Duke Nukem 1 & 2 were some of my favorite games in the early 90s. The only shooter I liked better was Bio Menace, another Apogee game. They were impressive sci-fi sidescroller shooters. They had tons of powerups that you had to explore huge maps to find, and puzzles that required you to use the items you have in innovative ways.
Duke Nukem 3d however was very crude. There was nothing sophisticated about it. The story, the jokes, the gameplay, the level design. Sure, people will say that the weapons were fun and they enjoyed exploring the labyrinthine levels but I did not. The weapons were nothing special. The only thing that impressed me was the shrink ray but once the novelty wore off the weapon had no actual tactical role. The levels basically involved clearing the area of monsters and then wondering around lost until you happened to blunder onto whatever object functioned as the key that allowed you to progress. And they made the hero a sexist dick. There were games from around the time of Duke Nukem 1 that had tits in them. But Duke was not one of those game until the 3rd game in the series.
Duke Nukem 3d represented to me the end of an era in gaming. Sold out for a cheap laugh. T&A instead of gameplay. Soon all of my favorite games would reinvent themselves as hollow shells of their former selves. In fact once the new xcom game comes out I don't think there will be any 90s game series that I like anymore.
>Surely they're holding back in the interest of rule of law, and not out of lack of ability?
They are holding out in interest of the golden rule. As in who has the gold makes the rules. There is a wikipedia page titled "CIA Drug Trafficking". There is a whole section on Mexico. Maybe you should read it.
>Look, can you show me a single case of where meth is useful to humanity?
You mean like the Dextroamphetamine, aka "Go Pills" that the US Airforce feeds the brave and noble officers that serve this great nation by flying 22 tons of metal at Mach 2 while laden with enough tactical nuclear weapons to level a city?
That meth? or you mean the other meth?
Like Methylphenidate, aka Ritalin. The drug fed unwillingly to millions of US school children to suppress behavior that the establishment deems undesirable. Or did you mean the Amphetamine dirivite Adderall, fed daily to millions of Americans for a plethora of medical reasons?
You have a 4 and a 7 y.o? That is funny. I was 7 when my step mother put me on Ritalin for "adhd". My legal guardians forced me to take meth every day for most of my childhood.
So I just want to say fuck your ignorant self righteous bullshit. The gangsters and mafia are in control of your government. Your government is feeding meth to your children. And you don't have a fucking clue.
What is to stop apple from porting all the software that apple owns from the old os that apple owns to the new os that apple also owns? They have the source code. They can just recompile it.
It seems only logical to have a unified mobile and desktop os. But then again I am the kind of person who wants my smartphone to run slackware.
I'm just going to point out that the Nazi's human experimentation was done under the guise of scientific research. Just because something is done in the name of science does not mean it is right.
Konqueror is imo such a more useful tool then firefox. On other people's machines I need like 8 different apps open just to match the functionality of what konq does, let alone the features like window panes that no other browser supports.
I beat the first Half-life in under 2 days. I finished the first Fallout in under a week. I was done with Fallout so fast I was able to return it to Babbages. If I recall correctly I traded it in for X-COM: Apocalypse.
X-COM: Apocalypse took me a month just to figure out how to avoid getting my team blown up by those little blue poppers.
On an unrelated note, one of these series is no longer being made. Anyone care to guess what one?
google "Mechwarrior 4 free", it is a free and enhanced release of MW4:Mercs with tons of upgrades and bugfixes, as well as like 100+ extra mechs. The folks who are in charge of it are also remaking Mechwarrior 2, but tbh their MW4 is pretty damn close to the feel of the older title. imo they should just make the single player campaign missions from mw2 in mw4, but whatever...
Most software bitrots. The number of games that I think of as good that will not play anymore on modern OS is astounding. Knights of the Old Republic does not work on widescreen monitors and randomly locks on windows 7. System Shock 2 wont run on any windows after 98. Mechwarrior 3 won't run on any windows after XP. Mechwarrior 2 will run in a dos emulator, but won't be hardware accelerated because 3d only worked with 3dfx voodoo drivers.
I played a phenomenally awesome Atari arcade game in the 90s called Space Lords, that is impossible to play on an emulator because it used custom hardware to render the sprites.
First off the game is highly gear dependent. Rare equipment gives a huge stat bonus over the more common gear. A level 32 gladiator in full elite abyss golds could kill level 50s if they are careful, and 3 shot someone their own level who was in average gear. More or less the only advantage leveling up gives you is access to higher tier skillbooks and equipment.
