Bay 12 Games Forum

Virtz, wanting a lot less than 100ms is like having to have the optimal '60fps'. I'm fine with 150~ ms. Over 200 and I fear that I might lag, but I'm never screwed up at 100ms.

Well, I guess it depends on netcode implementation. But I really have played FPSes where 100+ ms meant you started seeing people teleport around and they weren't neccessarily bad games (the most notable example of good game - bad netcode I know is AvP2).

I like the idea that you can aim your shots, it makes it feel like you're actually doing something.

Perhaps, but not only does it violate roleplay by letting you handle the combat skills, it also looks freaking ridiculous. People circle strafing, running like headless chickens, occassionally attacking enemies that briefly appear in front of them for a quarter of a second and so on. This is how it looked in Face of Mankind. And judging from Darkfall videos, that's similar in melee, except with notably more range.

Perhaps it could be handled so that it doesn't look that way, but I question if it can be done. FoM tried to minimize this by slowing strafing to a crawl, the result was just that people started running ahead and turning a lot more instead, which actually looked even more ridiculous than normal CS-esque circle-strafing. The only way I can think of of making it look normal is by semi-realistic health systems, so that people are dead before they get into range to begin this ridiculous dance.

There's Dominions 3, but I'm uncertain if you'd consider this animated enough. You can always try the demo.

There's also Fantasy Wars (couldn't find a better video), which is essentially a 3D, animated Fantasy General - that is, a turn-based, hex-based strategy game with unit experience and persistance (meaning you get to keep them from mission to mission). Demo available.

Then there's the Heroes of Might and Magic series. Starting from 1, which is pretty cartoony, to 3 which is pretty highres-looking. 4 changed gameplay and graphics to the point where it wasn't as appealing (but you may like it if you thought the previous ones needed changes) and 5 returned to the old formula, but turned anime-ish.

If you feel like you were cheated out of your money, why dont you read online reviews/the back of the case first? I hate pirating, so.

That might be the case once reviewers start reviewing on objective terms rather than how fun it was for them. Not to mention the bribery that goes on in the gaming industry. Game (p)reviews are simply not a reliable source.

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it's fairly weird to think a MMO can be pirated

Ultima Online, Lineage, Counter-strike, half-life series, Warcraft, WoW, a lot of other examples.

Yes, great MMOs right there. :|

Concerning piracy, I question how much it actually impacts the industry. Everyone's been screaming about it since day one, and yet game development costs continue to needlessly grow, with money being spent on big name celebrities for voice actors (rather than, you know, real voice actors), increasing graphics whoredom, pointless gameplay gimmicks, etc.. The industry also more and more grows to think it's ok to screw over gamers, with clones of clones, shoddy ports, grand scale hype lies, "can you tell the difference?" sequels and most of all, no demos (often paired with bullshit like "It wouldn't serve the game justice"). Overall, I wouldn't mind if most of the industry, in its current form, would just crash and burn due to piracy. But I doubt it'll happen, yet it brings me joy to see dumbed down, hyped up crap like Spore get pirated up the arse. But cases where piracy is that rampant are rare, hence I doubt it could bring down the industry anytime soon, nor meaningfully affect a single game company. The gaming industry is more likely to bring itself down due to idiotic development costs.

The only area where I think piracy is unjustifiable is with indie game developers, who most often deliver on what they promise, provide proper demos/trials and do not necessarily strive to sell a generic game to a highest possible amount of customers, but rather go for niches and try to be innovative (although there are also those who just want to be EA's little sister).

Anyone who liked Sword of the Samurai has a good chance of liking Covert Action. They're somewhat similar, both being a sort of collection of subgames of different genres. That and both being from Microprose and released around the same time.

And now for something obscure: Millennia: Altered Destinies. A game of the now dead Strategy/Adventure genre.

So what's it about? Mostly time travel. Your objective is to populate an empty galaxy with 4 sentient races and track and alter their technological progress through 10000 years. Ultimately, these races will have to face a common alien enemy and it's your job to make sure they're ready for it and that they can eventually supply you with technology for your ship.

Your ship's most prominent feature is the ability to travel through time, at least 100 years at a time. You can also always view the race homeworld timelines, showing you what sort of events will occur in time. And you, of course, are to move back and forth through time and attempt to alter these events so that these races survive and prosper. And they will need help surviving.

The races are sort of anthropomorphic caricatures. There's the war-loving lizards, the fanatically religious polar bears, the hivemind insectoids and the consumerist fishpeople. They're all utterly stupid and are guaranteed to drive themselves (and possibly each other) into extinction without your guidance.

Upon seeding these races, you also sent down immortal variants of them to act as your ambassadors. You'll mostly be interacting with the race through them, via dialogues. They do not, however, consider you God, nor omnipotent. They mostly turn to you when they have problems and it's convenient that you instruct them on what to do and eventually they may resist your advice and face annihilation unless you're persuasive enough. This mostly means having to go through the same dialogue tree till you get it right (you can control time, after all), but some of the dialogues are pretty amusing. And you should throw out all your modern sensibilities out the window when dealing with them. Most races will not prosper under our idea of the ideal political system (democracy), that'll downright lead them to failure. You need to consider their tendencies and make sure your advice doesn't conflict with them, but you cannot let them overdo it (nuclear war is not good, even for the lizard people).

Your own ship doesn't require much. You need only to make fly-bys near gas giants to refuel and repairs are done automatically. You can try to fight the enemy in space, but this just leads to a dull point and click battle and, from my experience, all this does is divert the invasion to a different star system, so your success relies on how the races evolve. Each of the races will eventually be able to supply your ship with some unique technology. The combination of these will allow you to return to your own galaxy (the real ultimate goal). You will also find out that you're not the only one travelling through time.

It's worth noting that this game is hard. I never played it effectively enough to even have a single race become space-faring before the invasion came. And there's no walkthrough out there whatsoever. However, the game is worth checking out if only for the concept of freely travelling through time and altering it to achieve a greater goal.

Someone just suggested Perfect World to me.  I watched some gameplay videos and it looks quite nice.  Has anyone ever tried it?  I'd never even heard of it until a few minutes ago.

It's an mmorpg. An Asian one. Expect much grinding and "kill/gather X amount of Y" quests.

Not all of them are illegal. HOTU does some serious checks to whether a game is illegal, and removes the link if it is, so it's a good source.

What they do is still "illegal" in the sense that it violates copyright of games no longer being sold, which is enforced by no one.

Personally, I don't give a damn about these faulty laws protecting the property of no one. And neither does anyone enough to enforce them unless they're paid to specifically do so (ESA).

And for the record, Abandonia keeps track of these things as well. Pretty much most abandonware sites keep track of game retail status to some extent, just that some do it more diligently than others. The ones that don't at all are pretty rare and most often non-English.

it says "dk.tmp: No such file or directory" when i type
Mount D: C:\Dosgames\Darklands\
D:
Darklands

Well, beats me. Doing that works for me with a recently extracted version. The dk.tmp file is created when the game if first run. Have you tried creating an empty file (.txt, for example) and renaming it to dk.tmp?