Still chasing the dream
While Jagged Alliance is without discussion one of the finest squat squad-based strategy games ever made that has seen the daylight, I especially enjoy the ‘personal’ characteristics that the mercenaries bring with them and the frivolous Butt Groping demonstrated in this clip shows this side of JADG nicely. The map seen in this video is one of the scenarios that can be found here.
Check out The Great Game Experiment, a community site especially for gamers and game developers. Members can introduce their favorite games, add new games, meet other gamers/developers etc. The site also focuses on Independent Game Developers, after all it was Jeff Tunnel of Garage Games who breathed life into it (The same Jeff Tunnel of Dynamix fame btw! Games like Project Firestart and Rise of the Dragon come to my mind).
Developers can introduce their creations and find other developers – both professional and hobbyist – to get working together on a project. Games made in Flash are welcome and there’s even a category for it.
The game is basically still the same since I left it! Many of the same old bugs and a gameplay that has only distantly something to do with RPG. Examples: Tried to continue the ‘Secret of the Syrens’ quest but the Black Sun Bunker at the waypoint never spawns,I want to call my mount pet inside the Kashyyk Hunting Grounds but it doesn’t spawn, I want to attack that imperial trooper that permanently shoots at me but I can’t because he’s stuck inside a wall … the list could go on for a while.
Thy Dungeonman 3: Behold Thy Graphics, a text/graphics adventure from Homestarrunner in the style of the very early days of computing. Complete with fake floppy load delay and amber screen display! You find yourself in a dungeon cell with doom lurking all around you. The texts are intentionally exaggerated old ‘english’ and once you got out of the first area you’ll notice that this game plays quite smooth. It’s a short but funny and while you’re there, you find several other oldschool imitations on Homestarrunner and videlectrix.com.
… I’m not talking about fun with playing the NGE mind you … when the NGE came live there was a lot of derision and mockery on the official forums. Among all this down pour of anger, hate and dismay about the NGE there were a handful cynical postings of how scenes in the Star Wars movies would look if the NGE had affected them. Because they were so utterly hilarious I decided to save them for later and what better opportunity do I have than to post them here for people who have missed them. In this sense read on and enjoy! 
If we can believe these rumors originally from mmorpg.com it looks like Star Wars Galaxies is very soon history for Sony Online Entertainment. According to the news Lucas Arts withdraw the SWG license from SOE and gave it to Bioware, the makers of SWKOTOR.
“Bioware did indeed gain rights to develop a second version of SWG. It wont be called SWG2. Its not a completely new game but rather a reworking of existing code.” … sounds vague but I’m curious what Bioware will make of this in case this is going to happen! I hope it will be something like a Pre-CU SWG without bugs and a good portion of true Star Wars feel. And don’t forget to put the Creature Handlers back in! But Bioware would have it easy to make a good game … it’s hard to top a developer like SOE in terms of incompetence and customer dissatisfaction!
I’ve been playing Star Wars Galaxies on and off for about three years so by the time a large amount of screenshots have been piled up on my harddisk. And because it’s a good opportunity, here’s a little
memorial gallery for SWG, the game that once was a hell lot of fun. There were many nice times playing, hunting, flying, taming and crafting around in the galaxy and it still hurts a bit that the game since a while is gone as we know it.
Maybe there will be a time when a new and similar good MMORPG appears, maybe even a SWG2, who knows?! Whats left until then is good memories and a crapload of screenshots. I’ve picked some of the more interesting from my collection and made a retrospective to show some of the things that others eventually might not find in any of the other popular MMOG’s.
(Caution: Large amount of image data ahead!) …
Playsyde has published a video of the first 10 minutes playing into Tomb Raider Legends. This is the first time you can really see how the game looks in action and it looks pretty impressive I must say! It seems that Tomb Raider finally grew up (after the unsuccessful TR Angel Of Darkness). The graphic looks stunning and Lara’s movement seems much more natural and smooth than before.
The game is going to be released on 18. April and you can count on a review from Dataleak! Until then check out the official site for more info and preview treats!
What do you need spells for if you got a decent Blaster Rifle?!
According to this forum post on allakhazam.com, the result of Lucas Arts Focus Group discussion about the future of Star Wars Galaxies most participants yelled for a server rollback pre-NGE in unity.
Star Wars Galaxies suffered a huge loss of players in late 2005 because of the NGE total game damage that a certain Julio Torres who thought he might be funny came up with (dataleak reported). Obviously the royals at Lucas Arts and Sony Online Entertainment were envious about the high sale counts of other MMOG’s (WoW) and tried to make Galaxies conforming for dummy players. But somehow Fantasy themes are much more popular than the Star Wars Universe (something I personally will never understand).
Though there is alot of false publicity from SOE and Torres striving in the wild of the official boards and gaming sites about how well the NGE was accepted, it was obvious to them that SWG went nose-dive after the NGE was published. The damage was done!
The question for them is: what to do now? Many of the players left SWG and went over to other MMORPG’s, some of them are happy with it, others think they are a poor replacement for SWG and wish that SWG would come back like it was pre-NGE or even pre-CU. The SWG servers are yawning from emptyness with too few players on them. My once shiny bunker house that I got when pre-ordering Trials Of Obi-Wan surely has thick layers of dust in it’s vaults! How many players would come back to SWG if it would be rolled back and how many of the new post-NGE players who are fine with the current game would leave because of a rollback?
I have managed to not play SWG since the NGE came live (4 months now) but I would resubscribe without a second thought if the game was rolled back, simply because there is no other MMORPG that has the amount of complexity that SWG had before. If I wanted to play a no brainer shooter, I’d use any of the FPS’s out there. WoW is too simple for my taste, the graphics are inferior and the population too childish and besides I totally don’t dig fantasy.
Or how to completely destroy a popular MMORPG
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