.kkrieger is a pretty graphically impressive and very short on plot or explanation first person shooter game. Apparently plot is one of those things that you sacrifice to fit the game into 96 KILOBYTES!!!!!. Holy crap. The average FPS almost certainly has single textures bigger than 96KB, and here they’ve put the whole game in that amount of space. It does take a really long time to load up, so I’m guessing they must be pregenerating just about every texture on the fly. I can’t really think of any other way they’d accomplish that. It’s a bit demanding on system resources, but worth checking out at least once. Besides, it’s not like waiting for a 96KB download is that bad anyway.

Comments

Comment by Dan on 2004-05-12 00:15:35 +0000

I read about that a while ago. They’re pregenerating the textures at runtime using those fancy math things… what’er they called? Ah yeah.. formulas.

Comment by Carrie on 2004-05-13 01:31:32 +0000

I know how they did it: magic. And wizards.

Yup.

Even though I do 99.78% of my online gaming on the PC, I’m still pretty intrigued by Xbconnect, which was pointed out to me by a resourceful co-worker (one of the few people I know of at work that’s a gamer, which I find odd for a software company). Anyhow, Xbconnect is a program that tricks your Xbox into thinking it sees other Xboxes (Xboxen?) on a LAN when in fact they are on the inter-web. This lets you engage in Xbox Live style multiplayer action, sans yearly fees. When I heard about the program, I had really expected it to just be something simple where you had to know the IP addresses of the boxes you wanted to play with. Not so, it actually comes with a pretty good match making setup for finding people to play games against. Right now the only game I have to play online is Halo, but now that I can play online without signing up for Live, I’m thinking of picking up either Crimson Skies or Mech Assault now.

Comments

Comment by Carrie on 2004-04-26 14:25:41 +0000

Ingenious. Stick it to the man!

Tumiki Fighters is a completely and mind-blowingly insane side scrolling shooter based around the concept of adding the wreckage of other ships to your own as a power-up. Entire chunks of massive ships attach themselves to your ship giving extra firepower and absorbing damage. I’m also fairly sure that its entirely impossible, as it often fills the screen with ridiculous bullet barrages made even harder to dodge by the fact that you’ve got about 5 other planes hanging off of you at any given moment. However, that hasn’t noticeably decreased my enjoyment of it. The same developer has several other games, and its good to see that someone is keeping the super twitchy shooter genre alive. (via Penny-Arcade)

Comments

Comment by Phil on 2004-04-15 11:26:14 +0000

Wow. I can only get to the second level. I don’t ever remember a linear shooter being this crazy!

Having been overlooked for the initial round of World of Warcraft beta testing (no doubt due to a lack of 1337ness and h4X0Ring on my part) it looks like for now the closest I’ll get is this World of Warcraft Television site. By television they mean in-game screen caps updated every 20 seconds whenever one of 4 lucky bastards who actually got picked for the beta happen to be playing. Which is not nearly enough I should mention. In fact, the only feed that I’ve found to consistently work is this one. Still, its a generous sacrifice of bandwidth and maybe even frame rate on their part, so I guess I can’t complain too much. Actually, its not so much the screenshots that have me looking forward to this game but rather what I’ve been reading about it at places like the Penny-Arcade forums, where most people have been proclaiming it the most humane MMORPG to date meaning that it scales back on the amount of endless treadmill work that has been the staple of these types of games to date. Of course, games often are made more difficult after the beta ends but if this is really an online RPG that one can enjoy without spending 30-40 hours a week playing then I’m all for it and will likely be hooked.

Comments

Comment by Tobin on 2004-04-14 11:47:19 +0000

I’ve never played any MMORPG’s yet. If this is good, maybe I’ll try it. You’ll have to let me know.

Comment by Neal on 2004-04-14 17:43:45 +0000

I know that Dana is absolutely obsessed with WOW, but I’m betting that it won’t run on Linux (making it not an option for me).

My current MMORPG of choice is Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates. (http://puzzlepirates.com) If you’re looking for an anti-level-treadmill MMORPG, Puzzlepirates is it. There is no leveling at all. Your performance while sailing a ship or fighting brigands is based solely on how well you do in the various Tetris-y puzzle games that you play to make the ship go, etc. You do get skill/experiance ratings in the various puzzles, but they don’t affect the game at all except for seeding when you enter a swordfighting or drinking tournament (yes, I said drinking tournament – drinking is a competative puzzle).

Comment by Kimmee on 2004-04-14 18:31:30 +0000

Will! I haven’t read your blog in so long! it’s redesigned! it’s updated! there’s PICTURES! i’m so outta the loop!

