How lovely, how sad.
N e w s o f t h e D a y
31 January 2000
Slayfest addendum
Somehow I forgot to thank my new kick ass wife, who spent just about every Saturday night at home with me for a year so I could run those silly events,.and who has always put up with my endless bitching and moaning without ever spitting a single molecule of it back at me where it probably belonged. You'll probably never read this, but thank you just the same. :)
And OneIFreak, jimbobwey, GiGaKiLLeR, and especially Harloch and Mackie and hed1 for the news. You guys rock.
I must back up what Harloch said about Xalimar. The man may be impossible to reach under normal circumstances, but when we really needed him he was there in a flash. Just one of the many reasons I consider SSX to be the best server bank of all time.
Please take note
I realize that SSCE Resistance SVS is very, very screwed up right now. The zone is having some truly anomalous problems which I haven't had time to properly troubleshoot, and because of them the zone is essentially unplayable right now, plus I am unable for some reason to assign sysop powers to anyone including myself playing under another name. I appreciate that people, especially Black Lotus, have tried to play and did eventually alert me to the problem. I have simply been too busy lately to do anything about it, but this will change soon. I intend also to simplify the game some, and to have a traditional style map back up there instead of the goofy Extreme Games Arctos spiral 2fort thing that is in there right now. Just bear with me.
Counter-Strike
This mod just keeps getting better and better. The newest version has ironed out a ton of problems and two new game variants have just yesterday been promised for an upcoming version. One is rather like The Hunted for TeamFortress Classic except without all the silly rocket jumping. ;) The other sounds much more promising, with terrorists starting pinned and required to reach one of several pickup points for safety. To make things more exciting they'll have to decide between a fast break or a more roundabout path which will take them to an armory en route. The CS team released mapping information for these scenarios at the official Counter-Strike page for those interested.
In case anyone still doesn't know, Counter-Strike is a slow paced, team-intensive modification for Half-Life with all the quirkiness you might expect from HL but a level of professionalism and polish comparable to LMCTF or even TeamFortress Classic. It balances highly realistic tactical gameplay (including almost-realistic damage and weapons that actually exist in real life) with somewhat abstract game types and an interesting, effective buying system. It is also just damned cool.
It bears mentioning that one of the people behind Valve's intense support of this mod is Art Min, formerly of FireTeam. This game, from around two years back, never became very successful, and I personally didn't enjoy playing it, but I do remember dealing with Art Min, especially after I decided I wasn't being a good tested and wanted to hand over my beta account to a friend. He was the most receptive and on-top-of-things member of a dev team I have ever come into contact with, and it didn't surprise me for a second to find that he has become so instrumental here.
I still can't make myself play single player Half-Life. It just scares the shit out of me.
Space Junk
I think it was Mackie who mentioned me retiring from Subspace in a slightly more grim light than I had intended it to sound. The simple fact of the matter is I just can't find SS games anymore that capture that huge feel, and increasingly I find that massiveness to be a phantom pain that ruins what is actually fun about the game. I was in Star Warzone this afternoon and found myself oddly having fun and getting bored at the same time. It might have been that I hardly knew anyone in the zone, but then there in itself is a compelling reason to move on. I'm getting an urge lately to put a lot of work into the Space Junk section, so keep an eye out there. If anyone would like to help, give a buzz.
You missed the moon bee show damn you
Every Monday morning at, err . . . well, 4:00am Pacific, actually. Yeah. I'm serious though. Best program in the history of radio, and there is no conflict of interests there or anything when I say that. It's totally unbiased and objective. Bookmark this.
Typos
Too damn tired to proofread this. Sorry. :|
<Maduin> You see, though, I have this idea that Canadians and Americans
are exactly alike, except that you can make bacon out of Canadians.
The Last Dictator to the station crept
In tattered clothes, he lay down and wept
Shooks his fists at the world and hissed
"Is this it? Is this it?
My farewell delegation
These few trees, this station that is no station
That is left, that is mine
I could have saved you all
You gave me so little time"
GG
30 January 2000
Captain Harloch's Saturday Night Slayfest
R I P
6 February 1999 - 29 January 2000
End of an Era
With its 50th game running this weekend, Saturday Night Slayfest is officially retired. I no longer have the time or patience, it's become clear to me that the players no longer have the enthusiasm or temperament for the event, and 50 is a nice round number. Also, when you consider that there was no SNS on Christmas or New Years day, these 50 Slayfests amount to a year long series.
