Doom 2009

So, the great FPS game will be back before the end of the year 2009. Either the launch campaign started early in Nepal or the bus drivers are using their vehicles as video game weapons (the latter would explain the extraordinarily high frequency of dramatic road accidents there).

They were the FPS games of your youth (if you are as old as I am): Doom, Heretic and Hexen are three games where you killed, maimed, crushed, punched and powdered thousands of monsters and all kinds of adversaries. Did you know that you could play all three of them on line?

Point your browser to the Doom Triple Pack.

On-line Doom + Hexen + Heretic

How many PC gamers started their career with video games as raw (according to today’s criteria) as Doom or even Quake. We may find their quality too low for our eyes, but they already demonstrated their main strength: the gamer found interesting adversaries and environments where you could not know what would happen behind the corner of a corridor (that generation of video games did not yet open the doors to a wide environment like in FarCry or Crysis).

Doom 1

Already, before the year 2000, PC games were expensive. But here comes the Internet and bands of Internet users now expect to find free things all around. Authors of such games (like Id Software) decided to follow this trend and offer some of these older games as ways to attract more customers for other games. These ones start by being free, and stay as being very pleasant to play.

Doom was put in the public domain a few years ago. Consequence: Here is somebody deciding to re-write it in Flash and you will be able to play Doom (more precisely, Doom 1). You will need Flash 10 and I’m told that PowerPC Macs are not compatible, but you’re going to tote a shotgun and the BFG mini-gun at outer-space monsters and without paying (free).

Doom is not enough? You want more, more quality, more guns, more speed? Why not Quake? Id Software just opened access to QuakeLive.com. For free, you’ll get to play Quake, right now, freely, for no money. It will be fun…

More precisely, here is Quake III Arena with free access to all. It will go fast. This is violent gaming. It will only stop when you’re dead.

This is not enough? Again? So, let me offer some video games with calmer settings, but still free. Even better, Linux games.

live.linuX-gamers.net succeeded at preparing Live-DVDs (DVD that are completely autonomous, you can boot on them without installing Linux).

live.linuX-gamers.net (DVD)

Russia is fast becoming the new national home of FPS game development. We had S.T.A.L.K.E.R. – The shadow of Chernobyl (and we are awaiting its prequel S.T.A.L.K.E.R. – Clear skies), but an old project that was known to some but nearly never discussed before just surfaced in the flow of video game information news:

Cryostasis: Sleep of Reason arrives to transport us in year 1968 north of the Arctic circle in a Russian polar station named “Pole 21″. The hero will be able to crawl in the entrails of an abandonned nuclear ice-breaker. Abandonned, but not really empty.

You will appreciate the grain of the wood of the slightly outmoded guns and it will freeze you to death (beware, cold can kill you, too).

“When hell freezes over“. This expression has been replaced by “When Duke Nukem Forever is ready for launch” in some circles of PC gamers, of FPS gamers. This video game has been 12 years in the making. Announced about once per year for more than a decade, but never really seen, nobody really expected it to be delivered to the market. But, this year, there is something totally wacky: In a video, the game itself seems to be appearing. As if it existed in alpha or beta status…

As if the guys had really been working on it all these years.

3D Realms may finally be able to launch such a game. But when? Will the game play reaching the level expected by hard core gamers of today? Will the graphic design have stayed back in time with a disappointing quality? Only time will tell…

The video game saga collectively known as F.E.A.R. (FPS games with an horror/terror ambiance) keeps pushing news opus. Before the end of 2008, we should see F.E.A.R. Project Origin on PC, PS3, XBox 360. It will be hard judging from the pre-beta demo here.

Beware: This is violent and bloody. Really not for sensitive minds.

Demo pre-beta trailer

Graphical (and grpahic) comparison between F.E.A.R. and Project Origin

FEAR / F.E.A.R. Project Origin.

It’s coming! The new FPS video game for PC is arriving. We had seen the first opus of the saga hitting our minds and PCs in 2007: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl. A game definitely attractive, where the player can really go anywhere in several square kilometers, where there is always something happening (you’d better be cautious). Now comes the prequel (not the sequel, but the a part of the story coming before the original title) under the -always too difficult to type- name of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky (or STALKER: Clear sky, for lazy typists).

It seems that the game is pretty well done and a few interesting bits are leaking on the Internet.

Transitions day-night-day

Alpha trailer

Always the same lovely atmospheres of abandonned landscapes around the old soviet nuclear power plant. But you can’t really consider this as a poster for tourism in modern Ukraine.

If you have a nVidia graphics card on your PC, you can get a free download of recent games from Steam / Valve.

For a limited time, if you qualify (you only need your PC to hold a nVidia graphics card), you can donwload a free copy of the following games from Steam just by creating an account or having an account on Steam.

• Portal: First Slice (11 levels of this new innovative game from Valve)
• Half-Life 2: Deathmatch (networked FPS)
• Half-Life 2: Lost Coast (FPS technology demonstrator)
• Peggle Extreme (a relatively simple game inspired by old brick games)

Look! It’s a free offer for only half of the PC owners in the world.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky, the game prequel to S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl (FPS PC game we appreciated a lot last year here at Roumazeilles.net) is now available for download at the Steam video game distribution web site of Valve. More, it will only be available there (no boxed DVD on the shelves).

It seems that this is proving the success of Steam as a distribution media (Valve did not limit it to its own games) and the efficiency of the channel (for the producers, it allows near immediate correction of bugs, removal of packaging-shipping, and coordinated distribution in all parts of the world; for the customers, it simplify the process and offers immediate pleasure – on the condition that you have a broadband connection).

When will Steam be considered as monopolistic?

I have already spoken several times here about a PC First Person Shooter (FPS) video game currently known under the name of Project Offset (a working title htat will certainly be replaced before the project goes to distribution). Its innovation comes from replacing the tired old “Space marine in charge of wiping monsters out of Earth” with a medieval-fantasy world where -instead of shotguns and pulse beam guns- you will get sharp blades and bows.

If you want to check the current screenshots, you can find them on the developer’s web site. They look quite good (even if this does not tell us anything about the playability of the finished game).