Half-Life 10th Anniversary

Hard to believe, but the game that glorified the crowbar is 10 years old this week.

Wednesday marks the 10th anniversary of the release of the original Half-Life, Valve's debut game and easily one of the greatest shooters ever made. While it's easy to look back and think that Half-Life's success was all but assured, it wasn't such a sure bet back then. Many don't remember that while the game debuted to critical acclaim, it took a while for it to become a commercial success.

You've probably played Half-Life or its blockbuster sequel, 2004's Half-Life 2, or the Half-Life 2 episodes contained in last year's The Orange Box. This is a tale of a science experiment gone horribly awry, an alien invasion, and the crowbar-wielding protagonist named Gordon Freeman. With its incredible attention to detail, story, craftsmanship, atmosphere, and scripted events, Half-Life helped to define first-person shooters as we know them today.

We had a chance to talk to Valve's Mark Laidlaw last week about the anniversary. Laidlaw is a science fiction and horror writer who joined Valve during Half-Life's development and hasn't left since. He worked on the story and level design of Half-Life, as well as Half-Life 2.

Valve was founded in 1996 by Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington in Kirkland, Washington. Both were veterans of the Windows team at nearby Microsoft. Laidlaw joined the company in 1997. "Half-Life existed when I got here. They had just named it. Actually, between the first time that I came up to Valve and the next time they had come up with a name for it. They were still calling it Quiver the first time I had saw it," he said.

The origins of Half-Life came from a "typical sort of Valve thing" according to Laidlaw. There was a series of meetings where a lot of ideas and features were tossed around. "A lot of level designers had been playing around with the engine already and the editing tools. They had a list of things they wanted, like fog and the ever-popular procedural moss. And then the idea to do something like The Mist, the Stephen King story, at least to the extent that there's some military facility experimenting with things it shouldn't be and then things go out of control. And early on there was the idea that the whole thing started after some disaster had happened and there was a gate opened to another dimension, and then about two-thirds of the way through you'd go through that gate into this other dimension," Laidlaw said.

"That was pretty much things looked like when I saw it; a handful of level designers building rooms with a crazy science-experiment theme, and all these different ways you could the player using bizarre experiments. There were scientists and security guards; a lot of basic elements were in place. But what I heard from Gabe [Newell, co-founder of Valve] that was most exciting to me was the idea of doing this cinematic narrative kind of thing, which was the thing I had been hoping that someone would do."

The opening of Half-Life remains one of the most memorable in gaming to this day. Rather than begin with roaring fanfare or a raging battle, the game begins with a quiet ride in a tramcar through the vast Black Mesa research facility. Despite having minimal dialogue, that opening sequence alone told an incredible story.

"The Half-Life genesis had already happened when I got here, and I was one of those people who was responding to everything that name and that basic story evoked. The first time I heard it I got excited; with the little bit I had seen of it, it just felt right. And I think that everybody partly responded to that; there was this little flicker there of something that everybody responded to, and then we all just kind of kept feeding things into that flame and keep it burning. The amazing thing in that process was our ability to express that vision was so vague, but we were kind of all seeing the same thing."

"We converged on it until the test chamber scene came to life. And that was the point where we built the rest of the game; we kind of organized all these things, these experiments and these puzzles and things we were building, around that experience. This is what we want the whole game to be like. Nobody had ever seen anything like this in a game. This was the thing we wanted to do, that we'd been pushing out all along… but it was about making that happen in a level and having it being an experience for a player. And it was surprising for us. Everybody came in one morning and played that level who hadn't actually built it, which was John Guthrie and Kelly Bailey sitting together over the weekend finally putting the audio in, hooking up all the entities. So for everybody except them it was total surprise, and it was this shock and recognition. This was the vision that we'd had that nobody had quite been able to put into words but we had been trying to realize."

Many don't remember, but Half-Life was one of several anticipated shooters that the gaming audience was looking forward to. The others included SiN from Activision and Quake II from id Software. And in the case of SiN, there was plenty of respect. "I remember the sight of SiN just panicked us," Laidlaw said. "[We were] comparing features and looking at screenshots, and it was fuel for some of the level designers who had been asking for certain features to go and bug people for them. Like, 'Look what SiN has! Look what SiN has!'"

