Just playing a little Dungeon Siege tonight. I've had it for a few days now, but I've been too damned busy to do anything other than admire the box. It's a nice box though, and now it's loaded and I'm playing... It's pretty cool so far, sort of a Diablo 2 meets Nox. I can hardly wait to get in a little multiplayer with Kingpin on the weekend. Looks like it'll be a great LAN game. The graphics are really good for an RPG, and it's not too complicated. Nice story as well. Hell, your characters can be set to defend themselves if attacked. Some very cool stuff, look for a review in a week or so once I have a chance to really explore the game. It's designed by Chris Taylor, who was the genius behind Total Annihilation. Still the best RTS game out there as far as I'm concerned... And it's been out for... Shesh.. What, damned near 5 years now I believe.

Just did up a little thing on biased reviews. :) Sometimes I really do manage to sound like a pompous ass. Ahh well. :)

Getting some flames in, now that the Global Ops review has been picked up by the big news sites. Sorry guys, but just like that singer, I stand by my man. Or review in this case. I gave the game a 70%. Sorry, everyone else seems to think it's worth an 80, or in some cases a 90. I dunno, a few of the reviews were also going on about the graphics. Your hands look like silly putty for godsake. People also seem annoyed that I concentrated on the single player. Not true. I also played Multiplayer quite a bit. It's the exact same game, but played with people instead of bots. I didn't feel it was worth it to write the same thing twice. I've played quite a number of tactical shooters. Actually, probably damned near all of them. Global Ops has some neat stuff in it, and it's not a bad game. It's just not a great game. And it's certainly not worth spending $60 on, when I can play CS and other excellent Half Life and Quake 3 mods for free. I'd have expected EA to release the game around the $30-$40 mark. Then it'd be worth the purchase. $60? Nah. I can buy Ghost Recon, the expansion pack AND Half Life for the same price.

Slow morning at work, so I'm just going to get a few quick notes of interest in before things pickup.

First off, just got a note from the Laser Squad Nemesis guys. Skotos, Skeezix and I were playing around with the game, at the request of the dev guys to do a review. I honestly didn't like the game. Not because it's a bad game. Indeed, it was an interesting little time waster... I've just never been a fan of turn based strategy games of the Xcom genre. Never found one that grabbed my attention and made me want to play. The dev guys have obviously put a great deal of work and their hearts into the game, and hey! It's $60/year (USD) to play. That ain't bad atall. Anyhows, I declined to do a review as I felt it just wouldn't be fair to these guys. If anyone likes these sorts of games, and wants to do a decent review up for me, send me an email and I'll see about getting you a trial account to have a go.

Here's what I got, nice to see they're constantly working on the game.

There have been some important changes in the game sytem recently so this mail should help to explain a few of the changes recently implemented and what we are planning next. There is a new timing system for games that makes sure that games will finish one way or another.

The good news is that if you are playing against an opponent who refuses to send orders (usually because he is losing) then he will ultimately lose by default and you will be awarded the victory you deserve.

This is how it works:

Each player in a game has a clock timer, which is effectively a time counter that counts down while the game server is waiting for orders. The clock is set to 30 days for each player when a new game starts. When you receive a results file your clock starts counting down, and stops when you send your orders in. If the clock reaches zero and you haven't sent orders then you will automatically lose the game.

If it is a league game you will be penalised 5 points for running out of time in addition to the normal penalty for losing games. In order to introduce this system clock times have been added to existing games based on the turn number. The number of days remaining is set to 30 minus a day for each game turn played. For example, if you had a game at turn 10 the clock time remaining for each player is set to 20 days. For each new game the clock is set to 30 days for each player.

You will also notice that you receive a summary of your games in progress with each results file or orders-confirmation message.

This table contains the following information:

Game number: This identifies the game, and corresponds to the game number in each results mail.
Turn: The game turn for which orders are waiting.
L/F: L = League game, F = Friendly game
Orders in: No = you still need to send orders for this turn.
               Yes = the game server has your orders and your clock is stopped.
Time left: The time left on your clock.

