- Shugashack.com - It's like Mission Impossible. Except we aren't that smart. And we don't really
have guns. And we look at a lot of porno - and games. We like to live our lives vicariously through
games. Oh, and for all our pining, no women. I guess it's not like Mission Impossible at all.
- kbanas
All I need is something good to feel alive.
N e w s o f t h e D a y
22 June 2000
Webmaster's tiresome spiritual crisis continues unabated
It's been a while since I've been hooked this bad, to the point that I find myself utterly without self control or any other sort of free will. Forgive the epic poetry which follows, but it appears that I am in love.
I went to Electronics Boutique last Thursday thinking, you know, I kind of miss old Independence War and wouldn't mind getting into Starlancer or Tachyon or something like that. I had taken a few looks at Alliance, but the beta test had irritated me a little, for reasons I didn't quite recall. So I'm looking over these games, ogling the cool cap ships on the Tachyon box and asking the guy at the store a few questions about Starlancer versus Allegiance, and he says, know what, if you get Starlancer there's a promo Allegiance in the back I can give you. I dunno if it works, but it's worth a try.
Something about Starlancer offended me in a way I couldn't put my finger on. Maybe it was the part about up to eight people playing together over the internet, or maybe it was the fact that the ships I see in the screenshots for that game are even uglier than the ones I saw in the Wing Commander movie. The guy gave me my free Allegiance cd and I took Tachyon to the counter. He pointed out that there was a basically new copy of Tachyon in the used section for $20. Hey, that's ten dollars a game, even if one of them wasn't going to work, right?
I still haven't installed Tachyon, and that Allegiance CD spent the entire past week in my drive, until yesterday when I realized it wasn't required. Damn this game is awesome. As I was first becoming hopelessly addicted to its many lures and wiles, I realized with no small amount of pride that I should. This, after all, I brag, was the game which I pointed out a really long time ago (try November 12, 1998) might be worth keeping an eye on, and I had indeed been keeping my eye on it until I stupidly lost patience with rudimentary aspects of the beta test a few months ago.
Other games have come close. The Counter-Strike mod for Half-Life can rival Subspace in pacing and teamwork and careful consideration. In its purest form, Starseige: Tribes challenged Subspace with hour-long campaigns fought over vast landscapes, with the outcome often turning on team maneuvers and individual teammates taking up the appropriate roles of support at the right times. Tribes even upped the ante with an ambitious command system organized over an innovative and easy to use strategic map. Much like Subspace, Tribes also balanced the slow pacing necessary for good teamwork with periods of furious action during which your plan either came together or broke down around you, and by then there was not a thing you could do about it.
But I can't think of anything that has come this close. Allegiance strikes an almost perfect balance between planning and action, one which has not been communicated properly in marketing or in reviews, so I'll make the point as clearly as I can.
A month or so back, I was playing Homeworld, which is just about the greatest work of art ever created by man, and I was thinking, would it not just be that much more bad ass if each of those units I am commanding was a real person, and for them this game was not a strategy game at all but more like an Independence War or a Wing Commander? I had either forgotten or underestimated that this is precisely how Allegiance works. Each team's commander sets strategy, invests resources in research, and gives out waypoints and orders. The rest of you carry them out.
This could become boring very quickly in the wrong kind of game, but in Allegiance one of two things usually happens. Because each team is constantly attempting to expand across sections of space which generally have two or three paths in and out, the balance is always shifting. Unexpected attacks are frequent. Imagine a Homeworld map with three Subspace-style wormholes positioned at the outskirts, each leading to another such map. While en route to an objective, I often find myself engaged by enemies as a new situation develops. Meanwhile, the conflict I've been called to assist in has either ended or blossomed into something else entirely. One is always hurrying, but while that hurry is underway one has time to gather one's thoughts, to discuss the situation with teammates and the commander, to reconfigure one's ship as necessary.
Likewise, when defeated in battle, the shot-down pilot finds himself not dead but in an escape pod. This is one of the most inegenous features of the game, actually. It's not that you can't die; the enemy can fire on your pod and kill you in it if they wish--but this sends you immediately back to base, where you can load up a new ship and immediatley pose a threat. So only a fool fires on a pod--much better to let him spend two minutes sputtering back to an outpost three sectors away, hoping to get picked up by a friendly scout or fighter on the way. One could simply suicide the pod, but this harms your score which informs your cumulative ranking as a player. The result of all this is the best incentive to stay alive since Jeff and Rod invented greening back in the day--none of the unpleasantness of an elimination game, just the unpleasantness and worry of waiting to get home.
