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        <h1><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><b><i><a href="../../index.html">loonygames</a><br>
          <font size="1">a <a href="http://www.bluesnews.com">blue's news</a> 
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<p><a href="../2.11/mailbag/index.html">&lt;&lt; Back to Normal View</a></p>
<p>URL: <a href="../2.11/mailbag/index.html">http://www.loonygames.com/content/2.11/mailbag/</a><br>
</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>Vol. 
                2, Issue 11<br>
                February 11, 2000<br>
                </b>
              <br>
              <br>
               
                <b><i>The 
                  MailBag </i></b></p>
                <b><i> 

                  Issue 2.11</i></b></p>
                Comments 
                  by Stephanie &quot;Bobbi&quot; 
                  Bergman</p>
              
              <p> 
                

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              <p>
              <p>
              <b><i>He 
                did play a mod!</i></b></p>
              
                 
                   
                    <b>Subject: 
                      </b>lonnyboi is forgetful</p>
                    <p>This is for loonyboi,</p>
                    <p> After having 
                      read your opinion on mods, I read this funny little comment 
                      at the bottom:</p>
                    <p>&quot;But personally 
                      speaking, I think I'll stick to deathmatch and CTF.&quot;</p>
                    <p>Hmmm, CTF...wasn't 
                      that...a mod? ummm it wasn't packaged with Quake 1 as I 
                      recall, a little team called threewave, and some guy..oh 
                      what was his name....err Zoid? oh yeah, that's right, CTF 
                      is practically BETTER than DM..wow, so much for the mod 
                      theory.</p>
                    <p>hehe, j/k I understand 
                      your p.o.v. most mods are junk, but without searching all 
                      the crap we'd have never found that one gold nugget (CTF).</p>
                    <p>-Dana</p>
                    <p><i> Gotta agree 
                      with Dana...you're busted, loony.</i></p>
                    <p><i>[Editor's 
                      note: actually, I never cared for Quake CTF (still don't, 
                      in fact). And I of course, admit that good ideas come from 
                      mods, but it took Starsiege: TRIBES to actually get me to 
                      like CTF.]</i></p>
                  
                
              
              <b><i>I 
                love my Guiness. So there. </i></b></p>
              
                 
                   
                    <b>Subject:</b> 
                      freespace2</p>
                    <p></p>
                    <p>u suck big time, 
                      freespace 2 is awesome and u pretty much said its mediocre, 
                      no, you are right u are alcoholic overweight losers grrrr</p>
                  
                
              
              <b><i>Oh 
                my, did you all ever miss Paul Steed... </i></b></p>
              
                 
                   
