Marek

I think it's hilarious that Fable has a giant database of thousands upon thousands of case-dependent dialog lines, with things like "if player has pants down and is drunk and just killed 5 chickens in town, old man will respond thusly..." and "if player has pants down and is drunk but previously gave money to the orphanage, farmer will respond with..." Okay, so I pulled those out of my ass, but the amount of AI-driven dialog they crammed into that game is hysterical.

I meant the Spy vs. Spy vs. Spy one. I have no idea where you found something called "trailer 6", since there's no other Spy Fiction movies listed on the main page.

Below is a press release for DOOM, that is... the original game. Reading this through and seeing the fetish-like obsession with "texture mapping" might be both humorous and sobering. (This press release isn't exactly the same as the one that was actually sent out at the time. It was an earlier draft, based on an earlier version of the game.) I love that last line. More on the game's revolutionary features can be read here, with entire paragraphs dedicated to texture mapping, variable height floors and ceilings and non-orthogonal walls.

Oh man, in that case I totally forgot. Sometimes my memory is a real ... umm, zeef. Especially when it comes to the very early days at AdventureGamer.com and the sidejobs I took back then. I wonder if Jeroen van Geel made money with RealGamer. [Edit: Apparently not.] It sucks that you dropped by at the HKU when we were just in the middle of a really strong argument on the game's design. Provided I don't fail my exam on tuesday, I should be exhibiting my current project at the upcoming EMMA expo in the main hall. It's an adventure game.

Wait, you're kidding right? So did I! What did you write for the mag?

Probably. I also think you can brush your teeth. In fact, you have to schedule regular appointments with the dentist, as you don't want tooth decay to damage your street cred. Brushing involves repeatedly tapping the X button while using the analog stick to move the brush around.

Erm yeah, LucasArts makes a ton of money with Star Wars games like KOTOR and Galaxies, but they also lost a ton of money on quite a number of non-Star Wars games of the recent past. I don't remember the exact number, but the number of copies sold for RTX Red Rock is truly the most embarassing thing ever. It was something like 3. Farbror: I don't think you're quite on the money there. The fact that they expanded on the action with FT2 was a cause for some controversy, but I think the lukewarm reception had a lot to do with the game's art direction and lackluster concept. They didn't seem to get what made the first one great. It seemed like some low-budget kids game about bikers instead of the sequel to the insanely cinematic and gritty original. Just my 2 cents. I also disagree that no one was excited about S&M2. Those people who knew about the game in fact were. Almost everyone who saw the trailer was immediately sold. However, LucasArts didn't really promote S&M2 much beyond that E3 trailer (much to our dismay actually). They kept saying it was too early, but in reality I don't think a real PR/marketing plan for S&M2 was being rolled out at any point during the project's lifetime. I think they were still working it out before it got cancelled. One trailer + 4 screenshots isn't exactly a hype machine, though S&M2 was still infinitely better received than FT2. Just have a look at Mojo's archived news comments.

No, no. This is great. I believe this is the first time anyone here has said "wait, you mean this old thread where we already discussed it at length?" This means Idle Thumbs' forums are grown up now. We must celebrate!

Is it this one? http://forums.idlethumbs.net/showthread.php?t=717&highlight=stranger

Which one is that?

I think that's more a result of the E3 2003 levels being really extremely polished to give a good first impression. Other stuff they showed later had a bit less variety in textures, isn't quite as densely populated with objects, etc. I mean, it still looks good, but they just haven't crammed as much assets in there as those first scenes the public got to see. It's not so much the video compression that makes the difference. Have you downloaded the bink exe of the E3 2003 demonstrations too? Looks just as impressive (or moreso) than their shakycam counterparts.

Yeah, HL2 is so ugly now The video Trep linked to is a re-encoded version of the 60 MB bink executable that was released not so long ago. Did anyone notice the alien being taking some kind of rod or case from Eli Vance and putting it in a machine? (Look in the background when he welcomes Gordon.)

Yeah, Molyneux is pretty in that video, but whatshisname David Carter is nice to listen to, since he tells things really enthusiastically.

This film sounds a bit better in jake's post than it looks in the trailer, but whatever, this director has an excellent track record so I'm definitely going to see it.

Agreed, that's the one way to make RTS fun in multiplayer. Rushing is lame. With Generals, we quickly developed an additional rule: no superweapons. The game quickly turned into a race for who first had a ton of scuds or ion cannons and everyone stopped attacking with conventional weapons. Once we agreed that the superweapons sucked, the games became a lot more intense.

apparently it's some crazy web phenomen I wasn't aware of until now http://www.wildpixels.com/bunchies/

Oh my God, another movie license. Burn it to the ground! Actually, waitaminute ... yeaaaaaaah, that actually does sound pretty interesting. A game where you play a shark? Well, it's been done before, but it's still an interesting premise. It could be really good. I'm going to keep an eye out for this one.

Jason Dela Rocca has an excellent post up on his blog, once more lamenting the fact that the games industry is "all center and no margins". He describes the concept of the opening act at music concerts and then wonders why that concept doesn't exist in games. He mentions Counter-Strike, which is actually a good example of a game that managed to lift on the success of a bigger game, and then became a well-known property on its own. (He says Counter-Strike: Source is no longer really an "opening act" and he's right, though the original Counter-Strike certainly was.) Anyway, food for thought.

There's an article over at Planet Half Life that shows some pics used in a presentation by one of the Valve artists at the Siggraph conference. It's nice to get a small peek at the actual research and sourcing for the game. Whatever will become of Half-Life 2's gameplay, I think the art direction is already proven to be excellent. If you put some screenshots of HL2 side by side with other shooters, the color palette and lighting in HL2 is strikingly well done. If you also stop to think about the videos that were released, the range of atmospheres is really good. You have like the night-time zombie movie stuff going on in small villages, the daytime stuff in the Prague-like city (with eerily empty streets reminding of the first scene in 28 Days Later), the dark Orwellian abandoned factory complex with crowd-control fences, the Scandinavian-style port with lots of reds and blues, the Dr. Kleiner HL1-style lab, etc. I think overall the more recent screenshots we've seen are less detailed and complex than the first batch of screenshots released around E3 2003, but the believability of HL2's world still seems consistently high. Left: research photo. Right: in-game shot. (Research photo) Hopefully the complete game will gradually offer more visual themes / locations as the game progresses. I wouldn't want City 17 to dominate the whole game. I'm betting there's a bunch of surprise locations, though you never know after all the troubles Valve went through. I'm really hoping this game will be as good as it suggests it will be.

Here's some funky semi-new concept art.

This mod would rule if they get it done. In it you'll play as termites, wasps or ants.

Here's some looks at the game's "San Francisco":

Come on guys, it's not so bad.

I haven't played the game since 1997, so maybe my memories got a little rose-tinted. I thought the story was reasonably well integrated, but memory can play cruel tricks on us all. "a new Outlaws" = Red Dead Revolver?

I think Outlaws might be a little unrecognized in gaming history. It was one of the few pre-Half-Life-OMG-We-Can-Tell-Stories-With-This-Genre story-based FPSes. I'm still sad that LucasArts didn't expand upon Dark Forces and Outlaws and sort of made it its second genre of expertise. If they'd stuck to story FPS games and adventures (oh and flight combat through Totally Games), they might have done a lot better. I'm sure some of the adventure designers wouldn't have minded working on a story FPS, and vice versa. It would have been good.