I found this funny flash video of the freeware strategy game Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn. It features sprites taken from the PC game itself.
And oh, MacGyver makes a cameo appearance in the sequel. Honest.
See the flash video of the freeware strategy game after the jump.
Please take note that this video is not my creation. It does NOT reflect my political views about France, Germany, GDI, the Brotherhood, or Kaine's bald head.
"...and he had his pocketknife and a box of matches with him."
The quality of the funny Flash video parody took a hit when its creator, Alexander "Killerratte" Schützner, converted it from Flash to AVI. You can see the high-quality version in his NewGrounds channel. The video has a sequel. It is titled "Command & Conquer - Tiberium Ecstasy" and can be found both on his YouTube and NewGrounds channels.
Memories of the first-person shooter PC game Medal of Honor: Allied Assault come to mind; Harry Patch, the last surviving veteran of the first world war, has died at the age of 111.
This news might seem unrelated to this site but I had to post this. Owing to the school massacres perpetrated by first-person shooter gamers, the public have slapped a stigma on FPS games and the people who play them. I don't know why PC shooter games are getting all the flak where catalysts for violence are concerned. I hear people getting mobbed, stabbed, and shot in sleazy bars and shady pubs almost every four or so months and these don't get hyped-up public criticism. It's so strange it's almost funny.
Why do I play video games in medieval fantasy or far future settings? Because I find games in realistic settings disturbing. Running around whacking pedestrians with a baseball bat is not my cup of tea. I gravitate towards games with unrealistic settings because to relax, I want to embark periodically in digital escapist adventures. Contrary to public belief, we PC FPS fans don't fancy taking guns in our hands and blowing people's craniums away. Real conflicts, wars --- they are so tiring.
Portrait of a hero basking in a nation's gratitude. (Image taken from Tough Guy)
Below are quotes from Harry Patch, a person who saw the horrors of the "war to end all wars":
"Anyone who tells you that in the trenches they weren't scared, he's a damned liar: you were scared all the time."
"I met someone from the German side and we both shared the same opinion: we fought, we finished and we were friends... It wasn't worth it."
"I didn't welcome the war at all, and never felt the need to get myself into khaki and go out there fighting before it was 'all over by Christmas.'"
"I was with him for the last 60 seconds of his life. He gasped one word — 'Mother.' That one word has run through my brain for 88 years. I will never forget it."
(At a 2007 remembrance ceremony) "Today is not for me. It is for the countless millions who did not come home with their lives intact."
It's sad that the last remnant of a generation has passed away. It's not unlike reading about the departure of the high elves from Middle Earth in Silmarillion --- a nobility has faded away into the mists of legends, leaving us hate-mongering savages to jump around the face of the land, spoiling it with our crude visions of civilization.
It just seems so ironic that countless heroes spent their lives to defend freedom and equality and now that they have all passed away, we are faced with savage cowards who blow up innocent people in the streets and leaders who launch nukes just to pressure world powers into giving in to talks. Compared to Patch you're the stuff that I accidentally step on sometimes. I hope you idiots all peacefully die tomorrow. F-22s roaring through the skies might be magnificent to behold. G36s assault rifles might be awesome. But let us all take the time to ponder about the sacrifices that an entire generation has made for us.
I am a first-person shooter fan but I firmly believe shootouts should stay on LCD and CRT displays.
Sam Raimi, the director of the Spider-Man movies, will be the one to direct the film adaptation of Blizzard Entertainment's wildly popular, money-raking MMORPG World of Warcraft.
And no, this isn't a prank. The massively multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG) is indeed coming to the silver screen. Links and resources after the jump.
Not the type who reads "long-winded" reviews? Click the link at the bottom to see the full review where a gameplay video of the downloadable PC free FPS multiplayer shooter is shown. A link to more free full downloadable PC free FPS multiplayer shooters can also be found below.
Released a year after Far Cry and Doom 3---two PC first-person multiplayer shooter games that upped the bar in graphics standard---Area 51 didn't garner a solid following of full game FPS fans and faded gradually out of the limelight almost immediately after its release. Recently though (after Midway folded?) Area 51 has stormed its way into the freeware arena, stomping its full game free fps shooter game brethren. Touting Midway-backed production values, the game---which garnered only average reviews from reputable gaming sites like GameSpot and IGN---now stands as one of the must-downloads in the downloadable freeware scene.
See the in-depth review---complete with screenshots and the download link---after the jump.
Area 51 is a sci-fi PC first-person shooter that is reminiscent of the Half-life series. As specialist Ethan Cole, you get to go inside the Groom Lake facility where---yes, you guessed it---something has gone terribly wrong. A virus has spread inside the facility, infecting its personnel. While in the beginning the base is under military control, things slowly start going south as you blaze your way through the game's levels. By the time you finish its first half, all your companions will have died.
