Tip #1: Learn to use your spell-checker (note: the error is Capcom's, not Blues).

I used to be a huge fan of MPC, but went to VLC a while back and never looked back. Its interface might not be as polished, but not having to worry about dodgy CODEC packs more than made up for it.

Not a fan of H1-B - it's been terribly abused by companies wanting to hire cheap foreign labor without the bother of going overseas - but I don't really support this change. For one thing, I don't think it's really going to change things much - the revamp is as full of abusable loopholes as the original.

More importantly, H1-B is part of the Immigration and Nationality Act, passed by Congress, and I do not agree with the idea that the President can overturn the act on a personal whim. If he disagrees with it, he needs to work with Congress to update the law rather than just change it by Presidential fiat.

I'm curious if there will actually be anything on the disc other than a steam installer ;-)

Bah, the guy is 30 years too late. Portal hit the Apple II back in 1986.

I'll just leave this here, shall I?

3DFX Tribute

There really was something awe-inspiring about 3DFX; everybody who came from software-rendering jaws dropped when they saw what 3DFX could do. Bad decisions - both on the technological and business sides - sealed their fate but there is no doubting that they greatly influenced gaming. Newer GPUs may be magnitudes more powerful but none of them create quite the same excitement as when I learned there was a new Voodoo card available for purchase...

I loved the original so I'm thrilled this is getting re-released. Still, there's something about the new graphics that really rub me the wrong way. Maybe its just that the low-resolution of the older game made everything look like it was hand-drawn, but this new version looks like a cheaply-made Shockwave/Flash game. Given the choice, I think I'd prefer the original.

I wonder how this is going to affect the TSM Mod, which already added a lot of roads and cities to France. Frankly, I find their maps far superior to anything created by the game developers, and I'd be annoyed if they had to remove their content to make way for this DLC...

Oh, Frontier Elite II, yeah, I remember that game. It was that awesome single-player open-world space-sim that I could play without an Internet connection. It's a shame they don't make games like that anymore.

I think I'll wait until the series is complete and on sale. I'm getting rather tired of these episodic games, both because of the game play and how it ruins the pacing of the story (e.g., each episode has to start with a brief recap, they have to end at a climax, whether its good for the narrative or not, and then you have to wait a month or two to find out what happens). It made sense in the beginning for Telltale - a cash-strapped independent developer - to make episodic games but at this point - now that they've made with some success - I wish they would drop the format (maybe keep the first episode as a freebie teaser) and sell the game as one complete piece.

While I too am surprised that Blizzard simply cancelled the game rather than trying to salvage it, I do agree that it wasn't ready for prime-time in its current state. Adventure games were a dying genre, and "Lord of the Clans" wasn't even a very good adventure.

While most of the animation and visuals are quite nice, the actual gameplay is pretty poor. There's very little real interaction with the game-world, and of the few things you /can/ click on, most of them result in some form or another of "I can't use that". The puzzles aren't very good, and the dialogue (and sound FX) is pretty awful. There are also a number of areas where the graphics look pretty poor.

I don't think their releasing the game would have been a disaster; Blizzard probably would have broken even just from sales to Warcraft fans alone. I doubt it would have seriously affected the marketability of the soon-to-be-released Warcraft 3 RTS. But I have no doubt that it would have quickly been relegated to the "old shame" closet, there to languish forgotten with "The Death of Superman", "Blackthorne" and "RPM Racing".

I think it speaks more about how comfortably situated Blizzard was /even before World of Warcraft/ that they could choose to swallow the development costs rather than even slightly sully their reputation with a mediocre - not bad - game.

Although I didn't much like the novels, his descriptions of online-gaming greatly influenced my expectations of what an MMO should be. The fantasy role-playing game played by Orlando and Sam in the book were the ultimate example of what I expect from an online game and - sadly - no game has come close to matching those expectations (Ultima Online, which was in beta at the time the first novel was published) was a good start, but rather than improving on that foundation the industry seems to have moved backwards). It's sad to see such an innovative franchise re-imagined as yet another characterless F2P game filled with grind and monetization.

I actually don't mind the EA client that much. I mean, I wish I could do without it, but it doesn't seem that much worse than other digital storefronts. While it did have a very rough start, these days I don't find its usability that much worse than Steam (which, admittedly, is not that high a bar to cross; Steam itself is pretty awful).

Having said that, I wish they offered a text-only list of games; scrolling through tiles is fine if you have five or ten games but once your collection starts getting bigger than that it can be troublesome finding the "box art" that represents the game you are interested in.

Oh, and they really need to work on letting you back-up/archive downloaded games; for those of us on slow or metered connections, that lack is really painful (there is a kludge involving manually zipping up the game-directory, but it is complicated and doesn't always work).

