>Besides, I realize FilePlanet has the right, in our free >market, to do this, however it's absurd.

>Say you wanna buy a car, well, you wanna test drive it >first obviously. But then, you find out you have to >pay/sign over your soul/install spyware to do so. You're >probably not gonna buy the car, or even bother to test it.

How is it absurd? How is selling something that people are willing to buy absurd? This argument has been had several times. Exclusivity doesn't apply forever. It's just for a limited amount of time. So the 'test drive' analogy doesn't really apply. You'll eventually be able to test drive the car. Just not right NOW, unless you pay a premium. It's not like the exclusivity rights have been for months. Some are a week long, and many are only 24-48 hours.

It simply capitalizes on peoples desire to 'have it now'. You can't fault them for that. (But apparently many people do) People are acting like they are forced to pay for these demos. Not one of these demos cost money to obtain. You just might have to wait for a place to freely host it. Eventually everyone will have free access to it. Some, however, through their monetary payments, will have quicker access to it. It's called the American Way.

Fact of the matter is that if its a GOOD game, it will sell whether or not there's a demo. You can't seriously tell me that when Doom3 or Half-Life 2 comes out, you would actually NOT buy the game, if they don't have a demo, or give fileplanet 48hours of exclusive distribution.


This comment was edited on Dec 16, 15:08.

>But exclusive demos reek of communism.

That just doesn't make sense. If Fileplanet pays a game publisher some money to have exclusive rights on distributing a demo for a set amount of time, thats CAPTIALISM. They paid for a service. If you had offered the publisher more money than fileplanet did, then YOU would have the exclusive rights. How is that communism?

Offering the demo freely to everyone at the same time reeks more of communism than exclusivity does.

Hopefully with (even more) time, consumers and game stores will realize that just because a board game sells well, doesn't mean it's a 'good' game. Check out http://www.boardgamegeek.com (it's a boardgame informational database, not a commercial site) and check out some awesome boardgames that are a lot different from the standard fare you'll find in your local Target or Wal-Mart.

Whenever it comes out, I'll be there. Just glad to see it happen!

Wow....Sword of the Samurai...what great game! And a terribly hard one to locate now. I haven't played it since it was new, and I no longer own the 5-1/4" floppies.

Many of my precious hours were played away during Pirates! too.

Sad to see another game company of our past go away.

>creators of the #1 best selling PC game in North America, Delta Force - Black Hawk Down.

Did I miss something? Was Black Hawk Down even ever a top 10 seller, much less #1 ???

>especialy after crap AI like Battlfeild 1942

To each his own. I actually appreciate the BF1942 AI. Is it great? Heck no, but does it give me something to shoot at? Yes. They may usually act dumb, but they do drive tanks, fly planes, and man all the other units and vehicles. It's all in what you expect. I dont load up 20 bots in BF1942 expecting it to mirror an online deathmatch. I load up 20 bots to have warm bodies running around the map. Sometimes they take the flags, sometimes they run into walls...but all in all, they do what I expect them to do. And regardless of how dumb they are, if you throw 20 bots into Stalingrad, or a similar map, you are going to be hard pressed to stay alive for more than a minute or so at a time. Some of us enjoy it.

>why dont these games plan ahead and include bots?

Hey, I feel your pain. To constructively answer the question: It's probably just a matter of when they want to release the game. For a game to have decent AI opponents in MP, the developers need to dedicate time and effort to that. Based on when they want to release the game, they may or may not have time to develop that part of the game. (Unless they go into it from the get-go, like Quake 3 or Unreal Tourney did.) I'm crossing my fingers that CoD will have MP AI, but I have a sinking feeling that it won't. I haven't read one single review/preview that has even mentioned it.

Here's hoping!

Some of us have valid reasons for our queries about bots in multiplayer. While I agree that online play vs humans offers the most rewarding experience, bots definitely have their place. Closed LAN parties are a good example. If I have 3 friends come over to play UT2K3, its nice to run a closed server with 4 bots, for a good 4 on 4 match. Each team having 2 bots and 2 humans. Having all 4 people try to connect online through the same modem doesn't always produce great results, which is why some of us like the idea of bots in MP.

Serious question to all the folks pissed at Sierra: (the ones who say they'll never download another demo or buy another game from Sierra) - Does this include Half Life 2 also?

- And a hypothetical question....While I doubt it will happen, if Doom 3 ended up on the exclusive demo list of Fileplanet, how many of you would seriously boycott iD software?