                    Anyway,</p>
                    <p></p>
                    <p>I just read that 
                      diatribe, er...well, that &quot;review of the reviewers&quot;. 
                      For the most part, I agree with what Paul had to say. I 
                      don't feel that there was as much open disgust that I have 
                      for some of the reviewers, as I have for them. First and 
                      foremost, apples to apples and oranges to oranges, since 
                      UT and Q3a are in the same general area, they are compared 
                      together...in fact, both of them are even stacked up against 
                      Half-Life and even StarSiege: Tribes. There are levels of 
                      quality here that just aren't in the same category. Each 
                      development team listed their goals and intents for their 
                      respective projects and mostly accomplished them.</p>
                    <p></p>
                    <p>Break it down:</p>
                    <p></p>
                    <p>* Half-Life - 
                      engine based on the original Quake/Quakeworld engine with 
                      extensive refinements. Valve took a game engine that was 
                      1+ years in development, and enhanced it. OOB (out of the 
                      box) it still needed serious enough patches to the foundation 
                      to get the netcode working (decals) or else Multiplayer 
                      capability was going to be shot. Other than that, as a single 
                      player story game, it kicked mucho @$$. Development teams 
                      goal was to make the best multiplayer game, bar none.</p>
                    <p></p>
                    <p>* Tribes - this 
                      engine was on it's own, but had a year or so behind it before 
                      it was kicked out to the masses. Dynamic extension of wide 
                      open expanses and support for indoors. Nice change of pace, 
                      and even the netcode didn't suck too badly. Characters and 
                      objects in game are static though. Not a whole lot of difference 
                      there.</p>
                    <p></p>
                    <p>* Unreal - new 
                      engine at the time, and 200 polys to the fore-front with 
                      dynamic rendered backgrounds. Gawds! This scene kicked totally 
                      all over Q2, since the whole thing was great to look at. 
                      Netcode bit the big one, and the coders scurried back to 
                      quickly hammer out fixes and patches...from which was born...</p>
                    <p></p>
                    <p>* Unreal Tournament 
                      - same engine but with all the fixes and patches built in...oh, 
                      ok not all the fixes and patches. But most of them were 
                      worked out. Bot design has been brought to a new high, although 
                      they had to reach down low to get it, since the ReaperBot 
                      was a cheating mofo (ok...I'm a little bitter, but I still 
                      think I can kick that thing's @$$ ^_^ ). So what's the total 
                      development for this gem? Well, U [1+] + UT [2+] = more 
                      than 3 years in the making. I would think that there had 
                      better be something else in the box other than deathmatch. 
                      I just can't help to wonder how often Epic is kicking themselves 
                      for not putting a CD protection on the disc like Q3a had 
                      on theirs (Activision). Development teams goal was to build 
                      a quake killer. Um, but last stats indicate that U/UT have 
                      a long way to go. In fact, according to the statistics from 
                      The CLQ, even Kingpin has more happening than Unreal combined 
                      for total minutes played and total number of servers. See 
                      attachment...numbers are directly from The CLQ, poplular 
                      servers page, current as of the moment that I write this.</p>
                    <p></p>
                    <p>* Quake 3: Arena 
                      - Technically and graphically, the most advanced polygon-pushing-rendered-hardware-accelerated 
                      game currently available. This engine was created from scratch 
                      in the matter of a year, and OOB didn't need any netcode 
                      enhancements, nor any patches that fundamentally changed 
                      the engine...just the gameplay or user interface usability. 
                      The development team didn't say they were going to build 
                      an Unreal killer or a Q2 killer, they said that they were 
                      going to build the best graphics/game engine. They froze 
                      their list of things to put into the game, and didn't continually 
                      add to the list like other developers just to make a few 
                      more gamers happy. They created a game that is cross platform 
                      compatible--meaning it runs on more machines, more processors, 
                      more operating systems than any game out there. And for 
                      every player you meet on the internet, your guaranteed to 
                      be meeting someone who has the balls to actually buy a game 
                      to play, rather than be a fux0r and leech it off someone 
                      else, while taking money out of the pockets of the developers 
                      and distributors who are trying to survive.</p>
                    <p></p>
                    <p>So far, just 
                      looking at the debates that have started since last year, 
                      it just shows that quantity seems to be more valuable than 
                      quality. Quantity of what's in the box, and what someone 
                      gets for free instantly, rather than quality. Games happen 
                      to be the one of the largest factors for pushing the computer 
                      performance envelope, since there are very few business 
                      apps that actually require 1 GHz of processing power, or 
                      over 10 Mbps of bandwidth.</p>
                    <p>Yeah, obviously 
                      I'm biased, but I'm pissed off in so many ways at magazines 
                      where Q3a gets rated lower than Tomb Raider (a brand new 
                      engine versus an aging single player game engine...ack! 
                      ), and so many things about Q3a are dismissed as being trivial 
                      and handed out from an uncaring company. When people get 
                      hit with the future, they don't realize what it is. Besides, 
                      even on my latest overclocked 458 MHz-Geforce-powered machine, 
                      Unreal still needs things turned off to be playable, and 
                      it still gives me headaches after 10 minutes of play....on 
                      the other hand, I can play Q3a all night long and not even 
                      feel it...except for not blinking...which makes my eyes 
                      hurt... :)</p>
                    <p></p>
                    <p>Randy Abulon 
                      / GameTraveler</p>
                    <p>-----------------------------------------------------------------------------<br>
                      Check it 
                      at http://www.gametraveler.com/<br>
                      -----------------------------------------------------------------------------</p>
                    <p></p>
                  
                
              
              &nbsp;
              <p>
              <br>
              <p>
              
                 
                   
