I downloaded an ISO of it a while ago and played through maybe third of the game. I found it to be very playable. People always mention the long load times, but it's worth mentioning that long load times were much more common back then. (Although Half-Life on DC was even longer than usual.)
Also, I hate to be nit picky, but the blog post linked here manages to be weirdly wrong about two things and it's barely one paragraph long, lol.
Half-Life is one of the most successful video games of the early 2000s.
Ahhh, 1998. One of the best years of the early 2000s.
Half-Life was everywhere... except one notable place: Sega's Dreamcast. It has been a mystery as to what happened with a game destined to have a port on every possible platform.
Half-Life was a PC exclusive until the PS2 port in November 2001, ten months after the Dreamcast was discontinued. The PC and PS2 versions are still the only official versions to this day. Half-Life is not known for being on every platform. Was the author thinking of Doom, one of the best games of the mid 70s?
You are correct about the release year. If one were being pedantic I suppose it would be correct to say that thanks to multiplayer and mods, Half-Life was a popular PC game/engine all throughout the early 2000s. Come to thinl of it, there are probably still people playing CS 1.6 today.
That's as many as the two most recent Battlefield games have combined right now. Battlefield 2042 currently around 8,000 and Battlefield V at 6,000. I'm sure console players would boost the Battlefield numbers quite a bit, but still. That's pretty cool.
Because the games are good? Does their need to be a deeper reason then that? I mean, I guess a boom in retro games among Gen Z and younger says something about the state of the modern industry, but younger generations have always liked older things despite entertainment industries trying to push them towards the shiny and new. Still definitely nice to see though.
Yeah, agreed. They play retro games for the same reason people watch classic movies, read literature, or listen to older music: because it's enjoyable regardless of how old it is.
It's also easier to determine which games are good and which aren't. I doubt there's a ton of people playing licensed games from LJN, at least not as many as are playing Zelda or Chrono Trigger.
I miss that era. Companies didn’t mind a bit of edginess and weren’t afraid to market to adults. The console culture itself also isn’t what it used to be.
These days, gaming consoles all need to be safe enough for five year olds to play on them. And it’s caused everything to be just too bland and safe, both in marketing and the console itself. Can’t really have things like Xbox 360 Uno with the live camera feed and no moderation. Or the wholly uncensored COD lobbies.
I like the part between your two paragraphs. The early gaming era was really shitty when it came to diversity and... It's not even representation, it's not having to play sluts or princesses or whatever.
The now-era is all AAA all-the-same sanitised stuff, nothing to do with lack of edginess. Just corporate safety in mainstream appeal. Currently, indie games are where the experiments and interesting ideas happen.
I'm certainly not going to say you're wrong on that first part. I've been online since 1996. At that time, the internet was the domain of white, heterosexual, nerdy, generally well educated guys. And me being a white, heterosexual, nerdy, well educated guy... well... going online felt like coming home. Those were my people. I still really miss those days.
But I also know that the experience of someone not like me would've been wildly different. I learned a bajillion slurs on COD lobbies after all. It's a good thing that more people now feel welcome online, as it led to platform growth and functionality that we otherwise wouldn't have had if it was just 'my kind of people'.
The current safe, sanitised, gentrified gaming sphere also has benefits: COD lobbies these days are very pleasant by comparison. You even have to sign a code of conduct to get on multiplayer. It feels more welcoming, less hostile. Of course, companies certainly have been financially incentivized to attract as wide an audience as possible. For example, the very first GTA game sold about 6 million copies. GTA V has sold 200 million. And with ever-increasing development budgets, you can't afford to cater to a niche, you want to cast as wide a net as possible to recoup those costs.
I don't think I've met any Brazilians back in those days; (online) gaming is really expensive there from what I heard, right?
One fun thing in the old COD lobbies was always to teach others slurs and general cursing in your language. I learned how to curse folks out in like 50 languages. Each country also has its own unique style of cursing. We Dutch really like to incorporate diseases for example.
I used to play Rune Quake with a guy on MPlayer named 'svfox' and he was from Brazil - this was 96/97. I miss him sometimes; we managed to lock down games of Rune Quake and CTF we played so well together.
"the internet was the domain of white, heterosexual, nerdy, generally well educated guys. And me being a white, heterosexual, nerdy, well educated guy... well... going online felt like coming home. Those were my people"
Thank you for putting it so clearly. Yes, it is completely valid to long for a time where the own niche was the in-group. As someone who's been on the web from early on but a woman, it wasn't really "my people". It was never a safe space for me, but I totally understand where you are coming from. It's great to be on the side of the "default".