You might be surprised to find that no one finds this boring. It's not boring. After five minutes of harried dogfighting and protecting capital ships while they bombard enemy installations, it comes as a welcome rest. One surveys the strategic map and wraps one's head around the new lay of the land. The commander draws out a new strategy and gives new orders.
These extremes of action and quiet, added to this breaking up of the enormous map into smaller (very large) sectors, amount to long, dramatically paced contests between a great number of players, with every player tending to an important objective which sooner or later results in combat. Even as a totally inexperienced player I was able to partake of this by simply choosing a teammate and flying on his wing, engaging his targets. As my understanding of the game grew, I've found myself involved in awesome moments the likes of which I have never seen in an online game and only rarely elsewhere.
Yesterday I sat in an interceptor at one of the wormholes (called alephs) with a blockade of capital ships and other interceptors. For a while, the capitals (each with several players on board operating gun turrets) tore to shreds everyone who got through the minefield which had been laid out in front of the aleph.
Then there was a momentary silence. We watched the numbers rise and fall in a distant sector where another battle played out, and reenforcements joined our blockade. Now a single fighter tore through this blockade at high speed, avoiding the thinning minefield. When our interceptors mistakenly gave chase, his teammates came through as well and were able to pierce our weakened and confused ranks. The sector, secure only a moment before, was now compromised, and we had a fight on our hands for the life of an ore refinery.
This chain of events hasn't repeated itself since. The game seldom does. It seems that all sorts of things will happen with any number of players present, so that the standard 20 or 30 player games have much of the same flavor as the bigger (and often more lengthy) games which are part of the pay service. Theoretically Allegiance supports games for 6 teams with up to 70 players each--a total of 420 people. I've seen 120 at a time and played with 80. This seldom creates a mess, though, as the action is always scattered across a big area--and after a campaign that has lasted an hour or two, a chaotic final battle like something out of Return of the Jedi or Robotech really does make all the sense in the world.
Did I mention that I am on a 200MHz machine? I've got a nice video card, but it hasn't had life this easy since Quake II. This visually beautiful game is so nicely scalable that except in really crowded situations I have no trouble with framerates, and I find myself going entire games without experiencing frustration over system requirements.
From a business and pricing standpoint, it's a little tricky. I probably wouldn't pay the $10 a month for any other game, but this is one of the few games out there--maybe the only one--where I can choose not to pay the monthly fee and still enjoy just about everything that had been implemented at the time the box appeared in stores. Considering the number of worse deals out there, I have little trouble putting aside my usual distaste for the UO style "box-plus-subscription" model.
And it enters my mind not infrequently that, even if this isn't the watershed event I view it as, even if Allegiance isn't the killer app it deserves to be, it is a beginning in the way that Subspace and Doom and Zork were beginnings. It has that awesome and captivating quality about it--the feeling of doing someing entirely new, something I will never do in real life, for the first time simulated magnitudes more convincingly than had ever been managed before. Not counting my honeymoon, I haven't felt this good to be alive since Boris Yeltsin helped blast apart his country's parliamentary building. And while it may be ruining my life on Earth, it brings me closer to God, and at least it's not hurting my liver or pancreas much.
It's good to be helplessly obsessed again, and I'm not sure that I mind it dragging me away from this house of cards I've built up around me over the past three years. Then again, I'm not sure this has anything at all to do with going away. It feels too much like returning. It feels like Subspace finally back from the dead.
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<Pl0k> He's a muppet?
<einexile> he's awesome, he says bork bork bork and stuffs other muppets in a big pot
<Pl0k> I thought he was a real chef
Just give me an easy life and a peaceful death.
N e w s o f t h e D a y
14 June 2000
Hell
Didn't realize it had been a week. Sorry.
We're subbing for someone's classical show, which incidentally is called So Damn Boring. This week and next. It's in a few hours, actually. 6:00am Pacific, 9:00am Eastern, lasting two and a half hours. Don't worry, we're not going to play any of the shit you hear on classical radio all the time. :) Sorry for the short notice, but they didn't give us much notice either. Us being me, the playlist god, and the lovely and talented dj moon bee, also known as my better half. Tune in here.
More update later if I have anything to say about it.
Good luck to everyone doing finals and stuff.
Interesting news on SSNet by the way.
And always read the Broken Vision.
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<Slurp-{Away}> Did anyone get the ironic social commentary in Starship Troopers?
<Sabre> No, Slurp, I have an IQ of 12.=p
Pain looks great on other people
That's what they're for
N e w s o f t h e D a y
7 June 2000
vB = faded
This is just too much.
