It's pretty hard to imagine how people back then spoke Elizabethan English with all the grammatically precise thees and thous. (Singular forms of 'you'.) People oversimplified (from their perspective) things to make writing easier. Long story short, we have today's English.
If one can go back to say, 1611 or even 1901, the most grammatically perfect post/article here would seem like l33t sp34k to them. All of us would be h4x0rs to them.
In Doom 2, I remember turning off clipping, then I found John Romero's head behind the boss, and chainsawed away. In Hexen, I just stayed behind a pillar and fired at the boss between shots, like a wild west movie. Wasn't really fun but I nailed him in the end. Very n00b I know, but I got the job done. Killing bosses in 80s RPGs like Ultima or Bard's Tale wasn't just fun, but it always felt glorious afterwards.
I guess all good games eventually become classics. Just look at the shelves today and you've got a lot of 'Best of' and 'Ultimate collection' games.
My 80s staples: Digdug, Ultima, Wizardry, Bard's Tale, Might and Magic.
In the 90s, I loved: Wolf3D, Doom, Heretic, C&C.
One good terribly underrated RTS that I liked was Krush Kill N Destroy. Sure it had 'generic' RTS written all over it but the story was good for its time.
Late 90s till present: StarCraft, Quake 3, AvP, Alpha Centauri, Diablo.
Timeless for me: Simcity, The Sims, Civilization, FreeCiv, Heroes of Might and Magic.
Casual: Minesweeper, Bejeweled.
Btw, I still play StarCraft on a regular basis. Graphics don't become dated unless you want them to be. It's all in the mind.
I'd have to agree. They're very, very effective in certain situations. Although this may be a simplistic view, it helps immerse me even more in the storyline. For instance, I was really able to "get into" StarCraft years ago. If you think about it, the carefully woven single-player missions with the cinematics in between, effectively changed it from being a "yet-another-RTS-clone" into a space-opera.
Far older games, which had even simpler graphics, benefited more. Yes, I do agree that plot is more important, but used carefully, they can and often do, drive the plot.
http://trygames.com/ has big-name titles. You can download the trials, which are different from the "trial" trials, then pay for the keys if you like it. The trials are actually the full versions, but are time-crippled. You can check it out.
Funny how an article like this should turn up, just when we were starting to develop sensory-neural interfaces, pain receptors, to be integrated in those action games, so we can feel those punches and shots.
Well said, but that's exactly it. The poor widow was commendable because she gave her last two mites, which was practically all that she had left in the world; all that she had to live on. Okay so several hundred million or even a couple of billion of dollars isn't chump change, but for Bill Gates, its like the kid grilling burgers you mentioned, giving out a few quarters, or maybe even a dollar or two, to local charity. I'm not trying to take anything away from Mr. Gates, but the day he gives out even half his personal wealth (or equivalent to 'one of the widow's mites') now that's a head-turner.
2010 isn't too far away, just like 2002 wasn't that too long ago, and things really haven't changed much. I RTFA, but I doubt if things would be really that different. More mods for 2005-2006 releases, more sequels. The source-code for Quake IV would have been released. And ground-breaking title or two will have come out. I do hope Starcraft II comes out though.
And by 2010, Duke Nukem forever will be coming out of Alpha.
Not to overly simplify things, but Win apps running natively in Linux under Mono isn't necessarily a bad thing. Flame wars aside, Mono has a good chance of doing a better job than Wine in helping people make the transition from Windows to Linux.
All things considered, putting it in FC is a good move. I look forward to what this holds.
TFA was nice. Old games can be hard to find. Compilations (or reissues) make it a lot easier. Even not-so-old games (2-6 years old) can be difficult to find at times.
Speaking of compilations, I've got a few of my own. I'm an old-school RPG fan. My personal favorites are:
Nothing beats old-school gameplay. These collections aren't for you if you're looking for eye-candy though. The games are at least 10 years old, maybe more.
