Entertainment/Gaming Consoles

[Elspode]

180, 150, 161...well within happy online gaming parameters!

I can hold my own in a *fair* game of Q3A, UT...we play here at work quite a lot. However, sports would be awesome...hell, even MP Online golf would be cool playing against real people.

Let's reach a consensus on a starter game, perhaps, and give us a few days to acquire it, then set up a match series? I would toss out FIFA 2003 only because I have it, but I'm willing to pick up whatever everyone else is cool with. Hockey would be fine, football, golf...pick one, guys!

[vsp]

Unfortunately, I'm as avid a gamer as anyone I know, but both sports games and online games leave me cold, as a general rule. I have the tools (DSL, Athlon 1300, Dreamcast, PS2 that I can get an online adapter for), but can't think of a single online game that I'd be excited to play (whether in opposition or co-op). I played a little Duke Nukem and Quake at an old job after hours with cow orkers, but it became very repetitive quickly.

I did buy PS2 NFL2K3 for $10 last week, but that was more of an impulse buy than anything else.

(I played netrek online back in the day, but that requires 10-16 people to play properly, and my skills have rusted substantially in the decade since then.)

[perth]

vsp, how bout warcraft iii or nwn?

~james

[Undertoad]

vsp, that's as strange a blind spot as I've ever seen. I played Duke 3D at work back in the day and it was a total blast.

There's nothing like hitting your boss with a rocket launcher and watching his head and torso fly in different directions.

Playing against real people instead of dumb AI bots really changes things, because eventually you figure out what the bots will do and then they become puzzle targets. People are not predictable like that.

[Cam]

Anyone here got Xbox live?

[vsp]

Originally posted by Undertoad
vsp, that's as strange a blind spot as I've ever seen. I played Duke 3D at work back in the day and it was a total blast.

There's nothing like hitting your boss with a rocket launcher and watching his head and torso fly in different directions.

Playing against real people instead of dumb AI bots really changes things, because eventually you figure out what the bots will do and then they become puzzle targets. People are not predictable like that.

And yet, they _do_ tend to be predictable like that, at least in my experiences in the multiplayer FPS world. (Read as: up until Quake, after which I had no one to challenge.) Nobody's a _total_ robot, but 95% of the people I've played against have certain behavior patterns and traits that are easily identifiable and that they'll rely on when in a pinch.

Does Bob take chances, or hang back, accumulate armor and weapons, and try harder to stay alive? Does Bill hunt others down aggressively, or sit back and snipe? Who has an idiosyncratic love for the grenade launcher or the axe, even though he knows they're not the most effective weapons? Who camps? Who's got better aim, or who tends to miss a lot? Getting to know most human opponents isn't that much more difficult than getting to know CPU constructions.

When you come down to it, a typical single-player FPS level is a heavily-armed obstacle course. Traverse from Point A to Point B, avoid or demolish the traps in your path, reach the goal/exit and move to the next. A well-crafted level is a thing of beauty. After long periods of challenging the same opponents, I found myself wanting something different, and new single-player levels (or new games, period) were more capable of providing that.

I'm not much for challenging people I don't know (pickup games on the net) -- usually they're either infinitely more skilled than I am, loud and obnoxious and l33t, or both. Then there's the whole online-cheating thing...

This is why, perversely, I prefer single-player mode on most fighting games, and have ever since the days of Street Fighter II. Granted, CPU chars were often absurdly one-dimensional back then, but on today's consoles, their AIs are immensely more complex and subtle opponents. (I'm looking at DC Soul Calibur and PS2 Virtua Fighter 4 as my two favorites -- PARTICULARLY the latter. Its AI-training mode lets you play "coach" and guide a CPU construct against all opposition, while its Kumite mode simulates a Japanese arcade and an endless stream of challengers suited to your skill level, instead of being blown off the machine by guys who've spent $8000 learning the timing of every single move and can dial up 120%-life combos on you at will. Play the game at _your_ pace, without needing a human opponent of similar skill to truly enjoy it.

Believe me, hitting your boss with the Freezethrower _was_ cathartic and fun. (A cow orker put together a Duke level based on the building's floor map, which added to the fun, right down to the beer in the mini-fridge in the boss's simulated office.) It just... got old.