Here is a guy who, after years of kissing up to everyone he thought he might gain something from (including me, if you can believe that), had finally got pretty much everything he wanted, then went and blew it, admits to knowing he was blowing it, all for his own sick amusement at being needlessly mean to someone who had irritated him mildly. This was over a comment on the InfantryZone boards, someone suggesting that it would be nice for the editing tools to be released once the game goes retail.
vB links tools which are not his to link, private files granted to him by Harmless Games in trust. He links to these in order to tease this person, because after downloading these files this person will find, to his disappointment, that he can't use the editor without library files which are missing. Needless to say, this is hilarious.
I have to wonder if it is a coincidence that the post was removed only after I suggested that perhaps we might assume vB was the individual who leaked the full map editor back in February. I suppose I'll just have to wonder about that part.
So now here is Scrum, crying about it on 8025 like this is some unfortunate tragedy, as if no one was to blame, as if vB didn't have it coming.
-
vB did a lot for the community, and we respect him for that. But, as the time passed his friendship with
Yankee grew worse and as they started to fight there needed to be a solution. The banning of VectorBoy
will be remembered throughout Infantry history. The Infantry community will miss you in your absence.
Good luck to whatever projects become your fancy in the future.
You ought to be ashamed of yourself.
And now we have Captain Harloch. A class act always, who need never be ashamed of himself--but wrong also.
-
Personally the thought of tearing down a zone that he contributed to for the sake of simply tearing it
down as part of a tantrum is appalling and he should be thinking of the IHZ players, the Harmless Staff,
the future of the zone and most of all his co-creator, 4U2NV when making his decision to take the zone
down.
I like and respect 4U2NV, but he shouldn't have given the time of day to Harmless Games after learning that they had started a discussion about HZ without him, that development of the zone would not be conditional to his blessing. Certainly it was gracious of them to include him in the equation, but that equation should have started with a request for permission, not an invitation to a VectorBoy-inspired coup of a Subspace zone.
It doesn't matter if vB does the deed out of spite or Harmless does it as punishment--if Infantry HZ is shut down, it will have been bad karma either way. That such a closure might be unfortunate makes the act neither more wrong nor more unwise.
My $0.02 if I still have that in my account? Turn it over to whoever in HZ administration most strongly objected to working with vB.
How to catch a spider
I have become an expert in catching spiders. Not Spiders, as in Subspace's only legit cloaking vessel, but those kooky, underappreciated, eight-legged fools we know from real life. Well I was going to tell you how to catch them, and where to put them once you catch them, and also when it is okay to kill them instead of being a man and capturing them then releasing them into the wild. (Hint: rarely.)
Anyway, I'm tired and Infantry has put me in a piss poor mood again, so it will have to wait, but I'll say this much.
Be careful opening and closing gates, especially the metal chain-link kind with the noisy things that slam down. Spiders will obey you if you give them clear instructions, but aside from that they are pretty stupid, and they will often loiter near the loud metal fastener things, whose name presently escapes me, until a careless act by a big lumbering monster such as yourself causes them to be crushed by the moving parts in question. Anyway, so always look around for spiders when opening and closing these things. Especially do this after you have already opened the gate, because sometimes the poor creatures become alarmed at having their gate opened, and in their panic will dangle down from what was a perfectly safe position, so that they are then swinging around a dangerous part of the gate. If you see them doing this, the nice thing to do is either catch their web on your finger (at a safe distance so they don't have time to climb up and bite you--remember, spiders are quite stupid), and hook it over a safe area where they won't drop down again--or, if you are frightened of a tiny little animal which contains barely enough poison to anaesthetize a moth, simply swing the gate around until they have the sense to grab back on. Remember, people have souls and legacies and obituaries and all that good stuff, but spiders have only their eight legs and tiny head to bring them small pleasures in an otherwise meaningless existence, and even then they don't live very long, so try and be considerate of them.
That's all I have to say on spiders so far. Manifesto to come.
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<Skie> My idea of being rebellious is majoring in philosophy.
Oh, maybe, in terms of surrender,
On a backcloth of lashes and eyes
In a flood of your tears, in sackcloth
And ashes and ashes and ashes and ashes
And ashes and ashes and lies...
N e w s o f t h e D a y
6 June 2000
Correction
Map Vault is mapvault.net, not mapvault.com. Sorry bout that. Also if you get a plugin-could-not-be-download error from one of my pages, it's because I've moved that page to its own subdirectory without sending along a copy of the mine.wav that goes with it. Please let me know if you discover one of these. Thanks Anna-Puma for the headsup on both.
I normally hate it when people do this . . .