Slayfest started a year ago when I approached Captain Harloch about running his Star Warzone events in the SCF. I had become increasingly unhappy with poor turnout and lack of involvement in the TurfNight and Philosophy Club events there, and the War Zone vangels, content to play their game once every five months in their own zone, had overwhelmingly rejected my proposal that they instead play once a week in mine. (Karma, bitches.) Captain Harloch was quite pleased about the offer, because unbeknownst to me, the Dawn of the Dead event held in SCF over Halloween weekend had been his inspiration for the Star Warzone events in the first place. He got right to work on the first scenario, and combining his captive audiences in SWZ and Zetasquad with support from the Subspace news community (which at the time was very healthy), the first Slayfest kicked off with a massive game. I think we had nearly 80 people present that night.
The event was called Clockwork Chaos, and must have been the simplest and most popular regular game we ever did. Eight different teams, each confined to just one ship, in a giant, empty, octagonal arena. This wasn't so much fun if you were a Lancaster or one of the cloaking ships, but it was bigger than fairness. We were there representing our ships, dammit! Because even teams were forced, sooner or later everyone got stuck in a ship they didn't like. I like to think that the one time (at a later date) we were allowed to choose any ship we liked, more than half the arena ended up on the Leviathan team beause a certain mine repeller brought that ship back into vogue. ;) But think what you like.
Each week brought a new scenario, always thrown together in a crazed configging and mapping frenzy on the night before. A few weeks into the series, we settled into a format. I would help Harloch run a big scenario, then Harloch would run Braveheart, and for a while Captain Cohn would run some elimination games after that. These would be my inspiration for the elims I later ran during my own stint at Slayfest MC.
Braveheart was a mad dash down a long tube--everyone in the zone--usually leaving no survivors. We would slam into each other at the center, and everyone's framerate would drop to 0 fps. I'm not kidding when I say that. Just in case anyone tried to survive the mess, Harloch made it so that the first person to die was the winner.
In time, games were added to this, and the map collected more and more weird little arenas. A narrower tunnel, a grid, a giant X. Braveheart evolved into what became known as the Circus, and we'd spend upwards of five ours moving between the different game arenas and playing any number of game types in them.
I think this was when I started making the maps for these events. It really began with the Wormhole Surfing event, which started with a simple enough idea. The flags would spawn at center, surrounded by wormholes which would warp the flag carrier and his pursuers to an unknown space and possibly great vulnerability. I really liked this idea, and set about making what remains one of my favorite scenario maps. To get between the fortresses I placed in the corners, one either had to brave a long vulch tunnel or navigate through a giant structure at the center. Doing this required careful slingshotting and bouncing around the wormholes, and was fairly difficult (a least for me), especially if a fight broke out there. We did an unprecedented number of large scenarios like this one throughout the Winter and Spring of that year. The highlight might have been Harloch and Cuervo Muerte's amazing Micro Machine races, with all its crazy pencils and coins and lego blocks. These races lasted an incredibly long time but people kept coming back for more, for hours on end. I think Pikachu won all of them.
I did a few more of the scenario maps--the zombiesque Necronomicon probably being the best of them--but it was the Circus events that more and more went the way of true collaborations, and for a long time I was making small arenas specifically for the different weird little events that Harloch designed, organized, and ran. He kept adding more of them, and new suggestions came from the players, until there was a large catalogue of these games.
In late June, Harloch first became busy with school obligations, and then got very involved in Subspace Amateur League. This meant that very few member of his squad continued to come to the games, and the same went for other regulars from Star Warzone and Extreme Games. This was fine to a point, because by then it was clear that I didn't have the patience or thick skin required to run large games anyway. With the exception of some of the really big scenarios Harloch ran, this was perhaps the most enjoyable time in the series' history for me, because it meant I could run a lot of small games with simple objectives and fast action, with minimal waiting between matches.
For a few weeks I experimented with different styles, most notably one night when we ran Arctos' trademark Warball game--fully armed ships playing Powerball in much tighter spaces than Powerball was probably ever intended for. We played in his maps, we played in a 2fort that I'd made out of the giant spiral from old Chaos West. I made a map that looked like a giant throwing star and Pikapoo made a map that looked like an H.R. Giger painting. This was also when Khris Kruel first became a really essential part of Slayfest, starting with him patiently keeping score because I could not figure out the propet powerball settings. He would later become a pillar of Slayfest and the reason it ran so smoothly for so long. These Warball games were a lot of fun, but they weren't meant to last. Starting in early July, team elimination became the official Summer "light fare" for Slayfest.
