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Here's a recent listing of free/open-source FPS games. I was aware of about half of them. Anyway, I just wanted to jot down the list for future reference. Free is good.
And actually, while I'm at it, here's a similar article, this one listing free linux RTS games.
Here's a little puzzle for you. What's wrong with the following two statements:
Along with more choices, and the consequences associated with those choices, Fable II boasts an improved combat system for mastering weapons and magic, an AI canine best friend and the much-anticipated Dynamic Co-op Mode, adding multiplayer functionality for you and your friends.
- EB Games newsletter
Lionhead is still making some tweaks to the online co-op formula. They assure us that online co-op is still coming, and that the goal is to have it launch within the first week after the release in North America. They also clarify that you will still be able to see your friends as glowing orbs prior to the update, but the online interactions will be limited to chat.
Did you spot it? The little lie. Or not so little, depending on whether you think claiming a product has something that it won't actually have is a 'little' lie. I'm sure the goblins in Marketing are so desensitized to hyperbole that they don't even categorize outright lies as lies anymore. Perhaps if pressed they'd explain that "It depends on whether 'has' means current tense or future current tense. Because in the future it'll be true. Almost certainly. Probably. Unless it will cost us too much money. Anyway, where's the harm?" The harm is in lying through your bungholes to get people to buy something that doesn't actually *do* what you claim it can do. We used to call that 'consumer fraud', and it got companies in trouble. Ah.. those were the days!
I managed to actually squeeze in some gaming the last few weeks, including an abbreviated affair with Arx Fatalis. If you're an RPG junkie, it's probably worth the $10 it currently costs on Steam, if for no other reason than that you can then sound snobby when you're discussing RPGs with less seasoned gamers.
So EA was going to ratchet up their disdain for people who pay them money for the privilege of playing Mass Effect or Spore on the PC, by using a copy protection scheme that involved online authentication checks every 10 days. For some inexplicable reason, people got upset at this prospect.
EA subsequently backed off and is now apparently only going to use a more traditional form of customer abuse. Their change of heart came, apparently, after listening "very closely" to their fans.
Not closely enough.
Listen closely to this: I. Hate. You.
SecuROM doesn't work. Period. Using it just makes you look stupid. Putting it in your games just makes me hate you. If you want to be stupid and annoying, go do it on your own time, not with products for which I've GIVEN YOU MONEY!!
Astute observers have already identified the true motive behind EA's actions - namely to strike a strategic blow to the used game market, which the big publishers view (through their greed-tinted goggles) as a big ol' giant pile of lost revenue.
Which also makes them look stupid. And makes me hate them. Every transfer of ownership of a used game does NOT equate to a lost sale of the same game new at retail. People buy used games because games are too expensive. It's the same reason people want to buy songs instead of albums. But just like the music industry, the mainstream game publishing industry wants desperately to establish a market that allows them to charge you money not just once or twice, but every single time you sit down to enjoy your media. The concept of 'ownership' is antithetical to their megalomaniacal greed.
And crap like the repeated SecuROM authentication checks are just incremental steps in that direction - where consumers have slowly lost the right to actually own anything. So every idiot that brushes this stuff off as just tilting at windmills simply doesn't understand the big picture. They say, "what's the big deal, I'm never without an internet connection, who cares if the game dials the mothership every other week?" It's not about dialing the mothership, it's about the inexorable erosion of your rights as a consumer.
It's never really about this little annoyance or that little inconvenience. It's about digging your heals in for a fight against the accumulation of all of those little things that one day measure up to everything.
The powers that be for this battle aren't interested in any given inch, they want to take enough inches to eventually add up to a mile, without anyone ever making enough of a fuss to disrupt the plan.
I read a Q&A article regarding independent (as in developed and published) role-playing games, and ended up with a list of games that I wanted to be sure to (eventually) seriously sample. So, here's the list, just for reference purposes:
- Age of Decandence
- Avernum 5
- Escalon
- Minions of Mirth
- The Broken Hourglass (in development)
- Depths of Peril
- Rampant Games (an indie publisher)
Whenever I peek through the looking glass at the *real* indie scene, I'm overwhelmed at the passion and variety thriving there, in its own little ecosystem, almost completely invisible to the 'naked eye' of the mainstream media firehose that runs 24/7 in its attempt to feed the great gaping maw of the corporate growth overlords now holding the reins of the gaming industry. And I come away feeling guilty that I've actually allowed myself to get swept up in the madness of the oppressively heavy marketing jackboot of the mainstream machine. I feel like I'm right in the demographic sweetspot for these indie shopkeeps, and I'm doing a disservice both to them and to myself by habitually eschewing my own gaming inclinations in favor of simply keeping up with the Joneses. So I'm also putting this list here as notice to myself to get with the program.