Second, no matter how gear dependent the game may be, pvp requires a high level of player proficiency to be successful. You can't just use auto-attacks, cookie cutter skill rotations or random skill spam, because the skill chains and reaction skills require you to respond to your opponents actions. Also, there are a large number of methods of incapacitation, from stuns, stumbles, knockback and knockdown to paralysis and aethers hold. This creates a lot of opportunity for combos and synergy between the classes. For example a chanter uses a Staff, and a Staff has a high number of knockdowns. A gladiator has a lot of skills that proc off knockdowns, so if a Chanter runs up and knocks someone down, a gladiator can follow up and combo with skills such as crippling cut or final strike.
Third, the rift system allowed groups of heavily geared characters virtually unrestricted access to the opposing factions homelands and quest hubs. Most of the endgame instances are located in contested areas, as are most world bosses. In fact it seems to me that most of the pve activities in the game are designed to funnel players into killzones to be harvested in pvp.
These three factors combined lead to not only individual players being able to lock down other players and kill them before they have a chance to do anything about it, but a group of geared players can lock down entire regions of the map for hours on end.
Which leads to my next point, PVP in Aion invariably breaks down into a zergfest. A geared group will camp an area for hours on end, until enough people get fed up with it and form an alliance. Then 20-30 people will go hunt down the offending group and camp their corpses until they leave.
And my last point, as others have said the game is a massive grind in both pve and pvp. The high end abyss gear costs millions of points, and while the game is not so ruthless to have full loot on death you do lose an exponentially large number of points. At the highest ranks you lose thousands of points per death while most players you kill will only be worth a few hundred at best. You can get 10k points in each pve abyss instance you run, but you are looking at running alot of instances to get enough points to afford the high end gear. In any case, as grindy as it is, its no worse then then scumming altars or thrones in nethack.
I admit the game was massively overhyped. It was billed as an east meets west wow-killer. In reality it is a hardcore Asian mmo, with Asian style pve grindfest that I would describe as merciless, combined with hardcore Asian style pvp that I would describe as brutal.
In short, two thumbs up from me, a hardcore oldschool gamer. In the end Aion might not be as good as nethack, but it looks alot better... and the pvp is lots of fun.
I play Aion, which is pretty much Lineage III with an original setting. I was never into generic fantasy but the lore and art style in Aion were unique enough to catch my interest. The game has some of the most ruthlessly brutal pvp I have ever see tho, and it is definitely a deterrent to all but the most hardcore players.
I am pretty sure I saw an arti on/. about how fringe was struggling / and or on its deathbed. Oh, and I am not sure if you can really call Fringe science fiction as it did not contain any actual science.
Quake Wars has no deathmatch, instead it has some of the most complex and rewarding multiplayer objectives available in a video game. After playing QW, mindless deathmatch games seem so boring.
I used to work as a developer for a production company that was branching off from physical media into the digital age. Their experience was in marketing, advertisement, and sales for print, television and film. They had a few technical people but they were all audio/video people. None of the higher ups had any clue about anything to do with the internet and management typically assigned a creative director or the sales associate in charge of the client to manage development projects.
After several cost overruns and horrible failures one of the more vocal developers told upper management that that software development was different then production and several requirements were technically impossible. At that point one of the producers actually threatened to set up cameras in the web department and make a reality tv show where he fires one developer each week until the project is finished.
Soon after, the developer was told his desk and office were needed for other uses and that he had to move his things to a plastic fold out table in the back storage closet. Instead he just quit.
I never ate lunch with bigshot reality show producer, except every Friday at the mandatory feel good company lunch... mandatory , because eating lunch with each other helps build a great team.
>You don't want to talk with the people you work with because of YOU, not because of them.
Exactly. Most of my co-workers interests has been limited to Clear Channel, ABC/NBC/CBS, professional sports and low brow misogynistic dick jokes. Why would I want to subject myself to their experiences?
>Microsoft is a successful company because they've got some pretty smart people working there. All that money didn't just come from nowhere.
Microsoft's money came from the same place that all money comes from. The only reason Microsoft is a successful company is because Billy's mommy had connections and was able to hand his startup several no bid contracts. After all you don't get anywhere in a corporate oligarchy without cronyism.
Also, there were the so called "ps2.5" games like Shining Force EXA that came out at the end of the ps2's lifespan. They were developed to target the new hardware but released for the old system. EXA was a ps2 game but put so many mobs on the screen it ran like total shit on the ps2, suffering huge slow downs in almost every fight. The game works like a dream on the ps3 tho.
Slashdot Mirror
Funny, I am friended to Obama on myspace.
omg i should have made my comment in reply to you. go read what i posted a few lines up. ^^
Duke Nukem 1 & 2 were some of my favorite games in the early 90s. The only shooter I liked better was Bio Menace, another Apogee game. They were impressive sci-fi sidescroller shooters. They had tons of powerups that you had to explore huge maps to find, and puzzles that required you to use the items you have in innovative ways.