This gave me an excuse to make a bunch of new maps, which is a nice thing. By the end of the Summer I had a cycle of four regular elimination arenas plus was using other people's stuff now and then when it seemed right for the game. With the whole disaster of Running Zone happening during that time and the disappointment of the War Zone revival, these elims were the only things that kept me involved in Subspace that Summer, and I kept them up for quite some time. In fact, they continued into early October, and the last of my eventual six elim arenas was actually only completed a week ago after languishing in a few prototype versions. If nothing else, it was good training for Hyperspace.
The one full blown scenario game we did during the Summer was a real fluke, because it went off perfectly, had a large turnout, and I actually had fun at it. The best and most complex map I'd ever made for the game had been cranked out in a fever-dream nine hours that day, and the action was like nothing I had seen in a long time. It was called Big Bloodbath, and it was the start of what I came to call the bloodbath rules elim, which dominated the remainder of the Summer elimination games. One life per player, each team with a Hunted-style "king" to protect, he powered up with a rabbit flag and thus a tempting offensive asset, all in a nonlinear map with lots of potential for deadly outflanking and narrow escapes.
Things reached a head in mid-October. If Slayfest had become the only reason I stayed in Subspace, Khris Kruel had become the only reason I kept Slayfest going. While it was me who designed and planned most of these events, it was often KK who ran them and it was nearly always KK who kept them running with minimal friction. In late October he announced that he would be leaving the internet. With him retiring, the staff becoming less and less active, and myself increasingly frustrated with the games, I replaced myself as MC with conspiracy theory just in time for my trip to Las Vegas.
The last game I ran in SCF for quite some time was Dawn of the Dead 2 on the weekend of Halloween. Although turnout was good and I enjoyed much of the game, the behavior of the players pretty much sealed my decision not to run Slayfest anymore. The next weekend I was going to be gone anyway, getting married and occasionally looking around Las Vegas for the Subspace Convention which I never did find. conspiracy theory's adoption of Slayfest meant that we had not missed a weekend since the event started in early February.
Then a funny thing happened. With conspiracy theory in charge, I actually gained back some of my enthusiasm. One of the incidents that triggered me handing over the reins was the total failure of a scenario that had been both adequately advertized and run smoothly. This had not happened before. Events had bombed, but usually there'd always been a clear reason for it. I'm not sure of the timeline, but the incident was a major part of me throwing in the towel.
I returned from my honeymoon having missed two reportedly dismal Slayfests. I realized that I had expected of conspiracy theory something that I had always resented having to do myself: both design the game and run it. Long before Slayfest was even an idea, one of the things I considered important to a healthy scenario scene was for the people who designed scenarios to be able to play in them. Likewise, I felt it was not a great idea for the person who had designed the scenario to have to deal with making sure they ran well. This philosophy never came to fruition in that era but was in my opinion an essential factor in the best of the early Slayfests.
Plus I was in a better mood. I had Sasha Vinni's autograph.
So I figured what the hell. I'd had my helping of cold turkey. What harm could it do to simply make scenarios for someone else to run? So I put together something fairly elaborate. We had the Subspace.Net propaganda machine on our side. We were a team. It was going to rock. Well, the same thing happened again. My theory, since I personally received no criticism on this one, is that no one really reads web pages anymore or cares what goes on in other zones. The scenario didn't suck, but about 12 people showed for it, so I found myself running elims that weekend and getting out of the scenario business yet again.
December came, and our propaganda machine had collapsed. I found myself slowly becoming the de facto fourth MC of Slayfest as conspiracy theory increasingly was involved in Infantry. After running two of these with little or no promotion save my own billing messages (for which I am NOT sorry, you jealous league-playing spunk eaters), it actually was returning to being a little bit fun again. The game needed a change, though. I didn't like the fact that I was running it once more, and it was becoming clear to me that the SCF was no longer a useful zone to Subspace, but had become kind of a sad little monument to SVS and to events in general. I decided then to transform the SCF into a test zone for Hyperspace and to move Slayfest into A Small Warzone. ASWZ had been suffering from a low player base in recent times, and it was as close to a sister zone as the SCF ever had.
