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August 25, 2004
Nielson knows where you camp
Nielson has decided it wants to move into the game space. They are taking the approach of trying to quantify how many ads a player encounters in-game, much like their longtime service of tracking TV ratings and commercial impressions.
It seems to me that there is a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation here. The data that Nielson could collect early on wouldn't be that useful, as in-game advertising is hardly a major force at the moment. However, it's unlikely that this type of advertising will gain popularity until it can be proven that there is a return on the investment for those who wish to advertise.
Posted by jb at 10:40 AM
August 22, 2004
Gametrak wins best of GC
At the Games Convention in Leipzig, the Gametrak controller was awarded the Best of GC prize. The Gametrak is an interesting idea, and should lead to some novel game designs.
The Gametrack consists of a pair of gloves, with wires attached to each leading straight down to the base unit. Using mild tension on the wires, the unit can calculate the angle, position and velocity of each of the player's hands. The first game to be released is a first-person fighter called Dark Wind, with a golf game coming soon.
Posted by jb at 08:47 PM
The ilovebees nonesense moves into the physical world
The latest countdown on the ilovebees.com site will end Tuesday August 24th. The site now has a list of GPS coordinates and times. Here's a map of the coordinates. And here are some discussions.
Where is this headed?
Posted by jb at 06:00 PM
August 18, 2004
The ten trendiest concepts in game design
The Guardian has written a great summary of the ten concepts that are getting the most attention in game design today. I think they nailed it, but should have added full dynamic lighting (a la DOOM III and Unreal 3 engines).
Posted by jb at 09:43 PM
Battlefield Vietnam WWII mod this week
The previously mentioned WWII mod for BFV will be released by EA and DICE this Friday.
Here are the features:
- Three Pacific Theatre maps: Iwo Jima, Wake Island and Invasion of the Philippines.
- Improved player customization using the Battlefield Vietnam-style kit, body and head selection interface.
- Flamethrower kits can be picked up by any soldier and used to wreak havoc on bunkers and exposed infantry.
- All Battlefield weapons and vehicles from the Pacific Theatre have been rebuilt to take advantage of the Battlefield Vietnam engine.
- New animations for all kit weapons, to bring them up to the standards set with the Vietnam-era weapons in BFV.
- Battlefield Vietnam gameplay tweaks: 3D Map, capture timer, and use of kit weapons from open positions.
Posted by jb at 02:20 PM
August 17, 2004
Sixteen player Mario Kart
Via kottke.org.
The Ann Arbor District Library is organizing a once a month Mario Kart Double Dash tournament. They've rigged eight Gamecubes together to allow 16 players to compete simultaneously. The video feeds are pulled together for broadcast on a central screen.
Man, if I had this in college it would've taken me another 5 years to get out of there.
Posted by jb at 10:22 PM
Counter-Strike Source review
Now that Counter-Strike Source has seen the light of day, the folks at Gotfrag have provided a detailed hands-on review.
A few notes.
- The physics updates make a real improvement to gameplay. Gotgrag notes that it may be possible for savvy players to get information by seeing how bodies are arranged, and thus make assumptions about how they died.
- Users of the AWP may loose their "green whore" moniker, as it seems it's actually useful for something besides camping.
- Flashbangs have a significant impact on both vision and hearing, and really disorients those affected by it.
- Smoke grenades now produce a black haze, and really make vision difficult by adjusting the brightness of your surroundings.
Overall impressions are that Source is an improvement over CS 1.6, and should continue to keep CS as one of the top skill games around.
Posted by jb at 01:09 PM
August 16, 2004
John Carmack 2.0
Not game related, but the quote from Mr. Carmack justifies the entry. In the Armadillo Aerospace news item, John announces the birth of his son. The following quote is pure Carmack.
"Much to our surprise, my fair-and-pasty genes somehow put one over on Anna’s Asian genes, and the little guy has blond hair. I have never been much of a baby admirer, but through the miracle of subjective observation, he looks rather cute to me. Except when he grimaces and stretches his neck, in which case he looks like Gollum..."
