SpiderMonkey

I thought about posting that article and bringing it into this discussion, as evidence supporting my "gaming autism" post. He goes on so much about the lack of characterisation and the lack of story in the game that I'm almost convinced he played it with his eyes shut.

From a technical standpoint, HL2's AI is vastly superior. Of course that doesn't matter so much if the player perceives it differently. I think the disparity can be explained with one simple observation: for a player to perceive an AI as intelligent, it has to display its decision processes very openly and vocally. If you look at almost any game considered to have "good AI", what is most notable about it is that it doesn't shut up talking about what it's doing. For non HL examples, consider Thief's guards, or those little shits in Halo running away from you, wailing with their arms flailing. The thing is, with HL1, the Marines were very vocal - With HL2, the sound guys put these extremely cool, menacing voice filters on the Combine soldiers' voices, so while they do say probably as much as the Marines, it's really hard to pick out what they say. In the same way that if a Thief guard said nothing, it would seem really dumb, my opinion is that the Combine seem less intelligent because of this. It's true that they both use waypoints, but that's really where the similarity ends. Without their waypoints, the HL1 AI was totally screwed - if you look carefully you can see the AI only travel between their waypoints; they stop on waypoints to shoot at you; they put their grenades down on waypoints. The HL2 AI needs waypoints to be placed to do anything more complex than "run straight at the player shooting", but they use them mostly for planning rather than simple navigation. On a local scale they can easily find their way around without them, and they can also find and move to their own cover without needing to be told where that cover is by a level designer. There are also a lot of more options for dynamically customising their behaviour (setting battlelines, etc) that probably don't need detailing here. If I had to pick apart the design goals for the HL2 AI, I would choose "reliability" and "flexibility", rather than "intelligent". Sure they aren't as bright as games set in one environment type (FEAR/FarCry spring to mind), but they work in corridors, in urban fighting, out in the open, etc etc, and they never break (in the "running continually against a wall"/etc sense of breaking). Oh and I guess I should throw the definitive, classic AI design rule on the end here, since I could probably make some point about it: "Enemies should be fun to play against first, intelligent second."

I've been noticing this too. What I've concluded is that a lot of gamers posting on message boards suffer from what I (offensively) deem a kind of FPS/gaming autism. It's a kind of disorder where you play games without any interest in any story or character elements and only with interest in the raw gameplay. "Where's the next enemy for me to shoot?" is about the level of immersion achieved for these guys, which explains to me why, for them, Quake 4 is an enjoyable game, Half-Life 2 is "crap cos you just run and gun against the same four enemies" and something like Psychonauts is "just a boring platformer". The best methods for diagnosis change but they always revolve around watching to see who declares that HL2 has "no story". Last summer, the best examples were the guys who played the Lost Coast and then posted saying "I've got to the top and into the church and now I don't know what to do". Despite the fact that the entire way up some bloody great cannon had been firing away and now it was in the same room as them, and despite the fact that that fisherman had mentioned it multiple times, they were always genuinely surprised to find they had to do something with the cannon. The current method for diagnosis is to watch for the people who say "Episode One is set in City 17?? Boooooooooooooooooooring. Give me somewhere new to shoot stuff in!", because you know, who cares about seeing what happens to the characters and the story.

I think my opinion is much the same as what has gone before me: The Source version is exactly the same except it comes with the HL2 flashlight, water and ragdolls. Also with the Source version you get the same chapter setup as in HL2, which is its biggest selling point - being able to dive back in to different points of the game, without having to trek through it all. OpFor covers pretty much exactly the same ground as Half-Life itself from a design standpoint. Somehow it manages to still feel totally fresh and compelling, despite that. By Blue Shift, you can tell that the photocopy of a photocopy has led to some serious degradation in quality. Generic level design and lower production values (inc. broken scripting) abound. For serious fans seeking story-completeness, only, imo. If I was playing HL for the first time now, I'd probably go with Source. I'd really enjoy the game but I don't think I'd be left gagging for more, in the same way that we were in 1998, so I don't think missing OpFor would be "missing out" in quite the same way it would've been back then. For some reason Valve don't do Gold/Silver/Bronze anymore. Now you can buy what used to be Silver, but it's called the "Valve Complete Pack" and it costs you $79.95 instead of $59.95. Bummer, huh?

"Look at you hacker, a pathetic creature of meat and bone, panting and sweating as you run through my corridors. How can you challenge a perfect, immortal machine?" (I think if I started listing all memorable quotes from that game, I would be here for a very long time.)

Me too (but just now in the demo) - I was getting pretty pro at all that jumping. Then when I got onto the next screen, How long is the full game? (In whatever metric you choose - screens, hours, what proportion is the demo of the full game, etc.)

Imagine the FPS map equivalent of a NASCAR circuit, where you are constantly turning left. Whatever the sensitivity of your mouse, you'll need to pick it up and move it back to centre eventually. Whatever the sensitivity of your Revmote, you'd end up pointing at the wall behind you eventually, in a similar manner, no?

The thing about having a mouse is that when you reach the edge of the pad, you simply lift it up and move it back to the centre. Unless I'm mistaken, there is no equivalent for "lifting up the mouse" for the controller (short of using a button, which seems like a waste). If you use it like a mouse, once you have turned through 180 degrees, aren't you then pointing the controller at the back wall? (Or at least, you will eventually be pointing at the back wall if you keep turning in one direction.) Trying to map your wrist gymnastics in that position back to the screen in front of you, in order to work out which is left and which is right, sounds awfully clunky. Have I misunderstood you?