Originally posted by perth
vsp, how bout warcraft iii or nwn?

I actually own one of the Warcraft II battle packs... bought it for cheap at BJ's Wholesale a while back... but never got around to installing it. I read through the instruction book and got caught up in other games.

I looked at NWN, but its single-player mode is LITERALLY single-player (you can't build a party, or take direct control of the one NPC you can travel with, according to the review I read).

Morrowind is more my speed -- tons of solo wandering in an extremely open-ended environment. Sort of the anti-Diablo. (Oddly, I enjoy the single-player PS1 Diablo more than the single-player PC version -- the controls are more limited, but they just feel right to me. Net Diablo was never an option for me once the rampant cheating kicked in -- that is, on day one.)

I've avoided MMORPGs as a general rule (Evercrack, Ultima Online and their ilk), and not just for the monthly fee or marriage-destroying tendencies. Basically, they're highly-graphical modern variations of MUDs, which I dabbled in a decade ago but eventually abandoned. The MMORPG experience seems more about the people you play the game with more than the game itself -- which (a) doesn't say much for the game design, (b) makes your gameplay experience dependent on finding cool people to play with, and (c) is just as susceptable to cheaters and 24-hour-a-day obsessives. Then you get the people who start building emotional attachments to others' online personalities... do I even have to go there?

But hey -- I'm weird. I know this.

<a href="www.netrek.org">Netrek</a> was the only online game I ever got into for any length of time; I played three seasons in the Intercollegiate Netrek League, including one remotely for Team UPenn. (And, before anyone asks, I _hate_ Star Trek, but its only impact on the game is aesthetic.)

The game is primitive by modern standards, but that's a good thing; it rewards clever strategies more than supernatural joystick/mouse skills. Teamwork is absolutely vital to success, which helps weed out the yahoos. The message system allowed for both trash-talk, macro abuse of the airwaves and/or ignore features for fending off undesirable chatter. Pickup games could be just as much fun as formal scrimmages. Server-side client authentication keeps cheaters out. Accumulated ranks affect only one aspect of the game (the ability to pilot a starbase), meaning that grizzled vets and raw newbies have nearly equal capabilities. And clients are available for umpteen platforms. About once a year or so, I get back into the habit for a while.

[wolf]

I might actually be willing to pursue the necessary computer upgrades if I could play Global Operations against people who weren't total assholes with cheat software running ...

[Undertoad]

Well vsp you're not invited to the Cellar LAN party then.

[vsp]

Well, _hmmph_. See if I'd want to belong to any club that'd have me as a member!

I too hate the cheats at Q3A, but in my circle of players, that's not really a problem. Most of the people I play with, I've been face to face with. We definitely should play once I get a decent connect back.

As for games that everyone might enjoy, I'm thinking something like Ghost Recon (Hi Tony!). I can see wolf enjoying that, I've been looking curiously at it for a while now, and I'm guessing the others could get into it. Tony knows more about it, so he should post.

Sports games, I'm really more into the console thing there, and I know we don't all have consoles, so... if someone had something decent there, I could go for it. I might have to buy a gamepad to hook up to the computer, but that's no big deal. I can't imagine playing soccer or basketball (the two types of sports I think translate really well to computer/console games) with just a keyboard.

'spode - here's a lame video I made in 10 minutes to show someone a few shots. It's me playing Q3 against a couple different opponents, and it should give you an idea of my skill level: http://www.msdelta.net/~dave/quake/v...highlights.mpg

[Elspode]

I play that map quite a lot myself...pretty impressive performance, Dave (I was particularly impressed with the on-the-bounce rail shot against the target on the extreme opposite bounce - a close second was the rocket shot on the cross-jumping target above the central platform).

Pretty good shooting, Dave. I'd still like to give you a run, but it couldn't be on my machine at home...it is too laggy, even on a hot connection. I would expect to get my ass waxed either way, though, based on the vid.

Well... on that map in particular, I am (not to toot my own horn) one of the top five players in the world. Yes, we have had tournaments for <b>just that map</b> and I've traditionally done very well on it. It comes from having played it for an average of, I'd guess, three hours a day for the past three and a half years. I'm not as good on other maps as far as movement and map knowledge, but my aim is about the same all around.