While I've got a long track record of railing against 'action' RPGs, I have an admitted penchants for just plain RPGs, where by 'plain' I mean games that actually offer legitimate role-playing, rather than confusing the concept with random number generation (which has always struck me as a particularly odd pair of concepts to confuse). So I've had my eye on Molyneux's Fable ever since I caught wind of it. That was a long time ago. Even for real time, not just internet time. Nevertheless, I finally got around to giving it a fair shake, and unfortunately what fell out of it was an admission that it's purported role-playing was a ruse. I did not react kindly. See for yourself.
Like the slow eroding effects of wind, rain, and time, I march through my list of increasingly ancient games, whittling them away one by one. The most recent being Call of Duty, the darling of 2003. Cinematic WWII shooters are essentially their own genre, and I admit to being able to enjoy them on their own terms. I've enough sense to know that for every dozen of them that are released (seemingly constantly), there's probably one or two worthwhile entrants, and I try to march through one of them at least once a year. Next up is MoH:Pacific Assault, I believe, though it will be awhile, since I also have enough sense to space them out pretty generously on account of them all being basically the same game. But that's about the meanest thing I'll say about Call of Duty, so enjoy the review.
As usual, it was one of Tycho's thought-provoking posts that provoked some thoughts in me which I in turn felt compelled to commit to the public record. This time, it was the following statement in particular:
"More than anything else, I think it was installing Vista that made me hate PC gaming. The constant, system-level interruptions, the impaired compatibility, and most of all the savage kick to my framerate's exposed groin made me wonder what precisely in the fucking fuck I was doing screwing around with this onyx monolith."
And in the very instant that I read that sentence, the following (potential) conspiracy revealed itself to me:
What if.. just what if.. Microsoft is using Vista to screw up PC gaming on purpose?
Finally!!! A new game review. I knocked out Lego Star Wars with a couple of quick late night play sessions. It was just the sort of thing to get me back in the writing groove at least, if not an actual gaming groove. I'll have to bite off something a little more serious if I want to get my sea legs back. But enjoy the review.
Disclaimer: I love Epic. Not some dreamy, first crush, doe-eyed pre-teen girl kind of love. No. A deep, abiding, respectful, sacrifice my own well-being kind of love. Why? Well, mostly because of stuff like this:
"Our PC fanbase is of ultimate importance to us. They are our bread and butter. We can't let them down or compromise their experience in any way to accommodate cross platform play." - Mark Rein
Oh you read that right: a major developer explicitly prioritizing their PC demographic over the proverbial fat-wallet console crowd.
The larger context for the quote is an explanation for why Epic won't be supporting platform cross-play multiplayer for UT3 (i.e. - PC players and PS3 players playing against each other on the same servers). Here's a full explanation. Normally, the phrase "won't be supporting" gets me riled up. Not so this time. Give me a legitimate reason why you're not doing something, rather than some maliciously deceitful and manipulative bucket of spin, and I'm usually placated. Make that reason actually involve *catering* to me, and the vast multitude who've served as the very bedrock of your success, and I'll take you home to meet mom.
That's why I love Epic. Well, that and the fact that they're not Valve.
We packaged up the latest version of the F-Sum mod and made it available as a public release, labeled v3. The resulting traffic to my server has nearly crippled my internet pipe, so please be patient if you're browsing the site. And please use one of the external mirrors listed on the F-Sum page if you wish to down load the mod - you'll be much happier with the bandwidth you get to the mirrors, I assure you, and I might be able to crawl out from under this crushing traffic.
As always, if there are questions about the mod, please email nsrl-help@negativesum.net.
Thanks!
[UPDATE] F-Sum is now Grid Motorsports.
Welcome netizens. If you've found your way here because of the release announcement for the F-Sum mod for rFactor, then we sincerely hope that you give it a try and enjoy it. We're hoping it generates some league recruits. If you're interested in the league itself, please peruse the League information, which unfortunately doesn't amount to much yet, though we did make an email address for just such an occasion.
A few disclaimers about the website in general:
- It's not really intended for external consumption yet.
- It's *really* broken on IE6, due to the fact that IE6 is *really* broken. You can blame me for not writing IE6 compatible CSS. I wrote nice standards-compliant CSS and IE6 buggers it to hell. I'm working on it. It looks great in basically everything else, and is serviceable in IE7. Sorry.