On the other hand, the need to re-enter your credentials every time the client updated was fixed about a year ago. At least, that's when Origin stopped bugging me about it after every upgrade. I haven't had to retype my origin password into the program for a loooong time.

Oh, and for God's sake, EA, finally get the stick out of your ass and put your new games back on Steam again. If I don't see it on Steam, it might as well not exist; I certainly am not going to open Origin to look for it. I'm fairly sure you lose more sales because you lack presence on Steam than ever you lose from Valve's 30% cut.

Every time I read about Descent Underground I'm momentarily confused and think they mean Descent to Undermountain. "Wow, they're still patching that old game?"

One of the things I liked about the original Gothic was the scale.

Most CRPGs fudge with the scale of the world; Skyrim, for instance, is supposedly the northern half of a huge continent but you can still walk across it in a few hours. I'm not complaining (much); by compressing everything the player is assured of having an exciting adventure every time he boots the game and it reduces the expense of world-building. Daggerfall, often used as a counter-example, has a much larger world but it suffers in pacing and detail. Between the two, I prefer the compressed version (of course, given the option I'd love a game the size of Daggerfall but with the detail of Skyrim... but that's not going to happen anytime soon; it would take decades to fill in all the nooks and crannies).

Gothic though (this was a post about Gothic, remember?) was set in a small valley, just a few miles across. It was /purposefully/ small and it helped the fiction dramatically. It explained why there were three villages just a mile or so apart and why each village had only a few dozen people living there. You didn't have to turn a blind eye to the limitations forced on the developers by the underlying mechanics of the simulation; instead, they used those limitations to build up the setting. It was clever world-building that went a long way to enhancing the feeling of immersion.

Unfortunately, the later Gothic games forwent this tactic and tried to simulate whole continents. As a player, you had to purposefully ignore how tiny the world was, and - while Gothic 2 and 3 were both good games - they also suffered a little bit from their expansiveness.

I had to read that three times before I realized they weren't talking about Warren Spector

Good news. ATS never grabbed me quite the way ETS2 did, and I realize now its scale very likely had something to do with it. One of the great joys of EuroTruck Sim was just toddling down the highway for hundreds of miles; its almost Zen-like. I never quite achieved that same feeling in American Truck sim but I assumed it was just because of the way the road-system was designed (with too many intersections and an abundance of overly-curvy roads, driving in ATS required far more concentration, negating the Zen ;-)

Although at the same time, ATS already felt very low on content even with its reduced scale - not enough cities or things to see - so I hope this change won't make the game feel even more sparse.

Some more variety in terrain would be nice too. Almost the entire game is desert (or dry brushland) and honestly, it is not very attractive. It looks like a title from the brown-is-real era of gaming...

Can't say I'm that upset about this. System Shock was innovative for its time, but its level-design and gameplay hearken back to an era when FPS games were pointless mazes gated by find-the-keycard puzzles, and hasn't aged well because of it. Just adding some more polygons and shaders wouldn't have made the game any more palatable. With a reboot, they aren't quite as tied down. That's not to say I want them to go whole-hog and change everything, but I'm quite willing to let them make necessary changes to the levels and gameplay.

Now, if they ever get around to re-doing System Shock 2, then that's a different story. Graphics (and last few levels) aside, that game came as close to perfection as any and they'd better not screw around with it ;-)

Some lesser-mentioned reasons Quake was important to PC gaming:

- It really helped to spur forward acceptance of using a mouse-n-keyboard to play FPS games. It wasn't the first title to use those controls (Terminator Future Shock was earlier, if I recall) but mouse-keyboard really didn't take off until Quake.

- On a related note, it introduced the idea of fully configurable controls to PC gaming, to the point that nowadays a game that ships without this option is decried as being a cheap "console port". While some earlier games offered the option to change what keys did what, it actually wasn't that common a feature and none of them offered as much freedom as did Quake.

- And related to that, the console. Being able to drop into the console and change key variables in the game - while the game was running - was as amazing as it was innovative. It's unfortunate that in recent years console access has slowly become less common but it is still considered a core feature of a hardcore PC game.

- Being able to change video-settings was another Quake innovation. Oh sure, some earlier games offered the ability to change resolutions or video settings, but almost all of them required you to quit the game and drop into an outside set-up utility to do so. Quake let you change resolutions not only while the game was running, but in the middle of a level. This has become another standard feature of a "true PC game" and woe to the title that releases without it.


For all of the above - but the more often mentioned reasons of true-3D, modding, multiplayer, machinima and esports and it's hard to disagree that Quake cast a long shadow on PC gaming, creating a standard to which all new games had to aspire. The thing is, I didn't even really /like/ Quake all that much but even I had to admit that it revolutionized the hobby. It really was an amazing achievement.

Yay Gwent!

Although, for those of you who can't wait for the digital edition, you can always download and print out the analog deck ;-)

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