>ever since Sierra took the text parser out of their >adventure games, they have really gone to shit

IMHO Sierra didn't go to S$%t when they dumped the text parser, but yes, I agree that the quality of the 'adventure' that they brought after that did go down a bit. -- While on the subject of parsers....text parsers have come a long way since the early Sierra/Infocom days. The freely available parsers like Inform are MUCH better than they were 15-20 years ago. It would be really nice to see an adventure game with the graphical presentation of Final Fantasy X, driven with a 21st century text parser. But I realize there's not a lot of market for that sort of game.....wishful thinking, I guess.

For those interested, Al Lowe's personal website is at:

http://www.allowe.com/

One of the cool things he has on his site are mp3s of the various LSL theme musics.

Hump,
I see what you are saying, and definitely agree with you to an extent. A week-long (or whatever) exclusivity demo release isn't the best way to generate good feelings in the community. I agree that it's simply a profit issue. But I was only saying that on the other side of the fence, the 'free' sites weren't complaining solely because they were fighting the good fight for the average gamer. I think they did it for the same profit reasons. Thats all. - We're a capitalistic society. If a buck can be made, it will. And if I can pay for something totally legal (like getting to play a demo early) then I don't see a problem with that either.

Of course, I can't argue the fact that we ARE getting the demo tonight! I'm truly happy about that

I'm with the crowd that supports Fileplanet. It's my opinion that the group of file hosting sites that sent the open letter didn't necessarily do so out of 'concern' for the gaming community so much as concern for filling their own download queues. The so called 'free' sites need to make money too, and they do so via advertising (getting people to visit their site). By complaining under the guise of community concern, they have successfully convinced Activision to back out of it's totally legitimate deal with Fileplanet, thus causing the likelyhood that they will generate more traffic for themselves.

It's a free country and the 'free' sites won a victory, but they didn't do it solely for the community. The community just happened to benefit from it.

All IMHO.

PS - my Fileplanet subscription still isn't worthless. I'm happy to pay for dedicated bandwidth, which means I won't be waiting all weekend to download it. And no, I'm not upset that everyone is getting the download this weekend - I just don't understand all the hate for Fileplanet. Game on...

>Since Raven can build 70 levels in the space of 18 months, >and do so for three different projects, I don't really see >why this has to be any different.

IMHO it's different because the level design, scripting, and AI in NOLF1 and 2 are better than any Raven game that I've ever played. I'd rather wait for an awesome game than get a mediocre one 'within 6 months'. Don't get me wrong, I'm not ranking on Raven...I've liked their stuff. SOF2 was an excellent game, but it had nowhere near the atmosphere of NOLF2 (or 1 for that matter)...again IMHO

I'm just glad another NOLF chapter is coming out, and it doesn't bother me that I might have to find the old CDS and load them back up.

>Saddam doesn't quite fit in with Stalin and Hitler, even >throwing in his war with Iran. As Stalin said, "one death >is a tragedy; a million is a statistic."

Ok, I'll agree with you on that. BTW - I respect your well, thought out response to my post. However, my intent was to point out that (IMHO) Bush and Cheney are no where near the type of person Saddam Hussein is. If people disagree with me (and I know many people do), I'd like to hear reasons why they think GW Bush is as evil as Saddam.

>The fact that criminals like Bush and Cheny are not only >not dead, but allowed to be in power to commit them only >further prooves there's no god-or at least one that cares->in this Universe.

And good thing Bush and Cheney are limited in their power from 4 to 8 years, unlike the reigns of upstanding, human-loving, non-criminal types such as Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Saddam Hussein.

>The links between the former Iraq regime and Al Queda are >tenuous at best.

Since when was Al Queda the only terrorist organization in the world? As only one example, Saddam and the former Iraqi regime have offered monetary compensation to the families of suicide bombers that target Israel.

>I'm ashamed to be an American, as are about 80% of the >people I know here who are my age. That's got to tell you >something

Well, I'm *not* ashamed to be an American, as are about 90% of the people I know here who are my age. It doesn't tell you anything other than you and I both hang with people who think as we do.

>>I just bought that ti4200 a couple months ago (finally upgraded from my Geforce256!) and now I see that the card is bringing me down!

I wouldn't worry about that too much. Just because you got a low benchmark score doesn't mean your card is bad. Realistically, there isn't any game out *right now* that would bring a GF4ti4200 to it's knees. Heck, I'm just running a GF3 Ti200, and everything runs great. I might have a problem with Doom III, but right now I can still run UT2K3 at 1024x768x32 at over 50FPS.

Being practical about it, GF3s and 4s are still excellent cards, especially considering their price.