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It's got much simpler lighting than Quake, that's one reason they got away with it. I didn't like Descent 2 much when it came out, but it's grown on me. It has a lot of one-trick gimmicks, but most of those gimmicks are pretty fun, and the maps are enormous. Descent 3 I'd love to play again, but I'm not sure where my copy is or if I could get it to work.
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Apr 17, 2013 22:00
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Gwyrgyn Blood posted:I'm kind of tempted to try out Descent 3 again myself, I remember there being a lot of dumb gimmicky levels in it but being pretty good despite. There were, but as with 2, they were pretty fun gimmicks and I appreciated that not every level was "get 1-3 keycards, blow up the reactor, run away". The only one that's really aggravating is near the end of the game where you have to find and kill ~20 robots in a huge twisty maze and there was a bug that broke the guidebot's ability to lead you to them. The next-generation engine also let them do fancy scripted stuff and give each mission a storyline, which helps a lot. haveblue fucked around with this message at 22:19 on Apr 17, 2013 |
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Apr 17, 2013 22:17
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Gwyrgyn Blood posted:I also remember there being one of those awful "subway" levels where you have to dodge trains while flying down the tracks and thinking that it was just so incredibly out of place in a Descent game. Yeah, that level is set in Seoul. It is not explained why there is no gravity in South Korea.
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Apr 17, 2013 23:22
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That looks an awful lot like Terminal Velocity to me, and I know there was at least one other game (Fury^3) that was just TV modded and rebranded.
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Apr 18, 2013 21:43
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I did the same thing, except that it was because I had fired it into a wall much too close to myself.
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Apr 18, 2013 23:27
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Most games on the Xbox never require you to hit a button and a trigger simultaneously (I recall MS actually having a directive about this when I was doing Xbox dev), so you can get away with using one finger for both most of the time. There are probably games where using both fingers gives you an advantage, though, and on a PC where you bind any command to any button it's impossible to avoid that situation. For drillers in Descent, there are two things you can do. Firstly, homing missiles and smart missiles allow you to hit robots without line of sight (as do mega missiles, but don't waste those on lone drillers). Secondly, since your weapons are mounted on your ship's wings, you can blind-fire around corners without having to expose the entire ship. haveblue fucked around with this message at 01:41 on Apr 19, 2013 |
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Apr 19, 2013 01:38
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The Ghostbusters game is actually rather good. The game part is merely serviceable but they absolutely nailed the franchise feel in the environments, how your teammates interact, and the gadget implementations. You really are the one firing the proton pack, laying down the trap, and corralling ghosts into it. The only glaring flaw is that they couldn't get Sigourney Weaver to come back, so her role is filled by a new character.
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Apr 19, 2013 17:57
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:The original Unreal bot code was written by Stephen Poeser(?). He was responsible for the infamous Quake 1 Reaper bots. Steve Polge.
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Apr 23, 2013 18:06
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The OS X version of Rebirth should work. I had to do a little messing around to get it to work with the GOG version of D2, but once I did it was flawless.
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Apr 30, 2013 19:16
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If the robots are dodging you are too far away 
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May 16, 2013 16:47
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Unreal really deserves to be much more highly regarded than it is, but a few months after it was released- while it was still buggy as hell and being frantically patched- Half-Life came out and that was the end of that.
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May 21, 2013 06:21
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Yeah, it's a mod called Oldskool. Make sure to turn off taunts or it'll ruin the atmosphere. I didn't really like that temple level very much; it's extremely dark and twisty and I kept getting lost. The best Unreal levels were the one that presented an entire place, rather than just the areas needed to support the critical path. There are at least three separate ways to get up the Sunspire, all leading through different parts of the complex. The sky town is a complete town, with lots of different buildings (not all of which are necessary to enter) and even a hunk of surrounding countryside to wander through. The towns you visit on the ground almost never have any actual mission objectives in them- you can run straight through if you want, but if you explore them each building has something unique in it. Bluff Eversmoking has a million different environments threaded through the mountain, all of which feel completely different when you visit them. No one makes levels like that any more.
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May 21, 2013 08:46
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The best thing to come out of Unreal 2 is this front page review, which is still funny (and accurate) despite some amazingly dated references.
