"The other person is cheating -- everyone cheats." That's what a few friends said when online Scrabble like games were popular on Facebook. Felt bad when I had to break it to my wife when she started playing Letterpress and Words With Friends and getting very frustrated. She was astonished when I showed her cheat sites.
Letterpress cheaters are easier to spot: They don't grasp the strategy of the game but have a Mensa level vocabulary. WWF takes a few rounds but chatting with them will usually give them away. It's so pervasive it's ridiculous. The cheat sites even prompt you to, "Tell your friends about us on Facebook!" WTF???

I remember picking up Far Cry 1,2 and 3 the same year 3 was released for like 30.00. That was a deal!

Looked nice but it still looks like they're not using a physics engine.

I've added Suse 10.2 and Ubuntu 6.10 onto a second hard drive a few weeks back and I'm having some fun with 'em. Linux has come along way but it still has a way to go. Hardware support is still an issue but generic drivers usually do the job. Credit to Nvidia for it's driver support. God help you if you're trying to enable 3d on an ATI card.

For avid gamers WINE won't do and forget about Cedega (questionable performance, doesn't support every game and for it's cost you may as well pick up a base version of Windows and enjoy the game properly). But there's always hope.

It's a shame that institutions, namely school boards, don't adopt Linux.

August 18, 2006 is the last news posting on the site linked to and the only download I can find is version 3.1 under downloads?

I think it was the 1.4 to 1.50 SF mod of the original UT that gave me some of the best MP fun I've ever had.
-alt aim
-over and underhand nade toss
-sprint mode
-nice particle effects
-great little community of players - 300 to 400 players online would have been a busy day.
-it was the REASON why I bought UT

Unfortunately, milestones were not only seldom met but the developer would disappear for months on end and leave the community in the dark as to what was going on. Also, I didn't like some of the game play and graphical changes made in 1.6(?).

If I owned UT2K4 I'd probably give this a look for old times sake.

I'm of the understanding that the Realtek chip(which I have) indicates CPU usage flutuates between 1% to 3%. Anyways, onboard is plenty good for me as even though I have 4.1 I usually use earphones. A musician friend of mine likes the Creative though, because it offers a lot for his specific needs. For me, the extra 100 bucks or so a sound card cost would be better put towards a higher level CPU or graphics card.

Of the two choices we have in Canada, Future Shop or BB, BB wins everytime. Far better staffing and some can be surprisingly knowledgable. They are more flexible price wise, at least in my experience, so beating them down can be fun and save you quite a few bucks, something a lot of people don't realize or don't even bother doing!

I guess the biggest problem with the outage was that when Steam found an internet connection but no servers it required you to log in again and when the log in was unsuccessful it made the off line mode unavailable as well. Unacceptable in my book.


Positives: When running, I can acccess all my software purchases from anywhere and software is indeed easy to purchase and acquire providing you have the bandwidth. Great for multi-player.

Negatives: The fact that Steam\HL2 and DOD:Source are the only software products I have on my computer that give me a BSOD every once in a while. Don't see the cost savings I would have expected although there have been some nice packages lately. Still needs a lot of work!

Episode One and DoD were cheaper at retail. Go figure. The only time Steam seems cheaper is because of the taxes (15% Ontario), or lack there of, when ordering through Steam... and that doesn't really have anything to do with Valve.

I've enjoyed Unreal games but they do\did have drawbacks. The original Unreal required tweaking if you were running it under anything other than Glide. So if you didn't have a 3dfx card, you had to tweak. Deus Ex required tweaking.

That U3 engine demo has to be at least three years old! They still don't have it finished?

I'm surprised by the developer comments here. One of the big selling points of the original Unreal engine was it's ease of use compared to the Id engines.

All the whining that goes on about a reluctance on the part of game companies to give out freebies... people here should be rejoicing.

It's the registration steps at the Sierra site that are screwed up. It's buggy! I had to enter a second email because it wouldn't let me reuse the first one that it screwed up.