Posted by jb at 06:57 PM
Pirates! and Evil Genius shipping soon
Earlier this summer, in our Gamewag Wishlist we mentioned Sid Meier's Pirates! and Evil Genius as two promising upcoming titles.
It's been announced that Pirates! will be available for the PC in November, and for the Xbox in the spring of 2005. The Xbox port will be Live-enabled and support HDTV resolutions.
Vivendi has confirmed an October 1 release date for their camp, 1960s spy game Evil Genius.
Posted by jb at 09:07 AM
Location-based games
Via The Ludologist. Here's a list of location-based games (Urban Mobile Games) that allow you to get outside to do your gaming. Some of our favorites:
(Note: for some strange reason, the URLs are all plaintext, forcing you to copy-paste. Uggh.)
Posted by jb at 08:52 AM
What can you do with a GBA linker?
Quite a bit. Curmudgeon Gamer takes a look at the Flash 2 Advance Ultra 512mb Linker for GBA, and the possible uses for it.
- Play homebrew GBA games
- Run your favorite NES roms on the PocketNES emulator
- Copy several of your favorite GBA roms onto a single cart
- All kinds of illegal things
The world of the GBA linker is a shady one. I went to a local NYC retro-gaming store and asked if they carry linkers. After clarifying that I was not just looking for a GBA cable, they proprietor wanted to know exactly what I needed a linker for. After convincing him I didn't intend to physically harm anyone with it, nor was I a law enforcement officer, he complied and showed my his... err.. wares.
Posted by jb at 08:38 AM
August 13, 2004
Teamwork in the Tropics
A mod that allows for cooperative play for Far Cry has been released. The mod allows up to 3 players to play the single-player levels. Each player can select a unique skin to simplify identification. Friendly fire can be enabled or disabled depending on how well you trust your friends.
Posted by jb at 12:44 PM
DOOM III SDK next week?
At the QuakeCon DOOM III seminar Thursday, some interesting details emerged. For one, Robert Duffy said that the id folks are shooting for an SDK release sometime next week, followed by "Don't quote me on that". So, of course we're quoting him.
Also of note:
- A patch for D3 is forthcoming to address some multiplayer expoits
- While not in the game, DOOM 3 does support vehicles. The SDK will contain a sample map that has a six-wheeled buggy.
Posted by jb at 09:47 AM
August 12, 2004
QuakeCon gets rolling
Just an FYI that QuakeCon is currently underway. According the official schedule, Thursday was mostly a bunch of talking and partying.
The real fun starts Friday at 9:00 with a QuakeJam, followed by tournaments all day Saturday.
Next year I'm getting a chopper and making my way down there via New Orleans. Oh, I've got a helmet...
Posted by jb at 11:15 PM
August 11, 2004
John Carmack knows A LOT more than you
And so do a lot of folks over at Beyond3D. And at ATI.
This past Sunday on the Beyond3D forums, an ATI engineer named Humus posted a process by which DOOM III players using ATI cards could speed up performance by 40%. He did this by digging into the D3 shader files, and found a significant inefficiency with regards to newer ATI cards. By making 2 small changes to said shaders, he made John Carmack look a little silly.
However, Beyond3D followed the thread by interviewing Mr. Carmack himself. His response indicates that he didn't expect development to go so long, and therefore underestimated the cards that would be available at the time of release. It seems that the compromise was overall better performance on all cards, vs. significant increases on modern cards.
The interview is pretty tough to read (this particular topic is covered on page deux). I had to read the original thread to get an idea of what he was really talking about.
Posted by jb at 09:24 PM
OpenGL 2.0 released
Go ARB! Some features:
- Programmable shading
- Multiple render targets that enable programmable shaders to write different values to multiple output buffers in a single pass
- Non-power-of-two textures for all texture targets, thereby supporting rectangular textures and reducing memory consumption
- Two-sided stencil
- Point sprites
Posted by jb at 09:17 PM
It looks like you're trying to save the princess.
