun) micromanagement. Moving those caravans all over the place wasn't fun. It's in Freeciv too annoyingly, but at least they removed the supply/demand system (which lead to even more micro).
Civ IV and Civ V have their micromanagment, but they feel honestly more productive in terms of tradeoffs. While in the older games, you would lose anything that overflowed or didn't round off right.
Civilization II is like Simcity 2000. Both games are heralded as being the best in the series by many people, but most fans I meet (that have tried out the newer games, and learned them) seems to prefer the fourth game in the series.
Simultaneous turns are pretty much obligatory if you're playing multiplayer, especially with more than two players involved, FreeCiv always been biased towards multiplayer, unlike the commercial games which all mostly focused on singleplayer (and I play both Freeciv, Civ IV, and Civ V :) ) which is why it's on default too. I think infact Freeciv was orginally meant to clone CivNet, which apparently introduced simultaneous turns.
The Freeciv AI seems to move all their units immediately too, so Freeciv feels turnbased when only AI opponents are involved.
Simultaneous turns are used on Civ IV and V multiplayer as well. Making it wholly turnbased can make the games take awhile, but on the other hand, it's perfect for play by e-mail games. See Freeciv longturn games.
Freeciv gameplay is pretty much Civ I/II, expect more balanced for multiplayer but I honestly prefer Civ IV/V for their depth.
There is also a registry value you can change to fix a drive (CD or HD, usually CD drives) that is stuck in PIO mode. Didn't even require a restart! This is just some "override" bitmask that Windows sets after enough reading errors, which can only be changed back with regedit (idiotic).
Loose cables or a bad disc, and Windows insists on using the slow reading/writing mode.
Reinstalling the disk controller helps too since you're basically removing the troubling registry values and let Windows recreate them from scratch. Probably the easier way out for most people too. :)
Atari made the orginal Marble Madness, I think Rare ported it over to NES.
I suspect the Marble Madness engine was either reused (very uncommon back in those days), or experience from it was reused in the Snake Rattle n Roll game later on.
If it's even meant to backfire, if there was a group I wanted to discredit I would spread a virus in the name of said group instead of the group I take part.
I don't believe it's the case in the situation though. Experience tells me that most people don't realize that protesting through destructive means rarely works well...
Valve never said that the game was "open source", just that the source code for the "game logic" is available, similar to how it is with HL2. At some point, people (and press?) got confused and keep calling it open source, despite that it's not really different from the other moddable Source engine games that you can use as base. The intent being opening up avenues of modding, but the game still depends on large binary blobs to compile and is releases under a restricted license.
Valve probably didn't intend to mislead people, unlike the whole "Shared source" crap by Microsoft.
Bit funny that you use "Steam-junkie gamer buddy" as a example since Steam is apparently going to be officially released on Linux within a few months. Of course, time still have to prove whenever it's good or not (GPU drivers is still somewhat problematic for Linux).
But I have to agree that you need to introduce Linux (and OSS) where it makes sense to.
I like Nethack, thank you very much. It's steep learning curve is part of the charm, and the fact that lots of things can kill you. It's not a game for the impatient.
You might want to check out the Diablo series. Blizzard themselves admitted that they were inspired by Nethack (and Angband) when they made Diablo, AFAIK people still play it and is very hyped for Diablo III.
If you want to see popular games with awful UI, you might want to check Dwarf Fortress. Manages to be way worse than Nethack (with even steeper learning curve), but is very popular. Not open source however.
I don't try to claim that the average open source is innovative, rather I was trying to point out a huge exception (innovative dosen't mean it have to be mainstream friendly). I have a feeling it's much easier to get developers together to make a clone of a already loved game (which then can be improved upon), than something new and original.
For innovation, I'd personally rather look amongst what the indie developers offer.
What about Nethack? It's probably still one of the more original Roguelikes out there, with a long legacy. :) I believe some "original commercial" games was actually inspired by Nethack.
