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Cream-of-Plenty posted:I think he was talking about using both skulls and keys in a map, for a total of 6 keys. One of the maps in CC4 does this and I think it's pretty obnoxious. The whole thing comes off as a ridiculous attempt at making the biggest, most drawn out map in the pack for the sake of it, especially when the level is a sprawling mess of empty hallways and caverns. I always wondered if you could do this, since IDKFA gives you both sets of keys and skulls, I assumed that somebody could in theory make a map that required you to acquire both. But yeah, why would you.
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Dec 21, 2012 16:47
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Reive posted:Holy crap! Just tried it with Deus Ex and it's awesome, I smell a replay. I can't wait to try this with the Deus Ex 'New Vision' retexture mod pack too... 
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Dec 27, 2012 17:29
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Guillermus posted:When I play a map/wad for first time I normally use Beautiful Doom (I love the sounds!) and avoid using BD because some fights are completely hosed up because Imps jump at your face or lost souls being absolutely a pain in the rear end. Another alternative is Samsara because while you get to play with different chars/weapons, moster behaviour is the same. I loving love Samsara. As you said, its great for testing WADs because most everything stays the same. Also, co-op hilarity. Just ran through PLUTONIA.WAD for the first time (I know) with a friend, myself as doomguy and he as security (he's a mac fanboy). It was just so much goddamned fun. 
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Dec 28, 2012 20:19
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The Kins posted:Here's a weird mod I'm keeping an eye on: A Doom take on Mario 64, of all things. Well since they're just kinda taking the setting & the idea of the magic paintings and otherwise keeping it pretty DOOM, that looks pretty awesome. I was prepared for some kind of platforming nonsense when you said Doom Mario 64 :P
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Jan 3, 2013 19:38
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Install Gentoo posted:Sector culling doesn't help with the massive amount of monsters that all need to be rendered (and AI routines run etc) in Nuts.wad, especially if you try to do it in Brutal Doom. They're all standing in the same bigass sector. Exactly, if they're all in one sector, then that does nothing. The Doom engine wasn't meant for so many enemies to occupy one sector, the engine (being 2.5D, so lots of shortcuts) was built on sectors, which naturally lends to sector culling, which as has been described, isn't perfect. Its like painter's algorithm vs Z-buffering, it works, and its faster, but there are special case scenarios where it doesn't work so well. It really shouldn't be that bad to do normal occlusion culling though in a sourceport, I can't think of a reason offhand why they haven't already :confusion: except I guess that sector culling normally works fine, and is kinda inherent, but still... I guess there'd be some overhead from the culling checks on all current monsters which would largely be irrelevant other than nuts.wad type scenarios? I might have to pull the source and poke around, see what's up. You guys have made me all curious, and I love low-level rendering stuff like this, back when things were simpler. (A more civilized age) Is there some kind of a hacky way you could create really tiny invisible sidedefs to break up nuts.wad? like little steps throughout the room? What happens if you sidedef off a room with the neighboring sectors having equal heights? Lol its been like forever since I messed with doom mapping. Dominic White posted:This doesn't explain the phenomenon that on maps with a lot of enemies, looking straight up or down makes the framerate plunge. It certainly seems to be graphics/renderer related. As somebody else suggested, the looking up bug is probably a result of hacks in ZDoom to let you look straight up, which Doom couldn't do at all, resulting in rendering the entire area to cover the pixels that wouldn't be normally rendered. You could expect somewhere like a 1/4 reduction in FPS from rendering each viewport separately and then combining them. Its probably not that bad, but something like that. There's definitely a better way to go about it, but...  Sometimes with free open-source software you get what you pay for :| Zaphod42 fucked around with this message at 23:15 on Jan 7, 2013 |
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Jan 7, 2013 23:04
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Convex posted:According to PC Gamer, some guy managed to get his hands on the original alpha demo for Half-Life and uploaded a couple of videos to Youtube to prove it. Whoa, whoa, whoa This is awesome! It looks exactly like quake2, as can be expected.