Duke Nukem 3d however was very crude. There was nothing sophisticated about it. The story, the jokes, the gameplay, the level design. Sure, people will say that the weapons were fun and they enjoyed exploring the labyrinthine levels but I did not. The weapons were nothing special. The only thing that impressed me was the shrink ray but once the novelty wore off the weapon had no actual tactical role. The levels basically involved clearing the area of monsters and then wondering around lost until you happened to blunder onto whatever object functioned as the key that allowed you to progress. And they made the hero a sexist dick. There were games from around the time of Duke Nukem 1 that had tits in them. But Duke was not one of those game until the 3rd game in the series.
Duke Nukem 3d represented to me the end of an era in gaming. Sold out for a cheap laugh. T&A instead of gameplay. Soon all of my favorite games would reinvent themselves as hollow shells of their former selves. In fact once the new xcom game comes out I don't think there will be any 90s game series that I like anymore.
>Surely they're holding back in the interest of rule of law, and not out of lack of ability?
They are holding out in interest of the golden rule. As in who has the gold makes the rules. There is a wikipedia page titled "CIA Drug Trafficking". There is a whole section on Mexico. Maybe you should read it.
>Look, can you show me a single case of where meth is useful to humanity?
You mean like the Dextroamphetamine, aka "Go Pills" that the US Airforce feeds the brave and noble officers that serve this great nation by flying 22 tons of metal at Mach 2 while laden with enough tactical nuclear weapons to level a city?
That meth? or you mean the other meth?
Like Methylphenidate, aka Ritalin. The drug fed unwillingly to millions of US school children to suppress behavior that the establishment deems undesirable. Or did you mean the Amphetamine dirivite Adderall, fed daily to millions of Americans for a plethora of medical reasons?
You have a 4 and a 7 y.o? That is funny. I was 7 when my step mother put me on Ritalin for "adhd". My legal guardians forced me to take meth every day for most of my childhood.
So I just want to say fuck your ignorant self righteous bullshit. The gangsters and mafia are in control of your government. Your government is feeding meth to your children. And you don't have a fucking clue.
And where is the 3-prong N64 controller now?
nono, silly. just the good democratic revolutions.
What is to stop apple from porting all the software that apple owns from the old os that apple owns to the new os that apple also owns? They have the source code. They can just recompile it.
It seems only logical to have a unified mobile and desktop os. But then again I am the kind of person who wants my smartphone to run slackware.
>evo (the phone the guy had) has a microsd. but there's no easy way to get it out quickly...
Sure there is! All you have to do is smash the phone on the ground and pick the memory card out of the pile of chips that comes spilling out.
I'm just going to point out that the Nazi's human experimentation was done under the guise of scientific research. Just because something is done in the name of science does not mean it is right.
Konqueror is imo such a more useful tool then firefox. On other people's machines I need like 8 different apps open just to match the functionality of what konq does, let alone the features like window panes that no other browser supports.
>More hits for google.com - more data, ads and more money for them. Only makes sense, really.
this. mod parent up.
I beat the first Half-life in under 2 days. I finished the first Fallout in under a week. I was done with Fallout so fast I was able to return it to Babbages. If I recall correctly I traded it in for X-COM: Apocalypse.
X-COM: Apocalypse took me a month just to figure out how to avoid getting my team blown up by those little blue poppers.
On an unrelated note, one of these series is no longer being made. Anyone care to guess what one?
google "Mechwarrior 4 free", it is a free and enhanced release of MW4:Mercs with tons of upgrades and bugfixes, as well as like 100+ extra mechs. The folks who are in charge of it are also remaking Mechwarrior 2, but tbh their MW4 is pretty damn close to the feel of the older title. imo they should just make the single player campaign missions from mw2 in mw4, but whatever...
Mechwarrior 5 looks like Metal Gear Solid 4.
>Are Sony offering any kind of counselling for those poor addicted geeks' horrendous withdrawal?
yes, they are offering therapeutic QQ on the official sony forums.
Most software bitrots. The number of games that I think of as good that will not play anymore on modern OS is astounding. Knights of the Old Republic does not work on widescreen monitors and randomly locks on windows 7. System Shock 2 wont run on any windows after 98. Mechwarrior 3 won't run on any windows after XP. Mechwarrior 2 will run in a dos emulator, but won't be hardware accelerated because 3d only worked with 3dfx voodoo drivers.
I played a phenomenally awesome Atari arcade game in the 90s called Space Lords, that is impossible to play on an emulator because it used custom hardware to render the sprites.
First off the game is highly gear dependent. Rare equipment gives a huge stat bonus over the more common gear. A level 32 gladiator in full elite abyss golds could kill level 50s if they are careful, and 3 shot someone their own level who was in average gear. More or less the only advantage leveling up gives you is access to higher tier skillbooks and equipment.