The first weekend of this new venue--one week ago, that is--proved problematic. It was not going to be possible to change settings without kicking everyone off of the server. This meant that if we wanted to remove elimination mode, we either had to clear the arena or tell everyone to use ?scorereset on themselves. A lot of people lost their scores in the main arena because of this. That game was run by divine.216 and was quite a bit of fun, but my impression overall was that this would not work out in the end. This weekend, the problems caused by how the subgame is set up, plus general reactions to those problems (which would have barely been noticed a year ago) started me thinking that Slayfest's time had really passed in more ways than one. This was cemented by very immature behavior from a number of people who had been around for a long time--long enough to have run their own scenario instead of mine--and who really should have known better.
In my opinion, Subspace has continued a trend I saw growing a long time ago. I realize that this is an ugly opinion--it is not one I formed brashly--but as time passes, I believe a larger and larger percentage of players remain loyal to this game not because of its quality but because of the quality of their machine and its connection to the internet. The result is a whole lot of people who are bitter, immature, and lazy, and who don't care enough about online gaming enough to spend any money on it. I do not claim that this is true of everyone, but I cannot help but conclude that I see it growing, especially when it increasingly rears its head among players I thought I knew.
So to those of you who said that tonight's event killed Slayfest, feel free to consider yourselves right. Know, however, that this was your finest moment. Fifteen seconds of fame before an audience of maybe a hundred Minefield readers. You can take that to your grave, knowing that in life you DID make a difference. It is not in spite that I end the Slayfest series, but your kind certainly don't make the game an ounce more fun for anyone that tries to contribute something to it on occasion. Die soon and come back as someone willing to pull your own weight.
I want to thank the people who helped me all this time, especially those who stuck it out until the last. Khris Kruel, Capt Yummy, Pikapoo, mdK, i88gerbils, divine.216, DEATHMACHINE even though frankly he's an ass (at least he's a loyal ass), and anyone I've forgotten to mention who can't think of a reason why. And of course Mine GO BOOM and Xalimar, without whom we'd have been up a creek on many an occasion. I would also like to thank everyone who ever came to one of these events and contributed to other players' enjoyment of the game, even if it was just by being a good sport. I think a lot of you don't appreciate how fucking rare that is, and I wish you would more actively influence this game. We'd all be better off for it. Lastly, anyone who cared enough to read this entire history. Thank you.
This essentially ends my relationship with Subspace as well, although I'll make an effort not to retire from the game completely, at least not yet. Maybe it'll give me a bit more enthusiasm for the various zones I probably should spend more time in but don't. Meanwhile, I will be working on the Scenarios area of this page to give it some closure, and will be supplying the necessary files so that anyone wishing to run them can do so.
*arena Thanks for coming, see you all next week. %24
<Shackled> e's everything you want, e's everything you need
<Shackled> e's everything inside of you that you wish you could be
In the morning you go gunning for the man who stole your water,
and you fire till he is done in, but they catch you at the border.
And the mourners are all singin' as they drag you by your feet,
but the hangman isn't hangin' and they put you on the street.
N e w s o f t h e D a y
29 January 2000
Slayfest blurb
Have you ever wished you could live as a mutant in the radioactive sewers below a ruined city? Have you ever wanted to hunt your fellow human beings for food and clothing? Now you can! This weekend's Slayfest pits your hive of slime-oozing, eyeless, humanoid monsters against a wiley band of slack-jawed, hairy-chested, leather-clad marauders. If they skin your Queen there will be no plascenta to eat! You don't want that, do you?? Or, if you are into leather and chest hair, you can play as one of the marauders. "A Small Blastradius" starts at 10:00pm EST tonight in SSCX A Small Warzone.
(I'm going to go work on the map now.)
GiGaKiLLeR
I dunno if this is common knowledge, but Turf Zone's mapper laureate, who retired from Subspace mapping about half a year ago, has started designing levels for Quake III Arena and has a few of them near complete. To my knowledge none of them have been released but maybe he will let me see them when I have room to reinstall Q3A. ;)
Realism and Counter-Strike
This is rewritten from a letter I sent to someone that couldn't be bothered to either post it or respond intelligently. I thought I'd put it up here for the hell of it. Forgive me if the rewrite leaves some of it a bit awkward.
