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From a purely mechanical perspective I think Descent and Descent II aged well. Such fun, tightly designed, devious games. I still hate the Thief-Bot.
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Jun 1, 2020 19:46
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Twerk from Home posted:It's even more incredible that they did that with tracker music, at a time when a ton of other games were just putting redbox CD audio on their disks. MOD music was a cool feature of the Unreal 1.x engine, added because it's light on hardware resources while being more flexible than Redbook audio and more consistent than MIDI across a wide range of configurations. When you were lucky to have MMX at all, let alone a Pentium II, that counted for a lot. Unreal's (and UT99's) music was no slouch either. Hasturtium fucked around with this message at 17:23 on Jun 2, 2020 |
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Jun 2, 2020 17:21
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Barudak posted:You want to play Quake in some way that automatically enables mouselook because otherwise you will be going into the command prompt and typing in the code to enable it every time. Nah, there’s a workaround: add +mlook to a text file named autoexec.cfg in the id1 folder, where it’ll be enforced for Quake and its ports by default.
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Jun 6, 2020 02:09
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Twerk from Home posted:“A custom engine written in Pascal imitating 1990s software-style rendering with unfiltered textures and polygon jitter.” So in a weird way it’s a love letter to Chasm: The Rift, which was also written in Pascal. Interesting.
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Jun 6, 2020 17:12
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Yeah, dude. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8F1cOvZ3nS8 Overload is good stuff, goons, thanks for the recommendations.
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Jun 8, 2020 14:55
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Al Cu Ad Solte posted:Christ apparently some malevolent AI is trying to stop me from having any fun in Deus Ex. Anybody get this weird issue where shotgun blasts and the plasma rifle explosions cause the frame rate to tank? I'm playing GMDX community edition, but the same exact thing happened when I used another mod called Vanilla Matters (it's poo poo, don't bother). Didn't happen in the regular, unmodded game. Dumb question, but are you using the improved OpenGL/Direct3D renderers? It'll make an immense positive difference if you aren't.
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Jun 9, 2020 15:35
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ETPC posted:duke nukem forever turned nine years old three days ago The game felt like its own community HD asset upgrade when it was brand new. DNF is hard to interpret as anything but a reconstituted cross-section of FPS gaming from 1997 to 2009; this far out, it’s a museum piece or a coelacanth with dick jokes.
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Jun 14, 2020 05:49
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SkeletonHero posted:I've been thinking about this recently: If Blood were to get a Wolfenstein/Doom-esque modern update, what would you like to see in it? What tone/setting/style should it be? What mechanics would it be built around? Should Caleb do executions? If somebody wants to make a Doom 2016-alike with Blood, I'd be up for that. Set it in the 1930s, start in the Dust Bowl, fight your way to and through an art deco mega city, then chase the Big Bad into a portal that goes into surreal nightmare dreamscapes until you reach whatever's behind it all. Mechanically I'd love to see something like a more streamlined Doom 2016 - fewer types of upgrades, but keep that propulsive momentum. Just don't nerf the ammo count. Why wouldn't Caleb do executions?
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Jun 17, 2020 15:52
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Sodomy Hussein posted:Duke3D was not as good a game as Doom even at the time. I sure hope you know what road you’re headed down.
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Jun 19, 2020 00:40
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Sodomy Hussein posted:The correct one; trolling around Duke3D in godmode was its ceiling as an actual fun game, and it's aged terribly while Doom has always been good I like Doom more too. Doesn’t mean there won’t be a response from Duke people. And a few levels with dumb puzzles and too many drones aside, I like how Duke3D feels like you’re a badass dancing on a knife’s edge.
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Jun 19, 2020 00:59
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Narcissus1916 posted:Duke 3d's second space station episode is the epitome of "gently caress it, we burned all our ideas on a great shareware demo. Um.... here's the scraps." Ehh. It’s the weak sister of the game, but I still dug its aesthetic and how it felt more like a previous Duke entry made 3D than the rest of it.