Every time a new version of ICQ or Winamp or some other popular program comes out, a lot of people pimp it out and spam it up for no particular reason, so realize that I am sensitive to this sentiment. And yet, and yet. The new version of Winamp absolutely rocks. Maybe a lot of it was stuff implemented in versions between my old one and the current one, but whatever. I just need to say here that this has become one of the coolest programs you can get for free or otherwise, and it's little wonder that its name continues to be synonymous with mp3 and streaming for anyone who takes either seriously.
Bitch; moan; bitch, bitch, moan.
No Half-Life 4U = SUX, whine, gripe, etc. I feel it too buddy. Just hang in there. At very least we can look forward to the sweet release death will bring.
Oh yeah
We're fucked. (Thanks Shugashack.) And also Einstein was dumb. And don't you say I never told you so.
"Mommy, what's Eblana?"
I've given up on answering this question. You figure it out.
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<ebim|afk> i'm bored so i'm making wall paper
She says no no no no harm will come your way
She says bring it on down, bring on the wave
She says: nobody done no harm
Grace of God and raise your arms
She says: face it and it's a place to stay
This, this is the way it was
This, this is the way it is
When the water come rushing, rushing in
N e w s o f t h e D a y
5 June 2000
Mini-update
First of all, I want to congratulate Lord Tsura and T3 The Gauntlet on entry into the SSC. It was a long time coming and well earned. It's unfortunate that, perhaps I'm not well informed, but the appearance is that the zone was brought into the SSC in order to protect it from copy zones which have sprouted up since the real mccoy ran into server troubles. This isn't a good enough reason. The Gauntlet belongs on iNET billing because of its dedication to an old form of zone that is nearly dead, and its long life through variety and community and, last time I was there, hands down the best damn super zone map ever made. I am pleased and proud to have these guys finally on iNET billing.
Not too much else going on. All the Half-Life stuff was delayed yet again, as you likely know all too well if the subject interests you in the slightest. I don't really much care, though, because when it does come we're going to have the most fun in the history of first person shooters. New netcode, new TFC variants, new Counter-Strike, brand new CTF game for Opposing Force, and an upgrade to Worldcraft that will kick ass if it's half of what it looks. While you're waiting for this monster of an update, grab the current version of Counter-Strike and enjoy the last days of de_fang, a wonderful map that is being retired after a life tragically cut short. Not all of us misunderstood you, O grand detonation map. You will be remembered with honor and fondness long after your critics are but wormshit rotting in the topsoil.
Speaking of first person shooters, I've been doing a decent job at keeping Map Vault up to speed, I think. It's all mappy and stuff now, have a look. My Half-Life map is looking like it will turn out as a TFC opposing fortresses type deal, by the way. Expect that ready in time for Christmas.
And speaking of ready in time for Christmas, the much hyped thirty-day orgy of programming and other work on HyperSpace is getting underway, as I understand it. We hope. Knock on wood for me, or something. Me, I don't much trust those wood faeries.
Start getting it into your head that you will be present this Saturday at 6pm Eastern time for Sheepy Wonderland V. Write it down on your hand so you won't forget it. I made you fools an interesting new map for the occasion this last weekend, and enough people came that we could have had a great time fighting in it - but you all came at different times. End result: Total partitipants, maybe 30. Greatest number of players present at any one time, 8. Blah.
By the way, if you missed this morning's installment of moon bee's excursions on KCSB, the best radio station in America, you missed a phat playlist which was painstakingly selected and ordered by none other than yours truly, it being the case that mrs. yours truly was feeling grumpy and not up to the task. Anyway, so to helll with you. Listen next week. :P
And I was going to say something else too. Oh yeah, I'm all set to update Radio EMF soon, so keep an eye out for that. (I'll post something more specific here when I actually have done it. For now it's the same 11 songs that have been looping there for the last four months, sorry.)
I guess this has been more of a rambly-update than a mini-update, sorry again.
Anyone know where I can find a Kelly Havel winamp skin?
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<BluesMojo> I've been to Michigan man
<BluesMojo> It's a cold, sterile pile of sexless hell up there
Laughing at each other's pain
They run the heater in the morning rain
This'll pay the rent around the world
Wanna buy a picture of a girl
N e w s o f t h e D a y
3 June 2000
SCF event = now
This is just to confirm that the time and place for Sheepy Wonderland IV is indeed 6:00pm Eastern time in SSCX SCF West, as I mentioned tentatively yesterday. The game will be relatively simple and no signups or anything are required. See you there, or wherever.
More update later, maybe.