A few days ago, CS Nation posted a couple of rants on the topic of Counter-Strike's nature exclusively as a team game, and tossed out a blanket condemnation of those who use CS servers to "play deathmatch". Specifically, these rants concerned rushing, claiming that it is totally counter to the team aspect of Counter-Strike, and that furthermore it is an unrealistic act, especially for terrorists. The assumption here was that in a realistic situation the counter-terrorists would greatly outnumber the terrorists, and thus the terrorists ought to pretend going outside their hideout means instant death courtesy of a dozen different computer-controlled snipers.
While CS Nation made a good point about teamplay in these pieces--a point which is somewhat obvious but unfortunately needs to be restated constantly--the assumptions made about rushing are incorrect, and they runs totally counter to the actual nature of CS.
In a realistic situation, indeed there would be another team of counter-terrorists set up outside with snipers, surveillance equipment, and so forth. The last counter-terrorist alive would also be able to radio for a pickup, wait for reenforcements to arrive, and so forth. If we were playing Quake II no one would think of this, because Quake II is not a realistic game. Even traditional Half-Life doesn't get the players thinking: gee, can't I call up the FBI on that phone over there? Shouldn't I be able to set off the fire alarms? blow up a gas main? and so on.
It is precisely because of Counter-Strike's extreme realism, or at least its attempt at extreme realism, that it is much less natural for us to suspend disbelief. The more realistic a game is, the more its flaws stand out. Take Tribes as an example. This is quite possibly the most surreal game that is popular today. While it isn't exactly appropriate to think of its elements as "symbolic" of something else, it resembles a board game, or a classic arcade or Nintendo game such as Zelda, in that you accept the premise, scenario, setting, and visual effects as representative of something else, and suspend disbelief from there. I doubt anyone playing Tribes has ever thought to themselves, "I shot him right in the visor; his helmet shouldn't have protected him." But in Counter-Strike, it is a little irritating to shoot another player in the face and hear the bullet impact against Kevlar, only to watch that player keep firing on you.
Since there are so few such complaints about Half-Life (and a mature player would not make that complaint), it is only natural that instead of suspending disbelief by making excuses for the game, we take the game at its word in all aspects. Counter-Strike is already about extraordinary situations, and an assumption that goes through all of the scenarios is that for some reason neither side has any backup. In the end, it is assumed that the survivors will have all the time in the world to bomb the target or rescue the hostages. Perhaps the crisis is an embarrassing secret; perhaps no reenforcements can arrive for quite some time and the situation is too dire to wait. Is this how the world really works? I don't know, and unless you have top security clearance at the Pentagon neither do you. But it is certainly a long-accepted tradition of the action genre in fiction, in movies, and more recently in games. One can't rationally have a problem with the situations portrayed in Counter-Strike without also condemning the entire action genre.
Whatever the case, this makes things more interesting because, if you can accept that premise of limited time, limited resources, and a secret situation, the terrorists do stand to gain by risking a rush, and likewise the counter-terrorists might do well to wait and see if the terrorists might try such a tactic. Since neither team knows the other team's strategy, each must be more cautious, and this contributes to the spirit of non-recklessness that is why most of us play Counter-Strike instead of CTF or some other team game.
The problem, then, is not rushing or other "unrealistic" acts, but individual players acting recklessly without the support of their teammates. The problem is that Counter-Strike in theory is entirely a team game right down to the endgame, but in practice is is still to some degree a deathmatch. Say what you will about reckless rushing being unrealistic, but it wouldn't be so damned annoying if it never worked. The problem is that, for an LPB who knows how to exploit lag, it can. work. Newbies see this behavior, and sometimes see it succeed. A careful player is, after all, less fun to spectate.
The game's premise and level design can only do so much to enforce its ideals, and I would personally like to see the CS team at least experiment with realistic damage and an enforceable team hierarchy. In a realistic situation, a member of your team who behaved in that way would be fired if he were a counter-terrorist, and probably taken out back and shot if he were a terrorist. Obviously a situation where the team leaders can kick other players off of the server would be a little extreme (not to mention harmful to the game's reputation and fun factor), but I can see where a balance might be struck between realistic punishment and no consequence at all. For example, the team leader might assign subteams, and the leaders of each subteam might have the power to force a rogue player to sit out a match, to forfeit half his money until he shapes up, or to change teams.