The only spaces I genuinely miss are phpbb forums. I honestly believe they are better than reddit, or the fediverse for that matter. Smaller interest groups have a self selection mechanism and better moderation. I think they could still foster a great environment today that would welcome nerdy educated people on a shared interest without specifically speaking to just one type of educated nerds.
I miss forums as well, and I'm actually moving back to them. Back in the early 2000's, I visited like a dozen forums each day. I was a member of like three watch forums, a camera forum, a Star Trek forum, some gaming forums and others. Just 'doing the rounds' kept you busy for a while. People also were insanely knowledgeable on those niche forums, and they all had their own specific culture and flavor to them.
Places like a niche subreddit are... OK at best. They are convenient and easy to visit, but don't tend to have the level of knowledge and discourse that I generally enjoy. You also run the risk of your sub getting ruined by people who are into the wrong aspects of your particular hobby. For example, on a watch FORUM, the discussions are about design, mechanical features, history, photography, how to repair, etc. etc. On the subreddit, a lot of posts tended to be drive-by posters who 'found a watch and wanted to know what it's worth'. or 'is this fake'. The subreddit didn't curb that, so eventually I and many others just stopped going there. It was basically too easy for people to post there just because, well, they could. Whereas on an actual watch forum, you can do a bit stricter moderation and the registration requirement weeds out low effort posting.
Some consider that 'gatekeeping', but I see it as a valid way of protecting one's chosen community.
It was basically too easy for people to post there just because, well, they could.
I expect the difference you're describing was partly due to moderation (and lack thereof), but also partly due to the barrier to entry imposed by the forum signup process.
Unfortunately, the signup barrier cuts both ways: Despite loving high-quality discussion forums, I seldom bother participating in them these days, mainly because jumping through signup/captcha/email-validation hoops and then having to maintain yet another set of credentials for yet another site, forever, became too much hassle once I had more than a couple dozen. (I have hundreds, so I'm very reluctant to add to the pile.)
OpenID managed to solve a good deal of that hassle, but it's mostly forgotten these days. I think well-moderated federated services have the potential to solve it completely, though. Here's hoping.
It's the eternal pendulum swinging between slut and saint, whore and Madonna. AAA games are afraid of sexuality, and one can see why when looking back on how Lara Croft was portrayed in magazines. We need games that, when appropriate, acknowledge sexuality in a way that reflects its role in people's lives.
Ah, back when Nintendo mastered the concept of using proven, slightly older technology, in genuine amusing and fun ways. The 3DS had StreetPass, Download Play, free AR games, a free Flipnote animation app, a sound editor, several hidden easter eggs, an interface that had themes and badges and trinkets.
Now you get a flat, soul-less interface with a lot, and I do mean a lot, of updates trying to stop pirates. They do not work. The browser also does not work. You're getting sued for mentioning Nintendo in this post without the proper license, by the way.
When I got a Switch I was looking forward to those fun quirky menus Nintendo is known for. Imagine my disappointment when I turned it on for the first time.
I originally came from a conservative country, and yet there were plenty of ads for softcore porns in TVs and billboards in those days. Even as a child, I questioned why do they show such images in front of full view to everyone.
The thing is, such mysoginy was the norm without us even realising it. I remember reading an article of a woman reminiscing her college days in early 00s. There were pictures of college girls on pin up boards and they get graded on how beautiful they are. The author said no one thought bad about it but looking back, it was very degrading and also invading privacy. There was also the matter of the infamous wardrobe malfunction of Janet Jackson. She got all the public spotlight afterwards because she is a woman, but Justin Timberlake pretty much got away with it for free. JT also shamed Britney Spears about losing her virginity to him, instead of keeping his mouth shut, while Britney was branded as slut.
I'm sure in the 2040s, people will say the 2020s were misogynistic too. And they'll be right. Equality isn't here yet.
Progress always seems to mostly march onwards, but you only have to watch Beverly Hills Cop 2 to see Eddie Murphy calling Brigitte Neilsen "that big bitch" like it was perfectly acceptable. And even that was probably considered pretty forward thinking at the time having a woman being cast in an action role, rather than just being fucked or fridged like pretty much every other 80s action movie.
This. The funny thing is some folks think that progress just happens. The amount of people who died or ruined their lives in the name of progress is baffling to me.
Worth considering that if Alien was produced today, there would be a lot of criticism of it being "too woke". Not only progress doesn't just happen, but it's also not granted to stick unless people are still pushing for it.
Absolutely no doubt. In coding they say „regression“ is something breaks after and update. Its no different from the real world imo.
