Saturday, April 22, 2000

Evil Avatar Reviews the Daikatana Demo -- 10:17 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Evil Avatar beat most everyone to the punch with a full review of the Daikatana Demo. To put it mildly, he is not pleased. At all. Here's a snip from the beginning of his review:

"We waited four years for this?"

After a somewhat tumultuous beginning the demo version of Daikatana is finally available and gamers get their first real taste of John Romero's pet project. From their less than humble beginnings with "John Romero Will Make You His Bitch" to the total humiliation of having almost the entire Daikatana team walk out on him, it has been a long hard road.

Sadly, the light at the end of the tunnel turned out to be the headlamp of an oncoming train.

I haven't had an opportunity to play all the way through the demo. I've played the first part of the first level and, to be honest, I really have very little impetus to finish the demo. I'm kind of forcing myself to have fun.

When I downloaded the Soldier of Fortune demo, I wanted to keep playing to see what was coming next. With Daikatana (where the first level is very dark, very green, and you are attack by, um, robot frogs and dragonflys/mosquitos/something) I really don't have that urge. But I will give it a fair shake and probably try to play online before I pass final judgment. Stay tuned.

Friday, April 21, 2000

Daikatana Demo -- 8:18 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

As they had promised, ION Storm has released a demo of Daikatana. The demo weighs in at a portly 102.5M so you modemers better pack a couple dozen lunches. Expect a full review of the demo here on The Haus early next week!

Daikatana Gold! -- 8:14 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Egads! Violence! Mayhem! Cats and dogs living together in the wild! Believe it or not, folks, Daikatana has gone gold after only 75 years in development (OK, about four years, but still). If you haven't repented yet, this might be a good time to start. The end is obviously near. I'm going to have to have a little sit-down. Thanks Blue.

UT for PS/2 -- 4:03 pm CST, Update by The Master

Blue has a post on Epic's plans for Unreal Tournament on the PlayStation 2. This sounds VERY cool, especially with the PS2 being able to support USB devices-making FPSes really do-able on console-class systems. Yum.

NVIDIA Announcement Soon -- 10:14 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

NVIDIA's website has a new Flash intro pointing to an announcement they will be making on April 26, obviously of whatever they are going to be calling the NV15.

The interesting thing is that the 3dfx V5-5500 previews I've been seeing (and as compiled at the Shack) show that V5-5500 is only 15% faster than a GeForce DDR on a P3-650 on Q3A's "High Quality" settings. With ATi and NVIDIA's new chips coming out RealSoon (tMS), 3dfx may set a record for shortest time as the speed leader. Not to mention the fact that both companies products will have hardware T&L while the Voodoo line still will not.

The Master comments: From what I've read, on the P3-650 the V5 is CPU-limited. This wouldn't surprise me. I doubt you'll be seeing max performance from the V5 until you get to really high end processors and 4x AGP. Otherwise the V5 is just too powerful for the rest of the PC to max it out. Which makes the V6 look really senseless, doesn't it?

FWIW the Geforce256 is CPU-limited right now too. I know Carmack is really impressed with what he can get out of a G256 DDR at 1ghz CPU speeds.

A.T. Hun comments: Which basically means we've reached "ludicrous speeds" (to quote SpaceBalls). What will you need to max out the V6? Dual gigahertz Althons? Give me a break. Of course, 4x FSAA will gladly eat up a lot of that fillrate. All this makes 3dfx' decision not to add T&L that much more curious. Then again, these new cards were supposed to come out six months ago.

Preview of the ATI Rage6 -- 8:42 am CST, Update by The Master

IXBT has a preview of the upcoming ATI Rage6 online. Sounds like it could be a winner. We'll see if ATI can deliver. Saw this on the Shugashack.

A.T. Hun comments: The BIG question in my mind is not so much whether or not that hardware will be cool, but whether or not they can actually write drivers for it. Cool hardware doesn't amount to much when the software kills it.

The Master comments: Good point-ATI has always had VERY poor driver support for their cards. I know Crawl hated his ATI card :-)

Counterstrike update coming -- 8:40 am CST, Update by The Master

The Counter-Strike homepage has been updated with news on the upcoming 6.5 release of CS. CS is a VERY popular mod for Half-Life. We also run a CS server on EZ-Net's game server.

Russian Duma ratifies CTBT -- 8:32 am CST, Update by The Master

Russian President-elect Vladimir Putin has managed to push the Duma to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. This is good news for reducing nuclear tension in the world. HOWEVER, Russia has also changed it's military policy today to reflect it's inability to defend itself with conventional arms since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The new policy indicates that Russia cannot contain a mass conventional attack without nuclear arms. Considering that the largest army in the world (China) is right next door, that may not be far from the truth.

History today -- 8:24 am CST, Update by The Master

• 1649: Maryland Toleration Act is passed. This act allowed freedom of worship for all Christians in Maryland.
• 1789: John Adams sworn as 1^st Vice-President of the United States.
• 1836: John Houston leads Texas into victory over Mexico in the Battle of San Jacinto, winning Texas it's independence.
• The Red Baron is shot down and killed.
• Apollo 16 astronauts begin exploration of the lunar surface.
• Timothy McVeigh arrested and charged in connection with the Oklahoma City bombing two days earlier.

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