This suggestion may sound like one that can't be implemented, but it is indeed the implementation that is an issue, not the principle, and some experimentation with rules and interface for these functions might well result in an efficient and intuitive system that doesn't lend itself to abuse and won't offend players who understand and love the game.
In that same spirit, I think more could be done to make players fear for their own lives in the game. As I said before, the main reason watching someone run in with guns blazing is that realistically he should go down in seconds, but he does not. I personally would like to see this tactic simply made impossible. In the early stages of the game, it should be made literally not possible for a one man army to inflict any damage whatsoever on a group of armed opponents who are entrenched. Likewise, I would like to see any hit at all kill him. Once a large firefight has broken out or the two teams have scattered naturally, it makes sense that such situations will arise innocently, and certainly in the endgame there is nothing more exciting than watching the match decided by one man's heroics. So once the conflict is in full effect, this bias should be dropped, but for the sake of CS's team spirit and overall fun factor, I think that for these Rambo style players to fail in their attempts without exception would teach them some humility, some caution, and the value of their own flesh and blood.
Likewise, however much enjoyment everyone is getting out of choosing between two dozen different weapons and then jumping around seeing which asshole can get four or five bullets into the other asshole first, let's be honest here. Kevlar may save your life, but it might not, and it will not turn you into the Heavy Weapons Guy. Realistically, any terrorist or counter-terrorist is going down once they are hit. We all watch too many action movies and probably most of us can stomach the idea that, when shot, the hero needs to go hide in a safe place--at least until he stops panting and grimacing--before he can fight again. I can accept that it's a game and that too much realism spoils the fun, but it also spoils the fun for people to abuse a lack of realism. I'd like for players to fear being hit once, by any weapon. Let the weapon used and the presence of Kevlar influence their chances of ever recovering from that first hit. And let's have two hits take you out of the game for good. To my mind, if we accept the notion that a person can take two bullets and still run around jumping, climbing ladders, and kicking ass, then we do not actually want realism. There are plenty of other games out there for people who want that.
Of course some of what I've said here is idealistic in theory, but it's not theory I'm after. What I want to see is a game very much like Counter-Strike, but a little less friendly to those who wish to play as though it were Quake. My suggestions are specific and extreme, and probably well off the mark, but I believe some experimentation along these lines would prove fruitful. In the meantime, it's best to just enjoy the game how it is and accept that some individuals are not going to take it seriously. If a person can't recognize Counter-Strike for what it is and respect it, then they certainly aren't going to read and consider philosophical debates on the topic.
<_ct> being a hooker is a regular pacific rim job eh?
Old black water, keep on rollin'
Mississippi moon, won't you keep on shinin' on me?
N e w s o f t h e D a y
21 January 2000
What's doing
People must have thought I had lost my mind. Sorry about that. The midi file is the Millennial Fair theme from Chrono Trigger. I had expected to update again before the 12th and take it down then. By the time the 12th rolled around I'd forgotten about it entirely. On that particular day my connection was hosed and I had to ask SuperFly to upload the page for me. For the same reason, I don't think I loaded the page until it was far too late. Ah well.
Chrono Trigger is on a level with the best console RPGs ever made, by the way. It might be the best I've ever played, at least, neck and neck with Final Fantasy IV, not that I've played a whole hell of a lot of them. Well, not that I've finished a lot of them, at least. Wonderful game with an epic quest, reckless disregard for everything we pretend to know about time travel, lots of likeable characters, and a variety of settings with unforgettable atmospheres aided by a beautiful soundtrack composed in part by Nobuo Uematsu. The rest of the music is actually better than his, for the most part. Yes, Subspace, I am a recovering RPG dork. Sue me. :) Perhaps most importantly, to many people at least, the game is neither overflowing with random encounters nor weighed down with boring, time-consuming scripted events. Combat involves a lot of cooperation between the different characters, and you probably won't too often find yourself lying with your head back holding down the fire button until you hear the battle end. Anyway, there's my miniature classic console game review for the month.
Subspace
Fuck me, I just accidentally deleted everything I wrote about Subspace. Which wasn't much at that point, so no harmn done. Later, I guess.