Comment by Will on 2004-04-14 23:27:41 +0000

Kimmee – Yup, I switched to a better hosting service a while back and decided it was finally time to resurrect the old blog. Glad to see that your latest jetset adventure went well!

Neal – I’ve seen banner ads for puzzle pirates various places and thought it looked pretty cool. If I weren’t playing so much Unreal 2004 and Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow I would have given it a try by now. Can you choose who you play with in a game, or does it just random assign matches?

Comment by Neal on 2004-04-15 00:10:10 +0000

The main activity in PuzzlePirates is pillaging on the high seas. Most of your time pillaging is spent operating the “sailing” puzzle, the “bilge” puzzle or the “carpentry” puzzle needed to make the ship go – those aren’t head-to-head puzzles. Once you finally collide with and board another ship you play the swordfighting puzzle against the entire other crew. As long as there are multiple opponents on the other side of the sword fight you can choose which opponent to send your attacks to by clicking on them. (The ideal number of pirates to have teamed up on one opponent is 2 or 3. Any more than that is wasteful.)

Take for example, Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow which I just picked up today. The single player game has a just few minor improvements over the original, plus another captivating storyline (at least so far). The new multiplayer mode though is, well, awesome. Pitting 2 vs 2 teams of spies against mercenaries in a game of hide and seek with guns, this is the best application of stealth based gameplay I’ve ever seen. In all single player stealth games, you can always fool the AI and hide out virtually in plain sight from time to time. When you try that against a human opponent, not so much. Every one of the gadgets available to both sides are critical to play, so there’s a pretty steep learning curve but it’s insanely fun. The very first time I played was as the mercs, and one of the spies dropped down out of the darkness behind my teammate and grabbed him to use as a human shield, gun to head. After a few tense moments of staring at each other and dodging around I did the only thing I could: I took the shot and nailed him in the head (the spy that is). And things like that that I’d never experienced before in a multiplayer game just happen all the time. It’s brilliant.

One of my favorite games of all time is the orginal Deus Ex. It was a conspiracy theory riddled masterpiece that blended RPG and first person shooter elements plus stealth action in an utterly addictive way that I’d never seen before. Its sequel, Deus Ex: Invisible War, has been out for a while now but due to hearing some negative reviews and also having completely no time to devote to it, I hadn’t gotten around to trying it until I rented the Xbox version this weekend. After playing it, I’d like to offer some tips to anyone that’s looking to make a bad sequel to a game. The basic idea is this: take all the best things about the original game, and “fix” them in the sequel. For example, if the original had unconfined environments that made you feel like they were part of a living and breathing world, replace that in the sequel with spaces that feel completely contrived for the purpose of shuffling you back and forth through the game world. If the original had a great experience and skill system for building and customizing your character, remove that completely in the sequel. If the original had a unique and creative system for “hacking” in-game computer systems that required some strategy and skill from your character, replace that with a system that involves hitting a button and watching a progress bar move. In short, don’t add anything new and interesting to the game and dumb down what make the original a classic. The thing is, Deus Ex: Invisible War is really not a bad game at all on its own merits. But, as a sequel to the original it fails in pretty much every aspect.

So when you think of World War II, what’s the first thing that naturally springs to mind? That’s right, circa 18th centrury pirate warfare. I can hardly believe it myself, but there’s actually a pirate based mod for Battlefield: 1942. It’s bizarre, yet strangely compelling. If only the developers could be convinced to add ninjas to it so that the real ultimate power of a ninjas vs. pirates battle could finally be made available to those of us not fortunate enough to have been born as a pirate or a ninja. (That’s right, I’m linking to realultimatepower.net well over a good year after it was totally awesome to do so. What are you going to do about it?)

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

I finally decided that rather than trying to come up with a brilliant comeback post, a new design, or even just a clever reason for leaving things to collect dust here for over 3 months that I should just post something and be done with it. So I did. I wish that I could say that I spent the last 3 months building a supercomputer out of 70 PS2’s but that’s just not the case. I did, however, build a really cool machine that plays the new Legend of Zelda game out of only a Gamecube, a television, and the Legend of Zelda game disc.

The multiplayer demo of Battlefield 1942 has me all weak in the knees. My roommates and I have been playing for the past few days, and I can’t really remember if there’s ever been more shouting, yelling, and screaming in our house. There’s just something great about being able to drive an aircraft carrier, take off from it in a bomber, dogfight with another plane, strafe a tank and bomb it, bail out and parachute down, and then steal a jeep and drive it like a madman around an island all in the space of 5 minutes.