Category Archives: Gaming

Red Orchestra = Best Multiplayer FPS

Posted on August 8, 2005 by Snake

That’s right, I’ve been playing a lot of Red Orchestra. Wanna fight about it? I swear it’s the most realistic and intense war FPS you can play online since Infiltration. So I urge you, my faithful three visitors, upgrade your rigs, get UT2004, download RO, and let the getting pwned because you’re noobs begin. I was a noob, too, when I started playing at 3.1. Now at 3.3, I’m really starting to get the feel for the game. Just see for yourself.

How to start playing Red Orchestra:
You’ll need a computer that’s no more than 3 years old. The CPU should be no less than 1.6Ghz; 2Ghz or better is recommended. Lots of RAM is a must: 512MB is good, but 1GB is best. The video card doesn’t have to be real great; a GeForce 3 or Radeon 8500 is probably bare-minimum. A mouse with a lot of buttons is great to have, as is a large screen. Also consider that UT2004 with RO takes a good 7GB of disk space.
Since RO is a mod of UT2004 for now, you have to buy UT2004. It’s less than $20 at most online places. I’d suggest buying it unless you hope to get lucky with finding a serial somewhere that isn’t banned or in use. You can get UT2004 from Newegg.
Then, you gotta download RO itself. It’s up to about 700MB these days. Get your preferred format of download here. Be sure to find the community map packs to download, too.
Finally, you should practice with the bots for a few days before you jump onto a server. There are a lot of factors to get used to, such as that machineguns have to be set down on something to be aimed accurately; you can only aim accurately by looking down the sights; only a few people can occupy most roles; there’s no ammo display, so you have to count your shots; etc.

PS: I reviewed the new iteration of Delta Force here.

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Music Reviews

Posted on February 10, 2005 by Gandalf

So, the lack of content at S–l is hurting my brain. Thus, I’ve decided to do music reviews. Maybe if I do enough of them, Snake will give me own button. I hope so. Anyways I’m going to try and do one a day. so here’s the first:

Mum- Summer Make Good

Oh, and I’ve wanted to post this for a long time:

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playing games and stuff

Posted on December 29, 2004 by Snake

I haven’t had as much time to work on the site and apps and such as I’d planned because I was given Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 for Christmas. The former I just finished yesterday after an unexpected and rather uninspired ending. I have much criticism of HL2 and it just doesn’t deserve the 98% from PCG and unpresidented 11/10 from MaxPC. First off, my biggest gripe is Steam. It works on the assumption that you will only be playing games from Valve and have a broadband connection. It’s also a huge annoyance for its new piracy measures. Not only did I have to copy everything from 5 discs, but I then had to sign up for Steam, decrypt the entire 4GB of data, download critical parts of the engine, and then download the latest update. Five hours later, I actually got to load HL2. It takes a while to load, and I’m afflicted with some kind of bug that causes the game to hang while loading after roughly 15 to 20 loads (quickloads and new area loads). It also wasn’t that fun of a game. After the first few hours of “woah, check out this engine!”, the gameplay gets rather unexciting. There’s nothing you haven’t seen before. It only looks better. Then there’s only half the number of weapons that HL had, a weak plot, and unclear mission objectives. I had the feeling a number of times that I was just wandering through the linear maze of a level and shooting things without a purpose. However, there are a few isolated cool scenes in the game. One being the Tremors/Starship Troopers “Ant Lions” chapter. Some of the squad stuff was also fun. While HL2 may look absolutely stunning, it plays rather lame.

I just installed Doom 3 today. I was initially put off by the fact that Doom 3 doesn’t like to run when Daemon is installed. I immediately went for a NoCD that fixed it right up. These game developers and publishers are going too far with the piracy protection. It’s almost a pain to be legit these days. That aside, Doom 3 is quite impressive. It sure did scare the shit out of me when the accident happened and the guy right next to me became a zombie. However technologically advanced, it still feels reminiscent of Doom.

And because you never have too many screenshots:

Now for the real news. LOL. 😉 I fixed the email script and there’s a new major beta release of the RoN Script Maker. It now comes in two flavors: Full Version and Lite Version. The difference being that Full has an installer/uninstaller, makes start menu shortcuts, and installs necessary redistributables (hard ass word to spell and type).