                    <b>Subject:</b> 
                      Reviews are important &lt;dammit&gt;</p>
                    <p></p>
                    <p>I haven't read 
                      any negative review of Quake 3 to date.. I have however 
                      read reviews which often compare Q3 and UT, giving UT much 
                      better scores for gameplay value. As for these reviews and 
                      reviewers being worthless (TOTB article), I would have to 
                      disagree. Perhaps to a developer they are, but to your average 
                      gamer with 60 bucks to spend at a time with so many *good* 
                      games coming out, those reviews written by gamers who have 
                      played the games are important. Without those reviews, your 
                      forced to guess or read reviews in a magazine (when the 
                      magazine runs a 2 page ad after the review making you *wonder* 
                      if those extra review points were paid for and if the game 
                      is as good as they write). </p>
                    <p></p>
                    <p></p>
                    <p>[TOTB] &quot;... 
                      But come on. You know as well as I do too often making a 
                      review is more about making the reviewer famous and the 
                      site popular than making an accurate, useful observation 
                      on the product being reviewed.&quot; </p>
                    <p></p>
                    <p>A website or 
                      umm... 'reviewer elite' is still going to get the same amount 
                      of hits if the review is bad or good. If people WANT to 
                      read that site's opinion on a specific game they will. It 
                      doesn't matter if the game scored a 1% or 100%, the same 
                      people will read it, the site will get the same hits...</p>
                    <p></p>
                    <p>... and we gamers 
                      will just have a few more opinions and views on a game before 
                      we plunk down way too much money for them :) </p>
                    <p></p>
                    <p>'Rora</p>
                    <p></p>
                  
                
              
              <p>
                 
                   
                    <b>Subject:</b> 
                      &lt;no subject&gt;</p>
                    If 
                      your going to work on a game, the spirit of gaming needs 
                      to show it. If your working hard to the point where you 
                      hate it, its going to show in the game.</p>
                    <p></p>
                    <p>The best of the 
                      best of people show that &quot;Caring about your work&quot; 
                      works.</p>
                    <p></p>
                    <p>Paul McCartney 
                      put Care into his music, see where it put him. Ok, well 
                      you may think his music 'sucks&quot;, that can be just your 
                      confrontational ways. Just conjecture. I can role play that. 
                      Q3A has definately a lot of work behind it, but without 
                      the caring, it can be no better than the quick mods and 
                      maps a newbie throws together. It takes skill to map, code, 
                      build a game like Q3A, and to do it right. The game took 
                      4-5 months longer to make than Q2? that should make it a 
                      better quality game. </p>
                    <p></p>
                    <p>Perhaps you shouldnt 
                      listen to reviewers, but they give you a feedback about 
                      the game, and treading boards is another way to get feedback, 
                      good, bad or ugly. An artist will paint and the viewers 
                      will muse, that is what the result is. They aren't the artist 
                      or know the tools to do so, but they will know what they 
                      like or not.</p>
                    <p></p>
                    <p>Have you seen 
                      the movie Man On The Moon? Its about Andy Kaufman. It also 
                      has an underlying statement about performer/audience relationships. 
                      A must see.</p>
                    <p></p>
                    <p>-dinwitty-l</p>
                    <p></p>
                    <p><i>While I don&#146;t 
                      think anyone could argue that id does not care about Quake 
                      3: Arena, dinwitty has a point. When this many reviewers 
                      all say the same thing, maybe there&#146;s some truth to 
                      it?</i></p>
                    <p></p>
                    <p><i>Ultimately, 
                      a review is opinion, and we all have our own opinions. Good 
                      reviews or bad, they&#146;re read just the same. In fact, 
                      the smartest thing when looking into games is to read both 
                      a good and bad review of a game (assuming you can find one 
                      of each). Get the full picture, then make up your own mind. 
                      </i> </p>
                  
                
              
              &nbsp;
              <i>- 
                Stephanie "Bobbi" Bergman may possibly be the world's worst Age 
                of Empires 2: Age of Kings player. She still loves it, though.</i></p>
              <p>
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<p><i><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="-2">Credits: Print CGI is 
  &copy; 2000 <a href="http://www.square8.com">Square Eight</a>. Used with permission. 
  Article is &copy; 2000 its original author. All other content is &copy; 2000 
  loonyboi productions. Unauthorized reproduction is prohibited. You got that??</font></i></p>
 