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Jun 19, 2020 18:39
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drat it, Kins, you’re the best. Thank you.
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Jun 28, 2020 20:35
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Karasu Tengu posted:OSX's support of the stuff that makes GZdoom work isn't very great at present and only gonna get worse. I'd not expect to see OSX ports for much longer, so maybe a good time to learn how to boot camp. If there's a saving grace, it's ZDoom embracing a Vulkan renderer. I've tested that on a hoary old late 2012 Retina Macbook Pro, and while it's a little slower than the OpenGL renderer (I know...) it does work thanks to MoltenVK. ZDoom's full feature set is contingent on a bunch of middleware, from Fluidsynth to OPL libraries; are these at risk of being dropped from macOS going forward? I've gotten ZDoom running on a Pi 3, so it's at least capable of running on ARM...
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Jul 5, 2020 02:14
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The Kins posted:OpenGL is depreciated on MacOS, which means that support for it might get yanked at any given moment. Yes, but MoltenVK has been used to get Metal up and running. If it works on my late 2012 Retina MacBook Pro, it should work on newer hardware, too.
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Jul 5, 2020 05:29
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The Kins posted:
I've got a couple of buddies who have worked at Valve during that time. I didn't hear much in the way of firm details, but anything you can imagine about a dysfunctional internal culture? Double it.
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Jul 10, 2020 05:20
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Carpator Diei posted:pagb666 has started a new playthrough of a less-than-stellar DOS FPS and you should really, really watch the intro: Ah, yes. I actually grabbed this at a Target for $10 around 1996. It's a weird, funny thing until cringe-worthy racism pops up later, and built on some kind of bespoke Wolfenstein-alike engine. The controls flat-out suck unfortunately - I gave up on it because it feels kinda spongy and unresponsive. Pity it didn't offer VESA support, because the sprite art isn't half-bad. Any fans of Witchaven here? God help me, I kind of like it.
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Jul 20, 2020 16:29
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Cream-of-Plenty posted:Uh excuse me sir, but Serious Sam 4’s TEN TRILLION ENEMIES beg to differ. I hear there’s an entire level...that’s just dead bodies of enemies. The only things I noticed in vanilla maps was that crushers didn’t reliably kill me. As complaints go, especially in Blood, it’s closer to a relief. I just wish they’d made an official Linux port; running it through Steam Play with Vulkan seemed to involve the first few minutes of any session chugging to compile shaders, then straightening out and performing fine. I liked Eternal - enough to beat it three times. And I was excited enough for the game to grab the art book before release, because I adored Doom 2016. But after getting through Ultra-Violence, I think I’m done. It’s such a specifically engineered experience and punishes you so hard for going off-script that I find revisiting it to be sorta dull, now. I paid for the special edition pre-order so I’ll play the DLC. But I’m not thrumming with glee at the prospect.
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Jul 23, 2020 17:13
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comingafteryouall posted:Civvy mentioned in the most recent Doom movie review that at one point, id had wanted Doom to be an Aliens (movie franchise) game. Here's my question: if it was basically the same game design but palette swapped with Aliens, do you all think it would have endured in the same way? I doubt it. Fox probably would have been less permissive regarding level editing anything involving its IP, and I can’t help thinking it would have been a less diverse experience in terms of monster encounters, in-fighting, and general level design. I could be full of poo poo on any of that, but think it’s probably better that id had full control.
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Jul 23, 2020 17:20
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Plan Z posted:The atmosphere of Doom 3 is amazing and still genuinely impressive. The gameplay loop of imp whack-a-mole is not. I posted this a while back, but it’s still worth sharing - Doom 3 was aesthetically gorgeous. https://youtu.be/OQAd-HHdf1c With the sound pack from the leaked alpha, a lot of common enemies and weapons sound much punchier and more menacing. Those meaty sounds don’t fix the fundamental monotony of a lot of monster encounters or the weapon issues, but it does make a surprisingly big difference in suspension of disbelief. Still eats my brain that when id was brainstorming the BFG Edition, someone actually concluded the original game didn’t have enough ammunition. What the gently caress, guys?