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Jan 9, 2013 21:51
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Red_Mage posted:The PS2 port was fun. It had splitscreen Coop, which worked fantastically well. I played so much co-op split screen Unreal Tournament on PS2 its ridiculous. We didn't have enough computers to LAN UT, so it was the next best thing. All we ever did was camp the redeemer  a different time
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Jan 15, 2013 23:48
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Thompsons posted:Edit: Nevermind, switching to Zandorum fixed it. Also, am I the only one who really kinda hates software rendering in these engines? It makes everything all super dark and pixelly and fuckin butt-ugly. Most source ports require you to fiddle with the options a lot to get an experience close to original Doom. I can't stand anisotropic filtering, and yeah, its usually super dark by default; change that. They have more options than the original Doom for a reason.
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Jan 18, 2013 00:01
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Essobie posted:Quake Machinima's foundation is horrible comic timing, horrible voice acting done with horrible equipment, featuring horrible dialog and horrible mapping/environment/texturing/modelling. I don't think I can remember any of those things that did not make me cringe at least a dozen times (including the ones I helped make). It was a different age, lower standards. It was impressive as hell if you could just get your lovely quake machinima working, having actual *jokes* was a crazy plus. Who cares if they're good? Lol. I still hold up The Seal of Nehahra as one of the greatest machinima projects of all loving time. But if you go back now and try to watch it, the audio quality is just loving horrendous. Its like everybody is shouting their lines, and they're halfway through swallowing the microphone while they do it. Nehahra is pretty funny though, and at times has good comedic timing. (Phil!) Othertimes not so much. I also like Nehahra a lot because it actually explains the Quake backstory through cutscenes, which back in the Quake days was just something written on the inside of the manual.
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Jan 18, 2013 19:34
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xanthan posted:Wait Quake had a plot, what was it? Basically what other people said, the military was experimenting with slipgates (on earth instead of mars, so different from doom!) There was a malfunction and they got sent to some weird other dimension, they went through to set up an outpost and found monsters and got murdered, the monsters went back through the slipgate and murdered lots of people. You're the sole survivor marine surrounded by monsters. You have to go from slipgate to slipgate trying to kill everything. That's why one minute you're in a techbase, and the next minute your'e in a medieval castle, and the next minute you're just in some hellhole. The idea is you're constantly warping around between the military bases on Earth and the different castles / wastelands in the monster dimension, trying to find which slipgate will lead you to the final boss. Its easier to just run through all the slipgates than to try to redirect one of them, right? You're no scientist. So, its actually both Doom and Half-Life's stories combined, and HL didn't come out until much later. Nehahra adds some extra flavor though that I like. Zaphod42 fucked around with this message at 17:16 on Jan 19, 2013 |
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Jan 19, 2013 17:13
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 comedy goldConvex posted:... This is Operation Counterstrike and you're in charge. Find Quake, and stop him... or it... And I love how even the writer isn't sure who Quake is. "stop him... or it..." Quake is Pat?! Red_Mage posted:Its actually really funny, because if you look at how Daikatana expects you to play it, and how Left 4 Dead plays, they are basically the same sort of FPS. One just has the advantage of having a working AI engine that makes the swarms of small guys and the coop play possible. The difference between theory and practice is that in theory, they're the same, but in practice they're not. 
