I'm pretty bad at this time zone stuff for some reason, but if my calculations are correct, it's already the New Year in all of Australia

Yep. It is.

Hmmm. A two-sentence "review"? Ok, the game is bad, but wasn't there anything else to say about it?

What's the point of putting up something like that? Either do it right or don't do it at all.

Then again, that could probably also be said about that Knight Rider game

I can't help myself. I find the idea of building such a mini-PC strangely appealing. It won't be much use with that crappy VIA board and CPU, but just building one is kinda ... cool

I wish that for once, they would look at the quality of their product, instead of strictly at their timeline.
Three years isn't that much to create and polish an outstanding and innovating game.

3DRealms is the developer for you - they are the other extreme. They don't care about the time, only about quality.

Raven has my respect for managing to produce game after game without any delay. And I consider most of them good games - maybe not the best of the best but definitely good. Other companies need seven months to produce something like Sniper: Path of Vengeance, Raven gives us JKII. You can say what you want about their priorities, they are definitely good at what they do.

[Edit] typo

This comment was edited on Dec 30, 10:02.

What do you mean? Bad graphics? Where?

I see high poly counts on the models and non-blurry textures (wether they are really high-res is hard to make out in a scaled-down screenshot). Some shadows seem to be missing but that is to be expected in a game that's still (at least) 6 months away.

Not much more to make out in those miniature screenshots, but what I can see looks pretty good.

[edit] coreeected typo...
This comment was edited on Dec 26, 16:18.

Warren has got to be the coolest designer is the world. The guy ought to teach a class...

Yep, the industry could definitely use more people like him. No matter how many interviews I read, the stuff Warren says always sounds strangely *right*. That's a guy with some great insights.

I can't help myself. I seem to alternate between "oh damn, this used to look so promising" and "could be a really great game" phases regarding Freelancer. I recently entered another "looks good!"-phase, it seems, because I really think this game could be a lot of fun. Even without joystick support.

Let's hope that there's as much Privateer/Elite influence in this game as there seems to be!

[Edit] musst leorn inglish...

This comment was edited on Dec 23, 15:13.

Either to teach programmers something (this won't, it's re-hashed Wolf3D);

Hmmm. So because the game content is supposedly not original, you cannot learn from it's source code? If you're really a programmer you should know that you can have ingenious programming in a bad game and the other way round.

but the engine is hopelessly out of date

It certainly is. But do you know how game programmers start out? With Tic-Tac-Toe, Tetris or the like. Everyone has to begin small. No one - no matter how talented - can jump right in coding a 3D engine with all that nifty stuff that we have nowadays. Looking at the source code of a professional game can help newbie programmers - if only to see in what way the game was structured. Never mind the graphics stuff - seeing the central game loop or the way in which the player data is structured can be a big help.

Having said that, reading the ROTT source code is probably not the way to learn game programming for inexperienced programmers. As "gamespysux" has described, games in those days did quite a few things that can be considered "inelegant" or even "bad" (by some standards) because speed was a major problem back then. Looking at assembly and self-modifying code will not help a complete newbie much. On the other hand, a more advanced programmer who is, for example, trying to get his little side-scroller to run well on his gameboy advance emulator may find those old techniques instructive.

I guess it all boils down to the old phrase: "Everything's useful for somebody". If you can't find a use for the source code that's fine. But someone else might.

[Edit: typo]

This comment was edited on Dec 20, 19:51.

okay, thank you for clearing that up for me and please pardon my ignorance on the subject.

No problem :). It is actually a pretty common misconception, for some reason.

I suppose, but any librarian that sorted titles that started with "The" under "T" would be sh

On the other hand, it would look totally anal if blue started listing reviews in the same ways as libraries list books. I mean

"Elder Scrolls: Morrowind, The"

? No thank you...

i'm sure they're aware of that, but in germany you're not allowed to produce any material relating to the nazis. this includes video games featuring nazis... even if the point of the game is to kill them!

Not true. You're not allowed to display swastikas (sp?), except in movies, but that's about it. We have tons of movies about the Nazis - every german kid sees dozens of them (mostly documentaries, of course) at school.

