XeNTaX

Mr.Mouse wrote: Doom 3 I started and then quicky removed from my hard-drive, I thought that was a load of bull. Gameplay from the Stone Age. In my opinion, they should have stopped at Doom 2. Id software just released a game that is not of this day in age. The only thing they are good at is building an engine. They totally lack skills in the gameplay area. But for me that's not enough.

Half Life 2 on the other hand was very good, though still linear. But the story and gameplay was excellent.

I think you're dead on about Doom 3. It was insanely hyped up and when I finally tried it I just got the "been there done that" feeling...nothing new whatsoever. Sure, the graphics are nice, but so where HL2 which I also thought had a good story with good atmospehere and gameplay you easliy got involved with. Because of this, the linear style of the game was not hard to forgive.

Speaking of engines, I'm looking forward to the Unreal 3 engine. Sure, it will hardly have much new in terms of gameplay...but what I've seen of the graphics so far it looks really sweet.

Then again, so does Elders Scrolls 4. I heard rumors about it using the Unreal 3 engine, but now I read somewhere else this is not so. Anyone know something more about this?

N

NinjaMuffin wrote:Then again, so does Elders Scrolls 4. I heard rumors about it using the Unreal 3 engine, but now I read somewhere else this is not so. Anyone know something more about this?

Oblivion uses a custom Gamebryo engine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamebryo

Cool, I did not know that.

Thank's for info and link.

Doom 3, Unreal 4, Half Life2, Elders Scroll 4....

Is there anything yet with double digit prefix?

I think no wonder that those titles make us attracted like moth to light, but there is NEVER anything like the originals. And even now going back to the originals it is not anymore the same.
Very fleeting and special relation those old games had with us.
I must say that I sometimes I feel very lucky that I had a pleasure to enjoy them exactly in the moment of their highest glory. Graphics were klunky (Zork had none), sounds primitive (beep beep beep), but they were to me like the Visions Out of this World. The originality and the storyline, creativity of the authors and the fact that my own imagination was always "on" like in the books.
Very special time... and feel very lucky and thankfull.

PS. Here are some of them and they might sound really maybe lame now:

* found the card in the pocket of SQ1 character after I typed "search body" ....
* got the beeped by the game character the following morning after I entered my real beeper number during previous evening game sesion....
* met first alien in Starflight, later found and recognised forgotten Earth in AD 3000, or something like that ....
* found an answer to the puzzle by licking the wall in Stationfall...
* saw the glint of the light of somebody watching me in the eyeholes of the portrait over the mantelpiece in "Colonel Bequest" ....
* got chilled scared by Shodan voice in System Shock 1....

Hehe, yes...I too have got a lot of memorable moments in gaming. Starting from that ol' Commodore VIC20.

* Lords of Midnight completely took all of my spare and not so spare time until I won the battle against Doomdark. I wrote complete stories of Lords battling it out in the game, created a huge map etc. Today the graphics mean nothing, but at the time all you needed was fantasy..it was like I was really in that world.

* At the time of Doom and Doom 2 we (The Gee and I) were living in a flat in some suburb of the city, where you could hear the wind howl around the flat, much like the sounds of wind and machines in the movie Alien. Playing Doom 2 at night with this sound at the background was excellently scary.

* The first time I played Thief made me bow in honour to those excellent people at Looking Glass studios (yes, the same that brought you System Shock). Thief was excellent, and also very exciting as you had to actually avoid battle with people, which made it a very tense experience as you waited in the shadows until guards passed by, afraid to be spotted. Thief 3 was an excellent experience as well, with the Shalebridge Cradle level the scariest level of any game I have ever played. Supreme!

ah and many more memories....

Uhuhuhuhh.....

i was playing Dungeon Siege 2....

i had a superb level 90 firemage, and one day in february i
thought , "hey, lets reinstall windows"

i forgot though that the game saves all files in Documents and Settings...

and no. i havent started the game since that day :/

infact...i have not played ANY game since that day!!!!

Strobe wrote:Uhuhuhuhh.....

i was playing Dungeon Siege 2....

i had a superb level 90 firemage, and one day in february i
thought , "hey, lets reinstall windows"

i forgot though that the game saves all files in Documents and Settings...

OMG. I reckon you have spanked yourself for that....

The point I was trying to make that something has changed in the game industry. It is sad observation and let me hope that it is because of ... not quite advanced yet, but shall we say ... progressing age. I find hardly any originality and creativity, or fresh ideas. Is it me, or PC gaming is visibly in the decline.

I used to come to game shop and I wanted to play most of the games found there. Now I see so many colorfull boxes, but nothing really catches my eye. No more surprises, I know already what is there inside that box. Besides, PC gaming goes to the most remote corners of the shops. Is this the begining of "gone with the wind" era?