Thanks!
Just before the holidays, I got really sick, and since I was feeling miserable anyway, I figured why not suffer through an action/RPG. So I wasted a dozen or so hours on Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance 2. Move along. Nothing to see here.
I'm really not a negative person. It's not that I set out to tear down the high profile games. Honestly. But I will call a spade a spade. And by 'spade', I mean 'over-hyped game that isn't nearly as fun as it should be'. At least, that's what I mean for Doom 3, the victim subject of my latest review.
10-4: Claim backwards compatibility, but then fail to include 7 of the 10 games I own on the official compatibility list.
3: demonstrate your continued disregard for creativity by crafting a launch lineup consisting of 14 sequels and only 4 original titles (2 of which were already available on the predecessor console).
2: charge $60 for new games. Same disc. Same packaging. Same rushed one year dev cycle for all of your shitty EA sequels.
1: Royally f*** the consumer by conspiring with retailers to offer ONLY bundles, and charging between $600-$1000 for them.
Things are moving along at a good clip here, as I've got another review posted -- this one's for Gothic, a quaint little action RPG/adventure hybrid, courtesy of a few gents from across the pond. Nothing terribly special, but a good candidate for Best Game That Lets You Smoke a Joint.
That's at the heart of my World of Warcraft review. As an aside, I think MMOs are an inherently negative trend for the industry. I think a lot of good games aren't getting made because they aren't the kind of thing for which someone can justify charging a subscription fee.
After reading Tom's AoE3 review, I ended up in the corresponding QT3 forum thread, in which I found this beautiful little nugget:
"It seems by the time you've stripped the game of all the meaningless micromanagement, either of the economic or military variety, and fleshed out all the interface and other constraining factors, you've no longer got an recognisable RTS game."
That comes courtesy of a poster by the name of TheSelfishGene, which, incidentally, is the name of an absolutely outstanding book by Richard Dawkins. Totally unrelated.
Anyway, the point made by the well-read forum-ite is quite astute, and, I think, goes a long way towards explaining why I (and likely many others of my ilk) find ourselves increasingly disenchanted with RTS, as a conventional genre. If, as seems to be the case, the defining characteristic of an RTS is that it derive its challenge from overly cumbersome and burdensome play mechanics and inefficient UI, then as far as I'm concerned this recipe for game design is a dead end. Or, as I've often argued for 'action RPG', the genre is tragically misnamed. More and more, the RTS genre is being defined by games whose principal challenge to the player isn't strategic decisions, but rather adept and efficient manipulation of a purposefully obtuse interface. Sure, the player still makes a few choices over the course of the game, but 99% of their success hinges upon the feverishly dexterous execution of a slew of individually insignificant actions. That's not a 'strategy' game. That's closer to an arcade game. It's closer to a platformer. And if that's the only kind of game they can make that has both an analog clock and the trappings of strategy, then I'll stick with turn-based (or pauseable) strategy. At least with those, though their interfaces aren't necessarily any better, at least the interface isn't the dominant factor determining victory or defeat.
...failure?
Apparently, Ensemble continues their tragic and confusing slide into mediocrity. I'd been guardedly excited about the third installment in Ensemble's Age Of Empires series. Evidently I can now stop. Reading between the lines of Tom Chick's recent review, along with reading the actual lines themselves, it seems that Ensemble is continuing in the very unwelcome direction they headed with their previous release, Age of Mythology. Specifically, that direction involves systematically removing the vestiges of intelligent design from their first two ambitious games in favor of shiny pretty graphics. Ooo... look at the polygons!
Let's pretend Age of Mythology never happened. Had Age of Empires 3 simply fixed some of the UI flaws in AoE2, it'd be a decent game that would be obsolete by the likes of (already years old) Kohan and Creative Assembly's Total War series (see Shogun). But it seems AoE3 doesn't even offer that, let alone the kind of progress of which Ensemble seemed so capable initially. To simply have dropped a heavyweight DX9 era graphics engine on top of busted play mechanics smells like a game developer who doesn't care anymore. They've checked out. Hire a few really smart graphics guys, pair them up with about three dozen artists and modelers, and call it a game.
Tom includes a particularly pithy comment:
"The difference between micromanagement and strategy usually boils down to the interface".
So
it does, and thus the one thing that desperately needed Ensemble's
devout attention is the one thing about which they seemingly don't give a hoot.
