Quake is 10 405
cyclomedia writes "Late on 22nd June 1996 Quake was uploaded to cdrom.com's archives in the form of 7 1.44MB floppy disk images. Though it wasn't until the 23rd that everyone realised (or at least, that's my excuse for being a day late with the news submission). Cue much aggravation on the newsgroups as eager downloaders experienced glorious 2 FPS gameplay."
The Size was incredible (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh how times have changed.
Happy Birthday! (Score:2, Insightful)
Fun times!
Re:10 years! (Score:5, Insightful)
Perfect time to re-install and re-play (Score:5, Insightful)
Put it on nightmare, type +mlook into the console and let er rip. Not many games can be enjoyed 10 years after their initial release, but Quake stands above the crowd.
Next you'll be telling kids to get off your lawn (Score:5, Insightful)
There are plenty of great new games, if you haven't found them it is because you are being willfully blind. Some are nothing more than updates of old games, but wonderful ones at that. Civilization 4 is a good example. As the name implies it's the 4th in the series. Each game is just the old one made anew. The fundimental premise of the game doesn't change. However each one is a worthy successor. The gameplay and mechanics take a huge step up, as well as graphics and sound. Some are more orignal, such as Knights of the Old Republic. Jedi Knight meets NWN.
Also, I think you'll discover that if you take off the rose coloured glassess of memory you'll find that many of those great old games, well, aren't. I've found that games that I just loved as a kid are not nearly as good now. I remember how tought Final Fantasy used to see, how a group of us would get together on the weekends and play it as a team. Now it's trivial, formulaic even. If enemy if type X, do strategy Y, etc. Still cool, but no comparison to, say Baldur's Gate 2. Of course I doubt I'd have liked BG2 as a kid, too high level, too much reading.
So please, let's stop with this "new games don't bring anything to the table". Yes they do. They aren't all great, of course, but you would be positively amazed at the utter crap released for old systems. Ever play Captian Novilon? I thought not, it was an SNES game about diabeties. Yes really. A huge pile of shit and it's just one of a massive list.
There are plenty of new, good games. There are plenty of resources to help you find them, or you can ask on Slashdot. However if you can't find any good modern games, the problem is not the state of games, the problem is you.
Re:10 years! (Score:2, Insightful)
Quake 4, Half Life 2, etc.. All the fun and more, with a healthy dose of jaw-dropping graphics.
Quit trying to get cred by waxing nostalgic for graphics that sucked.
I remember Quake fondly, one of my first University projects was to write a report analysing the usage of a particular language, and while most of the class jumped on the shiney new Java, or latest iteration of Visual Basic, and I did QuakeC. Got like a 97% on the project too, dragged down by a couple stupid typos.
It was fun pissing my roommate off by playing various Quake mods all hours of the night, and when he'd complain I could retort with "I'M RESEARCHING MY PROJECT ASSFACE"
Re:blah blah (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I can still remember Quake 1 being released (Score:2, Insightful)
Coincidently, I still have the soundtrack on my mp3 player. Which, interestingly enough, has more horsepower than the machine I bought to play Quake (with a student loan, I might add).
I was playing qtest1 for weeks before the official release. My first real-world program was a utility that queried servers for the people playing on them. God, I miss that game.
Re:Perfect time to re-install and re-play (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Next you'll be telling kids to get off your law (Score:4, Insightful)
In fact everything is right with the slashdot crowd.
The slashdot crowd is absolutely bloody right to expect that 10 years later something with the visuals of Quake and the level of game AI complexity of Nethack should have been written released and shipped.
And that has not happened. The monsters in the newer quakes, dooms and the likes are as daft as in the original. There is no random or even pseudorandom level generation.
It is the same old grind. Granted it is with very fancy visuals, but in 10 years I would have expected the industry to come up with something moderately more engaging.
So the slashdot crowd is entitled to bitch and it surely does.
When it is not engaged playing Nethack. Where the f... did that storm giant go... I need to kill it and eat it as I am missing the intrinsic...
Re:Revolutionary Game and GPL'ed Engine (Score:2, Insightful)
Tenebrae was what I was thinking of when I posted a link to DarkPlaces, but it's another good version of Quake with fancy new graphics.
Re:10 years! (Score:2, Insightful)
Remember Sturgeon's Law. 90% of everything is crap. You only remember the good stuff.
Quake was the pinnacle of games (Score:2, Insightful)
2)No keep the dam cd in the drive even though we have 3 other layers of copy protection/account validation required, hello EA mfer's. 3) The game was fun to replay over and over. You know that thing called singleplayer. 4) Gameplay was king, not oh look at our water/terrain/multi-k poly count while the mechanics blow chunks. 5) Always was and always will be better than any Unreal based game. 6)It had a grenade launcher.
Re:Next you'll be telling kids to get off your law (Score:3, Insightful)
Typical gamers that grew up with the current generation are really looking for flash and instant gratification. A large percentage of modern games focus primarily on graphics, and tend to throw gameplay out the window.
Older games had to focus on gameplay simply because no matter how good the graphics were they still were just a series of low FPS, low-res, 2d, pixelated images.
It's not that I'm against awesome graphics, I just think that gameplay has to come first, which really doesn't happen all that often any more... and I understand why. It's because most of the people who are driving the game market want flash over substance.
And just so you know I do agree with that in some ways the game industry has made significant advances. Racing simulation games are absolutely awesome these days. TOCA 3 is probably one of the best racing sims ever made.
On the other hand... I spend a lot more time in xmame than I do utilizing my fancy 3d graphics card. Why? Because they just don't make em like they used to.
Re:Next you'll be telling kids to get off your.. (Score:1, Insightful)
Katamari Damacy.
In fact, Quake sucked (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd naturally assumed that Quake would improve the gameplay, monster AI, and co-operative play. Instead, they dumbed those down and just improved the graphics and deathmatches. And thus began the tendency of FPS games to develop in exactly the opposite direction to the direction I'm interested in.
OT: mod comment (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Next you'll be telling kids to get off your law (Score:3, Insightful)
You mean, something with the visuals like This? [mooh.org]
In the 10 years since Quake, you've had engaging story elements added by the likes of Half Life, high player interaction with plot in Deus Ex, an MMPOFPS Planetside, the FPSRTS Savage, The whole counterstrike phenomenon, Goldeneye, an FPS platformer in Metroid... There have been a lot of great FPS games released in the 10 years since quake. To say that there was quake and then there was nothing ignores huge swaths of game development.
You don't want smart monsters and you don't want random level generation. Trust me. Or don't. Smart monsters hide out of your cone of vision, and bury an axe in your back when you turn around. Smart monsters headshot you through the wall. Smart monsters are those 13-year-old fu$%ers who camp spawn points with sniper rifles. Random level generation, on the other hand, A: is very difficult to do, B: is very difficult for AI's to navigate, and C: the player loses the ability to "learn" an area, which is one of the most satisfying parts of playing an FPS game.
The latest Dooms and Quakes are exactly like the old Dooms and Quakes because they're bloody sequals. Branch out a little, and you'll find all sorts of original fps games in the world.
Re:Descent. (Score:2, Insightful)