Wednesday, September 5, 2001

The History of Gaming -- 9:59 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Ars Technica has a pretty sweet article on the history of computer gaming. It goes all the way back to the very first games in the 50s to the 3D shooters of today. I found it to be a nice walk down memory lane. He concludes with some thoughts on gaming's future, fearing that it will become as trite as most popular movies or music to appeal to the masses. With the success of Deer Hunter and the countless Pokemon games, I fear that that time is already upon us.

As an aside, a complete stranger (who was a serious redneck) asked me out of the blue when I was in the software section of Wal-Mart if the graphics in "Deer Hunter II" (or something like that) were any good. I was surprised that he asked me at first, then I wanted to laugh, but I just said something about graphics not exactly being the game's forté. I'm sure he was up all night trying to figure out what the heck forté means.

Max Payne Demo Released -- 1:11 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

As promised, 3D Realms has released a demo of Max Payne (130.8M), their popular third-person shooter. The link takes you to Blue News' list of mirrors for the demo. Modemers might want to pitch a tent.

NVIDIA 1.0-1512 XFree86 Drivers -- 9:51 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

NVIDIA has released their 1.0-1512 drivers for XFree86 in Linux. The word is that these new drivers give a nice speed boost, especially for GeForce2-class cards, and fix some nagging bugs a few people have reported. Thanks Linux Games.

UPDATE! The drivers are now also available on NVIDIA's FTP site. There you will find the other kernel RPMs which are not yet listed on the website for whatever reason.

Tuesday, September 4, 2001

Max Payne Demo Tomorrow -- 8:24 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

3D Realms' Joe Siegler update his .plan with word that the demo for Max Payne will be out tomorrow. It probably will take you longer to download the demo than to make it through the actual game. The demo weighs in at 137,163,202 bytes. Have fun, modemers!

While I Was Gone . . . -- 2:18 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

There were a few interesting stories that popped up over the Labor Day weekend while I was spending some all-too-rare time with my family. Here they are in fun bulleted format.

• Croteam announced a follow-up to their hit Serious Sam. Not many details were given.
• Much to no one's surprise, details have come out regarding new video cards from NVIDIA, the GeForce3 Ultra and the GeForce3 MX. No word on how much the Ultra will cost, other than "a lot".
• Hewlett-Packard is buying Compaq for <carl sagan>25 billion</carl sagan> dollars. That's a whole lot of cash for a merger that I'm not sure makes a lot of sense.

J.t.Qbe comments: After reading comp.os.vms for the last few months, this merger suddenly makes a lot of sense. Compaq wants to move above the PC market, but needs a serious clue. HP's already there and stands to gain some good resources from Compaq, which has never seemed to know what to do with DEC/VMS/Alpha(R.I.P.). The hope is that HP will actually back VMS and promote it. The fear is that HP won't.

Bleh -- 2:12 pm CST, Update by The Master

We're done some major upgrades to software on The Haus. Pardon the mess while we patch things up.

A.T. Hun comments: Ahhhh, gotta love off-site updates of PHP and MySQL :) At least everything's working again.

The Master comments: Actually, to my amazement, it all went relatively smoothly. Unfortunately, PHP has changed their default handling of quotes in later version of PHP 4. That'll teach me to test better before I label an upgrade a success :-/

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