Well, I second to everything for that matter. Ubuntu doesn't try to be too lean, or too optimized. (I've done LFS, btw.) Doesn't try to put every single app in the galaxy into 3-4 DVDs. It's just right, and it just works. I don't mean to be a flamebait (and I'd suppose this has been hovering at the backs of the minds of more than just a couple or people) but I guess it has captured that "Windows formula" and then some.
Make everything fit on a CD, plus the essential stuff that'll run your PC. Plus don't give out too archaic, or too dumbed-down error messages.Make adding and removing programs a snap.
I just love the Synaptic Package Manager. To Windows users, its like Critical updates on steroids. Like I said, everything just works, and everything's, convenient. That's the word I was looking for.
I absolutely agree. I don't think it has anything to do with gender per se. Its hugely environmental and gender is just incidental. I have lots of geeky friends who surprisingly, aren't into games; and I personally know a lot of women - who at first glance you'd never think were gamers - who are very much into games. This whole guy vs. girl gamer thing has been beaten to death and blown out of proportion. Same thing would apply to other so-called "girl" things like cooking or cross-stitching. Girls probably have their own forums discussing guy chefs or something like that.
Yes, it would seem pointless at first, since, all you seem to do is get to play what you already live out in real life, paying bills, getting late for work, etc. I still find it amusing because it lets me do or be other people. For instance, I can be a cop, a soldier, a president, or a crime-lord. I get to swim in jacuzzis, have a gardener mow my lawn, etc.
And since I still live in my parents' basement, I get to feel what its like to live on my own; have my own big house to play with. A lot of things people take for granted may not necessarily be so to others. And that, I suppose is the allure of this thing.
I agree. I had an old Pentium 266,32MB RAM, 3.2GB HD. When I first got it about eight years ago, installing Win98 was a snap, compared to installing Mandrake 7.1 not too long ago. Refurbishing now ancient PCs with Linux isn't really the issue here. Its getting X, KDE/Gnome to run smoothly. There even some people who've installed Gentoo and Linux from scratch on older 486s.
I hate to admit it, but it seems like Win 95/98 still win hands down. It took me 2-3 hours to install Mandrake 6.0 on a Pentium 75; and Win98 about less than half that time. OpenOffice.org? Forget it. Slow as molasses on those machines. Even AbiWord and Gnumeric feel like MS Word and Excel.
Liberated Games is dedicated to cataloging all full commercial games that have been liberated and made free in playable form to the public.
I play some of the games you mentioned myself, but the site lists only the games that were once sold in stores but are "free" now. It would be nice though if they had a section of the "best free or open source games" you mentioned.
Music from the 80s Bard's Tale trilogy were classics. And you could even choose. This was from a time when music was rare on PC games. (Before Adlib/soundblaster came out.)
On a more recent note, I enjoyed the industrial cuts from C&C, KKND2 and Quake. The terran themes from Starcraft are also cool. I sure wish AAA gaming companies regularly came out with soundtracks that accompanied their titles, like OSTs for movies, so I wouldn't have to go thru the extra step of painstakingly trying to extract them.
(Once in a while, I drive people crazy here at home by playing the background music of the Sims over and over. Makes the real thing seem like a game.)
Yes, it wouldn't do any harm to brush up on your C++ skills. If you don't have a C++ compiler yet, get Dev-C++ http://www.bloodshed.net/devcpp.html
Then try to finish at least one game. It doesn't matter how simple it is. If you then want to concentrate on design, instead of the nitty-gritty details, you might want to try http://www.cs.uu.nl/people/markov/gmaker/
For 3D, 3DGamestudio http://www.conitec.net/a4info.htm is a cheap, decent, all-around game authoring system. You can cobble together a quick FPS and if you put more time into it, a good RPG.
The two I just mentioned are for the windows platform, btw.
If you really want to start with a good (cross-platform) 3D engine, Irrlicht http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/ is a good open-source one. It works with Dev-C++.