Zaphod42 fucked around with this message at 22:23 on Jan 21, 2013 |
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Jan 21, 2013 22:18
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Johnny Law posted:And y'know, there are some good things about that. This article is not written by me but I like the cut of its jib: http://www.lunaran.com/page.php?id=200 I've been saying that a ton about movies lately. On the one hand, you have recent hollywood's trend with dumbed down least common denominator movies, we better spell out the plot extra clear so nobody in the back gets left behind, movies like Harry Potter (not saying its a bad movie) where the main character acts as a stand-in for the audience to vicariously learn what's going on. What is all this?!? So Harry asks questions, and we the audience get answers. Contrast that with a movie like Ghost in the Shell, my favorite example. GITS drops you in media res, right in the middle of the story already going on. They don't explain dick to you, you have to pay attention. They don't have to stop and say "look, its the future, there are cyborgs, this guy is probably a hacker, maybe these people are criminals?" No, it has the confidence to say, "We're going to put all these elements together and show you something as though it was real, and we're going to get the details right so that you should be able to understand just from watching." Its SO much better that way. Its not like lazy Sci-Fi, I don't get the feeling that the author of GITS couldn't come up with explanations (and the manga does go some more in detail), but rather that we didn't need to know them. In fact, there's so many tiny details in everything that you don't have time for, its a joy to discover them on repeat viewings and slowly realize more and more of how everything fits together in this world. You get the feeling that on the opposite, the author DID take the time to explain everything, but then kept it all a secret, and now you want to figure it out. Its so much more fun. On top of that, there's the mystery angle. That article hits on it, that Hitchcock would rather not show you things and let your imagination play, because your imagination will always be better. The original Alien was a rubber suit, but you only ever saw brief glimpses in shadows, so it was frightening as hell. It could be anything, everything you didn't want it to be. It was a literal nightmare: imagined fear. When everything is explained for you through game manuals and loading screen tips, it takes away a lot of the magic. Most of what I miss in MMOs is the mystery, games like Everquest and MUDs you have no idea what all is going on in the world. But modern games like WoW, they're designed to not let you get confused, to constantly inform you what you should do and funnel you forward to the next event. Its easy and relaxing, but its so less satisfying. DoombatINC posted:I loved how (edit: in UT3) they tied both the small amount of players per team and the respawn system together into the plot element of "We could send armies to fight and die on the battlefields, but gently caress it, let's just keep sending the same dozen hand-picked psychos over and over" 
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Jan 21, 2013 22:33
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Johnny Law posted:That's the UT2k3/4 intro which is kind of adorable IMO. Compare to the UT3 intro which is blurry and gray and over-serious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1j0XIQwmz08 Yodzilla posted:The Unreal and Unreal Tournament OST are pretty great for background programming music.  I think this'll be my jam for the week at work
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Jan 22, 2013 05:41
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Watching all those old Quake speedruns and machinima videos is great. Really brings me back. For me, this was my all time favorite quake video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FVJ__rBFxk I played Team Fortress when I was still in elementary school, and it just blew me away. But that video in particular, the music fits the action so well, and everything perfectly captures the mood of Team Fortress. Everyone is going to die, everyone is going to be gibbed and everything is going to be chaos and it is going to be glorious; you'll just respawn and do it again. Does anybody still play TF? I might have to download it and see. I downloaded Doom TF for skulltag awhile ago, which was pretty silly, but I didn't really see anybody playing. But that was a reverse port anyways, Quake was the original.
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Jan 22, 2013 16:27
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Gay Abortions posted:So, back on the topic of Quake Machinima, I finally dug up a copy of Fiend Run Lite which is probably my favorite. What is this I don't even Is it just a model swap? Or like a mod or something? Seems like he's jumping higher without rocketjumping, some kinda mod where you play as a Fiend? (Or as a guy on a Fiend's back, lol)
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Jan 22, 2013 23:31
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Amethyst posted:"Save anywhere" really is a kludge though. If you find yourself having to patch it in, you hosed up somewhere along the line. Honestly I don't think most games should have a "game over" at all. I think its a carryover from the early days when gaming was about high scores and extreme skill and sucking down quarters. In the modern age of easy to play Call of Duty games, why keep killing me with grenades every so often? I think games should find more ways to "soft punish" the player rather than resetting them at the beginning. Only roguelikes should have game over, games that are built AROUND it as a mechanic. Dark Souls, Devil May Cry, sure. (although even DMC3 realized that starting over after every boss failure was dumb and special edition made it so that you could try the boss over and over and over). Is Doom completely boring if you play on IDDQD? I still have tons of fun running through the levels at full speed blowing away all the enemies. Its a different experience, for sure, you don't have to be careful so you can get away with a lot and you aren't challenged to be strategic, but you can HAVE FUN. I think games have really lost focus, they're supposed to be about having fun! Sometimes a roguelike challenge is fun, but sometimes godmode is too. Like I said, find ways to subtly punish the player without starting them over. Maybe have lots of locked doors that simply won't open until you've killed all the enemies in the area? Having no game over almost completely mitigates the need for saving, too. You only need to save between sessions then. And honestly, an experience like Heavy Rain where you HAVE to play straight through it, where you save as you go and you never start over, that makes you commit more. You're far less likely to shoot NPCs or children or whatever if it permanently scars your character's reputation. But if you can shoot, chuckle, and then load save, that frees you to be a sociopath.
