Comments on: The Sunday Papers

By: Phlebas

Phlebas — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 11:13:47 +0000

I loved Strife. Very ordinary as a shooter, and the script was pretty bad, but it did storytelling things in the gameplay that I hadn’t seen before. It succeeded in feeling like a world (divided up into areas) rather than just a series of levels, and there was a real sense of change in the world – the resistance base is underground in some sewer tunnels to start with, then later in the game you defeat a boss in a castle and the base moves there. And you can go back to the tunnels and see the last few traces of the abandoned base. That sense of coming back to the same place and finding it changed was something I didn’t get again until Thief.

By: Kieron Gillen

Kieron Gillen — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 10:29:29 +0000

A friend mentioned it to me this week as sterling work, and I agreed.

By: M.P.

M.P. — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 10:27:05 +0000

How come you linked to the Secret World preview so long after it went up, Kieron? Hoping to drum up interest in the game in the face of layoffs at FC and its possible delay?

By: etho

etho — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 00:05:30 +0000

Well, my point was that I am a mac owner/mac user that also owns and uses a PC because they are both better for different things. I like using my mac, but I also like using my PC. I don’t like using my Mac for, say, playing Team Fortress 2, because it won’t. I do like using my Mac for playing WoW because the mac version interfaces nicely with iTunes.

A tedious bullying wanker that goes on about how awful PCs are is no better and no worse than a tedious bullying wanker that goes on about how awful Mac users are. It’s a pot-kettle situation with this Brooker fellow.

By: Thants

Thants — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 21:34:47 +0000

It’s worth mentioning that you can just boot into Windows on a Mac to play Windows games. That’s what I do. It’s less convenient than not having to dual boot, but it’s certainly possible.

By: Wisq

Wisq — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 21:29:59 +0000

I like how the “Off the Map” article is officially about Thief:TDP, and hence, the Eurogamer standard question at the bottom is, “Are you excited about Thief: The Dark Project on PC?
(View Eurogamer readers most anticipated games)”. Time warp!

By: James

James — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 19:12:19 +0000

You have to click the reply button.

By: Dante

Dante — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 18:20:27 +0000

God damn it, why are my replies not working?

By: Dante

Dante — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 18:19:32 +0000

I don’t see it as odd at all, I’m not bitter that the AI gets smarter as the difficulty goes up (hypothetically I mean, as to be honest I didn’t see any difference) I’m annoyed that they supposedly designed the AI at this level for hard difficulty alone. The majority of users will play on normal, you should aim to have good AI in place from there.

If your AI gets better as you turn up the difficulty, one has to ask why you cut these features out of normal.

By: Tei

Tei — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 18:01:35 +0000

I have played games with Windows NT 4.0 and It was totally Ok. Maybe a bit of problems to configure midi, but who needs midi? Windows 2000 and XP adds nothing. The move to XP was forced by Microsoft not releasing new versions of DX to Windows 2000. I have tested Windows 7, and I laught at the need of 640 MB just to have a notepad open. I can run Windows NT 4.0 with the same features, and It only need 24 MB. Windows 7 is a bloated monster from hell.

By: Tei

Tei — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 17:46:33 +0000

About a 90% of AI is making the Bots fail. Normally a bot will neve fail a shot, and will have a vision of 360 degress. Will see you trough walls, trough the level, and know instantly if the superweapon has respawn, or how much time for it to respawn. The bot can see, even on the most dense of the particles explosion, and is not lost by different heights. Normally a game AI start godlike, so 90% of it is to make it worst, add errors, make it only see in front, make it forget things, etc.
Making AI good or bad at playing is trivial and a waste of our time. Is not important. You can have a slider to choose how much aim you want your bots to have, from 0% (fail always) to 100% (always hit). Thats trivial.

The thing is make bots interesting, human like, and probably things like fake chat comments.

And about halo… Is a corridor shooter, his code can be resumed in while(1) { aim(); show() }; I don’t need more than that, and probably don’t have much more. A shooter is a bad game to choose some good AI. What you want a soldier to do, other than take cover and shot of you?. Do you expect a enemy soldier to write poems, or design a perfect strategy plan?

By: little grilly

little grilly — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 16:48:25 +0000

i played through strife this year, excited about coming in playing a doom game i’d never come across before. it had some good ideas, but the execution was terribly broken, and the end product was nonsensical, hackneyed, and broken. the ending i got was jaw droppingly tasteless.