I always felt a great sense of satisfaction playing, and finishing the older rpg games like Bard's Tale, Ultima and Wizardry. Each time I finished any of the games, it actually felt like I had saved the world or something like that. Finishing Diablo just a few years back didn't give me quite the same experience. Shooters? This sounds funny but playing Digdug back then was probably as intense as my Q3A games now. The Ancient Art of War (not quite an RTS) kept me up more than any recent wargame (RTS or turn-based) I've played recently. And personally, I find Infocom text games like Zork or Spellbreaker to be more entertaining than their modern-day point-and-click counterparts like Myst.
Maybe the lack of good graphics back then forced me to use my imagination. Either that or its just my aging brain talking.
I remember vaguely this caption in an Infocom ad, "We use the most powerful graphics card in the universe: your brain."
Excellent, Civ4 will now be like FreeCivhttp://freeciv.org/, except that it won't be free, and it won't be for Linux. Years after FreeCiv has been trying to be like Civ, with rulesets for Civ1 & 2, Civ4 has succeeded in becoming LIKE FreeCiv! The irony.
Slashdot Mirror
It's pretty hard to imagine how people back then spoke Elizabethan English with all the grammatically precise thees and thous. (Singular forms of 'you'.) People oversimplified (from their perspective) things to make writing easier. Long story short, we have today's English.
If one can go back to say, 1611 or even 1901, the most grammatically perfect post/article here would seem like l33t sp34k to them. All of us would be h4x0rs to them.
In Doom 2, I remember turning off clipping, then I found John Romero's head behind the boss, and chainsawed away. In Hexen, I just stayed behind a pillar and fired at the boss between shots, like a wild west movie. Wasn't really fun but I nailed him in the end. Very n00b I know, but I got the job done. Killing bosses in 80s RPGs like Ultima or Bard's Tale wasn't just fun, but it always felt glorious afterwards.
While saying this might make me off-topic or flamebait, I suppose http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060215-6190 .html would make it (ripping our own cds) moot and academic.
I guess all good games eventually become classics. Just look at the shelves today and you've got a lot of 'Best of' and 'Ultimate collection' games.
My 80s staples:
Digdug, Ultima, Wizardry, Bard's Tale, Might and Magic.
In the 90s, I loved:
Wolf3D, Doom, Heretic, C&C.
One good terribly underrated RTS that I liked was Krush Kill N Destroy. Sure it had 'generic' RTS written all over it but the story was good for its time.
Late 90s till present:
StarCraft, Quake 3, AvP, Alpha Centauri, Diablo.
Timeless for me:
Simcity, The Sims, Civilization, FreeCiv, Heroes of Might and Magic.
Casual:
Minesweeper, Bejeweled.
Btw, I still play StarCraft on a regular basis. Graphics don't become dated unless you want them to be. It's all in the mind.
And of course, nothing beats paper and pen D&D.
I'd have to agree. They're very, very effective in certain situations. Although this may be a simplistic view, it helps immerse me even more in the storyline. For instance, I was really able to "get into" StarCraft years ago. If you think about it, the carefully woven single-player missions with the cinematics in between, effectively changed it from being a "yet-another-RTS-clone" into a space-opera.
Far older games, which had even simpler graphics, benefited more. Yes, I do agree that plot is more important, but used carefully, they can and often do, drive the plot.
http://trygames.com/ has big-name titles. You can download the trials, which are different from the "trial" trials, then pay for the keys if you like it. The trials are actually the full versions, but are time-crippled. You can check it out.
Funny how an article like this should turn up, just when we were starting to develop sensory-neural interfaces, pain receptors, to be integrated in those action games, so we can feel those punches and shots.