The good folks over at Fark have posted the voting results for a photoshop contest with the theme, "What if Nintendo was owned by Microsoft".
Results range from funny to desperate, but there are a few keepers:
"The Operation Failed. Maybe try blowing on it or something."
"Thank you Mario, but an exception has failed at world 1-4..."
"It looks like you have a sword. Would you like help defeating the Moblin?"
Posted by at 01:47 PM
August 10, 2004
Getting excited about Fable
4tomsm4sher over at _render_ has posted some info on the much anticipated Fable RPG for the Xbox. He links to a nice preview and some videos, over which you may commence drooling.
Fable, formerly known as "Project Ego" is expected to ship September 14th in the US.
Posted by jb at 04:52 PM
CS: Source update
Some Counter-Strike: Source tidbits.
- Dust will support 20 players per side (I'm assuming the Source version of this map will be larger, as I can't imagine 40 players on the old Dust)
- The beta will be available Wednesday at cyber cafes that are members of the Valve Cyber Cafe Program. You can look here for a list of cafes. (you'll probably find their owners are disfigured from the Valve arm twisting...)
- Later this month, the beta will be available to Condition Zero owners
We here at Gamewag got tired of CS about 2 years ago, but the new engine will probably spark a renewed interest. I've lost my HL CD and CD key about 3 times now, so I guess I'll be making a donation to Valve yet again.
Posted by jb at 02:58 PM
August 09, 2004
The Commandments of Online Gaming (11-20)
The traditional ten commandments of FPS are too basic to deserve an article. Don't TK. Don't whine. Don't cheat, spam, type in all caps, lie, steal, block, camp in dumb places, or covet thy neighbor's ass. If you can't figure them out on your own, you should consider going back to minesweeper.
If you've managed to form this framework on your own, good for you. Let's move on to advanced game etiquette 201. This isn't just about winning, this is about being a gentleman (or gentle person - a/s/l?). If you think being a gentleman equates being a wuss, look up the gentlemanly art of Schlager Fencing. That being said, let's dive right in.
11 - Thou shalt be humble.
If you find yourself on the losing end of a battle, whether you've got the high score or not, attempting to elevate yourself above your teammates by proclaiming, "OMG my team sucks" singles you out as the poorest of sports. Once you've said such a thing it doesn't matter if your team sucks anymore, because clearly you're the biggest ass.
12 - Leaders seldom appoint themselves.
Few things are as bothersome as someone who spends their time telling other players what to do. So don't do it. Play your game. If you deserve to be followed, it will happen.
13 - Voice comms are for the game.
I was invited a few weeks ago to go on comms with a clan that was "21 and older". When I got into their TS server, I listened to the voice of a child telling everyone about his/her dreams the previous night. The kid needs some therapy. Oh, voice comms are for the game.
14 - Respect the Imaginary Que.
I have to admit that I've broken this one a few times myself. You know where a vehicle spawns, there are 2 people already standing in the spot, and you run up and spam the "enter vehicle" key, hoping your ping will rub out the others already waiting. I know the temptation, I know the need, but it's a crappy thing to do that none of us appreciates when done to us.
15 - Thou shalt apologize.
I've TK'd. You've TK'd. "Sorry for TK" doesn't take long to type.
16 - Name-calling is reserved for the weak.
I see far too many people casually calling each other by names that would make my grandfather blush (and he was a sailor). Race, color, creed, and lifestyle choice have no relation to a players game behavior. Being a jackass does, and if you think it's alright or cool to throw around racist terminology, then you've got bigger problems coming to you.
17 - Give credit when it's due.
If you suddenly get knifed in the back of the head when you thought you were alone, that's someone else's skill speaking for itself. Don't tell that person they were lucky, don't call them a jackass (unless it's jb), and certainly don't ask the admin to kick them. "Nice knife" will do, and generates peace and love and good happiness stuff.
18 - Admin doesn't mean God.