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Jul 28, 2020 04:43
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Groovelord Neato posted:That's how a poo poo ton of games looked in the 90s. Mostly of the edutainment variety. The mid-90s Sierra aesthetic was real - nicely illustrated but visually simple backgrounds, characters with minimal shading, and few frames of animation with lots of expressiveness in what made it in. Aesthetic issues aside, it hurts my brain to think the Streets of Rage and Street Fighter series were available to learn from when this was released.
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Aug 3, 2020 18:15
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al-azad posted:Those adventure games also had like maybe 3 sprites on screen at a time and didn't need to run at 60fps. Consoles always had the edge over PCs until dedicated GPUs. Virgin published Street Fighter Alpha 2 on Windows in 1998 and the drat thing runs like a slideshow, it's absolutely worse than even the PS1 versions of Street Fighter. Oh, I never said the aesthetic was a good idea given the limits of early Pentium-era hardware and the framerate and responsiveness requirements for a fighting game. I'm pretty sure a Streets of Rage-alike would have been doable on a Pentium 90 with a decent VGA card and 8 MB RAM, but this... eurgh. There's a reason most games end up going down a memory hole.
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Aug 3, 2020 21:51
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SeANMcBAY posted:Installed Quake 1 via Quakespasm and I’m playing it for the first time. It owns. The graphics still have a charm to them imo. Depending on your hardware, VkQuake is a Vulkan-native variant of QuakeSpasm with some additional exposed graphics options, and it’s great too.
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Aug 4, 2020 03:09
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SeANMcBAY posted:Does it get really bad with spawning enemies later? Not spawning like monsters teleporting in. You’ll see. 
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Aug 4, 2020 03:27
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SeANMcBAY posted:Things are also on sale on the 3 consoles. It’s pretty funny that nothing Quake related is on sale other than GOG. Why the gently caress can’t we get modern ports. Quake was a traumatic event within id where two different games were awkwardly jammed together and rushed out the door after years of wrestling with the tech and bad internal politics, and everyone was a little surprised that it was as big a hit as it was. As time rolled on, I don't think id really knew what to do with it. The main contributor to VkQuake works for id, and I'd like to think that's a bellwether of future plans. But after a quarter of a century, all we've gotten is a couple of mission packs, MachineGames's "fifth episode" from a few years back, and the grab bag of multiplayer-only fun that is Quake III Arena and its sequels. I'm not holding my breath.
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Aug 4, 2020 20:46
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Overwatch Porn posted:ended up doing this, cranking the number of enemies up and leaving everything else medium. having a lot more fun, not being instantly sniped but still having a fair challenge. gotta say the tnt is one of my fave FPS weapons now, it feels so good Secondary fire with both barrels at close range will nearly always kill one. I wouldn't use a single shotgun blast unless you're dealing with a bunch of enemies at once and need to buy yourself a little time, and that's never the best option. Flares and TNT are the best lower-level options for zombies; the big guns are usually a waste of harder to find ammo unless you're taking out a bunch at once. The Pitchfork Poke is fine for individual zombies once you've gotten the hang of darting forward and back and timing your attacks. haveblue posted:The best FPS sound is the Quake/Doom rocket explosion (they're the same, right?) but honorable mention has to go to the grunt birthday party headshot They're not the same sound effect, Quake's is longer and beefier on the low end. But you'll never hear me complain about the grunt birthday party headshot. Obligatory reminder that The Fortress of Dr. Radiaki is a thing that exists and cannot be undone.
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Aug 4, 2020 22:27
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SeANMcBAY posted:I wonder if more people just play Quake 3 at this point instead. They also unceremoniously discontinued the Linux and macOS ports of Quake Live a few years after its introduction, so I'd kinda hope they've all jumped to ioQuake3 instead.