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May 26, 2013 02:06
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They did, there were two displays in there, using late 80s/early 90s technology. That's why those things were so goddamn heavy.
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May 30, 2013 18:40
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Cream-of-Plenty posted:My point was more that HQ really has jack poo poo to do with the overall image quality. It just sort of sharpens things, and has the opposite effect of "vaseline" blurring the image. HQ2X and friends were deliberately designed to preserve color and edges while upscaling.
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Jun 12, 2013 21:53
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Unreal both starts and ends with some terrible levels, so it's really hard to come away from the game with a good impression. Either you get sick of it before you get to the Dark Arena and give up, or you stick it out for the whole game and get rewarded with a sour aftertaste for your efforts.
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Jun 19, 2013 16:24
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How would you even stop him? Every time you try to hold a conversation with him he just runs around the room smashing things and throwing junk at you.
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Jul 2, 2013 05:37
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There's a new beta release of Aleph One, the Marathon source port out, and the banner feature this time is support for the original Marathon 1 data files and behaviors (the modernized version of M1 that's been available for some time is a remake that isn't 100% accurate in some ways). Honestly, this won't make a huge difference to anyone who doesn't remember the original game with sparkling clarity, but it's pretty neat that they pulled this off without the M1 source itself and considering that the M1 files are based on obsolete MacOS Classic formats.
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Jul 9, 2013 05:41
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I still think vehicle games are going to be a better fit for the Rift than FPSes will ever be.
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Jul 11, 2013 14:27
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The Marathon guys called that "5D space". Their engine could do it without any special tricks and the games are full of impossible spaces where it happens accidentally- buildings where the first story ceiling is above the second story floor, hallways that pass through rooms without connecting to them, etc.
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Jul 31, 2013 14:14
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Zaphod42 posted:Mostly just talked about a bunch of engineering stuff, which was interesting as usual, but nothing revolutionary. Some people asked him some questions about future consoles and rockets and stuff, but I can't think of anything really huge that I could quote. Highlights from a summary I read: -The Xbox One and the PS4 are basically the same and he refused to pick a side; spec pissing contests don't matter because no one person or team is going to master either of them for years. Sony's dev tools are leagues better this time around. Kinect is still terrible at being a primary controller for serious games and probably always will be. -Microsoft did have the right idea with the original Xbox One usage model since it's obviously the direction everything is headed and it's what Steam and iTunes do already. The privacy worries about the always-on Kinect will fade away just like they have for things like always-on personal GPS devices. -There won't be any point in having another console generation after this upcoming one until the hardware can comfortably do real-time ray tracing, and nobody's even going to guess when that might happen. -Really disappointed that 30fps will still be a thing.
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Aug 2, 2013 19:01
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There was a study going around a while back that showed that including multiplayer in a game universally increases sales even if it's hastily hacked-together garbage. I guess having the MULTIPLAYER bullet point on the box generates more impulse buys than it loses readers of negative reviews.
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Aug 15, 2013 17:49
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Dark Forces 1 was no slouch either. The engine was about as capable as Build and could do room-over-room and animated polygonal objects. Most of the levels have areas with really impressive verticality.
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Aug 30, 2013 19:06
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Rather Dashing posted:For one reason or another this popped into my consciousness from the mists of time. I seem to remember the demo being rather good - anyone have any recollections/a working copy? That is one of the very, very few games to ever receive a positive score from the SA front page review section.
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Sep 3, 2013 15:24
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Irish Taxi Driver posted:Wasn't the Shambler a yeti creature? It was a Lovecraftian monstrosity. It always had the faceless maw thing going on, it was just hard to see because the polycount and texture resolution were so low.
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Sep 3, 2013 15:30
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 I feel a little dizzy after watching 30 seconds of that.
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Sep 5, 2013 16:06
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I just liked playing through, as someone put it earlier in the thread, the game equivalent of an 80s heavy metal album cover.