If I was building it, my first iteration would be: - You can point your "cursor" anywhere on the screen. - There is a "dead zone" in the middle of the screen where you can point which does not affect what you look at. - Once you point outside the dead zone, the view moves to put your "cursor" back in the dead zone. - The further you move your "cursor" out of the dead zone and toward the edges of the screen, the faster it moves your view. Then it would just be a matter of tweaking the size of the dead zone and the different view movement speeds until it felt right. Imagining it in my head, I think that would work pretty well.

God the trolling those guys get up to gets so tedious sometimes. I remember reading before Half-Life 2 even got announced some comment from one of the two 3D Realms guys about how the reason Valve hadn't announced the game yet was because they were "discovering how difficult it was to write a new engine", or similarly catty words. And Mark Rein? Well I guess he knows what the next-gen is all about - putting shiny graphics on yesterday's gameplay. Gears of War ... as CliffyB puts it "the first entry in a new genre ... the Cover Shooter". Or as my sneaking suspicion goes, boldly taking action games back to 1997 and the days of Time Crisis.

Probably true, but in this case, he seems to be warezing out of laziness rather than greed, so I figured being helpful might go some way towards keeping him on the straight and narrow (especially since he seems completely ignorant of any of the major ways of pirating games, so is perhaps a first timer).

Now those are awesome. Finally I get to be more than just a cameraman in the cutscenes that aren't cutscenes, but are really cutscenes.

You can find a download for the shareware version of the Duke Nukem 3D on this page. http://www.3drealms.com/duke3d/index.html (In case you don't know what shareware is, think of it as a kind of demo where you get one third - one quarter of the game for free. If you aren't interested in paying money for the game, this is the download you should be looking for.) You may also like to use this software http://jonof.edgenetwork.org/index.php?p=jfduke3d to help you run it better on modern machines. If after playing the shareware version, you want the rest of the game, it is still available for purchase here: http://store.yahoo.com/3drealms/duknuk3dated.html. Or alternatively you might like to look on eBay, it's likely much cheaper there. 3D Realms have forums too where you will likely find more people able to help you if you have more questions. http://www.3drealms.com/forums.html

If I had to call it, I'd be more inclined to say the Crysis revision of the engine is more appropriate for that. Even at the time of its release, stuff like the way you could just waltz through the foliage and the pop-up in the distance as you moved around, was a bit disconcerting and game-ish for me. But yeah, perhaps after this iteration, Crytek can make a game that involves more than just shooting people.

Truer words never spoken. I never got more than 3 or 4 levels into FarCry because I couldn't stand the storytelling, the writing, the voice acting. The entire implausibility of it. From what I've heard of the rest of the story, it doesn't sound like it got any better either.

In a way, this thread sums up more than just HL2, it sums up why I like coming to these forums now and again. You guys get this stuff. Any other message board, by now, someone would've strolled in trolling away about how it's just not an FPS without guns and explosions and the whole discussion would've collapsed in ugliness. I don't really have anything to add because all these parts are exactly what I love about HL2 too. When I finished the game, my overwhelming impression was that, despite their focus on human characters, the strongest character in the game was City 17 itself and the whole game was just a portrait of the city and its surroundings.

And to continue that speculation, perhaps it's in response to something Sony did or didn't do the day before? Like announce a price (so Ninty could undercut them) or show the controller or something.

Yeah I thought as much but my recollection of the book is much worse than of the game.

I dunno why everyone was portraying this guy as someone who was only in it for the money and uninterested in games. If you read this news story it sounds like the guy frickin lives inside a game. Fake police departments? Reminds me of the awesomeness that was Westwood's take on Blade Runner.

Heh, I saw that list the other week and did my own clunky maths on it. Gather the titles up by publisher and you can see (through my hugely scientific and accurate methods) who has contributed to the truly memorable games for that platform: All genres Microsoft - 7, Ubisoft - 4, EA - 4, LucasArts - 2 No sports games Microsoft - 7, Ubisoft - 4, LucasArts - 2, EA - 1 No sports/racing games Microsoft - 5, Ubisoft - 4, LucasArts - 2, EA - 0 I'm looking forward to the other lists being published, so I can declare which publishers have produced the most memorable games this generation. Maybe I'll do the same with IGN's Top 100 that they are in the process of revealing.

I was under the impression they were doing both for some reason.

Afaik the ring pops up with notifications of Live messages and the like. (Split into quadrants on a per-player basis.) Something along those lines anyway.

Hmm, how to write this without sounding like a corporate mouthpiece? Shacknews, the quite excellent gaming website where I normally hang out, is looking to hire a new writer. http://www.shacknews.com/docs/press/hiring.x http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/37789 Why do I think you guys should care? Because Shacknews is looking to move from being a link machine into homegrown content, but to do it without turning into a GameSpy/IGN-alike. And because if I had to pick just one example of non-IGNSpy excellence, I'd pick the Thumb everytime: I think there's potential for a good match to be made. It's perhaps a bit perverse to be posting here, since you could argue that recruiting away from the Thumb would harm it (maybe this thread will be met with a swift from the Emperors around here, in which case I apologise in advance) . But I'd like to think that if you went on to Shacknews, you'd be helping to spread the Thumbs message to a wider audience and to grow the size of the voice that it represents. On top of that, it'd maybe be a worthwhile career move for those of you for whom this is only a part-time thing (or indeed, only a forum-loitering thing)?

Yeah Maarten comes from, and updates the site from Holland, which allows him to do the "morning" updates at a suitably relaxed time in the day for him.