While in itself the game's hackneyed story can't hope to captivate its players, Area 51 does provide PC FPS fans with a cathartic experience delivered by a decent game engine.
Despite being trumped by Crytek and id Software's games, for a 2005 release, the engine is more than capable, rendering light sources convincingly, bathing in-game objects with bloom effects. It also has no trouble rendering firefights with multiple adversaries; these play out smoothly, exhibiting consistent framerates.
Yes, lights; lots of them...
The game initially pits you and the HAZMAT team that you belong to against hordes of infected AREA 51 personnel. Sadly, the developers didn’t quite get the cathartic, frenetic feel of popular horde games like Doom 2 and Serious Sam. This can be attributed to the fact that despite Area 51’s superb audio---glass shatters convincingly and you can almost feel the recoil of the guns---infected react to injury in a very anemic manner. Even if hit by multiple bullets, they don't even scream until before the moment they croak, making shooting them as exciting as shooting moving pieces of cardboard. This comes as a disappointment given that the first part of the game is chock-full of these creatures.
Without spoiling anything too much, the game does pick up in the second half. You become infected and gain the ability to mutate temporarily into a long-taloned, thick-skinned monstrosity that soon enough gains two more abilities:
• Parasite - enables you to shoot tentacled flying things that seek out and latch on to the nearest enemy, leeching health and giving it to you (how they do that I have no idea) and • Contagion - lets you shoot a stream of bacteria/pheromones/whatever at an enemy, making them go postal. Enemies in this state will attack whoever is nearest. The infection then kills the afflicted after a short period.
The game also introduces a new type of enemy ----- spec ops soldiers. These baddies are as smart as the infected are dumb. While not exhibiting an AI as smart as of FEAR, they do take cover and lob grenades. They also take cover behind crates though I think the programmers have defined “safe zones” for Area 51’s AI. When they come near one of these (crates, alcoves, etc), they immediately make a beeline towards the zones come hell or high water. Though they use these self-preservation tactics consistently, they don’t know how to flank and more often than not rush headlong into your fire while their comrades provide suppressive fire. Again, the behavior isn’t FEAR but it does the job fairly well, pitting players against competent enemies.
...and soldiers. Lots of them too. Wait until you play in Hard mode and see their entire tribe.
One ax to grind against this game however, is the poor implementation of several features, namely its dual-wield system, grenade “inventory,” and how you access the in-game documents you input into a mini-computer that is attached to your character’s wrist. (Yes, it’s like Q collaborated with Vulcans to invent a tricorder-disguised-as-a-wrist-watch thingamajig.) I believe that all video games play on the concept that the player is in control. It’s with the aforementioned things that Area 51 fails.
The game lets you dual-wield assault rifles. While this is cool, aiming is hard. In the early stages of the game (when the sniper rifle isn’t available yet) this forced me to use a pistol in long-range firefights. An option to drop the second rifle when the situation calls for it would have been nice as it would have given the player greater tactical control over firefights.
The grenade inventory system fails --- big time. The game lets you use two types of grenades: the usual one and this alien-spawned Jelly Bean of Death that explodes on contact, bounces wildly once, creates a black hole, and then explodes a second time. Needless to say, the second is very powerful and is best reserved for very hard gun battles. Unfortunately, saving up on this JB grenades is an option not available to you. They “stack” on top of your regular grenades with no way to toggle between regular and alien grenades ala Halo. Again, this deprives the player of a greater tactical control.
What's an "Area 51" game without alien weaponry?
Lastly, the in-game documents that you can gather throughout the game provide the player glimpses of the life of the scientists in the Groom Lake facility. They also bolster the conspiracy theory behind crop circles and various epidemics that have ravaged our planet. These are meant to improve the immersive atmosphere as the player runs through the previously sterile halls of the science facility. Or they would have, if the designers of the game decided that the player can only read them if the exits the singleplayer campaign and accesses them through the game’s main menu. How they reached that decision is utterly beyond me.
All these however, are minor annoyances if compared to the mix of cathartic audio, fierce firefights, and immersive environments that is Area 51.
The Nvidia GeForce ION 190.38 graphic driver update, while enabling my Nvidia GeForce video card to render richer colors, falls flat in the FPS department. Video card benchmark tests show numbers that lagged behind the Nvidia GeForce ION 190.38 's predecessors. I've read the feedback of several users and more than a few of them expressed their disappointment with this one. Perhaps it's the new Stereoscopic 3D Driver Service that Nvidia has bundled with this graphic driver update.
(Tweakguides has provided steps on how to uninstall these however. It can be found here. Take note that it removes the game profiling feature that Nvidia GeForce users find so useful.)
I've also noticed that at its default setting, this driver has a slightly lower gamma level.