I see. But I seem to recall there was (or just has been) a large RAM shortage around the time (1994) Transport Tycoon was released. :)
Indeed. After you been spoiled with various custom trainsets (UKRS, NARS, 2CC, the upcoming PJ1K) industries (FIRS is very promising), aircraft (AV8), ships (FISH) and road vehicles (eGRVTS), it's really hard to go back to the original vehicles. Most of the custom stuff feels more balanced (Aircrafts/trains are somewhat less profitable, road/ships are more profitable) and more interesting (with the default vehicles you always just pick the fastest vehicle for your line...).
The only bad thing with those sets is that they generally make the game a bit harder, so I help newbies to learn with the default stuff.
You have to keep in mind of the system requirements at the time too. Originally Transport Tycoon was coded to run on 486 computers. While they vastly improved the pathfinding of both networks and AI's with A*, I'm not even sure if it would work as well on the old 486 computers the game was originally made for (Amusingly, some of the largest rail networks in openTTD slows even down the fastest computers).
I don't know the computational powers needed for A* (other than it majorily increased openTTD system requirements when it was introduced), or if it could been simplified to run better for the hardware at the time.
Freeciv 1.0 was released 1996, so no this is not the first "open source clone" to reach 1.0.
And then you have games like Nethack that's been worked on since the 80's and is a timeless jewel and that nice turnbased medieval strategy game I forgot the name of. I am a huge gamer and I mostly play commercial games (Team Fortress 2 being my current favorite), but I wouldn't sneeze at the open source games.
Keep in mind that generally, open source projects only reach version 1.0 when a major milestone have been reached. It doesn't mean that 0.x versions are unusable or buggy/unplayable, openTTD have been rock solid throughout it's history as far I know (the only bugs I stumbled upon was in the nightlies... which is to be expected).
This gallery have some examples of TTD AI stupidity.
Have a explanation why the orginal AI is poor, note that the "glitches, cheats and bugs" mentioned in the FAQ have been fixed in openTTD since a long time ago. ;)
I remember back in 1994 or so on my first computer when I got a demo of Transport Tycoon from some British UK magazine we imported. You were only limited to few (five?) years of building and I had no idea what to do. I later got the very first original version of Transport Tycoon, the one with the real vehicle names, I honestly don't remember much what I did with that version.
I then got the Transport Tycoon Plus version, the one with the "mars terrain" as alternate graphics. I remember spending most of my childhood with that version, looking at envy at the "Deluxe" version which had maglev and one-way signals. You can bet I was happy when I eventually got the deluxe version, and I thought anything was possible with one-way signals... I had no idea about pre-signals or path signals yet. ;) I used TTDPatch to run Windows TTD under Win XP, then later got openTTD 0.3.x. That's when I was hooked again. One of the best things with openTTD compared to TTD or even TTDPatch is a fully working multiplayer. In both TTD and orginal transport tycoon, you were lucky if the game went past thirty years as it desynced very easily. OpenTTD is much more stable in that degree, and fails more gracefully if it does desyncs (which is rare, and the orginal versions would just crash or glitch up).
openTTD supports custom AI's written in the scripting language Squirrel. See http://wiki.openttd.org/Noai . There's a quite few AI's to download, of varying quality and personality.
The original (now removed) AI did indeed suck badly, but it's stupidity did provide players with some amusement at the same time. ;)
"It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried." - Winston Churchill
3D glasses used in modern cinema is Polarized, not tinted with red/blue.
Just keep in mind that Civ IV is different from earlier Civilization games. Especially when it comes to terraforming, it's way more varied and requires more thinking than "irrigate all grass/plains".
There's some silly but cute effects like the battle animations, but those can be turned off if you prefer seeing the results right away. :)
Before Alpha Centauri there wasn't any notable differences between the different civilizations. With Alpha centauri they wanted to have different factions with way different strategies and "beliefs". I thought this was intresting, especially seeing how people picked a diffrent faction depending on their playstyle.
The backstory of Alpha Centauri tries to explain why there's different factions. Perhaps Alpha Centauri is a little campy, but I always thought most of the technologies in the tech tree seemed rather realistic for me (although some of them are probably in a odd order).