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Aug 4, 2020 22:29
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SeANMcBAY posted:Is the first Unreal campaign still worth playing? I don’t think I’ve ever played single player Unreal before. It's more than a gorgeous-for-1998 tech demo, but it's a little unrefined. The art direction holds up, it's one of the first FPSes where colored lighting was really important for setting atmosphere and mood, and the first time through stands out both for its use of scripting and for the fact that variability of enemy behavior and attack patterns was actually a thing. On the down side, there are parts of the game with huge, garishly lit rooms and not a lot else happening in them, and what story there is trails off about halfway through, then gets a headslapper of tacked on irony for an ending. But I'd be a liar if I said parts of it don't excite me even now, and it builds an atmosphere that isn't quite like anything else. Also props for its MOD soundtrack, which was a headturner at the time and still gives it a certain style and ambiance today.
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Aug 5, 2020 05:13
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FanaticalMilk posted:I dunno if this counts as retro yet, but for anyone that never got the original 2006 Prey from Steam before it got delisted, Play Asia has region free codes still available for purchase. I tried it yesterday and after first registering it popped up an error when trying to install and didn't show on my game list. But I checked this morning and it's all there and let's me install just fine, so I think it was just a side effect of Steam making GBS threads the bed. It’s been 14 years - it’s as retro now as Doom II was in 2008. It’s quirky but solid, and does some really interesting things. Grab it, and don’t be alarmed that Prey (2017) installs to the same Steam folder, they don’t step on each other.
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Aug 5, 2020 16:37
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haveblue posted:A true pioneer of IJKL I used to know someone whose brain was broken by X-Wing Vs. Tie Fighter and used some mutilated version of those keybindings for everything afterward. To date I haven’t heard a weirder scheme, but IJKL still makes me vaguely uncomfortable.
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Aug 10, 2020 15:45
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I am really curious what Civvie’s next dance with DOS jank will be. Personally, I’m hoping it’s The Fortress of Dr. Radiaki, which I am sad to say I bought with my own money many years ago. At least it wasn’t expensive...
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Aug 12, 2020 17:23
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Bonobos posted:It was like 30 bux plus tax for the floppy version at Software Etc and I’m still upset how long I saved for that stupid game. Oh. Oh, god.  I spent like $10 at a Target in their budget pile and still felt put off after a few hours with it. The writing was weird but sorta funny until The Racism showed up. Controls were clunky, the engine was crude, and I don’t even remember what advantage the CD version had over the floppies. But somehow I still have it.
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Aug 12, 2020 22:04
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caleb posted:I don't think he's done Kiss: Psycho Circus yet. That could be funny. I've never played it. I want to but I don't trust abandonware sites. Oh yeah. I met one of the programmers for Kiss Psycho Circus in the pit before a Nine Inch Nails show started, he seemed nice. Never played that game, though. Art direction looked good - I hope it felt more solid than other early LithTech games. And yeah, Heavy Metal’s engine was id Tech 3 for sure.
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Aug 12, 2020 23:44
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Groovelord Neato posted:I'm honestly dreading what they do with the next Doom. I dunno about gameplay, but Bethesda hyping a member of Trivium livestreaming it at Quakecon was probably a pointed hint at who's doing the music for the DLC. As for Eternal, I beat it three times and loved its high points, but eventually resented being slapped to the ground hard any time I deviated from the One True Path for dealing with any given scenario. I'm lukewarm about the DLC at best, and skeptical of the third game outright - especially after the Mick Gordon drama and his probable absence from it. Hasturtium fucked around with this message at 15:43 on Aug 13, 2020 |
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Aug 13, 2020 15:38
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The Kins posted:Here's some more Fake Doom: Oh Lordy, this with the Final Doomer BtSX weapons will keep me happy for a while, thank you.
