Marek

Meh wasps are okay. At least they're fat enough for you to know where the fuck they are. I also sometimes find wasps amusing, such as when they're chasing some dude who then starts running around like a girl. Good times. Mosquitos are the real fuckers. They're all skinny and stealthy. If this mod has mosquitos they should have limited invisibility.

I'm planning on reviewing Rise of Nations for the thumb, a review which will inevitably discuss the issues of TBS vs RTS at length, since Rise of Nations sort of steals elements from both and tries to sit happily in the middle. I'm primarily a TBS man myself. (ugh that would sound so wrong in Dutch, where TBS means going to a prison-like mental institute ... erm yes anyway...) I like playing games such as Civ where you can really take your time and think stuff through. You know, the kind of strategy game where you can plan things out years in advance, like slowly building up your war machine for an invasion and moving them all one by one to your border. While I've had countless hours of fun with Warcraft and C&C, with C&C: Generals I've come to realize that this style of strategy games is particularly fun in multiplayer, and not so extremely interesting anymore in singleplayer. I don't like having to build a base each time only to have it erased for the next mission.

Except when they're tired.

Hmmm. What policy?

Hey look guys, it's the first screenshots of a crappy looking Vice City 2 the excellent game Scarface!

*looks around* Or rather 0,1%, but I think that percentage is slowly going up.

Heh. Erm yep, in-game. The boxed copy won't be cheaper. I think a lot of people outside of the US are going to buy it through Steam instead of wait for their local release (e.g. me). I'm not sure I even care about the box. I was cleaning out my room just yesterday and then I noticed what a gigantic pile of boxes I've gathered over the years. I really ought to sell some of that crap on eBay. (Anyone care for a copy of Laura Bow 2, still in its original shrink wrap?)

Robert: very true, though on the other hand, modders are getting plenty of opportunities to prepare. Based on the available information, seminars and presumably the SDK*, you can already begin asset creation, such as the models, sound, etc. Also, it's alledgedly very easy to import HL1 maps into HL2, so I suppose some very rough mapping could be done. * Has it been released? I'm not sure.

Are you guys planning to buy it through Steam, or retail?

The half hour video of E3 2003 had me floored. I don't think anything ever impressed me as much as that one video. Really, if I think back about all the games that impressed before that, starting with the 286 age, I don't think I was ever quite as excited. I watched it over and over and over again. Then I watched it at work, and everyone stopped doing whatever they were doing and gathered around the monitor. Productivity dropped completely that day. HL2 was all we could talk about at lunch. Since then, things have calmed down a lot, and I'm keeping expectations low. I actually don't expect the final game to impress me as much as the first video. Nothing near it, in fact. I expect HL2 to be flawed. But I still have very high expectations and I will be dissapointed if it doesn't provide an extremely polished and immersive experience that is at least one step ahead of Call of Duty or other recent scripting-heavy FPSes. It's a bit crazy how much depends on this game. Everything in HL2 trickles down to Day of Defeat: Source, CS: Source, Team Fortress 2 and especially the mods. Some kind of modding gold rush is bound to happen when Source becomes available. What I've seen of the tools they've created, it's all extremely user friendly.

Erm wait, so ... Fate of Atlantis was the first game with dialog? Interesting. It's funny how G4 didn't bother with savegames or anything and just recorded the first 5 minutes of all the games, heh. Oh man Simon J , Tom Sarris . The whole George Lucas thing at the end is a load of shit.

Although I wasn't the perpetrator of that brutal act, the link-and-quote style of newsing is a bit lame. If we are to link to Q&A's, we should probably paraphrase what's going on.

With "Remixor" as nickname, how could he not be a DJ?

http://forums.idlethumbs.net/showthread.php?p=9102 (last bullet) It's funny how it's somehow automatically assumed that Nintendo is behind on everything. The GameCube sales are generally being made out to be far worse than they are (the GameCube isin fact competitive and 2nd or 3rd place in the race depending on which figures you look at) and for its handheld devices Nintendo seems to have no trouble gathering support despite people on most gaming forums assuming their weak GameCube support automatically transfers to their other hardware.

While that may be true for the GameCube, it isn't for the DS and the GBA. Nintendo has more third party development going for the DS than Sony has for the PSP.

Tom Hall suggested the Freudian connection right after the name was settled on. "ID" comes from Ideas from the Deep, a working name for a company Carmack and Romero used at some point. So I guess that's where the different capitalizations come from.

I think it's about time some really frustrated developers mixed the Tycoon formula with some sort of WarioWare to create the ultimate Game Dev Tycoon, a management game where you can harass the shit out of programmers and artists (Dungeon Keeper style) and compete against well-known entirely fictional companies such as Schmeletronic Schmarts, Schivendi and SchmubiSoft.

Tom Hall, American McGee and John Romero were the only actual game designers who worked at id. I think what held back John more on his solo project wasn't his design skill, but rather his personality. Once he became project leader, there was no one there to contain his enthusiasm.

Yes, Commander Keen was gold. In fact, in the early days, id Software was ... actually really good. I think they when downhill once they stopped implementing features like "player must be able to eat dog food".

Carmack and Romero and probably most of the original id team were drop-outs.

Yes and yes. That picture is fucking hysterical. I hadn't seen it before. Where is it from?

Heh. Wasn't there some idea earlier on about using UN inspectors, which got shot down? The irony is of course that the US could use it more than some of the "developing countries".

He started making games when he was about 13 or 14. I think your friend is called after a city near Rotterdam, by the way. That's a pretty funny name.

Some, yes. But a lot of shareware games worked on the principle of "get this part free, then get the rest by mail if you pay for it". That's how Apogee did business.

36 I think.