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Sep 17, 2013 19:55
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Cat Mattress posted:Play vanilla Hexen as a mage. You get an infinite ranged weapon which fires super-fast rippers. Drawback: it deals like one half point of damage, so using it is an extremely monotonous exercise in plinking monsters to death. (On the other hand, if you have huge hordes of monsters and you can get them to stand in a line, then since the projectile is a ripper, it may very well be the fastest way to kill them all as it won't take that much longer to slaughter them all than to slay a single one.) Also, his third weapon goes from floor to ceiling at all times, so you can hit things down drops or behind ledges with it.
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Sep 18, 2013 19:14
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I can see getting tired of The Longest Yard after playing the poo poo out of q3test for months.
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Sep 24, 2013 21:05
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It was a flaw, but it became so integral to the game that when Carmack announced that it was going away as a side effect of general bug-fixing there was enough backlash to make him artificially re-create it. This sort of thing used to be a lot more common. Tribes skiing was also unintentional.
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Sep 25, 2013 19:03
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closeted republican posted:They also have a really lovely "dodge" that makes it a pain to lob a large Eightball rocket volley at them, which is lame. None of the enemies in Unreal 1 can dodge grenades, so if you want to put a lot of explosions in one place use that mode. I'm not sure if they can dodge in Oldskool since the UT bots can.
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Sep 25, 2013 22:19
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xanthan posted:Anyone got details on this? I want to know how the hell you could end up with THAT as a bug. Probably a consequence of the map size limit discussed earlier- the math that checks whether or not a bullet hit any wall breaks down once you get far enough from the origin, and the crazy numbers it comes up with count as a "hit" at a point that doesn't correspond to an actual wall.
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Sep 27, 2013 17:23
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Zaphod42 posted:Ah damnit, it totally was Doom2. Now that I think about it, I remember opening the door at the end of map01 and seeing map02 just begin instantly without the expected score crawl screen, and it blew my mind. How did they handle levels like Dead Simple where the exit is in the middle of a bunch of geometry?
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Sep 27, 2013 17:42
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Quake was a half-finished fantasy game and a half-finished sci-fi game smashed together.
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Oct 3, 2013 20:22
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Keiya posted:Sadly not as influential as whatever gave us regenerating health and cover buttons. That would be Halo and Gears of War. (Someone will probably point out that they did not *invent* these things, but they sure as hell popularized them.)
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Oct 7, 2013 06:10
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Those criticisms apply to 2 more than 3, though. It's basically the same game as 1, only with an extra dozen gimmick weapons and maps that are bigger without being any more interesting. It also had some total bullshit parts like the boss that turned invisible and fired homing mercury missiles at you. Also after ~50 levels that were all basically the same claustrophobic maze ending with a reactor to blow up and an escape hatch, I was really glad to see bigger maps with different narratives and objectives types. haveblue fucked around with this message at 22:12 on Oct 10, 2013 |
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Oct 10, 2013 21:58
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Luigi Thirty posted:Descent 1 supported those wacky early-90s VR goggles and 3D orb controllers didn't it? I still have an old 3D textbook that talked about how that poo poo would be the future. The CYBERMAXX? http://www.zardoz.net/technology/cybermaxx/
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Oct 10, 2013 23:31
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FirstPersonShitter posted:So far the game seems really depressing and I cant figure out why. You're voluntarily playing a game based on the KISS license.
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Oct 16, 2013 15:53
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RyokoTK posted:I was pretty certain that mouselook was only available for Infinity and the PC version of Marathon 2, but maybe not. When I was a kid, I used the keyboard. I think Marathon 1 used the old-style utterly useless mouse control where pushing the mouse forward made your character take five steps forward and vertical look was still on the keyboard, but I never used the mouse in the Marathon games (and still don't) so I may be wrong about this. quote:In this enlightened era it's just evident that it simply wasn't as good a game as Doom. It beats the piss out of other second-tier FPS games like Duke, and I will stand by that, but it was just a little clumsier and less skillfully balanced in the gameplay department than it could have been. Yeah, it's noticeably clunkier than Doom, but it was one of the first FPSes to make a real effort to have more going on in the world than "bad guys are shooting at you, your mission is to shoot back until they're all dead" so it has a completely different atmosphere.
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Oct 23, 2013 16:44
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I doubt it's that simple. They licensed the engine and made significant code changes that aren't present in the open source project. But yeah, play the Marathons.
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Nov 1, 2013 00:26
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