So that’s the news. 8)

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Tinkle Tinkle Poop Plop

Posted on May 9, 2004 by Snake

I couldn’t think of a title that wasn’t trite, so enjoy the quote from Beavis. On to business…

I’ve been playing a lot of CS: Condition Zero lately. I flip flop between the botmatches and “Deleted Scenes”, but of course the botmatches are the most fun. The old models suck, though, so I replaced them with some of my better downloaded ones. Just my luck, they didn’t work right. I spent the last two weeks figuring out how to fix them, though. In the course, I devised two methods of upgrading the models to CZ standard, one of which I wrote a program for in VB. As I believe other CZ players will have this problem, I wrote a guide to upgrading CS models. It can be found here.

Other than that, there have been no other updates. Some Columns are still in limbo currently. Given the end of the semester for college and the end of my relationship with Beckie as well as my lack of acquiring a job, I’ll unfortunately have a lot of free time, now 😕 . At least the site will get some upgrades, perhaps even a new graphics set soon. Although, in the gloom of my current love life, the bloody walls are strangely tranquil. Which reminds me: Gandalf and I have recently blogged on our mixed pool of emotions and thoughts. Enjoy.

Peace. Fuck you. Whatever.

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jDoom and You

Posted on October 9, 2002 by Snake

Since version 1.13, jDoom has surpassed the other ports as the leader in all aspects. It has decent multiplayer support (although no splitscreen like Legacy), excellent lighting/particle effects, support for models, a great console/command-line/control panel system, the usual HUD and control options, and finally working EAX (and it sounds awesome). But something that I have really found ingenious and essential to the refurbishing of the game is the high-quality textures. Being the pixel pimp that I am, I have already started making my own flats for Doom. Usually, I take the old texture and bring it up to 128x128x24 and then tile it, so I can get to work. It takes a good hour to redo the texture well, but the results are more than pleasing. Take a look at some of my flat (a flat is a square ceiling or floor texture) work in these screenies:

Getting jDoom is pretty straight-forward, unless you want the models (you want the models!). In which case, it’s kinda confusing. So here’s how to get jDoom.
1. Acquire an IWAD. The shareware (doom1.wad) is everywhere and that should suffice for many, but Doom.wad or Doom2.wad is preferable. They can be found in various places (*cough*cough*S&L*cough*ftp), but few really sell them anymore.
2. Download the main Doomsday package. Linkage. It’s a Next>Next>Install>Finish sort of deal, you shouldn’t need to change any defaults.
3. Get the KickStart2 launcher. Linkage. You’ll need this to “launch” jDoom, since once you’re inside the game, some things can’t be changed, such as graphics API, IWAD, and initializations.
4. Get the models! If you have a pretty modern rig, you’ll want these, because they totally submit that “New Doom” feel. Linkage. Linkage. Optional Linkage (Hi-Res skins).
5. DOWNLOAD MY REFURBISHED FLATS! Linkage. Follow the instructions in the comments.
6. Say “Boom”. 8)

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And here’s the news.

Posted on October 6, 2002 by Snake

You know it’s time to do some news when people start getting angry about the lack of news. There’s not really anything newsworthy to throw out, though. Most of it is recent developments. For one, both Gandalf and Rachael have their own journal here. And Rachael helped me fix a huge bug in the journal script, today.

Today, I started working on a timeline of the history of S&L. It’s a very long image, separated by clan and host eras. Much of the early S&L isn’t documented, though, as we had no Columns or news back then. It’s very schweet seeing everything layed out graphically, though. I’ll post it somewhere, probably as a Column, on a later date.

We’ll be having a rippage event on Halloween once again this year (codename S4) and then the next day, we Surge …3.0 style 8) . It’s possible that we may actually have 4 people for this event. With even teams, we’ll probably be playing a lot more of the good stuff (TFC and UT). This will be one for the history books…er, timeline.

Well, that’s pretty much it. Be sure to look at our journals, as they get updated more often 😉 .

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