If you're an admin, congratulations. Remember that the argument, "It's my ball and if I can't be quarterback, I'm going home" was last used by David Jameson in the 5th grade. In the 6th grade, David left the ball at home and moved on to beating other kids up because they didn't like him.
19 - Don't feed the trolls.
Inevitably, you will find an unmonitored server that has someone breaking the rules intentionally. They'll hack, play dumb, call names, insult your dog, TK, and otherwise do everything in their power to make everyone else mad. These troglodytes are to be pitied and ignored. Short of kicking them, there is nothing you can say or do that they don't want you to say or do. Don't buy into it, they don't deserve your attention.
20 - Be the model.
Play like a champion, play with gusto and style. Play like the unique snowflake (with a gun) that you are. Great players don't just stand out because of their skills alone, they stand out because of their attitudes and willingness to be consistent despite adversity. Sticking by the rules is easy when everything is going your way, the real tests always come when your blood is boiling. Be better, play clean, and win beautifully.
Go forth and prosper!
Posted by at 10:50 PM
Hello Kitty DOOM III hack
Want to soften the DOOM III experience a bit? Maybe give it a little Japanese schoolgirl flair? Well, here is your hack. Some folks have replaced the default flashlight TGA with Hello Kitty, Batman and more.
Warning: the site is getting slashdotted and boing-boing'd simultaneously.
Posted by jb at 10:00 AM
Canned fear
After a few hours of playing DOOM III, I began to tire of the things that made the game interesting at the start. In the first few levels, I would get freaked out upon hearing a noise behind me. After awhile, it became obvious that events were being triggered whenever certain points in the level were reached. This scripting, once terrifying, became routine, nay, annoying.
game girl advance has written a nice piece on this very subject, outlining the pitfalls that come with over using scripted events.
Posted by jb at 09:52 AM
August 07, 2004
Make Something Unreal 3rd round winners announced
Epic has announced the 3rd round winners of the Make Something Unreal contest. The winners are grouped into 11 categories:
- Best first-person shooter (FPS) – Red Orchestra
- Best non-FPS – Alien Swarm
- Best Level – CTF-CBP2-Pistola
- Best Level With Original Contest – DM-CPB2-KillyBilly Barn
- Best Mutator – Unreal4Ever MSU Edition
- Best Model – MonstAr
- Best Voice Pack (or Audio Modification) – Alien Swarm
- Best Vehicle – Clone Bandits
- Best Tool – Ushock
- Best Game Type – Jailbreak 2004
- Best Use of Karma Physics – Unwheel
Posted by jb at 11:56 AM
August 06, 2004
EVO2K4 shows how gaming stars are born
EVO2K4 is the 2004 edition of a three-day tournament of fighting games for the PS2, Xbox and Dreamcast.
In the Street Fighter 3 finals, Daigo "The Beast" Umehara battled Justin Wong, and a wonderful gaming moment was captured on video.
In many fighting games there is the concept of parrying. This essentially allows a fighter to block and nullify an attack by another fighter, and also allows the defending fighter to counter-attack. It's often a difficult thing to do, and requires very precise timing.
About halfway through the video, you'll see Daigo's character (the male dressed in white) get attacked with a "super" (big, repeated attack). He parries each hit in the attack (looks like a block with a blue flash), which is incredibly difficult to do, and comes back to win.
The crowd goes absolutely wild (turn your sound on).
Here is a link to the zipped video (may be slashdotted, in which case let us know and we'll mirror it). This is a must-see.
You can also read the ensuing discussion.
Posted by jb at 12:38 PM
GTR at Spa
SimBin is currently developing a much-anticipated racing sim called GTR. GTR is "The Official FIA GT Racing Game", and has been lauded for its realism and fantastic graphics.
This past weekend, the SimBin folks were at Spa-Franchorchamps (a track in Belgium with a deep racing history) for the FIA GT race. They had their "Get Real" bank of GTR racing simulators setup for folks to experience what it's like out on the track. Over at Race Sim Central, you can view videos and pictures of the event.
My favorite video is of Henrik Roos (who drives a Viper in the GT series) giving the sim a run.