Well said, but that's exactly it. The poor widow was commendable because she gave her last two mites, which was practically all that she had left in the world; all that she had to live on. Okay so several hundred million or even a couple of billion of dollars isn't chump change, but for Bill Gates, its like the kid grilling burgers you mentioned, giving out a few quarters, or maybe even a dollar or two, to local charity. I'm not trying to take anything away from Mr. Gates, but the day he gives out even half his personal wealth (or equivalent to 'one of the widow's mites') now that's a head-turner.
2010 isn't too far away, just like 2002 wasn't that too long ago, and things really haven't changed much. I RTFA, but I doubt if things would be really that different. More mods for 2005-2006 releases, more sequels. The source-code for Quake IV would have been released. And ground-breaking title or two will have come out. I do hope Starcraft II comes out though.
And by 2010, Duke Nukem forever will be coming out of Alpha.
Not to overly simplify things, but Win apps running natively in Linux under Mono isn't necessarily a bad thing. Flame wars aside, Mono has a good chance of doing a better job than Wine in helping people make the transition from Windows to Linux.
All things considered, putting it in FC is a good move. I look forward to what this holds.
TFA was nice. Old games can be hard to find. Compilations (or reissues) make it a lot easier. Even not-so-old games (2-6 years old) can be difficult to find at times.
s /index.html?q=rpg%20archives
0 01QEP9/103-7875370-8027035?v=glance
0 01QEP7/qid=1135045711/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8__i1_xgl63/10 3-7875370-8027035?v=glance&s=videogames&n=229534
m agic-archives
Speaking of compilations, I've got a few of my own. I'm an old-school RPG fan. My personal favorites are:
The Ultima Collection: http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/ultimacollection/
(Ultima I-VIII)
The Ultimate RPG Archives: http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/ultimaterpgarchive
The Ultimate Wizardry Archives: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00
(Wizardry I-VII)
Forgotten Realms Archives: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00
(Pool of Radiance, Curse of the Azure Bonds, Secret of the Silver Blades, Pools of Darkness, Gateway to the Savage Frontier, Treasures of the Savage Frontier, Hillsfar, Eye of the Beholder, Eye of the Beholder II, Eye of the Beholder III, Dungeon Hack, Menzoberranzan, Blood and Magic, and the Baldur's Gate interactive demo.)
The Ultimate Might & Magic Archives: http://www.mobygames.com/game/ultimate-might-and-
(Might & Magic I-V)
Nothing beats old-school gameplay. These collections aren't for you if you're looking for eye-candy though. The games are at least 10 years old, maybe more.
Come to think of it, all life's a game. Except there's no load and save.
By then the average desktop will be powerful enough to handle this smoothly. 3D Desktop. http://desk3d.sourceforge.net/
Well, I second to everything for that matter. Ubuntu doesn't try to be too lean, or too optimized. (I've done LFS, btw.) Doesn't try to put every single app in the galaxy into 3-4 DVDs. It's just right, and it just works. I don't mean to be a flamebait (and I'd suppose this has been hovering at the backs of the minds of more than just a couple or people) but I guess it has captured that "Windows formula" and then some.
Make everything fit on a CD, plus the essential stuff that'll run your PC. Plus don't give out too archaic, or too dumbed-down error messages.Make adding and removing programs a snap.
I just love the Synaptic Package Manager. To Windows users, its like Critical updates on steroids. Like I said, everything just works, and everything's, convenient. That's the word I was looking for.
Maybe at first. There's nothing casual about playing Bejeweled 5-6 hours (or more) a day, everyday, to get to the top. I ought to know. Heh.
I absolutely agree. I don't think it has anything to do with gender per se. Its hugely environmental and gender is just incidental. I have lots of geeky friends who surprisingly, aren't into games; and I personally know a lot of women - who at first glance you'd never think were gamers - who are very much into games. This whole guy vs. girl gamer thing has been beaten to death and blown out of proportion. Same thing would apply to other so-called "girl" things like cooking or cross-stitching. Girls probably have their own forums discussing guy chefs or something like that.