You may find that you have games listed that you have lost. In this case you must use the 'Get game results' option from the special options screen. Please note that the 'Request last results' option does not work at the moment, but this will be fixed in the next version.

We will be making additional improvements to LSN very soon. Version 1-07 will add the following features:

1. A 'concede game' option, which allows you to concede victory to your opponent. This can also safely avoid the 5 point penalty for running out of time if you are losing badly and near your time limit.
2. The option to set the clock to different values. The time selected will be indicated in the initial challenge.
3. An additional scenario type 'HQ', in which victory is solely determined by the destruction of enemy HQs. This scenario will mitigate against purely defensive or evasive tactics.
4. Further scenario configuration options, including choice of turn limit, initial force points and a point limit for units (e.g. play with only 1 FP units)
5. A hardware options screen that allows you to change between windowed/full screen mode, different screen resolutions and high/low res textures without haivng to edit files or even restart the application.
6. Graphics files will be stored more efficiently. This means faster load times, and better performance on low end graphics cards.

Thank you for your continued support, and good luck with your games.

Regards,
Julian, Nick and Stephen
The Codo Games Team

Wondering where Rune's gone? Me too. :) I figured for sure we'd find him in an alley somewhere, lying drunk in a pool of filth. Instead, he's been busy with school. Not nearly as good an excuse I thought, but still acceptable I guess. He has been sending in some news though, so I will post the following in memory of Rune. May he leave school and wind up in an alley soon. *bows head*

Apparently Blizzard's still cranky about the whole Bnetd thing, as we can see here. I don't know about you guys, but they're just starting to sound like whiney brats... On the other hand, I can see their point. Everyone has the server code, and they'll get Counter-Striked. (That's my new term for a game that's overrun with idiots and hackers, just so you know.)

Here's a pretty sad situation. I knew Evercrack was bad for your health, but this is a little ridiculous. I hardly think it's responsible for this guy's death. If only he played Tribes, he'd still be with us today.

Back to work I go!

Hah. Reading some of the message threads about the new CS release. All these players bitching and complaining about the end of bunny hopping in the game. Personally I used to kick hoppers off my server if they kept doing it (Red Leader for instance was almost constantly kicked for being a bouncy little whore.) I think it'll be cool, and perhaps I'll start playing again. Mind you, I do think it's a little stupid to get a game established and then change everything. If I were valve I'd be concentrating on the cheats first. That's what destroys the game, and is a major reason I stopped playing CS.

Speaking of CS and cheating, someone sent me a link to this page on Clan Grounds. I love this guy's sort of relaxed attitude on creating uber nasty cheats. What a twit.

File Planet has the Metal of Honor level editor posted. WOOT! Can hardly wait to see what people come up with for an already excellent game. Maybe someone could make a better (*&(*& ending?

Does anyone else remember a crazy ass little game from many years ago called Postal? It had amazing hand drawn backgrounds, and was such a guilty little pleasure to play. Gamespot has a preview of Postal 2 up, and I can hardly wait. There's nothing like just snapping and killing everyone. As the first line of the preview says

"It's only funny until somebody gets hurt," exclaims Running With Scissors CEO Vince Desidiero, "at which point it becomes hysterical."

Now that's a line I can live with.

Just got this in, thought it was worth a post.

Greetings,

We would like to announce that it was decided that the game currently in development under tentative title "UFO: Freedom Ridge" will be now developed and published as "UFO: Aftermath". The press release (old but still relevant :-]) can be found at: http://www.altarinteractive.com/press05.html

At our UFO: Aftermath information site you can also read first part of Developer's Diary: http://www.altarinteractive.com/ufo/diary01.html

We updated the section with conceptual art, too. Please feel free to download and re-post the images found there, but refrain from modifying them. Especially avoid cropping and/or resizing them.