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Jan 23, 2013 00:48
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SPACE HOMOS posted:I was reading up on Doom and looking at its source but I am horrible at programming (only took two semesters of java), but does Doom build the bsp as it loads the level? It seems like all later id games have a program that creates a bsp which the engine loads later. I guess I should let somebody else that knows for certain comment, but I'm think that the BSP is created during a map compile phase for Doom era as well. (Half life era too, I think). The sectors and everything need to be laid out in the WAD already and structured in the tree, so the map program has to do that before the game is able to, AFAIK. Course with modern sourceports everything is thrown out the window, you could totally write a sourceport that behaves differently. I do believe that Quake 3 would create a navmesh for AI on the fly each time you load the map up, which is similar.
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Jan 23, 2013 18:21
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ColoradoCleric posted:One of the best mods for quake 2 that I wish would get incorporated into newer games is qpong. Basically a mish-mash of pong and quake 2, really it played like an aggressive version of soccer with railguns. TF2 would be perfect for this type of game mode. Interesting, reminds me of the never released team multiplayer mode for Portal 2. I feel like it would get old, but yeah, mix it in with TF2... I mean that's not really all that different from payload. Which is itself just an automated version of The_Hunted
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Jan 23, 2013 21:53
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Dominic White posted:To this day, a lot of people still haven't figured out the proper technique to using the BFG. You need to treat it like the SSG, but much bigger, and with a far wider cone of fire. It does pitifully low damage if you're just slugging away at enemies at long range, but you can one-shot the spider mastermind if you smack it point-blank, as it's a wide enough target to effectively catch the full power of the blast. This doesn't work nearly as well in Brutal Doom, but the spider's brain is much more vulnerable to direct damage, to it's safer to engage at range. To be fair, the graphic doesn't really explain/match the way the gun works, its poor conveyance. The original design for that weapon was to shoot out tons and tons of plasma balls in rapid succession, like a plasma shotgun, which would have been much better conveyance but was technically infeasible, so they changed it to the big boom. Which looks cool, but makes you think it works like a super rocket launcher; I've always used it that way myself. But you're absolutely right, its a super-supershotgun. I'm going to go BFG a spider mastermind in the face now, kthx.
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Feb 1, 2013 21:50
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H2Omelon posted:I will take this opportunity to pimp a guide I wrote on Steam that details exactly how the BFG works: 
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Feb 1, 2013 22:16
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Chinese Tony Danza posted:If it is, I'm demanding my voice acting be pulled from the game. There's no way in HELL I am having my name connected with something that has racist poo poo in it, whether it's patently obvious or not.  I mean, I still really like Brutal Doom, and I can still enjoy it even if he is a nutjob, but... yeah. :/ Makes me feel weird about it. Scyther posted:He stated that it was supposed to be a joke, admitted it was a bad joke, and apologized. It's pretty clear that he wrote it himself. Nobody ever said anything offensive while joking.
Zaphod42 fucked around with this message at 16:02 on Feb 8, 2013 |
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Feb 8, 2013 15:54
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Segmentation Fault posted:It's also up on Quaddicted if you want to putz around on it. Hey, that's really, really nifty. Runs like butt on my work laptop, but I'm impressed they made it work in pure HTML5 at all. I'll try it more on my home rig. Hey, does anybody know this map? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o17T6RgAtew Its like a remake of knee deep in the dead, looks familiar but I can't remember which .wad
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Feb 11, 2013 23:00
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Ohvee posted:I was just about to ask if there was a trick to getting mouselook to work. I tried in both Chrome and Firefox on a Win7 pc and no dice. Works for me in chrome 
Zaphod42 fucked around with this message at 17:34 on Feb 12, 2013 |
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Feb 12, 2013 17:31
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Wasn't System Shock 2 released legitimately for free? I'm pretty positive I downloaded it a few years back at no cost. Still, cool to see it on GOG, supposedly they're including lots of maps and art and behind the scenes videos and stuff. I'll buy it again.
