Volunteer geeks

Speaking of the efforts of volunteer geeks...

If you're playing DeusEx:IW or Thief:DS, then run, don't walk, to Graphics by John P. Wow!

Also - I grabbed the (decidedly large and) highly touted Red Orchestra mod for UT2k4. While it inarguably exudes professionalism, I'm disappointed that it ultimately doesn't amount to much more than BF1942 for UT2k4, and I mean that in the worst possible way. The normally stellar UT AI seems confused by the new surroundings and objectives. I was hoping that RO would give me a good realistic warfare fix, frosted with the characteristically great AI-padded multiplayer of UT. BF1942 is great on paper, but doesn't hit its stride with anything less than 16 honest-to-god humans. UT2k4's onslaught plays just dandy with the bots, and I hoped RO would end up as greater than the sum of its parts. At first glance, this appears to not be the case. Also - it seems like you have to be within like a 2 foot circle to trigger the control-point conversion, which makes you a veritable sitting duck. That's at least one thing BF1942 got right -- a large capture radius keeps the enemy guessing.

Lastly, I recently felt compelled to brave the gauntlet that is the process of installing and updating a few classic simulations: European Air War, Grand Prix Legends, and Falcon 4. F4 wins the trophy, hands down, no contest. As you can see from my install guide for Falcon 4 the community got it right -- one giant frickin' update with all the goods. Install, patch, play. Grand Prix Legends is better than it once was, but not by much. I still had to track down the latest versions of a bunch of disparate tools and updates from a bunch of stale websites, sorting through a bunch of broken links. The end result is still worth it, though. GPL looks better than ever. The GPLEA cars and tracks are gorgeous and the game remains stable (thus far). EAW, on the other hand, has more than twice the headaches of GPL, without really delivering the goods. Sure, with the new terrains and some effects tweaks, the game has aged well, but an attempted multiplayer session failed miserably, and several of the tweaks come in the form of (mutually exclusive) binary hacks of the executable. The worst part, though is that apparently everybody and their brother made some airplanes and skins, and there's no good cummulative collection of them. Ditto for the campaigns -- many of which look lovingly crafted, but consist of ~8 separate zip files per campaign, and no guarantee that you won't inadvertantly stomp on some of the other tweaks you've applied. Having gone through this multiple times now, without having gotten much mileage out of EAW itself, I'm left wondering why I try to keep up with it. The thing is, the community is still thriving, which speaks volumes. It's too bad they're not as technically adept as they are dedicated.