Thank you for your support and please don't hesitate to ask me for more information.

Sincerely Jiri Rydl
ALTAR interactive [www.altarinteractive.com]
Fight for Siberite at [www.original-war.com]

I've been wondering for a bit what had happened to that game. I know all my old sk00l XCOM buddies were all worked up about it. And from the screenies awhile back it was looking pretty hot.

Yet another link in from Mike. Looking for some sweet HTML colour art? Make your own from image files. Thanks as always bro.

Not much to report today,

First off, I finally got that damned Simgolf review done and posted. I've been working on it on and off for a few weeks now. Gah. There! Read it and weep world!

Secondly, I've always wondered just HOW Google.com made their searches so fast. All along I've suspected that it was Pigeons. Thanks to Snuggles, I now know I was right all along! Hah!

From Orchid comes the truth about men and women.

And lastly, apparently Iraq has upped their reward for suicide bombing from $15,000 to $25,000 paid to the family of the bomber. I find it quite amusing that they're paying in US dollars. If an arabic looking fellow asks you to deliver a package, and offers you $15,000 to do it, but say no and hold out for $25,000. Then return it to sender.

I'm out. :)

Greetings y'all. I've been bitching and complaining at people for a long, long time now that they should NOT use Kazaa. The damned things is notorious for it's virus riddled kiddies for one thing, and for another thing it's spyware... And I don't like they're EULA either. Finally, I have PROOF that they're evil sonsofbitches. Read it and weep.

Since FASA went under, I've been wondering what's going to happen with the Battletech franchise.... Wizkids has taken over, and they're working on some interesting stuff, check it out.

A new gaming company has just announced it's arrival. Thanks to Pierre-Alexandre Garneau from PaGTech for the heads up. They're going to be trying an interenet only distro model, something I find fascinating. Best of luck to them, we'll look forward to seeing what they come up with. I asked Pierre what they were up to, here's what we got:

FRAG: Hey Pierre, thanks for the heads up. What sort of games are you working on right now? Will they be simply downloadable single player, or online only? How are you going to handle copy-protection? Thanks :)

Pierre: Hi, The first title should be anounced soon, but I can't give much details now. What I can say, though, is that the first title will be playable online and on one computer against your friends -- I guess that does limit the list of possible genres ;). I hope to produce original games that are truly original, great fun and do not fit neatly into the set of current popular genres (RTS, FPS, RPG). Basically I want to bring great games that aren't cookie-cutter of existing stuff. Copy protection is still being looked at right now, so nothing is definitive but is certainly something that I'm working on. Sorry for not giving much details, the juicy bits will come very soon.

Pierre-Alexandre

Pappy-R enjoyed the little prank I pulled for April fool's day. In fact, he was so happy he sent me this response:

Pappy R: dead...completely dead. Dead man walking here, stand aside. dead meat, dead fish, cold as the dead....dead.

LOL! If you haven't visited Planet Pappy yet, click here for the hillarity.

Marauder out for now.

Not reallly gaming related but of interest technology wise Newsforge takes a sneak peek at Office 2000 running on Linux! How is this possible you say? Well with a little help from the well-known windows emulator WINE a company called Codeweavers has taken Office 2000 and gotten it to run. Of course the product, named 'Crossover Office', is currently just in beta and has a few bugs but it's still a remarkable achievement. Take a look at the details over here.

Tom's Hardware Guide has a piece up on how to test the thickness of your walls and wake up the neighbours. Well ok, it's actually an ol' fashioned speaker roundup but you get the idea. Need a little more omph to those games? Want to be able to crank up the tunes until your ears bleed? Well look no further.

Ah, what could be more fun than getting together with a few friends to help you burn and pillage with 50 foot Battlemechs? Sound like a good idea? Apparently the guys at HomeLAN think so. They've slapped up some sweet little interview action with the developers of the Mechwarrior 4 Co-op mod. Now these guys are no rookies at this whole co-op mod thing as they've also done up a popular co-op mode for my favorate namesake (aka Human Head's Rune). Now you too can be racking urban chaos with a little help from your friends. Here's a quick taste of the interview:

HomeLAN - Why did your mod team wish to take on Mech Warrior 4 as its next Co-op mod project?