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Feb 13, 2013 17:06
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Cat Mattress posted:You might be confusing it with Marathon. Either that or you've been conned into thinking abandonware was a legitimate thing. (I mean, morally it often is; but legally it certainly isn't.) Nah, definitely not. I know Marathon well and have had Aleph One on my machine since I stopped using a mac. Hmm weird. I swear to god it was on Fileplanet or somewhere legit as a freely available game, I was pretty happy about it, downloaded it and played through the beginning, like a few years back...  Maybe I dreamed it? Or maybe it was an abandonware site after all... I swear though...
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Feb 13, 2013 18:28
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The Kins posted:System Shock 2 has landed at GOG, as previously threatened. Embarrassing Admission Time: I'm also a huge pussy and am not big on scary games. I scream like a girl when things pop out at me. I generally don't like scary movies. That said, Bioshock may be my favorite game of all time, and I almost didn't play it at first because the Medical Pavilion (first section) was pretty spooky. Ends up the rest of the game was far less spooky, and all together AMAZING. Also, its insanely scary, but Silent Hill 2 is another all time favorite. I can't play it alone at night for long, but whoadamn its good. So I would say brave through it and play the crap out of System Shock 2 if you haven't yet, you might find its one of your all time favorites even though you hate scary games.
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Feb 16, 2013 00:11
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, 363 MB, soundtrack, pitch document, creepy stuttery lady voice, etc.
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quote:Carry The Flag Yodzilla posted:I really like this idea and I have no clue why a game hasn't tried this for their default CTF rule set. My biggest pet peeve with multiplayer games are modes that stalemate too easily and drag on. Monday Night Combat was the worst for this in recent memory. I'm pretty positive SOME game has included this, I can't remember which though. I remember playing tons of different mutations and variations on CTF, sometimes one flag, sometimes two, sometimes you have to have your flag to score the enemy's flag, sometimes you take it back to the flag location, etc. Can't remember which game though... so long ago... Also, lots of people don't realize (game design!) but TFC The_Hunted is really just capture the flag with special rules to prevent stalemates (take turns, only one team can have the flag, only one person IS the flag) And then TF2's Payload mode was an improvement on this still, where the flag was no longer a person, preventing the problem with having a noobie VIP in The_Hunted. The bomb is effectively a flag, but on a track. Payload Race returns to classic CTF style with two "flags" that each move independently (bombs). Then there's other variants like Halo's Oddball (hold the flag, don't cap it) or Duke Forever's Capture the Babe. They're really all just CTF variants. There's tons more. Speaking of old game modes that haven't shown up in modern gaming (I miss all those options, don't you?), I played a freeze tag mod for Quake3 that was SO MUCH FUN. If you died you were frozen in place, and an ally had to unfreeze you. It got pretty crazy.
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Feb 19, 2013 20:31
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Yodzilla posted:I remember the soundtrack being pretty good too. This begs the question of why didn't I play it more? I remember playing the first few levels of Forsaken and then...nothing. Whoaaa, that DOES look better than most PS2 launch games by FAR.  Jeeze, that almost looks on-par with Timesplitters 2.