You focus on fixing issues, if the only peeps caring about progress are the ones profiting from hate, chaos and fear, the things we took for granted go away.
I think science will come up with an explanation for this. Boomers hoarding all the wealth was quite possible but somehow its no longer discussed. I dont get why.
The Man Show was on air for 6 consecutive seasons starting in 1999. Their premier episode featured Adam Carolla and Jimmy Kimmel sitting outside trying to get people to sign a petition to end women's suffrage (as a joke, bro. Obviously it's a joke!)
Exactly, playing on people's ignorance like current talk show on-the-street segments do. The joke was not that they thought women shouldn't be able to vote... It is just humorous to hear people say they are anti-sufferage not understanding what theyre saying.
It's like asking people if they are afraid of dihydrogen monoxide in their water...
I think this is using recomp, anybody with a rom could theoretically do this on their own pc, so there's morning to destroy. The recomp isn't specific to Nintendo and isn't really violating copyright, as far as I understand.
Nintendo has not taken action on the massively popular SM64 Decompilation and PC ports (and ironically switch ports) in the past what…3 years?
Nintendo hadn't taken action against ROM sites for even more years (I was able to download NES, Game Boy, and SNES ROMs in the 1990s) and then decided to make an example of only one in 2019. Just because something is not on the radar of lawyers in Japan right now, doesn't mean a law suit over millions could not come any day.
The code compiles 1:1 back into a unable ROM but isn’t made just using a source code leak. It is reverse-engineered just like the SM64 decomp
Decompilation means it's still derived from copyrighted source code. It's not a clean-room implementation where one person analyzes the engine, writes documentation about details of that engine, and a completely different person writes a new engine. It's not even a grey area. The correct procedure is clear ever since back in the day "IBM compatible" were created.
If it were up to me, copyrights would work like patents: After 25 years they're void and people would be completely in the clear to decompile, modify, and redistribute old games. Sadly that's not the reality.
Edit: Unreal Engine, not Unity. My mistake. My point is that unless the project uses absolutely zero intellectual property, such as characters, stories, or franchise names, Nintendo will almost undoubtedly take ruthless interest.
Yes, they did a really good job. It handles the logic, but keep in mind the ROM itself is going to have operations that talk to the hardware that does things that just don’t exist in the code. The function will actually be in the hardware. Those pieces still have to be supplied of course.
It looks like the project is really careful not to include copyrighted materials in their distribution.
Source code automatically generated from copyrighted binary code is a derivative of copyrighted code, though. It's like taking a copyrighted book and running it through Google Translate and then clean up the sentences manually. You could be lucky that a publisher might not care about a translation into Icelandic but if you were to auto-translate a French version of a book into English and try to distribute it in the US, you'd probably get in trouble even if you leave out all graphic artwork.
Only reason I'm not outright dismissing this sequel is because Danny Boyle is directing it. I thought 28 Weeks Later fell short of the original but it was still enjoyable enough.
Well yes, ultimately that was the problem in the end. But they had 2 good releases under EA before that happened. Somewhere along the way EA went entirely to shit and Sim City was one of many casualties.
Yeah I love the fact that in this game, the message was just for the sake of it, while nowadays it would be in order to keep the person playing it addicted to whatever skinner box is integrated into the gameplay loop.
Sorry, but Acclaim really was that wild for a bit there. They also had a promotion where you'd get a free copy of one of the Turok games if you named a newborn child after him. For what it's worth, I don't think anyone took them up on either offer, but it certainly brought in the publicity.
I currently work with someone who worked with acclaim back then and Virgin at one point too. The stories he tells me of some of the game Devs of the time. Insane. Some of them Devs still exist to this day and knowing what happened behind closed doors I have no idea how they got more business.
One UK based dev that worked on some edgy PC games had a "Red Room" at their offices that was purely there for them to take drugs and trip inside. It was just a room completely painted in red.
Also the one where they paid parents to name their baby 'Turok.'
I sometimes wonder what those little Turoks are up to today (at least a half dozen parents took them up on it IIRC).
The shock advertising campaigns around games really were something. They worked - got a ton of free media coverage. But this was also at the time that video games were the Boogeyman like rock n' roll had been to a generation before. The media loved nothing more than a "look how terrible video games are" story and PR firms were playing into that environment.
So campaigns like this were basically the equivalent of Ozzy Osbourne biting the head off a bat.
As games became more normalized, the campaigns shifted accordingly and - like Ozzy - tamed quite a bit out.
Wow, I definitely didn't know it was that old, I know about it recently because ROM sites have become more difficult to browse and find (good sourced).
The look of the page definitely checks those days though.
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