Rick Francis - For years now, the MechWarrior players have been screaming for Co-op missions. To all of our disappointments, there has never been any Co-op in a Mech Warrior game, until now! With the release of the editor, it has finally given us the ability to add that, which has been missing for many years. If the developer doesn’t have the time to make the missions Co-op, then at least they can give the editor the ability to do so. Microsoft provided this capability with the recent release of the Mech 4 editor. It has made making these missions very bearable to create.

Personally I love co-op mode in games and it's something that gamers should really demand more of. It's a really under-rated style of gameplay that is often so much fun (take the co-op mode Serious Sam Second Edition for example. It's a real blast!).

Speaking of mech games, it seems that Marauder is really torn on this xbox Mech Assault game that is currently is development. On one hand it's full online Mechwarrior super eyecandy goodness... and on the other it's more of an arcade experience than the past Mechwarrior games (which have been more like sims). Now maybe I should explain that Marauder is one of those old-school dyed-in-the-wool Battlemech guys. He's read all the books, played all of the games (he proudly displays a Mechwarrior 1 box in his store), played the role-playing game and done just about everything else Mechwarrior that you can think of. He's not big on the newer Mechwarrior games (i.e. Mechwarrior 4) simply because they are not as much of a sim and they have more of a arcadey feel to them. This does makes a good deal of sense. I mean, when you think about it a 3-story 80-ton Mech just shouldn't be able to move that fast.. But even he could hardly contain his excitement when I showed this to him. He may just have to get an xbox for this one.

Look at the awesome trailer and judge for yourself.

So you've decided to take the plunge and pony up the dough for the latest and greatest video hardware that money can buy, the Geforce Ti 4600. Well before that money burns a hole clear through the bottom of your pocket you may want to have a look at Bjorn 3D's take on the PNY Verto Geforce4 Ti4600. Needless to say your computer probably should be a real speed demon if you want to be able to take advantage of the full power this card.

Just playing a little of the new Global Operations beta and it seems to me it's crap in alot of ways. Well, not really crap persay, but I really don't see any reason to play this rather than Rogue Spear or CS. The graphics and models are sub-par by todays standards in my opinion. Hopefully the final release has better than the demo.

Thanks to Mike for a link to the "Jesus is with you always" site. I'm not sure why I'm laughing this hard, cause the guy doing the pictures seems serious, but non-the-less I'm on the floor holding my sides. Mostly I'm picturing Jesus out there with a Shotgun blowing away birds in "Duck Hunter"

Heh. Pappyz0r used one of my Smackdown pictures for pic of the day on Planetwolfenstein.com. Woot. :) Oh my god! Pappy used my picture! Oh my god! OH MY GOD! (He's Pappy you know. ;)

Oh. My. God. Jim. Nice. Web. Site. On. You. Man this guy is looking old. Why isn't he dead, or mumified in

I've been blabbing for years that Linux will never be a mainstream OS untill everyone involved starts working together and some standards get set down for software developers. Check this out, some interesting articles and info on just that.

Out.

Well, well, well... it looks like Tribes 2 is not quite dead after all! Marweas (aka Alex Rodberg, the Sierra Tribes 2 brand manager) announced over on the Tribalwar Forums that changes are coming for the game. He mentions that they are close to signing a contract with a new development team who will be working on upcoming patches for T2. Check out the details over here. I played this game again for a while yesterday after not having played it much in months and it was still a lot of fun!

Former 3dfx PR guru Bubba Wolford gives the new Radeon 8500 64 meg card a workover on SimHQ. How did it fare you ask? Here's a brief snip of the review:

So my first test with ATI has been a mixed bag. I think they have come a long way toward getting their cards friendly with consumers. When the 8500 first launched, initial results were really down on them with drivers while performance was good. ATI has all the hardware working now and while there are some issues left to resolve, the card performed well at most every benchmark we threw its way.