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Feb 26, 2013 18:12
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xanthan posted:Should I start the Dark Forces series with the first game or has it not aged well enough? IMO Dark Forces has aged very gracefully, play it (possibly a sourceport so it plays nice with modern OS) However, I would say probably skip Jedi Knight I (Dark Forces II), it has not aged so gracefully. Awkward controls and gameplay mechanics, ugly early 3D graphics (rather than Dark Forces very stylized 2.5D graphics) and some really terrible live action cutscenes. Then on to Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast which was my favorite in the series, amazing controls, and then Jedi Outcast II: Jedi Academy which is not great but not bad, more of the same from Jedi Outcast. More options, less interesting story. (Apparently they're not allowed to use the number III) ToxicFrog posted:The first game has aged pretty well in every respect except controls, which are almost but not quite mouselook and honestly kind of a pain. Depending on how much you believe in fairies you might want to wait for XL Engine to reach a point where Dark Forces is fully supported - at the moment it's playable but some features are missing and the game is not, IIRC, completable. /agree Zaphod42 fucked around with this message at 22:19 on Feb 26, 2013 |
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Feb 26, 2013 22:16
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gooby on rails posted:The PS games are probably streaming audio tracks off the CD during gameplay. It was never the case that cartridges could hold more than disks; a CD held 650MB in those days and the N64 only got up to 128MB carts at the very end of its life, with games like Conker's Bad Fur Day. Anybody who thinks CDs hold more than Cartridges, notice how almost every PS game has cutscenes, while almost 0 N64 games do. Almost everything on N64 is done in-engine; they just didn't have room for video. The PS on the other hand was using discs, which were the new sexy medium that allowed things like Myst to happen. Why did Nintendo stick to cartridges? A ) We were used to it from NES and SNES, it had that Nintendo feel. B ) less prone to scratches C ) almost 0 loading times, vs Playstation having LONG load times Arguably not a bad decision. But not having CDROM size data limits was the key reason for Square Enix jumping ship from Nintendo (All Final Fantasy games previously were on NES & SNES), they wanted to do things (See: FFVII) that couldn't be done on the N64. For a good time, go look up the early FFVII demo on the N64. Zaphod42 fucked around with this message at 22:24 on Feb 26, 2013 |
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Feb 26, 2013 22:21
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xanthan posted:2 questions. Myst was a PC game which came out when CDROMs were new, and it used them to do some really cool stuff. It actually was the top selling video game of all time until The Sims (beating Doom and others by a landslide). The whole game was pre-rendered, so it looked WAAAAY better than anything else of its time; it was like playing a cutscene. It was very limited in gameplay because you WERE playing a cutscene, but it was very well designed. Puzzle game, played in first person. A long running series which has seen over V games and a failed MMO. The question, even at its time, is how much do you want to make each cartridge cost? That's the problem with cartridges, you have to buy the hardware over again for each copy, its not an efficient way to transfer data. They could make Terabyte cartridges, but then every game would cost like $200. Or they could make cheap flashdrive cartridges but limit themselves down to a few hundred megs or whatever. Its all variable, but the problem is the variable is money, and money is something you're trying to maximize, not minimize. Consoles are generally sold at a loss, they need to profit like crazy on games. Thing is, we've effectively superceded this now because we have Hard Drives in consoles, and far more RAM. You can get the game however you want (CDROM, DVD, Internet Download, whatever), and then install it on your hard drive, Then to be loaded you stream it to RAM. This is like making temporary cartridges. Cartridges are effectively external ROM with the game burned on. The upside was that some really clever developers (like Rare) did all sorts of tricks using the cartridge as RAM memory itself to boost the N64's capabilities. gooby on rails posted:About as much as you can get on a USB drive or SD card without breaking the bank (and keeping in mind that industrial-scale DVD or BD manufacturing will always be far cheaper). 3DS games range from 1 to 8 GB. This is a good point I didn't even think about, compare the DS and 3DS to the PSP and PSP Vita and we have the N64 PS days all over again! The Nintendo Handhelds actually continue to use cartridges (flash memory), while the PSP uses those stupid UMD discs. Its the same technology, just made smaller. (In both cases). redmercer posted:It was one of the early video-heavy adventure games. If I'm not mistaken it actually started life as a Hypercard stack. It's not aged well, and it came from the days in adventure games before things like "solutions that make sense" really came into fashion. It's under five bucks on gog.com so at the very least if you don't like it you won't have lost much. But! If you DO like it, they made a shitload of sequels so you'll be set for a good long time. Since they're not FPSes, further questions should probably go in the Retro Gaming Megathread, however. The Mac version was definitely just implemented in Hypercard, which is pretty hilarious. Hey, I think it holds up pretty good! Definitely better than early 3D games of its time! But maybe I'm just touched by nostalgia. Zaphod42 fucked around with this message at 22:50 on Feb 26, 2013 |
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Feb 26, 2013 22:44
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Red_Mage posted:Its not even like, difficult. Its arbitrary. It expects you to right down every dumb detail about every room and try applying each one to everything that can move in any other room. Its design team either really liked hintbooks or really liked those huge conspiracy theorist walls with the string and the random letter to number cyphers proving John Lennon is the antichrist. I dunno man, I beat it as a kid. It was definitely challenging, but I don't agree with your saying its arbitrary and dumb It definitely did NOT have the sort of annoying "well who came up with that?" developer logic that is common in SCUMM type adventure games. I thought all the puzzles were challenging, but quite doable with absolutely no hints.That said, it was a different age, when games were lots, lots, lots harder. Getting stuck in the same area not knowing what to do for days wasn't considered a game breaking flaw, it was just a challenge. I loved thinking about the game while I was at school (This is elementary school, mind you) and then coming home and trying new things, exploring the same area from another approach. I will give you that there got to be some arbitrary puzzles in the sequels, one of the last puzzles in Riven is pretty stupid hard and almost requires you to look it up on gamefaqs or buy the guide. But Myst? Just time consuming and tricky, that's all...
