Plok

100% Mammoth 0% Orca 'Nuff said.

Are you insulting South Korean StarCraft players?

Played Ticket To Ride: Europe. Apart from having an obnoxiously inaccurate city placement, it's quite fun. Also, Cottage Garden isn't as lame as it sounds.

So I don't have to upload it elsewhere

Atari is desperate. The chances are very low, since cryptocurrencies have too few practical uses, and since you weren't paying attention since you only ever read PC Gamer, the cryptocurrency bubble burst a week ago.

Dungeons II is free on GOG for 41 more hours: https://www.gog.com/

In this week's Throwback Thursday feature, we put the spotlight on one of the most badass, albeit rather seldom used infantry units from Tiberium Wars - the Black Hand Troopers. Members of the Black Hand were no longer the sneaky bastards like they were in Renegade - by the Third Tiberium War, they decided to drop all stealth and subtlety and go to right into the front of combat. Their members were now primarily armed with flamethrowers, decent black armour, and a cape just to be sure (wonder how it never caught fire?). The Black Hand subfaction in Kane's Wrath had them trained as veteran from the Hand of Nod and was able to refit their flamethrowers with so-called Purifying Flames, a special flammable mixture infused with Tiberium. Also, in Kane's Wrath, Black Hand Troopers were "permitted" to use Black Hand insignia on their chests instead of the regular Nod emblem. Sadly, in practice, they were mostly seen transported in Reckoners. Remember, you can click on the preview to see a larger and more detailed image. Don't forget to check out the Throwback Thursdays archives if you've missed a week. Check back again next Thursday for another Throwback. Send in your ideas for future instalments. We also encourage you to share this on social media using the hash tags #ThrowbackThursday, #CnCTBT and #CNCNZTBT.

If you don't have any stray no-CD cracks (which would be a reason why the patch won't work), reinstall the game, but run the setup program itself as administrator. There might be a missing registry.

Make sure you're running the patch executable as administrator.

The original Dead Space is on spyware's Origin's On The House: https://www.origin.com/irl/en-us/store/free-games/on-the-house

If I had even 0.005% of all of that, I'd be very happy. You must be experiencing intense bliss every time you enter that room.

The King of Fighters 2002 is free on GOG for 41 more hours. Also a big sale started. https://www.gog.com/

Today, one day before the 15th anniversary of the original release of C&C Generals, the first version of OpenSAGE, an open-source reimplementation of the venerable SAGE engine that powered EALA's Command & Conquer and Battle for Middle-earth games, has been published. Since the engine has had many iterations, and since it this project has only been in development for 6 months, the current build (20180210) is NOT playable. However, it does do basic rendering (with some effects like Tiberium Wars-like clouds), some menu displays, and preview data. You can read more on this release in this dev diary, and download and examine the current build on this GitHub page.

Of course not, but it's easier since somebody bothered to make the engine itself flexible and properly documented. With them recording the largest, or at least the top 5 largest revenue in the industry, I don't buy that. Social media integrations in websites and apps, creating your own "standards" just when everyone is using the same ones (hello Apple), skiving off on the QA, programming garbage just to equate the PC to smartphones/tablets (hello all Windows after 7 and UWP), mid-generation video game consoles... An exception rather than a rule, really. I wasn't asking why, I was asking how. To be exact, I said "Oh gee, I wonder how those budgets even became large before lootboxes were even a (popular) thing..." Multi-studio projects have existed for many years now, and as a concept and as a practice predate both the lootbox and the microtransaction crazes. And there is such a thing as too many people in a workplace.

Explain BioWare and Victory Games, then. Why did it take so long for them to use Frostbite for something that isn't a Battlefield clone? Necessity, where there are still AAA and indie devs who do well without them? Most interesting. Just because something's fashionable at the moment doesn't mean it's actually good and/or useful. The same goes about drooling over the tiniest graphical edits that have been made in the past 10 years (and in most cases they truly are tiny). And while everyone still whitens their pants in graphics discussions, gameplay suffers. Not only would I sign for a poor-looking but great-playing game, I need to remind you, someone who only plays what's latest in Activision's catalogue, that you can make a game without a space-age graphical engine AND microtransactions/lootboxes. For more information, see indie successes like the ones from Supergiant Games and Little Green Men Games. Oh gee, I wonder how those budgets even became large before lootboxes were even a (popular) thing...

Look at it this way: it's far harder and more time-consuming to teach Frostbite not to be an FPS than it is to other engines.

Uh... https://www.tweaktown.com/news/57906/dices-frostbite-play-rpgs/index.html

Of course not, but it's a retarded engine that you can't just force on non-FPS genres without rewriting considerable amounts of it, whereas Unreal and Unity are actually flexible and were made by sane people. It'll take them longer to learn Frostbite than proper engines, as far more people already know the latter, resulting in more potential candidates.

The tendency to use new tech (some of which is obnoxiously hard to work with like Frostbite being shoved into non-FPS games) is self-imposed. "Archaic" tech that is also from 10 years ago has sufficient graphics to be called "realistic", as now we're just putting more and more particles, nothing more. We've reached graphical peak, there's no reason to use closed and non-flexible engines when there are open solutions like Unreal and Unity which are actually documented. A game's quality doesn't depend on the number of people you pay, but how you manage them and what you do with them. Persistent crunch time will wreck your performance whether you have 10 or 1000 people. Expenses that publishers bitch about are their own fault, not the fault of the industry's nature. Microtransactions and lootboxes are not there to pay the wages of the actual working staff, they only fuel the golden parachutes of the upper brass. Otherwise EA would not have directly stated that cutting the microtransactions from Battlefront II wouldn't affect them financially, and they would have downsized the living shit out of DICE to save money.

Jim Sterling's best piece in quite a while. Unlike pretty much anyone else, he keeps track of all the corporate bullshit from the past decade and still brings up things from the archives of the Interwebs, which renders all companies' excuses moot. As he says here, anger from gaming communities directed at publishers is just the sign that we've had it. Finally gamers at large have realized that inaction and hiding behind excuses does nothing.

This week, our Throwback Thursday segment features one of the first Hollywood stars that Westwood brought to their video game cutscenes. The role of GDI general Solomon was played by none other than the legendary James Earl Jones, best known for his voice work as Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader in the original Star Wars trilogy, Mufasa from Lion King, and the "This is CNN" ident. He's also an accomplished theatre actor, and the only actor in history who has won two Emmys in the same year (1991). After all of these accolades, his first entry to the gaming industry was Tiberian Sun. In fact, Tiberian Sun is the only game not tied to the Lion King or Star Wars licenses that he has performed in, and for someone who was apparently in it for the money, he put a good performance and did justice to the player character from Tiberian Dawn in his older days. Remember, you can click on the preview to see a larger and more detailed image. Don't forget to check out the Throwback Thursdays archives if you've missed a week. Check back again next Thursday for another Throwback. Send in your ideas for future instalments. We also encourage you to share this on social media using the hash tags #ThrowbackThursday, #CnCTBT and #CNCNZTBT.

They always were, and the fact that they lived on without them well enough just a decade ago renders that point moot.

When it reaches mainstream news and even politicians, you bet your ass it's a controversy. There is none. EA convinced their shareholders that removing them won't affect their financial plan.

For a video game music track, Frank Klepacki's Hell March sure has a lot of covers. Just to be safe, here's another, this time a short but really sweet one by Obsidian Productions, which you can also download from SoundCloud. This one's worth a listen!

My collection's grown a bit. Also, SoldOut Software was awesome.