Second, no matter how gear dependent the game may be, pvp requires a high level of player proficiency to be successful. You can't just use auto-attacks, cookie cutter skill rotations or random skill spam, because the skill chains and reaction skills require you to respond to your opponents actions. Also, there are a large number of methods of incapacitation, from stuns, stumbles, knockback and knockdown to paralysis and aethers hold. This creates a lot of opportunity for combos and synergy between the classes. For example a chanter uses a Staff, and a Staff has a high number of knockdowns. A gladiator has a lot of skills that proc off knockdowns, so if a Chanter runs up and knocks someone down, a gladiator can follow up and combo with skills such as crippling cut or final strike.
Third, the rift system allowed groups of heavily geared characters virtually unrestricted access to the opposing factions homelands and quest hubs. Most of the endgame instances are located in contested areas, as are most world bosses. In fact it seems to me that most of the pve activities in the game are designed to funnel players into killzones to be harvested in pvp.
These three factors combined lead to not only individual players being able to lock down other players and kill them before they have a chance to do anything about it, but a group of geared players can lock down entire regions of the map for hours on end.
Which leads to my next point, PVP in Aion invariably breaks down into a zergfest. A geared group will camp an area for hours on end, until enough people get fed up with it and form an alliance. Then 20-30 people will go hunt down the offending group and camp their corpses until they leave.
And my last point, as others have said the game is a massive grind in both pve and pvp. The high end abyss gear costs millions of points, and while the game is not so ruthless to have full loot on death you do lose an exponentially large number of points. At the highest ranks you lose thousands of points per death while most players you kill will only be worth a few hundred at best. You can get 10k points in each pve abyss instance you run, but you are looking at running alot of instances to get enough points to afford the high end gear. In any case, as grindy as it is, its no worse then then scumming altars or thrones in nethack.
I admit the game was massively overhyped. It was billed as an east meets west wow-killer. In reality it is a hardcore Asian mmo, with Asian style pve grindfest that I would describe as merciless, combined with hardcore Asian style pvp that I would describe as brutal.
In short, two thumbs up from me, a hardcore oldschool gamer. In the end Aion might not be as good as nethack, but it looks alot better... and the pvp is lots of fun.
I play Aion, which is pretty much Lineage III with an original setting. I was never into generic fantasy but the lore and art style in Aion were unique enough to catch my interest. The game has some of the most ruthlessly brutal pvp I have ever see tho, and it is definitely a deterrent to all but the most hardcore players.
>What about Fringe?
/. about how fringe was struggling / and or on its deathbed. Oh, and I am not sure if you can really call Fringe science fiction as it did not contain any actual science.
I am pretty sure I saw an arti on
Perhaps they figure that since the Science Channel only plays fiction now, had to find their own niche?
Quake Wars has no deathmatch, instead it has some of the most complex and rewarding multiplayer objectives available in a video game. After playing QW, mindless deathmatch games seem so boring.
I used to work as a developer for a production company that was branching off from physical media into the digital age. Their experience was in marketing, advertisement, and sales for print, television and film. They had a few technical people but they were all audio/video people. None of the higher ups had any clue about anything to do with the internet and management typically assigned a creative director or the sales associate in charge of the client to manage development projects.
After several cost overruns and horrible failures one of the more vocal developers told upper management that that software development was different then production and several requirements were technically impossible. At that point one of the producers actually threatened to set up cameras in the web department and make a reality tv show where he fires one developer each week until the project is finished.
Soon after, the developer was told his desk and office were needed for other uses and that he had to move his things to a plastic fold out table in the back storage closet. Instead he just quit.
I never ate lunch with bigshot reality show producer, except every Friday at the mandatory feel good company lunch... mandatory , because eating lunch with each other helps build a great team.
>You don't want to talk with the people you work with because of YOU, not because of them.
Exactly. Most of my co-workers interests has been limited to Clear Channel, ABC/NBC/CBS, professional sports and low brow misogynistic dick jokes. Why would I want to subject myself to their experiences?
>Microsoft is a successful company because they've got some pretty smart people working there. All that money didn't just come from nowhere.
Microsoft's money came from the same place that all money comes from. The only reason Microsoft is a successful company is because Billy's mommy had connections and was able to hand his startup several no bid contracts. After all you don't get anywhere in a corporate oligarchy without cronyism.
Also, there were the so called "ps2.5" games like Shining Force EXA that came out at the end of the ps2's lifespan. They were developed to target the new hardware but released for the old system. EXA was a ps2 game but put so many mobs on the screen it ran like total shit on the ps2, suffering huge slow downs in almost every fight. The game works like a dream on the ps3 tho.