Work In Progress
This node isn’t frontpaged because it’s just an ongoing project that I want to start and ‘fix’, before giving it an actual shape. You aren’t supposed to read this but you may happen to finish here if you follow the “recent post” page.
Plan: Everything here is subjective. This is also the purpose of the whole site, hearing a subjective point of view, following subjective likings and suggestions. It’s a resource for me and noone else. At the same time you are supposed to be interested in what I think, as a specific point of view. The same is for me when I go read other blogs and forums. I’m interested in others opinions, what others like. Their subjective, opinionated point of view. If you expect something else you probably wouldn’t read this but a more ‘balanced’ mainstream network filled with fluff and hype. Everything here is pure freedom. It follows just my curiosity and subjective interest.
When it comes to games I’m omnivorous. I’m curious about everything. I like MMORPGs, RPGs, action RPGs, Japanese RPGs, FPS, RTS, graphical adventures, arcade shooters, management games, strategic games, flight simluators, space simulators, wargames and more… the only genres that I mostly ignore are sport and puzzle games and there are exceptions even here.
The purpose of this page is to gather and list all the games I read about over the internet and on the magazines and that got me interested for a reason or another. I keep always keep forgetting about the less exposed games and I usually write on the site only if I have something consistent to write. This page will gather links and references so that I can keep a somewhat organized “watch list” of what tickled my interest, with some short notes to explain the reasons of the curiosity.
Watch List
– Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends – This game sounds crazy. The graphic looks incredible and has a very unique and special mood that I’ve never seen in any other game. I don’t know much about it but it seems some sort of evolved RTS. Give a look to the screenshots, they are enough to generate all the hype you need. A mmorpg with those kind of environments in first person would be a wet dream. It also feels Steampunk, which I love. Release Date: Spring 06.
The graphics are fantastic. Effects flare and bloom with the majesty of royal fireworks, whilst units move realistically. While watching the elementals decimate ranks of men, one truly thinks “Yeah, that’s how I would move if I were a fire elemental.” Buildings all have fantastic detail, down to the men running the ledges waiting to open fire on nearby attackers. The cities, which are extremely different from those of most titles, are living, breathing things of beauty. They move in hundreds of ways and truly appear to be functioning factories of power.
– Enemy Territory: Quake Wars – Because it has batshit insane technology and looks great. It has the potential to be much better than Battlefield 2 and I always loved the look&feel of the Doom engine. 32 kilometres square maps. Many different vehicles and a Starship Trooper ‘feeling’. Its power will be in the immersion. It will try to encourage team play and simulate a huge battlefield that will feel as near as possible to a permanent campaign (and persistent character advancement, it seems). It will also try to minimize the HUD, as explained here. The design seems solid, same for the technology. Recently seen here. Release Date: End 06.
During the early part of the project we realised we wanted to be able to render these huge outdoor areas and John Carmack is undoubtedly the best graphics programmer on the planet. He proposed, and then devised, the idea for the MegaTexture, which is a single unique texture that covers the entire landscape.
It’s 32,000 pixels by 32,000 pixels, it creates a six gigabyte source file which we then have to compress to ensure good disk space usage but actually only ends up using 8Mb of video memory on a video card. We took this basic implementation of the technology and then started developing it further so we had it working on a 3D mesh, we introduced a single parallel light source for lighting, the ability to put other models and things on the landscape, foliage, tools like mega-gen which generates the texture, geometric texture distribution, the road tool that lets you just plop roads down along a route.
– Prey – Imho, the surprise of 2006. If they don’t screw it. The hype is definitely not enough since I expect this game to become a huge commercial success. It looks amazing and I really think the artists have done the best work possible. This game is pure art. I’ve written more about the game here. It will be the best FPS of this year. Release Date: March 06.