U guys didn't know that did you. If you downloaded the 650 meg america's army 2.0, check the file size on your hard disk. The file size is the number of Evil

666 megs.

See, America's Army is Satan's army. They use the game to collect statistics so when the draft starts up again, they know who is good at what.

Well someone found out about the 666 file size and started to spread the word about america's army being Satan's army.

So they added another 3 megs to the 653 meg file so that on the hard disk, it no longer says 666 megs. They want to cover up their tracks.

Don't work for Satan. Stay away from americas army.

I thought the conversation went more like this.

Microsoft accountant - Asheron's call is not generating the required microsoft profit of 50%.

Programmer - OK. We will make it better to increase profitability.

Accountant - Like hell you will. You will sell that steaming turd back to the people that sold it to us.

Oh ya. I still detest the Unreal engine's knee high jumps.

I am amazed. I had fun. Have not played multi in years. The graphics are OK, the sound is OK, player models are nice. The map I played was a good design.

2 things are all I can complain about after 1 hour of online play. Laggy. Really laggy. Watched some guy jetpack around me while I filled him full of lead. Then watched amazed as I fell down dead and he continued to jump around firing, finally.

The one big gripe I have is the player speed. There is a speed boost but it is only temporary. Takes forever to build up. Feels like it takes literally 3 minutes to walk from spawn point to the enemy base. Make this speed boost last twice as long and regenerate twice as fast and I think this is actually a decent budget buy title.

The game took some time and effort. It did have good parts. I had fun playing it. It was not inspiring. It was over very fast. The ending was really disappointing. Fire unstoppable weapon 4 times at unstoppable enemies. Ammo, 500 or so rounds of unstoppable ammo.

I still remember the first Unreal. The second one I took off the drive after 2 or 3 months. Went to go look at it again and the CD was bad. Multi CD games mean multi opportunities for trouble. ;(

In all the posts I saw about Deus Ex, I noticed something. The people talking about it do not know marketing.

Used to be, people that loved video games made video games. They would put into the game what would make them happy.

Then along came quake and some other games that showed the greedy money guys there was money in video games. Greedy money guys don't do anything without marketing guys. Marketing guys now run the game industry.

Marketing guys are trained to sell "boxes". That is how they talk. They sell "boxes". They do not care what is in the box, only that the box is worth money. The marketing guys think, "how can I sell this box"?

Let's take Deus Ex. Game prices are at $50 and will never go higher. That is economic theory. How can a marketing guy make more money? He cannot charge more for the game. He has 2 choices; Sell more boxes, or sell the boxes cheaper.

It is hard to sell lots of video games. They have their niche markets. Only a few are really big hits, diablo, starcraft, HL. That leaves selling the box cheaper as the only alternative to the marketing guy.

We are talking about a computer game, not a box of nuts. With nuts, the greedy guys remove nuts from the box to save money. That cannot be done with a computer game.

What happens with computer games is that the marketing guys use some of their insidious marketing tactics on people. Let's use Deus Ex for an example.

If Deus Ex is sold to PC, there is a limited market. If they sell to Xbox, the market is much bigger. Think about the people buying the games. A PC buyer will probably be a gamer that has certain desires. Xbox is much more casual gamer oriented.

So Deus Ex starts to get bad press. "It is dumbed down, looks awful". There are two choices, fix it or not. This is where the marketing guy comes in. He says "why fix it?" The game guys say "Our fans hate the game. We must fix it". The marketing guy says "Why? How many fans you have"?

See. The way marketing guys think? They need to make money. So instead of doing what is right, fixing the game so that the developer retains dignity and the buyer recieves enjoyment, the marketing guy whips out the evil marketing theory. He tells the game developer...

Listen, christmas is coming up, if we slap some pretty graphics on the box and pay the reviewers to give us a 9 of 10, All the people buying presents for kids, and all of the kids with christmas money will buy the game. They won't know till they get it home that it is a junk game.

Marketing research says that only a low percentage of people will go to the trouble of returning the game. No one wants to tell grandma or mom or dad, "The present you gave me sucked, I returned it".

The marketing guy tells the game developer, "we can ship anything in this box, it does not matter, the point is to have pretty boxes in the store for people to buy. If they complain, you guys can always promise them a patch. Then we just wait till they get tired of bitching.
---

From this point onward, the only good games will be home projects. Like Serious Sam. That was a home project and it worked out great. All corporate games will be poisoned and dumbed down and sold whether they are ready or not, just to make money.

This comment was edited on Dec 3, 12:31.

All the guys that said that Halo for PC was great have some explaining to do. If Halo was so good, and made lots of money, why is that guy quitting?

People leave when the product tanks. Just like Romero left after Daikatana.

The guys saying Halo was good? You owe the rest of us a beer for putting up with you.

What the heck is going on in the games market? HL2 delayed for 9 months. Deus Ex sucks. Halo sucked. Most other name games have been delayed. Every game that has been released has been trashed in reviews. Savage, Chrome, etc.

This is approaching the christmas season. And the lead story on BluesNews is about a Simpsons game?

Has the PC game market folded because of consoles? Are all new games developed for morons because they spend money for anything?