You can watch some videos of the event, read a write-up or download the GTR beta.
Posted by jb at 11:59 AM
Duct Tape mod for DOOM III
Well, that didn't take long. One of the biggest complaints about DOOM III is that despite taking place in the distant future, there doesn't seem to be any technology available for mounting a flashlight to your weapon. This results in doing a whole lot of switching between the two.
Glen 'FrenZon' Murphy has written a Duct Tape mod that allows you to use both a weapon and flashlight at the same time.
Posted by jb at 10:58 AM
August 05, 2004
Myst IV: Revelation site live
Via gamegossip.com. Ubisoft has replaced their Myst IV teaser site with the full deal. The web site takes the same form as the Myst games, forcing you to click around to discover the site areas. There are also some puzzles built into this experience. Warning: very Flash intensive.
Posted by jb at 02:35 PM
The Internet Archive video games collection opens
Via bluesnews. The Internet Archive, which is attempting to archive all things digital, has opened their video games section.
The archive initially has machinima videos, speed run videos, game previews, press kits and discontinued games.
Posted by jb at 02:24 PM
Playing the new WarioWare game will draw stares
Finally, a game built for people who suffer from the "Nintendo lean" (whereby the player thinks that physically leaning to the side will somehow influence game control).
The new GBA game, titled Spinning WarioWare Inc., will take advantage of an attached sensor that detects movement of the device, which translates into player control. The D-pad is not used at all for this title.
The game will have over 200 minigames and over 100 bonus games. No availability details as of yet.
Posted by jb at 01:24 PM
Carmack: Quake 3 open source by end of this year
John Carmack posted on Slashdot that the Quake 3 engine source code will be available by the end of the year. This is in line with their current strategy of making older game engines available to the open source community. The creative assets are not usually released as such, just the engine.
"By the end of the year. There are still a lot of higher priority things, but it is coming soon.
Hopefully punkbuster will keep the source release from having any negative impact on the player community.
John Carmack"
This is a great tradition at id; which allows young game developers to learn from the experiences of the experts in the field. I wish more development houses would do the same.
Via boingboing.net
Posted by jb at 10:36 AM
Play the old Infocom games online
This is an old gem, but worth bringing up again. Elsewhere.org allows you to play any of the old Infocom text-based adventure games (and more) via telnet. You can even save games in progress. There are 39 titles to choose from, here are a few:
- Adventure
- Bureaucracy
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
- Journey
- Leather Goddesses of Phobos
- Planetfall
- Sorcer
- Trinity
- Wishbringer
- Zork 1
- Zork 2
- Zork 3
- Zork: The Undiscovered Underground
- Zork Zero
Don't get eaten by a Grue.
Posted by jb at 09:12 AM
August 04, 2004
Manhunt critics silenced?
Some updated news on the murder case involving Rockstar Games' Manhunt. It seems that many of the news organizations covering this are focused on proving that playing violent games leads to violent behavior. What they've been ignoring is that evidence has indicated that 1) the motive seems to have been robbery to 2) pay back a drug-related debt and 3) it was the victim that owned Manhunt, not the accused.
Posted by jb at 02:54 PM
NWN 2 announced
According to Gamespy, Neverwinter Nights is the 6th-most active online game. I've got a feeling that it will lose at least 1 place in the coming weeks.
Today, it was announced that this popular RPG will see version 2 in 2006, released for the PC.
"BioWare and Atari created an immense community of players attracted by both the immersion of an interactive gaming experience and the ability to create their own pen-and-paper styled modules. Neverwinter Nights changed the very nature of roleplaying games," said Feargus Urquhart, Obsidian Entertainment's CEO. "With Neverwinter Nights 2, we're going to take that incredible experience to the next level by combining a huge new single-player game with deep character development and many new upgrades and enhancements to the already powerful BioWare Aurora Toolset for the modding community."
Now with 20% more particle effects!