The color quality is nothing to be scoffed at however --- Aquasky's "Most Wanted" Tribes: Vengeance video never looked so good
Well it's been a while since I updated my video card graphic driver. I surfed my favorite sites today and learned from Tweakguides that GeForce ION graphic driver version 190.38 is now out. The download weighs a hefty 81.8Mb (compare this to the streamlined Dox Optimised drivers and the image quality-tweaked Nvidia graphic drivers from Tweakforce, which weigh only 20 or so megabytes).
Some of the release highlights of GeForce ION graphic driver version 190.38:
Adds support for OpenGL 3.1
Adds support for CUDA 2.3 for improved performance in GPU Computing applications. See CUDA Zone for more details.
Adds a new user-controlled power management setting for GeForce 9-series and later graphics cards. This option allows users to set a performance level for each DirectX or OpenGL application.
Includes several new control panel features and numerous bug fixes.
According to Nvidia, this BETA driver supports GeForce 6, 7, 8, 9, 100, and 200-series desktop GPUs and ION GPUs.
Always we have seen science-fiction movies depict aliens as the all-consuming force, plundering entire star systems---including our little planet---for resources. This one took me by surprise; the wiki entry here says that the aliens are refugees and it's us that's doing the behind-kicking. That's a very cool twist, something I didn't see coming --- and one that makes me wonder why no one thought of this before.
What with the lockdown, the high-technology, and the sense of oppression that's prevalent in the trailer, this one reminds me so much of a certain PC first-person shooter game that I half-expected somebody to walk down the street in real power armor and a crowbar.
District 9 is being produced by Peter Jackson, the same dude---for those who don't know---who produced the LOTR saga.
And "District 9"; that's almost a dead ringer for "City 17."
Well, isn't this a night of whole numbers. K-lite just released v5.0.0 and VLC media player 0.8 is no more; the developers of the open source, free software media player just released version 1.0.0.
What does it support and how does it compare to VLC media player 0.8?
I learned that Bethseda has released Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall as downloadable freeware. The 1996 DOS game is the (then) cutting edge prequel to Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion.
Given how much acclaim the Elder Scrolls series has garnered, I couldn't believe what I was reading at first so I checked Bethseda's official site and went to their downloads section. Well pots of mana, it IS free! The full RPG game Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall is free.
Compared to the awesome v4.8.5, this K-lite Codec Pack Full version doesn't bring a lot to the table. However, if you haven't updated in quite a long while, I suggest you go to the free K-Lite Codec Pack Full download page and get this update. Version 4.8.5 was a must-download and this one still has the same superior bass and treble separation that the former had.
And yep, as I've mentioned countless times before, K-Lite Codec Packs are free and downloadable.
"Tugsh Tugsh" just keeps getting better. And yes, that's indeed me and my PC setup. :D
This version's rating: 2 (rating system: 1 - no discernible changes; 2 - changes in audio but it could be just my imagination lol; 3 - distinctive changes; 4 - a must-download)
I can't sleep. I mean I can, but that happens only when the sun is peeking through the rooftops of my sleepy neighborhood. My wife wakes up and I sleep. Come nightfall, it's her turn to sleep and I wake up.
It has taken a toll on my health and it's starting to show. I made a collage of me and my wife just to show my folks how well I'm doing financially but how serious my condition is. Here it is:
So with a whole sack of salt I downloaded this 9Mb freeware shooter game called Star Wraith: Shadow of Orion...
...and had my skepticism blown to smithereens by pulse lasers.
At 9Mb, I didn't expect much from this freeware full shooter sim game. When I installed it and listened to the minutes-long tutorial though, I realized there and then that this little baby has more than just flash from starship drives and space pewpew prevalent in wannabe games that just coat themselves with eye candy and throw everything else outside the nearest warpgate. Free full shooter sim game Star Wraith: Shadows of Orion has (nearly?) all the complexity that serious space sim fans crave for.
This game has controls for making your space fighter strafe, spin left and right, give orders to squadmates, allocate power to your shields and weapon systems, activate jumpjets, and drop electronic countermeasures at incoming missiles. Panels also let you see your current target and your squadmates' shields. You can also cycle through targets, making your missiles track targets of opportunity.
What with the dearth of space sim game nowadays, this free full shooter sim game should more than satisfy Wing Commander and Freelancer fans out there.
Download this free full shooter sim game from HERE.
The official site of Starwraith 3D Games can be found HERE.
Not meaning to sound like a star-touched fanboy but hey, considering that our place nearly went up in flames when the line outside our digs started sputtering invectives whenever we drew power from it a few nights back, this came as a pleasant surprise the morning after:
Gorgeous. Sexah. Witty. She's the YouTube bomb. Thanks Karen!