Half-Life went through a number of delays before it finally shipped on November 19, 1998. (To mark the game's 10th anniversary, Valve is selling Half-Life for 98-cents on Steam, its digital distribution system, on Wednesday.) But keep in mind that shipping a game in 1998 was a far cry from shipping a game in 2008. "It was very different because there was no instant release, there was no Steam, there was no instantaneous response from the world. Now when something goes out we can literally jump on a forum and watch people reacting to it and discover problems that we can correct immediately."

"When Half-Life was done, it went out of our hands and we stared in shock because very few of us had actually shipped anything of the sort. And then we went off to Mexico, and I think it actually hit the store shelves while we were having our celebratory trip to Cabo. The Leonid Meteor Shower was supposed to be a big one that year, that there was a sort of minor Y2K-meltdown fear that communication satellites would get knocked out, you're not going to be able to access ATMs. So we went to Mexico [and] as far as we knew we were going to be totally shut off from contact with civilization and we didn't know what was going to happen when we went down there. It added to this sort of apocalyptic feel to the whole trip," he recalled.

"I think at the time it came out we didn't know that it was going to have any kind of success outside of the fairly small seeming market for first-person shooters, and we were looking at SiN and Quake and these things that were going on around us and I don't think that I knew that there was going to be a wide interest in the game industry beyond that. But the responses that we got from people who played the OEM and Day One stuff were super encouraging. But it was also really slow building things. Even though it took a while getting onto the shelves--it was there for Thanksgiving and it started to sell--and we get a little bit excited when we start to hear about things like this billboard coming out and a little bit of marketing that was happening and articles in interesting places, but it built really slowly."

"Gabe had originally sort of dangled this thing that if Half-Life had ever hit number one on the top-selling games list then we'd get a trip to Hawaii or something like that. It was not until about a year after the game came out that it hit that spot, which was pretty unusual, but it just kind of indicates how initially it was just kind of slow, and we weren't really sure. There was that percolation of awards coming out, but we weren't necessarily sure beyond that how well it was going to do, and what does this mean to the company? And early on Gabe had said stuff like, 'A couple of years after this game comes out we're either going to be gods or we won't exist. There won't be nothing left, just a smoking crater.'"

:heart: :D

div style="FLOAT: right"img title="PSP Gets New Ratchet amp; Clank Entertainment Pack" alt="PSP Gets New Ratchet amp; Clank Entertainment Pack" hspace="5" src="http://www.ubergizmo.com/photos/2008/11/psp-brite-black.jpg" vspace="5" border="0" //div pThose who are thinking of picking up the PSP-3000 now have yet another choice - the a href="http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2008/10/psp3000_arrives_in_just_one_sku.html"Ratchet amp; Clank Entertainment Pack/a that will feature a black PSP-3000 along with Everyday Shooter. Guess a href="http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2008/10/psp3000_arrives_in_just_one_sku.html"what we speculated/a back in October a href="http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2008/10/psp3000_arrives_in_just_one_sku.html"proved correct/a, and you can at last pick up the classic black color instead of toying around with silver and echochrome. The entire bundle will cost $199 when it arrives in December, so don't hold your breath waiting for a standalone $169 black version since no release date has been set yet./p pa href="http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2008/11/psp_gets_new_ratchet_clank_entertainment_pack.html#comments"Add a comment/a | From: a href="http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2008/11/psp_gets_new_ratchet_clank_entertainment_pack.html"PSP Gets New Ratchet amp; Clank Entertainment Pack/a | Visit a href="http://www.ubergizmo.com"Ubergizmo/a | a href="http://www.uberbargain.com/"Good deals/a/p pmap name="google_ad_map_081119163745" area shape="rect" href="http://imageads.googleadservices.com/pagead/imgclick/081119163745?pos=0" coords="1,2,367,28"/ area shape="rect" href="http://services.google.com/feedback/abg" coords="384,10,453,23"//map img usemap="#google_ad_map_081119163745" border="0" src="http://imageads.googleadservices.com/pagead/ads?format=468x30_aff_imgamp;client=ca-pub-7335032025195922amp;channel=9684588219amp;output=pngamp;cuid=081119163745amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ubergizmo.com%2F15%2Farchives%2F2008%2F11%2Fpsp_gets_new_ratchet_clank_entertainment_pack.html"//p pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/dUMrGTmfGhdOigk2uI-3sMNhnP0/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/dUMrGTmfGhdOigk2uI-3sMNhnP0/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=VbmGhrMS"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=10sqdzRB"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?i=10sqdzRB" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=8Rzx5a8C"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?d=52" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=ff6LFSuj"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?i=ff6LFSuj" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=tQEZr2d8"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?i=tQEZr2d8" border="0"/img/a /div

Businessweek reports:

CEO Search: Can Anyone Save Yahoo?