Death (k)nell

I've always found 16 to 24 players to be the best count on most MP CTF type maps and games today. Anything over that, with some decent players on each team, is a virtual stalemate.



This comment was edited on Aug 18, 20:38.

Those pics are from the article, years back, that Tangledtoms was referring to. It was suppose to be conventional battle gear and team tactics. They also mentioned team play like requiring two men to operate a heavy MG. But that was before Battlefield, Splash's E.T., MOH, COD, DOD, America's Army and all the others.

Looks like they've gone back to the TF that most of you are familiar with and for good reason.

I'm a noobie to the game and played it for several hours on the weekend. Had some good fun and only got called a 'fag' once and that was for slapping a guy who TK'd me! So the players do seem a bit more mature than those of CS. Except for the guy who was playing the Kazoo and singing Happy Birthday to himself.

The silly thing about Steam is I can buy their games cheaper at retail in Canada than I can buy them online. Why would I use Steam other than to insure I have it the first day.

This comment was edited on Jul 9, 20:44.

Designing games for accelerated and non-accelerated graphics was one thing but how do you make a game that will play the same with and/or without hardware assisted physics.

I missed a bit of the Rainbow Six stuff but I played the oringinal and it's expansion and I guess a demo of the sequel but when I came across Lockdown I thought, "Dear God, what has this got to do with the R6 franchise?"

No mission strategy or mapping or briefing??? I quickly run and gunned all the enemy at parking lot level and then whacked all my team members to try and get a mission failure. Nope! Half Life 2 required more real world tactics to succeed!

I remember once when I was playing the original R6 that my wife sneezed as she was walking by our computer room when I was playing and I was given a mission failure status!

I watched Brokeback Mountain and enjoyed it a lot but I did prefer Crash of all the nominated movies that I've seen. And I have taken a lot of ribbing for not so much watching Brokeback but claiming to have enjoyed it. It's nothing I wouldn't expect from most of the guys I know anyways.

The curious thing about this movie is the taboo, for lack of a better word, associated with it. A friend of mine sells these movies on the 'side' and he claims this is probably the most requested movie he's had in over a year! That's right, bigger than Kong, Star Wars and all! Apparently he can't make enough of them! This is hardly reflected in their successful, but none the less, modest box office of 75 million! People will watch it but most don't want to be seen watching it!

I'd wait for a patch that optimizes the damn engine!

LOL, twice it has happened to me that I've put together a new and reasonably stout computer only to have the misfortune of Monolith releasing a new game around the same time. It's a humbling experience.

They make purdy engines but I wish they could crunch the code a bit better.

The first time I spawned on that Stalingrad demo map and looked up and saw the muzzle of an M1 sticking out a window and poppin' away with gunsmoke pouring out the barrel, I thought that it was going to be fun... and it was a ton of fun. But it's been downhill from the first installment.

A lot of talent left and I don't know if they'll ever be able to come out with another one like the first. It's near impossible for them to come up with something as fresh and innovative in that genre as the first one was.

Remember the arguing on some forums when they first showed the beach landing clip. Some people just couldn't believe it and maintained that it was just a cut scene\movie and not actual in game footage.

This comment was edited on Jan 17, 21:56.

If "ifs and buts" were candies and nuts, everyday would be Christmas!

Please don't attach any "ifs and buts" to in-game advertising. This is the slippery slope. We should be all be unconditionally opposed to, and repulsed by, this. Ad agencies realize that traditional avenues for adverising have become, "like spraying roach repellant on roaches that have become immune to it." This idea could mean a big raise for someone. I could see having to sit through a short ad before logging into a server or even starting a game as a way of the future.

I wonder if Valve is opposed to this on some sort of ethical basis or are they wondering, "why didn't we think of this?"

Now let's move on and fight some more serious battles.

http://www.redcross.ca/article.asp?id=000136&tid=001

This comment was edited on Jan 14, 11:09.