I posted in general abuse the other day about my new tf2 server*. It now has sourcemod running on it, so you can vote for maps and whatnot. It's set up for 8v8 atm, i still have to see how the server it's running on handles the load.

*the ip is 208.111.39.111. 

I'd be up for some #tf TF2, server added to favorites. 

Alright, we'll have to figure out when a good time.to play is.


On another note, I bought monday night combat, garry's mod, greed corp, and dead space yesterday. 

Oi, let's have some quality duels again. 

We have a tf2 server up. C'mon #tf TF2!


But if we don't have enough people I'll QuakeLIVE with you. 

I'll be available on tuesdays at 21:00 EST for tf2. Other days there's no gaurantee I'll be able to play. If i'm on and anyone wants to play, just invite me and head over to where ever you are.

playing right now, btw. 

pretty good game but the strong thematic concept actually made it a bit repetitive in terms of both gameplay and visuals after a while.

Was wishing for cooler set piece designs and different enemies after about 2/3 of the way through. 

Only just realized how many improperly aligned textures the maps have, floor trims in particular. Yeah, it sounds aspie, but still pretty lame how they don't even care for keeping a constant level of visual quality which wouldn't have been hard to maintain. The former custom maps are affected in particular. Sure, blah, gameplay++...
Also, they ported many arenas from ra3map1 - except for the best one of the map. I never understood why that whole map was so popular after all. Probably because most players were too lazy or dumb (no, "pro") to switch. Some of the later maps were much better. 

So what's the 'best' doom src port? I've seen some with silly things like md2/3 support, but are there any that stay 'true' to doom? Sorry if I'm being too vague. 

prboom/glboom are very faithful.

If you want a crosshair, mouselook, auto-run etc, use zdoom or gzdoom.

jdoom can be stripped of all that model/texture junk but it can't run larger maps from stuff like Speed of Doom or Plutonia 2.

I use zdoom myself, and prboom for viewing demos :) 

i use zdoom. it can be set to look exactly like the original but at the same time giving you proper mouse look and with tons of engine extensions. it's also very popular so almost all custom maps that have extra extensions are either designed for zdoom or have been fixed up to run in it. 

I use zdoom when I play Doom engine games. Also, JDuke I think it's called if you have a hankering for Duke3D updated engine. 

Yeah zdoom is great at keeping the old look and feel but adding some nice creature comforts :) 

the nice thing about zdoom is it plays other games too: heretic and hexen as well as strife. 

Though in some respect it's really the DP of Doom. And there're debates on how "faithful" and how good a standard port it is (just like, or even more so than with DP). It has a few compatibility issues/differences which alter the game experience in some cases, like infinitely tall actors (or rather the lack thereof) and other things.

I guess it's okay to use as long as a map's text file doesn't explicitly state it as incompatible. 

i was just agreeing with zwiffle. :) 

about zdoom vs DP...

when i started thinking about it, i couldn't really explain why i prefer zdoom over more faithful doom ports and why i prefer fitzquake over DP. 

Have you played much of Strife Necros? I completed it a while back. It's got a weird proto-Deus Ex feel to me :p

Technically jDoom plays Hexen and Heretic too. In fact I believe the guy originally made the engine for heretic. 

i totally loved strife when it first came out. it had a lot of depth for that era. a good story and consistent quality throughout. it still was easy to get lost as almost all games were in that day, though.

still, it's one of the games i go back to every once in a while. i still like it. :) 

Yeah I'll probably play it again, I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it, even though it is so primitive. The main thing I remember is the first town having that nice 'you're an outcast watch what you do' vibe, and then somewhat later on when you find that Robot libuary thing. The sound in that room is awesome :D

I also enjoyed the limit stealth stuff, wish it was more developed :E 

I use prboom, it has mouse look and openGL rendering by the way. Nice fast simple port with a lot of optional funkiness. ZDoom felt too sluggish to me. Tries to be everything all at once.