That rocket shot is one of the hardest to hit in the game, in my opinion. It's one of my favorite shots, except for the time I put 3 grenades into a guy in the air on pro-q3dm6 (the middle bouncepad - one as he came up, one as he was in the air above and in front of me, and the final killing shot as he fell to the ground below. I have the demo, I'll make a movie of it some time).

If you want, we can play on a server that's very close to you. I am stupidly ping dependant (I had really fast DSL and usually would ping sub-30 to most east-coast servers, meaning that I had big trouble playing with a ping greater than, oh, say, 40), so it would probably be more fair, what with both of our shitty pings.

[Elspode]

I could muster a decent ping, but not *that* decent. I seem to be able to get the low 100's pretty consistently from home, and comparable from work, though.

My machine at home is just a bit on the slow side to really run Q3A as well as it needs to be run to be a hot player. Still and all, I couldn't keep up with you based on what I see in that vid. Those were some *awesome* shots, and if you make them with any regularity, you'd eat my lunch and hand me back the empty bag.

I think the most telling factor about your skill level is the fact that you have such videos featuring your greatest hits at all..

A'ight, this is really stupid but... I make videos because there is a dorky crowd of fanboys around the Space CTF/trickjumping scene, and since I'm a visible character on both of those fronts, I have requests to make videos and whatnot. So I record *every* game that I play, and every once in a while I'll show someone the demo. What usually happens is that I get stuck in a 1v1 against someone on Space CTF and I have five or six spectators talking like idiots in messagemode1. "nice!" and stuff, but it's distracting. So anyway, some people don't want to watch a whole demo but just want to see some good shots. That video was for that purpose.

I do hit the shots with regularity, which is one of the things that puts me near the top on Space CTF. The first two shots - a rail coming up the jump and then an air rocket in the same area - were from the same game, recorded maybe two minutes apart. The continuous demo of the 2 rocket/rail combos (across the middle and then from up high) was obviously continuous, and I cut out a bit at the end where I air rocketed him twice in a row when he bounced up at me as I was grabbing his flag. My new specialty is machine gunning people all over the damn place, which is what you see in the last one - I had tracked him all the way from the mega up to the rail, so much so that, as you can see, he didn't have the air to get to the rail, and I had killed him before he landed anyway. The victim was cypH, another very well known player in the Space CTF community.

What it really all comes down to is practice. I've played Quake probably an average of four hours every day for the last three and a half years, and Space was <b>all</b> I played for the first year - and about eight hours a day, since I was unemployed and out of school.

You might be interested in some demos if you like seeing cool stuff. Here are a few trickjumps that are relatively difficult.

http://www.metastudios.com/quake/demos/walk.dm_67
http://www.metastudios.com/quake/demos/torpedo.dm_67
http://www.metastudios.com/quake/demos/drj2rail.dm_67

[Undertoad]

Ghost Recon I could host easily, and it plays OK on a P2-500 class machine with 3D on the level of geforce 2s. (I think it uses the Half-Life engine?)

Ghost Recon is a military first-person shooter. It's more realism-oriented than other FPS type games, in that if you get shot once you will usually die. Most of the time you don't hear the shot that killed you, although you may get the warning of hearing rounds chunk into the dirt or cement near your location. There are no "Medi-PAKs" or other arcade-like devices. It's all about angles, strategy, weapon choice. Half of the strategy is learning how not to die, which includes learning how to move around and use cover without being seen. If you charge into the action, as you do in other FPSes, you will be shot.

The "plot" is that you are a member of an elite special forces/navy seal type squad, doing things like stopping guerillas from blowing up refineries in northeast Africa.

Pros: it's a good game for newbs and non-newbs, because even though the new player may die faster, they are still useful, and will still enjoy it.

The game has transitioned into its mid-life, which means that the original game and its two "mission packs" are now combined into one single box.

Cons: Playing against each other does require a minimum number of players in order to be fun, because 3 on 3 on a large map means you spend too much time searching for the enemy. Co-op mode would be the rule for us.