snagged that 6555 like a champ ~ though I forget what the significance of that number may be in hocus pocus terms 

Number of hookers your father had to fuck to get you. 

I've always been curious how Quake 1 plays 11khz wavs just fine, but if played in an audio editor or app, the quality is obviously degraded. I know why it's degraded, but I don't know how Q1 "does it". Anyone know? 

in Fayette-Nam at the time, he probably did them all. 

Some of the .WAV files inside Quake are actually recorded as 22 Khz. The engine automatically resamples all of them to 11 Khz. 

But I'm still curious how 11 Khz sounds good in-game as opposed to not in-game. 

 

crate icon closest we have to a heart 

This is one of the funniest things I have ever read:

http://www.efn.org/~dredmond/PP5.html

This guy is trying to paint Half-Life as a "metaphor for neoliberal market-dominated globalization." I think. Some highlights:

The rise of the 3D game played a key role in the emergence of the information commons. While film and TV productions require comparatively expensive set designs, production crews and distribution channels, videogames could be produced by small groups of programmers, and played on inexpensive console systems and handheld devices. The advent of the Web in the early 1990s spawned multinational gaming communities, wherein fans, designers and programmers from across the planet could meet, play online, and exchange game-related media and news. Videogames very quickly became a privileged site where multinational cultural forms could touch base with new types of multinational politics � everything from the anti-Maastricht mobilizations which swept the European Union to the pro-democracy struggles of the East Asian region.

I mustn't have noticed that happen. When do I get to touch base with Cambodian nationals?

By contrast, actual theme music is deployed sparingly, thereby maximizing its impact. These are often conjoined to scripted events, e.g. the running bass line triggered when players don their power-vest for the first time, the exhilarating thrash metal music during the player�s first battle with the military death squads, or the guitar feedback pulse played when obtaining the plasma rifle. Most impressive of all is the prelude to the cliff battle of Surface Tension, when the roar of a passing military jet accedes to a low bass pulse, then a metallic drum-and-brush rhythm, with very light feedback. This reprises Valve�s opening theme music, which consists of a minor 3rd and another minor 3rd, a half-step below the first � an unmistakable music reference to the sonic palette of late 1990s hip hop (e.g. Kool Keith�s 1996 Dr. Octagon album).

One of the most entertaining scripted events in Half Life occurs when the player-character dies and must start over from a saved game. During the death-sequence, players literally watch their character�s skull roll across their field of vision: one eye is still in the socket, which could either be the ironic reprise of HAL�s disembodied gaze in Kubrick�s 2001, or the Information Age update of the medieval memento mori, depending on one�s morbidity level. This is the comic parody of death, a computerized gallows humor in the grand tradition of James Whale�s Frankenstein (1931) or Sam Raimi�s Evil Dead (1981).

What the fuck game was this guy playing?

Id�s quotation of video forms is perhaps the most interesting story of all. Id�s action games fused the visceral kinetic energies of the 1970s horror and Hong Kong films with the registers of the 1980s sci-fi blockbuster (e.g. the audacious action sequences of James Cameron�s 1986 Aliens, without question the cinematic highwater mark of Anglo-American neo-conservativism). But where Aliens exorcised the grisly reality of corporate neocolonialism by means of a reactionary biologism � the monstrous hunger of the aliens for human bodies � id biologized the technologies of neocolonialism.

This has to be a joke, or else this guy is masturbating all over himself as he writes this. I was guessing that his paper was overdue because he played Half Life all weekend, but according to his index site he is, in fact, a teacher of this nonsense.

The sample in question is a glowing crystal extracted from Xen, but what is striking about the ensuing catastrophe is the displacement of the generic science-fiction trope of the mysterious alien element or technology by a threatening hypermobility � specifically, the translucent green teleportation nodes of the Xen aliens. Matter is displaced by mobility, in a manner which irresistible recalls the hegemonic fiction of the neoliberal era � the utopia of a weightless, frictionless, and bodiless information economy. The reality was that the information economy was economically profitless, socially polarizing, and deeply destructive to the bodies of consumers and workers, as Doug Henwood�s magisterial After the New Economy documents in devastating detail.

Aliens teleport from another dimension, and voila, it's a utopian information economy. Brilliant! 

There is a similar moment of qualitative transformation in Half Life, and that is the counter-mobilization of the videogame culture against post-Cold War neoliberalism. The most characteristic form this takes in the 3D action genre is, of course, the spectacular production and consumption of informatic bodies � something which includes, but is by no means limited to, onscreen violence. The informatic body is a work-process. It anchors the game-play in the same way that the complex editing techniques of the martial arts thriller anchors the canonic Hong Kong action films, ranging from Robert Clouse�s Enter the Dragon (1973) to John Woo�s Hard Boiled (1989). What separates the informatic body from its social antipode, the information capitalist or silicon billionaire, is the fact that game-players must actively construct that body, by exploring and mapping the game-world, acquiring tools and strategies, and mastering the ability to operate in 3D space. At its outer limit, the informatic body turns into a cipher of the informatic laborer: that is to say, the patient, laborious acquisition of high-technology or service sector skills.