Tribes
The four or five of you who are interested in my ongoing love-hate relationship with Starsiege: Tribes, simultaneously the best and most disappointing multiplayer game ever made, and who endlessly reread my heart stopping tear-jerker memoirs involving same, probably missed my rhapsodic whining over at the shoe-in Best New Gaming Page of 1999, the feared and hated Map Vault. Oh yes, not only have I actually started playing the piece of shit again, I've given up everything else. Go figure.
As promised
Subspace. What can be said of Subspace. I have virtually retired from the game except for mapmaking and zone administration, which leaves me uninterested in 95% of the news that is posted (no offense) as well as incapable of posting any of my own. Obviously. There is some stuff going on, however, which is interesting at least to me, if only because it's mainly of my own devising.
For starters, after yet another dud weekend, Slayfest is burning bridges and moving to A Small Warzone, where it will, to whatever extent possible, become an ASWZ event. If I have anything to say about it this will represent more than just a change of venue for Slayfest. My first game will use ASWZ's trademark weird settings and at least one scenario is in the works by a well known zone personality. One benefit of this is we have the opportunity to play in some classic ASWZ settings and bases that have not made appearances for a long time. Oh, and I get to count the best zone sysops in the history of the world as Slayfest staff, now. Apart from them, the Slayfest staff now consists of myself, Capt Yummy, and divine216. For the record, conspiracy theory has not been "let go" or anything like that, he just doesn't really play Subspace anymore. ;)
This Saturday's SNS is the 49th, by the way. The 50th will be the event's year anniversary, since Christmas and New Years Day are supposedly less important than Subspace or something. (Whatever.)
The second map for Resistance SVS is very nearly complete, and I'm going to get back to finishing the first. The zone seems to have this fucked up tiny little cult following made up of people who never join the server at the same time as each other. At any rate, with quite a bit of stuff behind me now and the maps completed soon, I may be revving up this zone finally after over a month of little or no activity. If you are an old SVS fan and would like to help out, send me mail and we'll talk some.
Hyperspace
We're getting close the alpha test, if you believe some people. If you ask me, it is still four months away. ;) So far there have been several hundred alpha applications, but it looks like we'll be limited to choosing only about sixty.
The good news is we've got two good servers lined up. Without objection from rodvik, one of them will be the Sheep Cloning Facility. The way I see it, the time for tests and noodling around in Subspace has pretty much come to a close, and Hyperspace's obvious heavy Subspace influences justify the throughline. The SCF has been closed to the public before. In fact, now that I think of it, the zone has been closed for a beta test at least once in its history.
For anyone who might be pissed off by this decision, it should have become quite clear by now that I dislike the zone not having much of a purpose. More than any sysop in the history of this game I have solicited ideas and involvement from other sysops and the players at large. At least twenty people have had sysop powers in the zone, and perhaps half as many have had full FTP access. At this late stage of the game it's only appropriate to acknowledge that the zone's usefulness has played out, and that it must either perish or move on.
As for rodvik, he did create the zone and make up the name, and I have contacted him about the move, so if there are any issues concerning Infantry he will have an opportunity to raise them, and a chance to reclaim the zone he started if he wishes. Hyperspace is not a Subspace clone if I have anything to say about it. In keeping with that spirit, and considering it potentially shares a user base with Infantry, I have no desire to use a Harmless Games creation without their blessing to the game's betterment.
The Moon Bee Show
No, I'm not starting a webcam. :) My awesome and alluring better half has completed her semester of training on the baby AM station that no one can listen to, and will begin broadcasting on UCSB's leet FM station this coming Monday . . . um, at 4:00 in the morning. It's a baptism of fire, or something. I mention this not merely because it makes me happy, but because you can actually listen to it if you like. This is a once-per-week show lasting two hours, and even if I didn't think of her scatterbrained babbling as a reason in and of itself to listen ;) it is a seriously awesome program, a mixture of electronic music, underground pop, forgotten alternative gems, and generally avant-garde music which you won't likely hear anyplace else--all of it either very pretty or a lot of fun. Yes, they do allow that on college radio stations. ;) Visit KCSB's homepage for . . . well, not more information Visit it for a desolate, forgotten wasteland plus the webcast. ;)
Too many fucking smileys in that story
But I'm going to leave them in there for the hell of it. Maybe someday they'll teach a seminar about it at Berkeley.
<berrie> i think my morals are degrading again
<berrie> i need to be put on a strict regimen of thundercats and pepsi
Hello darkness, my old friend,
I've come to talk with you again,
H a p p y N e w Y e a r
12 January 2000
This fortnight's update . . .