Hey look! New Nvidia 28.32 Dentonator drivers! (and non-leaked for a change). Check 'em out: Win9x, Win2k/XP Of course a few people have also done benchmark comparisons on these new drivers for your viewing pleasure. So what are you waiting for? Grab 'em!

Odd, there's a nice little press release claiming that the Unreal Performance Test 2002 has been released and yet you can't find it available for download anywhere. That's some "release". As far as I know only Anand from Anandtech has seen it so far.

BTW, if you haven't seen that sweet, sweet video footage goodness of Unreal Tournament 2003 hop over here and grab it. It's 55 meg though so modemers may want to let their housemates know that they'll be hogging the phone line for a while.

The Playstation 3 will be able to solve world hunger, cure diseases and bring about world peace! Nah, let's do what 3dfx did and instead use all that power for games!

w00t! A new Winamp release has just come out! Also, make sure that you grab the Milkdrop plugin off of the Winamp site and give it a try (hint: try setting it to use 'desktop mode'! ).

As Marauder mentions we had a ton of fun at last weekend's Smackdown 3 in London Ontario. Thanks to the WAG guys for making it a great event. See you guys next year! As usual Marauder is mostly right about the experience (except for the rune being his bitch part.... I distinctly remember owning his camping little ass on more than one occasion ). (www.shot-rune-in-the-face-50x-with-sniper-rifle.com - Marauder)

Got a few links today for your amusment and enlightenment. (Ohhhhh, two 'ment' words in one sentance. Sweet.)

First off, I was looking around the Westjet site, Allah only knows why. I found their list of prohibited objects to be.. Well, amusing to say the least. Apparently automatic weapons, hand grenades and c4 explosive are something you have to leave in your baggage, no carry on for those. What the hell kinda crap airline are you dealing with when you have to leave your friggin' AK-74 AND your plastic explosives at home? I mean come on! Luckily they didn't mention Flame Thrower or "Nail with a board in it" so I'm going to have some fun. The rest of you are screwed though. Heck, you can't even bring your chainsaw or gasoline powered generator in case the lights go out! I'm never flying Westjet. I would fly Air Osama, but they just never seem to arrive on time and always make early stop overs. Air Canada maybe?

Snuggles wonders just what is up with Brittany Spear's breasts? They're big, they're small, they're one size fits all!

Generator256, the wacky english guy has been busy sending over links as usual. First off, ever wonder what the newest features of Dos 6.2 are? Here's a list. Nice. It includes commas!

Huh. Kay Hammond has a good idea. She's auctioning herself off on Ebay. Bidding apparently ended at 10 million pounds, between two guys who obviously were just screwing around. If you REALLY want to buy a wife, go here and send some flowers. I'm tempted to put up an auction and see if I can sell myself. Or perhaps Rune. I'll see if Pappy bids on it.

There's alot of people having problems with Paypal. Thank God I dumped their asses many moons ago. Check out the Paypalsucks forums, they've got info on the Class Action as well. You know, I constantly run down and make fun of ATI because well. They suck frankly. They have great hardware but their drivers are apparently writen by tranquilized monkeys from the Australian outback. None the less, some people love them. Let us all go here and make fun of them with our Geforce cards that actually work. Thanks Goshwin.

My good buddy Blue (No, not that Blue) sent in a link that I liked very much. You remember the guys that did the "Delta Ebonics" advert that was the rage a while ago? No? Me neither, I had no idea who the hell they were untill I got a link to Cigarman's site. Check it out, some funny stuff here. Of course I have a warped and twisted sense of humor, so you may not be ROFLing like I was. Ah well, your loss.

Anyhows, more on another bat day and bat channel. I'm trying to get inspired enough to go to work.