I have no idea. But, brilliant!


Even better is the next chapter of this epic. He spends most of the thing raving about how the single player works of Niel Manke redefined the genre.

http://www.efn.org/~dredmond/PP6.html

The third Coconut Monkey adventure, Saving Private Monkey (the title refers to Spielberg�s medium-grade war drama, Saving Private Ryan) is simply outstanding. After being transported back in time to the Normandy landing, Coconut Monkey must fight through hordes of Nazis in order to return to the present.

Holy mother of fuck what? Spielberg�s medium-grade war drama?

I can't read this anymore. Some else plunge in for me and post some highlights, my eyes hurt. There's seven whole chapters. 

that is all. 

but his stuff is decent. Its not great like all reviews seem to praise it as but it's still decent stuff. 

Don't touch that stuff. It's dirty. 

Hehe, nice find :) Gee, he sure does like that "neo" word - do you think he's a big Matrix fan? 

Manke's Quake stuff is dated now, especially his early work. His later Quake level/mods weren't bad at all. Go play Star Ship again - that was cool :)

http://www.quaketerminus.com/addon.htm
(at the bottom)

I can't see why anybody would knock Neil. I've had a couple of chats with him over the years, and he always come across as a nice guy. Never went pro despite offers from the industry. If he has produced loads of free playable mods that extend the life of people's games, that's a good thing right?

Anyhoo, looks like he might be doing something for HL2 next year according to his website.

http://www.planethalflife.com/manke/ 

http://bigjim.org/slime.html 

Though it isn't brilliant. Frank Miller is brilliant. That guy just talks too much, and he is obviously gunning for some kind of tax subsidized grant with all of those neo-s and Marxoid phrases he uses. 

http://tartarus.uwa.edu.au/~wedgey/slime1/

This one is the daddy.
I can get to the psycho slime (level 4) but ive never beaten that guy. If you can, kudos! 

Whilst adding custom ambient sounds to my Q1SP, I've noticed how ridicuously limited is FitzQuake when it comes to sound files. I had a 71kb 11kz 8bit mono .WAV file and it worked just fine in Darkplaces. I tried loading the map in FitzQuake and the .WAV refused to load. I cut it down to 49kb and it STILL refused to load in FitzQuake whilst working in Darkplaces. C'mon? What is this? 

I just skimmed most of it. The guy has some interesting ideas, but, yeah, he's masturbating furiously (and looking for great significance in every random pattern of splattering sperm).

The price Half Life pays for this narrative advance is, to be sure, the extinction of the categories of Cold War allegory. This is most evident in the final Xen levels, which lack the soldier-versus-alien firefights of the Black Mesa sequences, and temporarily regresses back to the mainstream videogame culture of the mid-1990s. Valve�s designers tried heroically to compensate for this deficiency with extravagant alien worlds and memorable boss-level opponents, with mixed results. The first, Gonarch, is a giant spider-like creature whose rotund body quivers beneath an armored carapace � the postmodern update of J.R.R. Tolkien�s lurid Shelob. The last is Nihilanth, whose resemblance to a giant, mummified infant earned it the unofficial sobriquet of �the big baby.� �For even Baal/feared children,� wrote Brecht in his Expressionist classic, and the contrast between the Nihilanth�s mechanical intestines, a combination of steel girders and rusty machinery, and the fleshy, womb-like enclosure of the Nihilanth�s lair, does recall the Expressionist science fiction thriller. When the creature is finally defeated, however, its head peels open to reveal a giant, malevolent brain, a conventional reference to the mad computers and ruthless cyborgs of 1970s science fiction.

How much you wanna bet that a couple of jerk-offs were sitting around trying to come up with a final boss, and some commercial about baby wipes or something came on, and one of them said, "Hay how about a big-ass baby? That would be cool."

I think that line is probably much closer to reality than, "Gee, how can we combine Brecht's expressionistic classicism with subtle references to some of the themes from our much-beloved '70s science fiction? If we could manage that, we just might have something!" 

lol. nail. head. hit. 

according to the sampling rate and bitrate, the sound should load. something else is the problem. do you get any messages about the sound in quake? have you tried loading the sound in glquake? 

2 shots of quake IV overe here:
http://gamesdomain.yahoo.com/feature/57067
Not sure what to make of it. Very doom3. (which i guess is to be expected) 

first shot is old, second is new.

those raven guys sure are doing a bangup job, eh? ;D 

I'm more interested in XMen 2 personally... to compare the suck-levels of both games!!!!! :D