Did 3D Graphics Kill the Adventure Genre? 02:17 pm - Robert 'Apache' Howarth - Games: Adventure (8 comments)
That's what Tim Schafer says in this month's The State of Adventure Gaming newseletter which reprints some comments from CGM:

"Well, really, I would say graphics killed adventure games. The second we switched from text to graphic adventures, their days were numbered. When you're playing a text adventure game, the most amazing worlds and actions are possible, because the budget is always the same. Doesn't matter what the worlds are. But as soon as you have graphics, then they have to get better and better until it's just not economically possible to do it anymore. [...]

But then when graphics got involved - oh, here I go again - you suddenly couldn't do anything, you could only do a few things. And so adventures started to get more and more beautiful, but more and more limiting. The interesting thing to me is, even in Grand Theft Auto III, you can really only do a handful of things, what is it people say they love about those games? The freedom! "You can do anything!" they say."

Thanks Evil Avatar.

Top 25 PC Games Being Played Right Now 02:00 pm - Robert 'Apache' Howarth - Games: General News (4 comments)
As seen on GameSpy:

1. Half Life 38862 servers, 102873 players
2. Half Life 2 13217 servers, 50688 players
3. Call of Duty 6447 servers, 16888 players
4. Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory 3096 servers, 10755 players
5. Americas Army: Special Forces 2035 servers, 9217 players
6. Unreal Tournament 2004 3219 servers, 8530 players
7. Battlefield 1942 2713 servers, 7872 players
8. Neverwinter Nights 1526 servers, 6891 players
9. Medal of Honor Allied Assault 2617 servers, 6053 players
10. Medal of Honor: Allied Assault Spearhead 1482 servers, 4755 players
11. Soldier of Fortune 2 1701 servers, 4615 players
12. Quake 3: Arena 2385 servers, 4521 players
13. Unreal Tournament 2573 servers, 3753 players
14. Battlefield: Vietnam 1412 servers, 3677 players
15. Halo: Combat Evolved 794 servers, 2779 players
16. Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy 638 servers, 1750 players
17. Vietcong 449 servers, 1457 players
18. Quake II 611 servers, 784 players
19. Halo Demo 154 servers, 644 players
20. Tribes 2 143 servers, 616 players
21. Operation Flashpoint: Resistance 278 servers, 572 players
22. Unreal Tournament 2003 192 servers, 551 players
23. Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast 258 servers, 539 players
24. Starsiege TRIBES 220 servers, 474 players
25. Star Wars: Battlefront (PC) 118 servers, 444 players

In Other News... 01:28 pm - Robert 'Apache' Howarth - In-House: In Other News... (21 comments)
Happy Easter, mofos. If anyone has any great new poll ideas for this week, feel free to email them in or post 'em in the comments. It's great to see the post-apocalyptic genre isn't quite dead yet. With Flagship's new game and Betheda's new Fallout, it could be coming back in a big way. Non-massively multiplayer RPGS in general have been a dead scene on the PC for a couple years now as well; perhaps this could be the spark that ignites interest in them once again. Today's Easter inspired question is:

What genre of games would you most like to see be resurrected?

I used to love those arcade hack/n/slash side scrollers like Golden Axe. :)

Update: And the first details are in, as Groovalicious Games posted some information (no scans) from the article. Here are a few points of interest:

• PC Gamer describes the game as Diablo played from a first person perspective and set in a post-apocalyptic London.
• Roper consders the game to be an RPG. His arguments: combat is entirely stat based, not twitch based. Hits, misses, and damage will depend on the stats of your character and their weapons; and ranged weapons cast spells (they're actually being referred to as "spell delivery systems").
• The game is set five years after a war against demons has already been lost. London is depicted as a burnt out shell of itself. The demons are in the process of "hellaforming" earth to make it more suitable for their kind. A handful of humans have survived.
• A third person view will probably exist, for melee fighting and whatnot. There will also be a third person "vanity mode" so you can view your character. Multiplayer will exist and support 16 to 32 players. Co-op gameplay will be emphasized, but deathmatch is a possibility. Roper says you will not be able to play as a demon.

In Other News... 12:30 am - Robert 'Apache' Howarth - In-House: In Other News... (32 comments)
Happy Easter weekend and all that jazz. Things are slow; people are doing their holiday thang, so it's a good time to talk about my favorite subject: Dark Age of Camelot.

With the decrease of active players and introduction of larger realm vs realm (Dark Age of Camelot has three sides which fight against each other, Albion/Hibernia/Midgard) zones, Mythic has merged smallers servers togethers forming clusters. Even though you can travel between servers and do other stuff like XP and quest, each server still retains its own little identity. What they do share, are the zones that the realms battle in. Most notably, New Frontiers, Darkness Falls and Passage of Conflict.

While the clustering was a great success in making the pvp side of the game active again, it has lead to the population balance being even more out of wack than they already were before the merging took place. Albion, or England is the most populated realm in Dark Age of Camelot. Why? Just look at the name of the game: Dark Age of Camelot. Camelot is the capital city of Albion, and the average person who creates a character wants to be a knight of the round table. World of WarCraft's Alliance faction suffers the same thing. People join factions that they are most familiar with, and there's nothing wrong with that (it's human nature). The other realms: Hibernia (Ireland) and Midgard (Vikings) are the second and third realms in the game, and are the least populated, which in turn makes them overrun by the Albion zerg that gobbles up all their keeps and captures their relics, which is the end-game of DAoC.

Pretty much all the servers are jam packed with Albs; the only way to correct this imbalance is to make the Hibernian and Midgard classes stronger, enabling them to fight against the greater odds. There really is no long term solution here as people will tend to shift sides and join whatever realm they percieve the best to be, but by actively balancing the classes and attracting players to whichever realm needs the most help, Mythic can go a long way in making the game more fun for everyone.

Today's question is: What, if any, massively multiplayer game do you play?