Little sad, but this is the reason I perhaps turned to modding. Nostalgia after the past and trying to relive those memorable moments.

Mr.Mouse, i have not only spanked myself. i have put my head in the micro-oven, yelled at neighbours. ive scared a cat. mashed my testicles
with a Windows ME CD-Rom. and im not finished yet ....=///

Strobe wrote:Uhuhuhuhh.....

i was playing Dungeon Siege 2....

i had a superb level 90 firemage, and one day in february i
thought , "hey, lets reinstall windows"

i forgot though that the game saves all files in Documents and Settings...

and no. i havent started the game since that day :/

infact...i have not played ANY game since that day!!!!

Ouch...

Maybe I'm also just getting old, but I also find good gameplay is good to find nowadays. I remeber the C64 with extremely crappy graphics by todays standard, but perhaps becuase the developers at that time couldn't depend to much on cool effects (which to me seems to be the main focus today), they had to put more energy on creating a immersive gameplay?

Btw, anyone played a game called M.U.L.E.?

Extremely simple graphics, very simple sound and when you first look at it didn't seem like much...but man what a great and fun game that was.

I also remember me and my friend sitting up many long nights with Elite (the mother of all spaceship travelling and trading games) getting killed over and over and having to save and reload the game on TAPE RECORDER which took like forever...but we still did it.

I wonder, is actually the games that are getting crappier...or are we just becoming harder and harder to please with old age?

Lets face it...maybe it's time to start going to the park and play chess with the rest of the old geezers...

N

Oh yes. M.U.L.E. is a definite classic.

So is Elite, I have spent day and night playing that game. Simply excellent.

The C64 is my mothercomputer, even though I have had a Commodore VIC20 and MSX 1 and MSX 2. The C64 was simply brilliant and I have had good times in the C64 demo scene in Europe.

Crazy Comets, Monty On The Run, Commando, Return of the Mutant Camels ... to name but a few classics. Rob Hubbard's music even now is superb and I listen to sid music weekly. Ok, so I am an old freak, so be it.

In the early ninenties a bunch of Dutch and English wizards even pulled it off to convert Lemmings to the C64, truly an amazing feat considering the limitations they had to overcome at the time, with only 64K max, and only 8 hardware sprites.

Oh I could go on and on....

Dune 2 on the Amiga was also a way of life for me, as was Syndicate. I have played that last battle of Dune 2 over and over and over to perfect the time I completed it, and even recorded it on video just to review what I had done and how I could improve it next time (there was no "replay" option as in C&C Generals and Warcraft III eh!).

But the call for innovation in games is really not new. I can show you editorials from game magazines as early as 1985 that already complain about the lack of innovation and "been there-done that" feel they got.

But you're right. There are few games these days that attract my attention. Young people see these type of games for the first time, so it a first for them, but I know better and know where the original games came from. Yep, must be getting old.

I also think sometimes that the original games were little like art pieces. There was much more there than just a piece of computer code. They were really making us to live those stories, but maybe because they were able to engage our imaginations.

Today the push is to make it just "glitzy". And there is no more diversity inside the games. If there is a shooter you may expect nothing but that. And I think they are little shallow. No offence hard working game developers, please.

Game like Loom comes to my mind. Not the most prominent , but nevertheless special. Not only good story, but idea of glueing music to the puzzles was simply creative and original. That is all what was and still is expected and awaited from the games.

I tried MULE, but that was already 386 remake version, not the original. Sadly did not make too much impression on me, but I have heard it was good. Harvesting, finding resources and goods and selling it later in Starflight was the same idea. I think that entire Privateer was built around this concept, but since it was already nothing new I did not like it.

Oh ... I could go on and on ....

The last good game was ....... ???

Xela wrote:The last good game was ....... ???

Tetris?

Hehe, well, it's not all that bad. For instance, like I said, I loved Daggerfall and Morrowind, and I can't wait to get my hands on Oblivion, which is GOLD and should be released the 20th of March!

I also thought that S.T.A.L.K.E.R. would be something different as a shooter, but it is plagued with setbacks and delays that makes me wonder if it will be as good as expected when it's released.

Mr.Mouse wrote:I also thought that S.T.A.L.K.E.R. would be something different as a shooter, but it is plagued with setbacks and delays that makes me wonder if it will be as good as expected when it's released.

Sadly, publishers often set unrealistic deadlines on developers for the completion of games, rather than doing the *logical* and most likely *money-saving* thing of giving the developers enough time to actually finish all planned features, get them tested, and add extra stuff they might think of towards the end... I think if publishers would just start pushing deadlines back, we could potentialy see the quality of games increase. But then, this is just the humble opinion of a game-programmer-to-be...