DuatDweller on 2/9/2024 at 16:05
What's wrong with Daikatana?
:joke:
demagogue on 2/9/2024 at 20:36
I actually haven't played it yet, and I've always thought the concept sounded cool.
So I still expect it should be a good game and am only wary because of bad reviews it got, so will go in with lowish expectations that I hope put it in a good light.
I think of it in the same vein as HL2 and Bioshock, part of that second generation of post-90s FPS / immersive sims that didn't have the same magic anymore and were more explicitly out for bling and sales. I used to date that shift to HL2, but have wondered if the line is better drawn at Daikatana (and for that matter Star Wars: Episode I). But since I haven't played it yet, I really don't have an informed opinion yet. I suppose I really have to play it sooner or later.
Edit: The only, well it's not a red flag but a flag or data point on it anyway that I know is that it builds off the D&D campaign the iD guys were playing mentioned in Masters of Doom. That's a flag just because it builds off something so personal to those guys and their experience with that game, it risks making it hard for them to cut or reshape things for the betterment of the game at the cost of their personal connection to it.
Nothing is supposed to be sacred when it comes to good game development, and you gotta be ready for the game to tell you what it is and not dictate to it what doesn't survive playtesting. Well as just mentioned above, though, over all of that was the interpersonal crisis with that manager that made the whole project toxic, so it's bigger than just that issue. Again, I shouldn't be saying anything about it until after I've played it though.
heywood on 2/9/2024 at 23:48
I really wanted to like Anachronox. It had a cool story and fun characters, but the combat was tedious and it came out right after a series of games that redefined the CRPG for me.
I didn't play Daikatana. I looked forward to it, hoping it would turn out to be a flawed masterpiece with some ambitious ideas that they couldn't quite pull off, rushed to completion but where you could see the potential. But the reviews turned me off, making it sound very average. The concept just wasn't that compelling, and everyone was complaining about the bad friendly AI. By the time it finally hit shelves, it just seemed like a game that would have been worth playing if it was still 1998. But the goal posts had moved a long, long way in the three years between Daikatana's announcement and its release.
And yeah, I think most gamers my age remember Daikatana and Romero but don't remember that Anachronox and Deus Ex came from Ion Storm too. Outside of places like TTLG that is. The press was treating Romero like a rock star in the late 90s. After leaving id, the fans split and there were plenty who wrote him off and enjoyed the schadenfreude when stories of largess and mismanagement started to leak out.
DuatDweller on 3/9/2024 at 17:42
Quote Posted by demagogue
I actually haven't played it yet, and I've always thought the concept sounded cool.
.
I played it top to bottom, sure I used cheats to bring along the two useless helpers, but its not a bad game after all.
taffernicus on 25/9/2024 at 11:04
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes,Social Contract by Rousseau, and Discworld by Terry Pratchett looks like a great book to dawdle over, i am bent on buying those books
haiduk on 27/9/2024 at 22:50
Currently reading Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, by J Weatherford. Very interesting. Especially the parts dealing with his early life and Mongol army tactics.
mxleader on 1/12/2024 at 02:45
Last week I finished reading an autobiography: It Doesn't Take a Hero : The Autobiography of General H. Norman Schwarzkopf. It'd been sitting there on my shelves for a few years and I got tired of the general staring at me. Anyone who served under him during Desert Storm, or watched a lot of CNN back then, wouldn't be surprised that the book had the same tone and tempo as the general did when speaking publicly. There were parts of it that were kind of annoying but overall it was in interesting view of the world from his point of view, from living in Iran with his dad as a child, to his combat service in Vietnam, to Desert Shield/Desert Storm. It was a long book at 503 pages but it went by surprisingly fast.
Currently I'm reading a Amelia Earhart biography that's lukewarm enough for me to keep turning the pages. I'm 1/3 in and hopefully it gets better. Maybe it's not as exciting as it should be because I've already learned so much about her over the years.s
taffernicus on 21/12/2024 at 05:37
I'm no embedded , OS and bare metal afficionados, but reading references and explanations of the inner workings , origins & design decisions behind < a,b,c,d,x,y,z > OS or something along that lines isn't taxing at all for me. I find The Design of the UNIX Operating System by Maurice Bach and UNIX internals by Uresh Vahalia fascinating to read. Could not recommend it highly enough for you wants to get into the weeds of that. Even the web(non book) Unix Clone tutorial from James Molloy) is quite excellent. There are many other books that are more updated. I found some educational ones that were released in 2013, 2015 and 2022.
Another reason is the transition of anti-cheat implementation to the kernel and i just wanted to see in general how the software-hardware interface works. i have personal animosity and bad feeling with that kernel level anti cheat feature news
Funnily I quickly get bored and running out of steam seeing the complexity of state of the art web development or alike.
taffernicus on 21/12/2024 at 05:40
Now I just need access to ancient hardware if the book is also ancient :D. Also that's why retrocomputing is interesting
demagogue on 21/12/2024 at 08:40
I read Tracy Kidder's book "The Soul of a New Machine" not long ago about the development of the Data General Eclipse, one of the early PCs (IBM clones), launched in 1980, which was also the inspiration and basic outline of the TV show Halt and Catch Fire. It goes into a little technical detail. The guy playing Cameron's character is the one they locked in his office to work out the microcode, and every once in a while he'll poke his head out with some genius solution to whatever the problem was. Anyway, it was a great read in 1981, and it's still a great read today. I recommend it.