Lame versus Not Lame
Rage and Striker, being squadmates, work together (as the rules allow) in the first two rounds of Masters of Chaos. Third round leaves the two of them and two others. They volunteer to split the fight into two separate fights, one-on-one. Striker wins his fight, and instead of helping Rage sits out the rest of the round. Rage loses a fair fight. What happens? You guessed it. RAGE=OWNED. GG STFU. Followed by unwarranted criticism of their previous cooperation. Now just how fucking immature is that shit? If ever I have seen a class act it was the two of their handling of these final rounds. To take that kind of attitude just brands yourself as clueless. Striker won the final round with a nice bit of maneuvering and a nasty kill, by the way. I should participate in these more often.
SCF stuff
The fourth Sheepy Wonderland was actually enjoyable, much to my surprise. There was no elimination but we fragged around for a while. I even had the cathartic pleasure of erasing some lamer's map when he had the nerve to spam his subarena in the middle of the game. :P The fifth one will be next week and hopefully have a little more organization.
Half-Life
I officially started mapping for HL yesterday, ph34r. I've been messing around with WorldCraft for a while now but never actually sat down and started work on a map that I intended to complete. This I might just finish. Anyone want to tutor me? :)
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<berrie> there's a ct in my living room!
No escape from the mass mind rape
Play it again jack and then rewind the tape
And then play it again and again and again
Until ya mind is locked in
Believin' all the lies that they're tellin' ya
Buyin' all the products that they're sellin' ya
They say jump and ya say how high
Ya brain-dead
Ya gotta fuckin' bullet in ya head
N e w s o f t h e D a y
2 June 2000
It's all good, sort of
Kind of forgot I scheduled an event for tomorrow. If you're interested in a good old fashioned SCF elim, watch this space for details. Most likely it'll be elimination games with a secondary objective of some sort, and start at 6:00pm EST. This is sort of a belated 2nd birthday party for the SCF.
I'm pretty much finished with this game. As soon as HyperSpace is ready, the SCF will almost definitely become a test zone for that game, and most of my mapping time is going to be spent either on that or on Half-Life, depending on when the editor for HS is completed. My relative silence here lately is due in large part to the relative silence of the Subspace community in general. As I perceive it, not much is going on in Subspace lately, and I just don't find Infantry to be an interesting subject matter. (The juiciest thing happening in Infantry lately is the news staff of NMEbase calling each other stupid in their updates--fascinating.) I'd spend more time posting here about other types of games as well as unelated internet and media type stuff, but frankly I do not feel that my feet are sufficiently wet right now. Maybe sooner, maybe later.
What's happened to Subspace in the month is really pretty sad. Normally in a case like Subspace HQ's, the absence of someone like Mackieman would result in a bunch of new staff members, all trying to flex their new public status and to be more active in the game. This is no criticism of the new staff, just an observation that Mackieman didn't really report news so much as invent it. In recent months, Mackie has probably done more for Subspace than anyone gives him credit for, just by maintaining a tone of enthusiasm and interest. This is not to say I doubt his sincerity, but I don't doubt for a moment that he's made a conscious effort to sound enthusiastic and interesting about what has in become a mostly stagnant and predictable hobby.
I do enjoy that the game has gone back to being substantially more popular than Infantry. Maybe if I and all the other people who take pleasure in those statistics actually contributed to them once in a while, the game would be as vibrant and awesome as it probably should be, but you can only kick a dead horse for so long before you get stomach acid on your shoe, eh?
And not that I've any room to criticize, but I've been pretty disappointed at how quiet SSNet has been since its redesign. This is a normal thing for any page, but the timing could not be worse given the all-but-death of SSHQ and sudden, needless, actual death of Subspace Planet. Say what you like about SS Planet and it's mostly awful staff, not to mention Rude Awakening's famous spamming habit, but that site was really getting its act together and was looking quite nice, had an active staff that seemed to be improving...and then the bottom dropped out. I am glad to see that the remaining staff members have picked up the pieces instead of just closing the site, but it could have been something really good by now had the old members not flaked out and gone off to dedicate their time to something that is truly boring and useless.
I continue to become more and more interested in Half-Life with all the new things Valve is doing for the game. It's good to be deeply into a game whose creators value their player community and regularly support their efforts. My admiration for Valve grows on an almost daily basis and the Counter-Strike forums are a lot of fun these days, devoid of most of the bullshit you usually find in online communities these days. This amazes me considering the game's popularity.
I have nothing else to say at the moment. Tomorrow morning I'm getting up at noon and setting up for the SCF game. Anyone with requests or a game they would like to run or otherwise partake in should contact me over ICQ.
Anyone got some extra bandwidth and want to do some custom HL teamplay?
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