Yes, it would seem pointless at first, since, all you seem to do is get to play what you already live out in real life, paying bills, getting late for work, etc. I still find it amusing because it lets me do or be other people. For instance, I can be a cop, a soldier, a president, or a crime-lord. I get to swim in jacuzzis, have a gardener mow my lawn, etc.
And since I still live in my parents' basement, I get to feel what its like to live on my own; have my own big house to play with. A lot of things people take for granted may not necessarily be so to others. And that, I suppose is the allure of this thing.
I agree. I had an old Pentium 266,32MB RAM, 3.2GB HD. When I first got it about eight years ago, installing Win98 was a snap, compared to installing Mandrake 7.1 not too long ago. Refurbishing now ancient PCs with Linux isn't really the issue here. Its getting X, KDE/Gnome to run smoothly. There even some people who've installed Gentoo and Linux from scratch on older 486s.
I hate to admit it, but it seems like Win 95/98 still win hands down. It took me 2-3 hours to install Mandrake 6.0 on a Pentium 75; and Win98 about less than half that time. OpenOffice.org? Forget it. Slow as molasses on those machines. Even AbiWord and Gnumeric feel like MS Word and Excel.
Liberated Games is dedicated to cataloging all full commercial games that have been liberated and made free in playable form to the public.
I play some of the games you mentioned myself, but the site lists only the games that were once sold in stores but are "free" now. It would be nice though if they had a section of the "best free or open source games" you mentioned.
Music from the 80s Bard's Tale trilogy were classics. And you could even choose. This was from a time when music was rare on PC games. (Before Adlib/soundblaster came out.)
On a more recent note, I enjoyed the industrial cuts from C&C, KKND2 and Quake. The terran themes from Starcraft are also cool. I sure wish AAA gaming companies regularly came out with soundtracks that accompanied their titles, like OSTs for movies, so I wouldn't have to go thru the extra step of painstakingly trying to extract them.
(Once in a while, I drive people crazy here at home by playing the background music of the Sims over and over. Makes the real thing seem like a game.)
It was run by Don Johnson (not the actor)
Well, now he is.
The "big three" religions in games/game-programming: Linux, Windows, OS/X.
Yes, it wouldn't do any harm to brush up on your C++ skills. If you don't have a C++ compiler yet, get Dev-C++ http://www.bloodshed.net/devcpp.html
Then try to finish at least one game. It doesn't matter how simple it is. If you then want to concentrate on design, instead of the nitty-gritty details, you might want to try http://www.cs.uu.nl/people/markov/gmaker/
For 3D, 3DGamestudio http://www.conitec.net/a4info.htm is a cheap, decent, all-around game authoring system. You can cobble together a quick FPS and if you put more time into it, a good RPG.
The two I just mentioned are for the windows platform, btw.
If you really want to start with a good (cross-platform) 3D engine, Irrlicht http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/ is a good open-source one. It works with Dev-C++.
The important thing is to get one game out.
I always felt a great sense of satisfaction playing, and finishing the older rpg games like Bard's Tale, Ultima and Wizardry. Each time I finished any of the games, it actually felt like I had saved the world or something like that. Finishing Diablo just a few years back didn't give me quite the same experience. Shooters? This sounds funny but playing Digdug back then was probably as intense as my Q3A games now. The Ancient Art of War (not quite an RTS) kept me up more than any recent wargame (RTS or turn-based) I've played recently. And personally, I find Infocom text games like Zork or Spellbreaker to be more entertaining than their modern-day point-and-click counterparts like Myst.
Maybe the lack of good graphics back then forced me to use my imagination. Either that or its just my aging brain talking.
I remember vaguely this caption in an Infocom ad, "We use the most powerful graphics card in the universe: your brain."
Excellent, Civ4 will now be like FreeCivhttp://freeciv.org/, except that it won't be free, and it won't be for Linux. Years after FreeCiv has been trying to be like Civ, with rulesets for Civ1 & 2, Civ4 has succeeded in becoming LIKE FreeCiv! The irony.