Yeah, I know. Well I finally caved to pressure when Cybrid nagged me and I realized I had become the same sort of monster he devolved into. O the irony.
I'm not going to rant about Sierra. Well, maybe a little. They let Dynamix neglect Tribes, they allowed Valve to use that horrid SafeDisc protection on Opposing Force which does nothing but cause inconvenience to the many people who bought the game only to find it was incompatible with no fewer than eleven different models of cd drives. Lastly they seem to have forced Homeworld into an incomplete release, with the second campaign unfinished and thus containing the exact same events as the first campaing, plus an unforgivable bug which prevented players from ever again building certain crucial units if they had captured enemy ships and joined them into their fleet. Then again, these are just about the best three games to come out in the last several years, so to hell with it.
I will say this much however. Every time a user like me is dealt the insult of a SafeDisc "protected" game ignoring his cd laser--which they have the nerve to blame on my drive's manufacturer because they have not released "updated drivers" for hardware that works fine as it is--they teach those of us foolish enough to buy games that pirating them really isn't that big a pain in the ass, and out of concern for our fellow law abiding netizens we link helpful sites like GameCopyWorld and Game Fix. These pages have supplied me with the tools I needed to play a game my wife spent $40 on for a birthday present, so I am grateful to them and I hope my loyal readers find them useful as well--and at least in Sierra's case I hope you find them useful in as many ways as possible.
Thomas Newman's gorgeous score to American Beauty has finally been released on its own cd, where it no longer need live as a footnote to a bunch of played out pop songs. If you missed the movie, woe is u. Check out this disc anyway though. Thomas Newman composed the music for The War, Meet Joe Black, The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, Three Kings, and a few dozen other movies. I consider him the best film composer working today.
In case there was any question, I am not paying much attention to Subspace lately and don't mean to pay a whole lot of attention in the future either. I've done all I can for the game and have obviously had about as much response as I'm likely to get got it, so I won't be around much from now on. Well, I'll finish work on Resistance soon and hopefully be playing more, but news and scenarios and maps are no longer part of this game, as I see it. More importantly, with Hyperspace coming up I'll be helping Kygva sort through the alpha applications plus I've been making some basic maps for it. If all goes according to plan the real deals are going to be far more interesting than anything I ever hoped to see in Infantry, not because I am this genius mapmaker but because the engine for this game is going to be a lot of fun and you're going to do things in this game that you've never done before in a 2D action game. Then again, maybe I live in a fantasy world. Those ship models sure are cute though. If you have no clue in hell what HyperSpace is look here.
Sorry for the short and kind of lame update but I have a bunch of crap I need to get done. Have a nice January.
Well, I was going to save this for tomorrow, but the odds against me updating tomorrow are pretty high. January 13th is Blackie's birthday. Blackie being the only VIE employee who ever really stuck his neck out for this game. Long after it became apparent that no one stood to benefit from prolonging the life of Subspace, Blackie not only put in a lot of time to meet with members of the community and carefully select members of it to take over operations in the VIE zones, but nearly lost his job over keeping the servers running. Some believe he may actually have lost his job for this game and its players. There are a lot of first things and great things on the internet, and in gaming generally, but there will never again be another first great multiplayer game, and Blackie's the guy who saved it. Don't you guys ever forget that. Happy birthday Blackie.
<Shanoyu> I am the first mass kicker of the new millenium.
And those who deny this world
Is the soul of the unbroken one
Lie
This is indeed Paradise
H a p p y N e w Y e a r
1 January 1900
Rocket packs
I am pretty sick of hearing about how we were all supposed to have rocket packs by now. The people who make this complaint watched too much television or read too many comic books or something. In most good 20th Century (man I love saying that) science fiction, they didn't even have the internet until around 2150. Stop complaining and play Tribes. When you were little did you expect us to have Tribes by now? No you did not. Be thankful, and if you want a real rocket pack go study engineering.
OMG This is the third time tonight I have quit something without saving it. Argh. Ah well, I give up. Tomorrow I have a rant against Sierra for you and a rundown of the good and bad stuff from 1999 (which I try to do annually but never do), but tonight I have only the regret that I am scatterbrained like no other fucker on Earth, sorry. Oh For the record, since the top news thing doesn't count, Happy New Year. Back.
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