There are good Hexen and Heretic ports here:

http://hhexen.sourceforge.net/

Awesome 33kHz sound pack for Doom:

http://perkristian.net/game_doom-sfx.shtml 

Bioshock - It didn't sit well with me in the beginning, especially the combat. Grew on me though.

Very well designed game, I enjoy this type of deep game, but I still think that the combat suffered. There are some good enemies like the spider splicers, but the weapons - core of any FPS - just feel underpowered / not satisfying to use in the end. I like the tommy gun though.

And Bioshock is a pretty standard corridor shooter FPS when it comes down to it, rather comparable to Doom 3 in fact, and the layouts aren't really that innovative. Still, it is OK as a corridor shooter, gameplay wise. I like the whole random crap they added to it, like vending machines, security bots and the plasmids, of which I ended up using only a few (Incinerate tends to get the job done vs splicers).

I wish it had a convincing shotgun though. There is a lack of ammo as well that must be compensated for by using plasmids (again Incinerate burns splicer health away quickly). I underused plasmids in the beginning and thus had a pretty hard time.

More varied enemies later on would have been nice, instead they just really ramped up the health of the common splicer to the point where they just wouldn't die unless you constantly used napalm etc. on them.

Underwhelmed by the whole Big Daddy / Little Sister thing. I rescued all of them, golden boy that I am. :-/

It looks like I have to play BS 2 now.

------

Yesterday I also finished Crysis:

Technically awesome game, as everybody and their dog knows, fantastic jungle environments, awesome alien ship zero-G environment, crappy final level that is an aircraft carrier where you're constantly ordered to go from A to B and back pointlessly.

Gameplay wise...

I loved Far Cry. FC is really without a doubt a motherfucker of an FPS game. It is half jungle island, and half doomlike indoor bunker shooting. With monsters, I might add.

Now here they took Far Cry, removed the bunker indoor aspect, changed the monsters to aliens, and gave the player a "nanosuit" that turns you invisible etc. so it gets a lot easier to sneak up on people than it was in FC. That's really the main thing the suit does, although there is a strength mode so developers can toss idiotic little challenges at you, and a speed mode. Golly.

Whereas the protagonist of Far Cry took an anarchistic "Die Hard" underdog approach to the game, in Crysis you're a US special forces guy in a special forces scifi suit and among a hitech scifi war of the US against the North Koreans, obviously. Crysis takes itself a lot more seriously than Far Cry did. It is much more of a scifi war simulation.

It's somewhat stale, even though they pile on tanks and aircraft for you to drive (the latter is not optional, and sucks balls).

Then the game starts to shine when the aliens are introduced. Their lair is an awesome experience, and the bastards are fun to fight, so for a moment it turns into more of a cool shooter game instead of a predator headshot fest - but sadly, it's over too soon. There's just one level where you really get to fight a lot of aliens - not counting the final carrier level, which is just prescripted stalinist level design nonsense that has you running around like a lab rat pressing buttons.

So, the game shines in certain moments, but sadly it's not allowed to go down that route. Killing aliens with a shotgun was the most fun I had in Crysis - only time I used that weapon, too. Kinda sad, except for the legions of console kids who love headshotting people while cloaked - more power to them.

Awfully cliched writing and voice acting btw (military squad antics).

I much preferred the anarchistic underdog approach of Far Cry to the routined warfare of Crysis. It looks sooooo pretty though. 

http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=4964.0

is quite awesome, but annoying after a while :D 

I found I pretty much stuck to wrench + electric bolt for most the game except where enemies were immune to lightning and Big Daddies. For the latter, I almost exclusively used grenades and heat seeking RPGs.

So yeah, I also found that the game did not encourage using of different weapons/plasmid combos.

What did you think of the design gb? Like I said above, very strong conceptually but like the gameplay, it did get repetitive because of that strong concept. 

Because I used all kinds of different ammo and weapsons in bioshock, even more so in bioshock 2.