What Yahoo needs, say management recruiters and analysts, is someone with the profile of Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) CEO Mark V. Hurd. A low-key operating wizard from the relative tech backwater of NCR (NCR), Hurd has managed to turn around HP in the three short years since he joined. In fact, one source close to the search says Yahoo isn't ruling out an executive outside the Internet realm. "You need someone who doesn't have the ego of a rock star," says Dona Roche-Tarry, a partner at executive search firm CTPartners. "But the new person would need the strength of character to stand up to Yang and the board."

Here is my pick: Sean Maloney, Intel's executive VP and its chief sales and marketing officer.

Sean Maloney has been Intel's top trouble shooter for many years. He is the one that Intel relies on when troubled business groups need to be turned around. He always gets the toughest jobs at Intel.

He is one of the most capable executives in the tech industry right now. My contacts tell me he was in the running for CEO of Hewlett-Packard following Carly Fiorina's departure but withdrew deciding to stay with Intel and the job later went to Mark Hurd.

Mr Maloney has been at Intel since 1982 and he has hit a ceiling. Paul Otellini, CEO and President of Intel isn't going anywhere, he took over in May 2005, and at age 58, he still has many years until retirement.

Yahoo would be a fantastic challenge for Mr Maloney, but he thrives on challenging situations and has had plenty of experience revamping poorly performing Intel business groups. He is fiercely loyal to Intel but he might be tempted by the enormous amount of value that would be created in turning around Yahoo. Intel has won the microprocessor wars and there isn't much else to do except to stay out of anti-trust courts -- that's a job for lawyers not for hard charging executives.

Yahoo needs a swift kick in the pants to get it going again. It's got great technologies and people but it is rudderless. Mr Maloney would be the best person to get Yahoo moving again and regain its former glory, imho.

Look, we know how much you love Ratchet & Clank-oriented PSP SKUs, don't try and hide your desire. This latest PSP-3000 bundle to feature the respectively furry / mechanical duo includes a black PSP and Everyday Shooter in addition to Ratchet & Clank Size Matters, instead of the silver PSP and echochrome featured in that other bundle. These are all very important distinctions, we assure you. A 1GB Memory Stick Duo card and the ever-diserable National Treasure 2 are included as well. The new bundle hits on December 15 for the same old $199 pricetag. We're still waiting on that $169 standalone PSP-3000 with baited, Skype-ready breath.

[Via PSP Fanboy]