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Feb 26, 2013 22:53
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gooby on rails posted:They went even beyond that and started shipping entire custom-built coprocessors in the cartridges, like the SuperFX chip. The hardware in a stock Super NES cannot run Star Fox, full stop. The only way to pull it off was to build a 3D accelerator into every cartridge, so that's exactly what they did. Well, that's way back in the SNES days. We were talking about the N64, and they didn't do that with the N64, they did what I described, which was even more clever because it didn't cost more money. But yes, the superFX chip was a thing in the SNES era. But it made every single copy of the game more expensive to make (they're essentially selling you a tiny graphics card with the game, which you can't use on other games). SNES carts are highly variable, they come in different memory sizes and there was less profit on each game sold based on how big the game was. That reminds me of the expansion slot on the N64, which I think was actually really brilliant. I was just telling some friends of mine, I really wish the Xbox 360 had an expansion slot. Its only got a pitiful 512MB RAM which is holding back literally the entire games industry right now, even PC games are held back to crazy small limits (everything is a port, or designed to be ported). The 720 and PS4 will see more RAM, but with them wanting to cut costs, there's no way they'll have "enough" in 4-5 years compared to PCs. The forward-thinking thing to do would be an expansion slot. I don't think consumers had too hard a time with "This game requires the N64 Expansion Pack", especially considering lots of games like Donkey Kong 64 were offered in a bundle with the expansion pack. (Sorry, Expansion Pak) Zaphod42 fucked around with this message at 22:57 on Feb 26, 2013 |
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Feb 26, 2013 22:53
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hippieman posted:Quake 2 on the PSX was a staple with me and my friends. We would do a lot of 4 player deathmatch with the Multitap. This was all with the old PSX controllers before Analogue sticks. You mean Half Life 1 for PS2? Yeah it was. It was a weird bastard offshoot. It also included the only co-op Half-Life game (Decay). I can't remember if the dreamcast version was okay or not... Oh. I guess it was never released. I bet the PS2 version was a kludge job, maybe because the dreamcast version fell through.
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Feb 26, 2013 23:25
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Install Gentoo posted:The Dreamcast version was great, and since it supported the keyboard and mouse it was great to play too. I don't know about Half Life on PS2, but lots of PS2 games did support USB keyboards. I feel like I did play Unreal Tournament on PS2 on keyboard once... although I can't remember if the mouse worked or not.