I am seriously making a mod for a game because it has been so long since a game came out worth buying. Last game I bought was Will Rock back in June. I know I can make a game at least as entertaining as the Simpsons or Deus Ex or Halo.

Look Fred. We all know that you are a pathetic. You spend most of your day posting insanity on the Blues News board.

This time you are going to far.

If you have some problem, send me your address. I want to come by and give you some physical readjustment to your attitude.

I know that you will get a charge out of this. Trolls love attention. I am serious. If one of us ever finds out who you really are and where you live, we are coming for a visit.

Trolling off of some persons dead loved one deserves one of the Mexican gang initiation type lessons. The one where you, Fred, walk down a line with the members of Blues News on each side. As you walk down the line, each one of us hits and kicks you until we feel satisfied.

With your record you are in for a lot of pain.

This comment was edited on Sep 21, 17:09.

Looks like Unreal 2 and UT2004 or whatever they called it musta sucked pretty bad huh? So bad the financial fallout has forced Epic to sign an exclusivity deal with the devil.

Unreal II was the biggest disappointment. Unreal was incredible. The mission paks for unreal were great to, return to Na Pali etc. Unreal II was like one of the military sim FPS. I never played UT2004 because I always felt that Unreal multiplayer was inferior to Quake II multiplayer. I read lot's of people saying it sucked though.

I wonder what caused Epic's downfall. Greed? Did all the money change the people that wrote Unreal? Does the original Unreal programmer have anything to do with the unreal franchise now? I see carmack's name everywhere. I have a hard time remembering the Unreal guys name. Did he give up on games?

Blizzard is already dead. After the founders quit, vivendi hired some college kids. The kids came in and fired all the people that made Diablo and Warcraft so they could start up their own little fiefdom. As well as stop paying dot com salaries to the people that made blizzard what it is. If you doubt, check the job listings they been posting lately.

I would not expect anything of quality from Blizzard anymore.

On a total tangent, I always wonder about people who say "Can't they make a new game, don't they have original ideas?" There are no original ideas. There are about 5 game ideas and they cycle in popularity. FPS, RPG, Simulators, then back to FPS etc. Maybe it is an age thing. You do not see the cycles until you been playing games for 10 years or so.

Oh well. Coincidental that 5 years was mentioned.

I been coming here for 4 or 5 it seems like. I think the thrill has gone.

Having to turn off windows media player everytime I visit the page is a headache. Really. I guess it has to be. Most of my favorite sites? when I vist them now, 3/4 of the page that shows up is ads, with 1/4 devoted to the reason for the webpages existence.

That along with the dismal state of games. A post by someone else resonated with me. They talked about buying games all the time before. Now they buy one every 6 months because of so much crapware. That is exactly my situation.

With no games to read about, having to turn off media player on every visit, and frankly, the turn of Blue's interest from video games to the home life, it is about time to head out for somewhere else.

Wanted to say thanks for providing a great site for the beginning of the internet boom. When someone realizes the dog and family are more important than video games, should he stay in video games? Kinda feels like visiting an old folks home instead of a game site. No judgement intended. How I see things.

Damn, I do not want to finish! I been here forever!

Awhile back there was some porn add with a womens breasts from 3 inches away bouncing up and down.

The popups are not so bad. Still, what do I see as the popup loads? I am looking up a womans ass from 1 foot away. i think that, OK, it is me, I am fixated on the woman's ass so that is what I see. It is not a sexual ad on a game website.

Then I see the name of the popup

Butt popup

Look, if ya gonna allow porn, get the good stuff that shows it all. The game scene is so slow I might come here more for tight shots of the hairy you know what.

Don't get too excited about working for Blizzard. They fired all the people that made Diablo and Warcraft. The sycophants to Vivendi stayed on. That is why there have been so many help wanteds from them lately.

I heard they have no projects in the pipe. The place is run by corporate droids now.

It's for kids. When they mention MTV that is all you need to know. If you have a big schlong, like to do live porno, or have big breast you like to flash, you will be selected no matter what your gaming skills.

Just watch real world. It is a live sex act starring 18 year olds. No credit card fees. OK, you don't get to actually see the good bits. You can see their outline thru bikinis, covers, shower doors etc. You can see the sex under the covers thru a draped cloth or listen to it over the speakers.

Maybe they shoulda advertised GGL wants Porn Star to front for their new business scheme. Must be willing to do GGL employees.

Don't listen to a word of that stuff. If you masturbate you will go blind, deaf and become crippled so you walk with a limp. The doctors and government know that.

They are releasing news like this "masturbating helps prostate" so all kinds of people turn themselves into cripples. Did I mention it makes you mentally crippled also?

Masturbating too much mentally cripples you so you are easy to lead or tell what to do. Just the kind of citizen the govt likes.

They are just now starting to animate characters?

U guys use computers, u are supposed to be smarter than that.

Did you see bush climb out of the plane? The spot I saw showed him walking from behind people dressed in the flight suit. I figured he was hiding on deck waiting for the jet and then walked out. If it was really him and not a double.

I cum to blues because the boobies and the crotches make my penis hard. Don't tell my mom.

So are things so bad financially that blues is going porn?

I have watched those tits go up and down for about 2 minutes and it is bugging the hell out of me. I am surprised the FBI isn't on you for tittilating the underage.