There's no law against video games featuring Nazis, as long as it doesn't contain swastikas.

I agree that the swastika-law doesn't make much sense nowadays, but it was passed directly after the war. Didn't make much practical sense then, either, of course. I guess it was more of a political "look, we hate that symbol" thing.

Albeit a sickening story, I find it funny how Germans find ways to associate anything with the Nazis, as if anyone alive today really experienced it .

Since you mention it, the only connection to Nazis that I know of has been made in the article Blue linked to (and I'm German). It was certainly not in our news shows (at least not the one I'm watching) and I also didn't read it in the newspaper.

Could be that the author of that article only thought everyone was secretly thinking of WWII. Some formulations in the article seemed that way...

Delphi (...) is much easier to code than C. I'm eager to see what this game looks like under delphi.

That's entirely subjective. Personally I think there's too much text in there - It's tiring to go through all those begins, ends and whatnots. I like the compact, mathematical style of C a lot better.

On the other hand, if we're talking about easier to LEARN that might be true. For the very same reason that I don't like it - lot's of language tokens are textual. Might be easier for beginners.

Why one would want to convert Quake to Delphi is beyond me, though - so much work, just to make it slower and non-portable... (yeah, yeah, I know, there's that Delphi-clone for Linux as well, but there are other systems besides these two). Can't we just focuse on the useful conversions? Like text mode Quake?

I need some help here. I want to buy a new hard disk, I need something around 80GB, reliable, quite and fast (at that order).
Suggestions? bad experience?

Yeah, plenty of bad experience with IBM. They used to make great drives, but the stuff they released in the last year was really, really, really unreliable. One of my drives completely crashed, all data lost, the other started to emit loud noises about one year after I bought it and I replaced it to play safe. To top it all off, around the same time a friend's IBM drive also broke down.

Recent hard drives from IBM also got some really bad reviews because of unreliability (which of course I saw a few days after I bought them), so I guess it wasn't just bad luck on my part.

But seriously I don't see the harm of editing movies like that as long as they make it clear they have been edited when you buy/rent the movie.

Ah, but, your see, people are stupid. You can write in big red letters on the packaging that the movie has been edited, but that won't stop people from thinking and talking of "Die Hard - Family Edition" as "Die Hard". They will forget that they are actually watching a different movie, which can have negative effects on the popularity of the original.

Besides, from a copyright perspective, those guys are selling a new movie that's based on the real one. If you want to sell stuff that contains copyrighted material from other people you need to buy a license. Since they didn't do that it's illegal.

I have to agree with the developers of SWG that one character per server is the right choice.

Hehe. For a second I thought you really meant one character per server:

The next thing to come in MMORPGs! Your very own personal server!! No more dealing with 1337 d00dz!!! Experience our new revolutionary concept of the single player massively multiplayer online role-playing games (SPMMORPG)!!!! Join the Revolution !!!!!

actually, it would be 'Quarter Life'...

No, "Quarter Life" is the life kids lived in the 80s arcades...

I'm a fileplanet subscriber, and I received this in the mail today on 2 CDs.

So let me get this straight. If you're not a Fileplanet subscriber you can download the demo but not use it. But if you're a subscriber and pay for the downloads you don't need to download it because you get it via snailmail?

So, there is actually no need for anyone to download this thing, right?

Strange way to manage a download service...

This comment was edited on Dec 10, 09:10.

Some shining example of intelligence posted the windows demo, under the mac link

Hehe, if that's true Blizzard is up for some embarrassment. Since they need to "look into it", I would guess that the Mac demo is not done yet and they need to stall for time.

A really funny thing would be if a Mac demo wasn't even planned, but they now have to get started on it to save themselves from looking stupid :).

Man, those new Ninjai episodes are incredible. Everyone who likes this kind of thing owes it to himself to check them out.

Anyone know who the creators are? I cannot believe that this is just a homegrown amateur flash movie. It just seems much too professional ... especially the music, but also the animations and the storyboard.

[Edit] typo
This comment was edited on Dec 8, 14:24.