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Feb 26, 2013 23:38
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ToxicFrog posted:
This is how I feel. gooby on rails posted:It wasn't totally illogical in the Roberta Williams "use cheesecloth with chandelier" sense, but it still expects you to learn through experimentation and with simple observation usually not telling you much. There are many places where you have to memorize a pattern or sequence in one place and use it in another. Most of the puzzles exist by tying together multiple locations and examining just one of them is baffling. You're meant to go around the islands fiddling with buttons and levers and noticing that they make various sounds or resemble various other parts of the island and put it all together to deduce that e.g. the icons on the posts surrounding the sunken model ship are constellations and you can tell which ones to press by using the list of times and dates you found somewhere else to configure the planetarium. At one point you have to replay a piece of music from memory (or paper) and some people are just innately bad at that. There's an enormous maze which is navigated in the first person with no guidance other than subtle abstract audio cues and any map you might care to draw yourself. I don't agree that it was badly designed, but it comes from an era where demanding that the player put all the effort into extracting information from the game wasn't the taboo it is today and it's not even going to put up a "you should probably start here" indicator. See, no part of that is the least bit unreasonable to me. That's a puzzle! That's a challenge! What else do you expect, a modern day FPS where you press A to win? Its a puzzle game! Writing things down, replaying music from memory, finding my way through the maze, I can remember doing each of those things (as an elementary school kid, mind you) and they were awesome. They were memorable because they were hard, but the fact that I did them as a kid with no help proves they weren't that freaking hard. Although my tone deaf family sucked at the piano puzzle and I had to do it for my dad, so I could see that one as being like The Water Temple for some people. But I loved it. Everything you mentioned to me, as a flaw, seems to explain why modern games suck. No part of Myst was "use the cheesecloth on the chandelier", everything made sense. You had to learn, you had to take notes? That's awesome! Although as I said before, Riven kinda took it too far, so I could see that as being a bit much... Hah, I guess Myst counts as first person, but we're getting off topic, definitely not a shooter. Zaphod42 fucked around with this message at 00:59 on Feb 27, 2013 |
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Feb 27, 2013 00:43
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horse mans posted:If you're thinking of playing Myst for the first time, or again, I urge you to consider the port RealMyst. It's a fantastic, completely faithful remake in a nice 3D engine. It looks loving fantastic and will make you remember why you loved Myst in the first place. Honestly I don't like realmyst. I find it to be lovely 3D graphics, it looks even more dated than Myst IMO. Yes, you can mouselook and walk around, but the rest of the game takes a penalty for it. The game wasn't designed to be viewed that way. If you freak out without smooth FPS controls, then play realmyst, but otherwise make yourself get the myst anniversary HD edition or whatever. It looks good and plays the way its supposed to. Both are on Good old Games for cheap. Also the rest of the Myst series is great, 2 and 3 are my favorites. 5 Lets you do full WASD FPS action like RealMyst, although 5 was my least favorite. Listen to the guy who says to ignore Uru, it was godawful.
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Feb 27, 2013 16:44
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dark1x posted:No sir, I cannot get behind that. The controls... are just so bad though. So horrendously bad.
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Feb 27, 2013 17:16
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Cream-of-Plenty posted:I just realized that my parameters prevent Doom, itself, from being considered a Doom game. Only Doom II! Hah! That said, the double barrel supershotty was like... easily the most satisfying weapon in the game. It wouldn't have been AS good in Doom 3 because you'd lack the superfast sliding on ice movements that made it so easy to slide up and blast somebody in the face and then slide off before you get hit, but it'd still be nice. drat iD, why no supershotgun in Doom 3?
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Feb 28, 2013 23:09
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Dominic White posted:See, that's something I consider a flaw in the core Doom design. It's no fun to run round the same handful of hallways you've already cleared out, looking for that switch or key that you missed. Especially as switches can look like just about anything, sometimes. The game has a freaking auto-map!  That's not just modern sourceports, it always did, even the floppy version. Use the automap. They took the time to program it and then designed the game to use it. I've never been stuck in doom for more than a few minutes.I don't know what you want. I'm so freaking sick of obvious corridor shooters and "Press A to play game" Oh noes, we have to actually stop once every 5 minutes and use our brains to figure out which way we should go? gently caress that noise. Yodzilla posted:The developer commentary for Half-Life 2: Episode 1 talks about this a lot. It's pretty interesting. Developer commentary on all Valve games is Must-Watch material. Seriously brilliant stuff, watching the Portal ones in particular taught me a whole lot about player psychology and level design. The TF2 one teaches you a lot about conveyance of gameplay mechanics through art design. Amazing stuff, well worth the few minutes it takes to boot up the map and watch. Zaphod42 fucked around with this message at 22:52 on Mar 1, 2013 |
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Mar 1, 2013 22:45
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