Archive for February, 2008

Retro games are as good as they ever were

Wednesday, February 27th, 2008

I recently found on an “abandonware” site a game that I hadn’t played in a decade. Neither Lords of the Realm II or my recollections of it have aged in the slightest: I love the authentic medieval setting and I still enjoy trashing an enemy’s counties while his army chases mine. I still enjoy sending childish missives to other counts who will react to the category of the letter (for instance “Compliment”) regardless of its actual content (for instance “you look and smell like a rhinocerous”), and I still really enjoy pressing the “mop” command when I have five hundred peasants and eight hundred archers on the field against his three pikemen.

Lords of the Realm II consists of two parts – the empire builder and manager (which is turn based) and the top down battles (which are played in real time). Sadly Lords of the Realm III tried to blur the boundary by making the empire building part real time and so forcing the player to sit and wait for up to five minutes while he watches his army doddle from one side of the country to the other. There were other faults, but the end result was that the Total War series of games knocked its socks off.

But that’s not an issue for us gamers any more because Lords of the Realm II is still the game it always was. The success of Sonic the Hedgehog, Worms, and Street Fighter II on XBox Live Arcade show that it’s not just a few nostalgics killing a few hours – these games are still worth playing.

And always will be.

John

john@inx-gaming.co.uk

Posted in Game Reviews, John | 1 Comment »

Game Over Jack Thompson?

Friday, February 22nd, 2008

Source: gamepolitics.com

Florida’s Supreme Court has finally had enough of Thompson’s “frivolous and inappropriate filings” and set the bewilderingly vehement campaiger a tough task, to “show cause on or before March 5, 2008, why this Court should not find that you have abused the legal system process and impose upon you a sanction for abusing the legal system, including, but not limited to directing the Clerk of this Court to reject for filing any future pleadings, petitions, motions, letters, documents, or other filings submitted to this Court by you unless signed by a member of The Florida Bar other than yourself.”

Thompson, bizarrely, forwarded the order to gamepolitics.org along with an email stating his intent to “deconstruct The Florida Bar“.

Many gamers regard this as a victory of common sense over baseless anti-games discrimination, myself included. The tragedy is that, with JT gagged, there’ll be no one for us all to laugh at. I guess that the jokes could only go on for so long.

John

Play nice. Nice and legal.

Posted in John | No Comments »

Setting up a 24/7 Surf Server

Tuesday, February 19th, 2008

Hi Guys,

Recently, there have been an increase in 24/7 surf servers. A few of our customers are wanting to set up a 24/7 surf server. So I am writing this to help them out, as there isn’t that much info on the net.

First of all, we need to know how to add maps to our server and how to edit our mapcycle.txt. This can be learnt here

Now that we have the maps we want. We need to upload them. Follow the tutorial above to add maps. You also need to edit your mapcycle.txt because you will need to remove all the standard maps and add your custom maps. Now that you have done this. We need to change the startup map. To do this, go to “Startline Editor, now in the box, type the name of the map you want as your startup map.

Now that this is done. We are almost finished, we now just need to add one more line to server.cfg. This line is

sv_airaccelerate 100

This is the key line to a surf server. Without this you will NOT be able to surf. Once that is done, restart the server. Now make sure the server comes back online. If it doesn’t, start from the begining. If it still doesn’t come back up. Try the “Fix me” tool, and if that doesn’t work. Please submit a support ticket.

Once your server has come back online. You are ready to get underway.

Congratulations on your 24/7 Surf Server.

INX|Matt

Posted in Tutorials | 1 Comment »

The BlackSite Atrocity

Tuesday, February 12th, 2008

On the 29th of November 2007 Harvey Smith, lead designer of Midway’s BlackSite: Area 51 project, announced at the Montreal International Game Summit that the project was “so ****ed up” and that he was not excited about making it. On the 30th of November 2007 Midway announced that he was no longer in their employment.

The result is a game that had a truly staggering amount of potential, but that has so much lacking – not least collision along the cliff walls beside the gas station in the first episode. In Harvey’s own words the game “went straight from alpha to final”. It also seems that the game was made in reverse order to how it’s played because the game seems increasingly more polished the further you progress through it. The first episode feels like a prototype and the last like a game that has been polished with pride.

Putting someone who isn’t keen on the project in charge of it’s design and development is a software development atrocity because it’s bound to murder it. If another designer is capable of that role isn’t it better for them to do it? And if you can’t convince another designer to take the role then is the project worth making at all? If you then run into problems but don’t have the time available to account for them because you’re crunching for Christmas then something has got to give and it’s almost always the game that suffers.

Look at the worm-like monster on the bridge as he swipes at your helicopter. Now remember that they called the other monsters “octopus-dogs”. Look at the detail in your team mate’s models for a text book example of good modelling. Then watch him get stuck as he’s unsure which way to turn so (to please everyone) he turns and moves in all directions. Look at the eerie debris-strewn corridors in the last episode and remember that you got lost on the way there because there are no arrows or pointers to guide you. The final boss’s speech is empassioned and furiously articulate, but it’s not good enough to account for all the “filler” speeches trail up to it.

Much fuss has been made about how short the single player campaign is and how BlackSite as a whole is not nearly as good as Call of Duty 4. The vast majority of first person shooters aren’t as good as Call of Duty 4 but we’ve got to move on at some point guys and BlackSite had a lot of cool things in it that Call of Duty lacked (the ability to drive vehicles and a variety of enemies for instance). In fact this game would probably have been in far greater demand if it hadn’t have been for Call of Duty 4 and Halo 3 which dominated the market this Christmas.

If you’ve played Call of Duty 4 to death then this is worth picking up. The BlackSite game can best be summed up as a marriage between Call of Duty 3 and Gears of War that didn’t work out but I enjoyed playing it all the same. Sadly when a project fails it rarely gets a sequel, so the true potential of this intellectual property will probably never be realised.

- John

john@inx-gaming.co.uk

Play nice. This one’s better than most FPS (that aren’t Call of Duty 4).

Posted in Game Reviews, John | No Comments »