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Aug 13, 2020 18:05
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Overwatch Porn posted:I finished Blood and Cryptic Passage and it ruled. It all ruled. Blood is so loving good No. Flatly. There was potential. If the publisher hadn’t insisted that it be shipped six to nine months before it could have been reasonably called “finished,” it could have been something worthwhile. As it was, it felt like an early beta that was hurriedly patched into slightly less shaky shape, then abandoned because GT Interactive wasn’t willing to pay Monolith to finish it after the fact. I bought a two pack of Blood and Blood II at a Best Buy back when boxed software was a thing. If I’d paid that price for Blood II alone, I’d have been livid. In retrospect it was like paying for one of the best shooters of the 90s and getting an inexplicably huge tech demo as a bonus.
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Aug 14, 2020 17:18
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Coffee Jones posted:My pentium 90 in 1996 ran quake 1 at 320x200 with acceptable framerate, quake 2 barely ran, bought a video card (Permedia 2 chip, if anyone remembers that) which claimed OpenGL support but nah, GL Quake wouldn’t run It ran when I tried it on one, but 16-bit color was ugly and you didn’t wanna push it past 512x384 because the fillrate was low. 400x300 was zippier than 320x200 and still a marginal improvement over software on a Pentium, but the Permedia2 had a lot of shortcomings. 24-bit color worked in 3D but it was s l o w. The same rules applied for Quake II, only harder, and it didn’t have the blending modes needed for colored lighting. Quake III barely ran with vertex lighting and artifacting due to the blending mode limits, but some lunatic undoubtedly tried...
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Aug 14, 2020 19:39
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I am frequently out of the loop and thought they were announcing that episode 2 was out, not that it was now available for the Switch. Sorry for confusing people!
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Aug 15, 2020 12:53
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Guillermus posted:Good thing is that even with a lovely computer or laptop you can enjoy plenty of great old FPS games and the new retro FPS ones aren't very demanding too. You'll be here for quite some time, enjoy! One interesting thing I’ve noticed with Fresh Supply: the OpenGL 3.3 renderer kept as a legacy option is considerably slower than the Vulkan and DX11 renderers on the same hardware. If you’ve got a clunky old box or laptop, you should experiment to see whether DirectX 11 or GL is the better option.
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Aug 16, 2020 23:04
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Rocket Pan posted:What is interesting is just how piss poor OpenGL runs on Mac. The performance is so bad we are all but certain Apple are doing it deliberately to force developers to use Metal. Sure, I get that GL won’t offer the same customization of rendering functionality to best accommodate Blood. AZDO might have had a shot, but doing that would restrict hardware capable of handling Fresh Supply as much as DX11. I’m glad someone running Sandy Bridge graphics or a still-alive 8800GT could have a go at it, I was just surprised how big the gap was in practice. And yeah, Apple dropped the ball on OpenGL terribly. They kept it around as a zombie at v4.1 with a handful of extensions for years, let the performance languish when they’d already developed a reputation for the worst-performing implementation around, then unceremoniously deprecated after that neglect and are going all-Metal. I’ll be shocked if GL runs on ARM Macs out of the box. Someone will likely take the Zink GL->Vulkan wrapper or something like it, then thump THAT through MoltenVK to offer some level of support in the future. SeANMcBAY posted:Gaming will even more poo poo on Mac once they switch to ARM. It’s going to be a slow trickle to get working ports I would imagine. I’m sure someone will do Doom relatively quickly at least. Hasturtium fucked around with this message at 05:06 on Aug 17, 2020 |
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Aug 17, 2020 05:03
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| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 00:36 |
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The Cheshire Cat posted:Yeah and this probably means that UT as a franchise is dead for good. It was already on life support for a while anyway but with them officially pulling the plug on UT4 it suggests that Epic has no interest in bothering anymore. I can sort of see where they're coming from - Arena shooters aren't exactly the big thing in 2020, but it still sucks. Honestly I loathed UT3’s aesthetic and story mode enough that I was lukewarm on it coming back. It’s weird that the franchise that brought Epic into prominence is dead now. Seems like there’s no love lost for Unreal - it’s just a thing they did and they’re past it. Granted, if I made a money press called Fortnite I might not give a gently caress either.
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Aug 24, 2020 21:10
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