Posted by jb at 02:20 PM
August 03, 2004
The history of Habitat and Lucasfilm Games
Habitat was a Lucasfilm Games and QuantumLink (now AOL) joint project that could arguably be called the first MMORPG. Chip Morningstar was there in the beginning, and was responsible for much of the design and architecture of Habitat. He's written a great article discussing how Habitat came to fruition, and what things were like for Lucasfilm Games in the very beginning.
"Because of the phenomenal success of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises, Lucasfilm existed in a weird kind of bubble that made it very different from other companies, especially companies in the computer games industry. Most of this weirdness had to do with money, or expectations about money. The basic attitude can be summed up as, "we are Lucasfilm, people will pay us." The fundamental business concept of making an investment in expectation of a future return was not part of the general mindset. The expectation rather was that people would pay us to do things, and then we would take a share of the profits of whatever resulted. In other words, we wanted a cut of the proceeds but were not interested in sharing any of the risk. This attitude is a luxury most business people would love to have, but quite correctly recognize for the fantasy that it is."
If you're interested in the game design side of things, there's a great, often cited paper titled The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat written by Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer.
Via /.
Posted by jb at 11:42 PM
Massively Multiplayer Online Forklift Racing
Sega has announced it is creating an online version of Shenmue for the PC. This is the first step in an effort to gain a foothold in the Chinese online gaming market.
My favorite part of Shenmue was driving the forklift to make money. I would have been happy to just report to work every day and ignore that pesky plot. Well, okay, I liked playing Space Harrier and Hang-On too.
In addition to Shenmue, Sega plans to release Phantasy Star Online Blue Burst and CTRacer to Chinese gamers. However, I have been informed that neither of these games have forklifts.
Posted by jb at 08:51 AM
August 02, 2004
DOOM III leaked (barely)
The BBC is reporting that DOOM 3 is floating around the warez scene. Granted it can only be considered a "leak" for one day, so it's not really that newsworthy. The article also magically decides that it's been downloaded over 50,000 times.
Posted by jb at 05:21 PM
Artificial Driving Intelligence
I've often wondered if you had a team of crack programmers, AI specialists and physics gurus if it would be possible for a computer to beat a human driver on a race track. Sure you'd need to put a load of sensors on the car to get as much "seat of the pants" into the computer as possible. Certainly, a computer would be able to reproduce activities such as breaking points more accurately.
I think it would be great to have a version of the Grand Challenge on a more restricted playing field. Pick a dedicated race course, put beacons on each turn apex and on the track shoulders, get a fleet of cars with identical performance and see who can add sensors, write code and get the fastest lap.
In the meantime, there are two open source projects focused on optimizing driving AI via race simulations. TORCS and RARS are quite similar in concept, although TORCS allows a human to drive and looks much nicer. Both, however, allow developers to create their own driving robots. Using a combination of inputs such as force vectors, car positions and track surfaces, developers can create logic and try to set the fastest time (or just be purely defensive and not let anyone pass).
This is such an intriguing concept to me, as there seems to be quite a bit of "feel" in driving. To be able to quantify that feel and make the most of it is certainly a difficult task.
It would be great if racing sim developers started offering this type of AI extension. I would love to start seeing folks competing as geeks as well as drivers.
Posted by jb at 03:27 PM
August 01, 2004
The Swedes conquer the world
Not that there was any question, given that the CPL (Cyberathlete Professional League) Summer '04 Counter-Strike finals consisted of two teams from Sweden.
EYE was crowned the CS world champions after crushing SK 7-5 in the first half, and 6-0 in the second. There was some drama, however, as one match was interrupted when a cameraman accidentally unplugged the router.
Head over to Gotfrag for news, interviews and videos from the tournament.
Posted by jb at 11:05 PM
'Twas the night before DOOM
"And then, in a corner, I heard a terrible howl,
Out came a Hell Knight who had been on the prowl.
As I drew out my shotgun, and was turning around,
Down from the ceiling spiders came with a bound."
In case it slipped by you, DOOM III is available tomorrow Tuesday. Follow the link for some holiday cheer.
Posted by jb at 10:12 PM
