To be specific, you need a card that supports pixel shaders 

Well I kinda like it, its still deus ex below all the graphical craziness.

The gameplay is actually quite good I thought, the only things I didn't like were the performance (obviously) and damn retina hud ( I like to see where Im going kthx!) and the god awful inventory management (thank the xbox for that no doubt).

If you can live with these flaws, then I bet the full game will be great. I'll be buying it. 

Just sent two SM58 maps your way. Right on the deadline... 

http://icculus.org/twilight/darkplaces/

In the race of the SuperBuild Quakes Dark Places pulls ahead of the competition, rivals Tenebrae (beautifully lit but every thing looks melted)and Telejano (eye candy so gorgeous, a Scag spitting poisonous luggies in your face becomes an aestheticaly pleasing experience) this past week. Lord Havoc released a version on the 18th that if you check through the release notes you'll notice it includes the fact the engine now runs the Quake 3 format -- I tested it in Quake 3 maps for several factors -- Hugeness, model polycounts, patch (curved meshes) rendering, and in all my maps it performed better than Q3 Arena.

BTW, I'm not in any way affiliated with the Dark Places team aside from my plans to release maps specific for the engine in the near future. I don't know the guy, and he does not even bother to answer my e-mails (no offense though, my questions could have very well been stupid ones). 

superfast movement in darkplaces? is it just me? it seems like you run faster than in normal quake. 

Looks like everyone doing their own expansion project is it. What does a Jan 2nd deadline sound like to you guys? Keep in mind that Jan 3rd the Turtlemap 3 event begins. We can make Janurary one hell of a busy month for mappery! 

I am refering to expanding/cleaning up speedmaps from the last few week's Megatheme, unless that wasn't clear. 

If you get Spike TV in your area, they're having the First Annual Video Game Awards on December 4th. This will probably be the only award show I watch ;) Anyways, you can vote for your faves here: http://www.spiketv.com/ 

this was a good year for shitty games. I voted Vice City for damn near everything. 

http://teamshambler.telefragged.com/ <<< THOUGHTS on unreal2

You lot moaned so I didn't have to =). 

Did you get my e-mail? 

GTA and GTA: vice city are abominations that should never have existed in the first place. 

Yeah, well detailed environments, open ended gameplay, and innovative missions are for losers. 

what about GTA2 or GTA3? 

GTA 3 was a bit crap and didn't run very well on many comps but Vice City was excellent. Wasn't it voted game of the year or something good anyway? 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3248461.stm 

metlslime:
never played gta2 or gta3.

pushplay, gib et al:
just becuase something is marketed, media-whored ad infinitum and given menaningless back slapping industry awards in the oh so wonderful media of our current popular culture does not make it good.

pushplay your post sounds exactly like a million, anonymous, marketing departments quotes.

im in a combative, grouchy mood today, can you tell? :)
it wont last long though. 

one, thought not the only reason i despise the whole GTA phenoma is that i am strongly opposed to:

meaningless, gratitous realistic violence in videogames, unbounded by any moral or ethical constraints or guidelines.

although that of course is a well known and completely different debate. 

when you say "GTA" you do mean the original, 2D, sprite-based, and very non-realistic gane, and not GTA3, the 3D, polygon-based, recent game whose engine was used for GTA: vice city, right? 

GTA3, the 3D, polygon-based, recent game whose engine was used for GTA: vice city. 

just becuase something is marketed, media-whored ad infinitum and given menaningless back slapping industry awards in the oh so wonderful media of our current popular culture does not make it good.

No, the fact that it's fucking good fun makes it good. YMMV, though. And pointless violence is possible, not required (though sometimes rewarded). 

given your opinion of the content of the game, your arguments sound as false as the mass marketing etc. It seems like you are bashing it simply because of the stuff it contains rather than the quality of the game itself.

I mean someone who doesnt like mindless violence at all could draw a similar argument against quake and any other FPS, regardless to the quality of the games themselves. 

What's important is: was I wrong on any of those counts?

You don't have to like GTA3, but if you're saying it's an abomination then you're taking a pretty strong stance there. A stance I would reserve for a rarified group including CS and... uh... no, just CS. 

I think meaningless, gratuitous violenece is great! ANARCHY!!! 

I respect your opinion and I would be inclined to agree with you, except for all the fun I actually had playing the game. There was a moment in the game where I had wrecked the cop cruiser I stole and as I crawled out, four men in blue tried to rush me. Just then the car exploded, taking us all out. Quite thrilling actually; kind of gave me that Young Guns II feeling, 'I'm going down in a blaze of glory.'

I see the crime oriented video games as being no different than mafia movies -- they go back a long way, and movies like the Petrafied Forest made in the 30's are as violent and cynical as any game we have today.

I watch mobster movies, and play violent games, but I could not kill or hurt anyone except in a moment of self-defense. Also, I am a polite, Natural Law abiding citizen and quite typical of the type of person who plays games, reads books, and watches movies.

Since the topic of violence has by its nature political overtones, I should add that instead of blaming violence on artistic preoccupations, books, comic books, movies, and games, we should look at the root causes of violence in our society, and that root cause is the existence of the Welfare State.

From the Welfare State a generation of lower working class Americans learned not to respect the property of others, and to focus entirely on day to day subsistance and a meager but destructive form materialism instead defering their day to day gratifications and saving towards bettering themselves.

High Crime rates did not exist significantly in America until the passing of Lyndon Baines Johnson's Great Society legislation which changed everything towards the worse for America's lower classes.