Filed under: Gaming, Handhelds

Ratchet & Clank headline another PSP-3000 bundle; you're simply thrilled originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 19 Nov 2008 14:34:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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div align="center"a href="http://www.amazon.com/PSP-Limited-Ratchet-Clank-Entertainment-Sony/dp/B001LJJZOQ/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8amp;s=videogamesamp;qid=1227104580amp;sr=1-6"img hspace="4" border="1" vspace="4" src="http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2008/11/psp-sku-new-1.jpg" alt="" //abr //div Look, we know how much you love a href="http://www.engadget.com/2008/10/27/sony-simplifies-psp-3000-lineup-only-offering-one-sku/"emRatchet amp; Clank/em-oriented PSP SKUs/a, don't try and hide your desire. This latest PSP-3000 bundle to feature the respectively furry / mechanical duo includes a black PSP and emEveryday Shooter/em in addition to emRatchet amp; Clank Size Matters/em, instead of the silver PSP and emechochrome/em featured in that other bundle. These are all very important distinctions, we assure you. A 1GB Memory Stick Duo card and the ever-diserable emNational Treasure 2/em are included as well. The new bundle hits on December 15 for the same old $199 pricetag. We're still waiting on that $169 standalone PSP-3000 with baited, Skype-ready breath.br / br /[Via a href="http:// http://www.pspfanboy.com/2008/11/19/ratchet-and-clank-bundle-to-include-black-psp-3000/"PSP Fanboy/a]pFiled under: a href="http://www.engadget.com/category/gaming/" rel="tag"Gaming/a, a href="http://www.engadget.com/category/handhelds/" rel="tag"Handhelds/a/pp style="padding:5px;background:#ddd;border:1px solid #ccc;clear:both;"a href="http://www.engadget.com/2008/11/19/ratchet-and-clank-headline-another-psp-3000-bundle-youre-simply/"Ratchet amp; Clank headline another PSP-3000 bundle; you're simply thrilled/a originally appeared on a href="http://www.engadget.com"Engadget/a on Wed, 19 Nov 2008 14:34:00 EST. Please see our a href="http://www.weblogsinc.com/feed-terms/"terms for use of feeds/a./ph6 style="clear: both; padding: 8px 0 0 0; height: 2px; font-size: 1px; border: 0; margin: 0; padding: 0;"/h6a href=http://www.amazon.com/PSP-Limited-Ratchet-Clank-Entertainment-Sony/dp/B001LJJZOQ/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8amp;s=videogamesamp;qid=1227104580amp;sr=1-6Read/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.engadget.com/2008/11/19/ratchet-and-clank-headline-another-psp-3000-bundle-youre-simply/" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent link to this entry"Permalink/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.engadget.com/forward/1377223/" title="Send this entry to a friend via email"Email this/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.engadget.com/2008/11/19/ratchet-and-clank-headline-another-psp-3000-bundle-youre-simply/#comments" title="View reader comments on this entry"Comments/a pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/YGX2_nrC_oYvN_lX6JASjO0eToY/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/YGX2_nrC_oYvN_lX6JASjO0eToY/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/engadget?a=BgGTtPuB"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/engadget?i=BgGTtPuB" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/engadget?a=8PPIPWuf"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/engadget?i=8PPIPWuf" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~4/yScDUE4VA6w" height="1" width="1"/

Following NXE launch, studio warns that putting entire shooter on the 360's HDD will actually increase load times.

img src="http://m1.cdn.spikedhumor.com/1/" align="right" border="0" width="175" height="150" alt="Stickman Madness 3 - Stronghold" vspace="4" hspace="4" /pRecruit your team, stock up your weapons, and get ready for the battle of your life as your face an army of sticks, tanks, and elite weaponry.hrRated strong4.5047/strong / 5 | 116 views | a href="http://www.spikedhumor.com/articles/158507/Stickman-Madness-3-Stronghold.html"0 comments/abr//ppa href="http://www.spikedhumor.com/articles/158507/Stickman-Madness-3-Stronghold.html"strongClick here to watch the video/strong/abr/Submitted By: a href="http://www.spikedhumor.com/Profile.aspx?userid=81606"dragon5/abr/Tags: a href="http://www.spikedhumor.com/Default.aspx?p=searchtag=truequery=shooting"shooting/a a href="http://www.spikedhumor.com/Default.aspx?p=searchtag=truequery=shooter"shooter/a a href="http://www.spikedhumor.com/Default.aspx?p=searchtag=truequery=stickman"stickman/a a href="http://www.spikedhumor.com/Default.aspx?p=searchtag=truequery=madness"madness/adiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Spikedhumor?a=K9jRN"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Spikedhumor?i=K9jRN" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Spikedhumor/~4/459060951" height="1" width="1"/

The HASTAC consortium has just announced a forum hosted by their HASTAC Scholars fellows on digital games, entitled Participatory Play: Digital Games From Spacewar! to Virtual Peace to "explore game innovations that surpass violent first-person shooters and military training simulations." Here's a further description: Beginning with notable exemplars of imaginative game designs, such as "Virtual Peace," we will explore the... (read more)

D3 Publisher has released new screenshots of Vicious Cycle's thirdperson shooter Eat Lead The Return of Matt Hazard.

The key to any good pseudo-educational show featuring demonstrations that typically result in explosions (i.e. Mythbusters) is super-duper slow-mo sequences that expand those fleeting instants of incredibly expensive pyrotechnical glory into multiple minutes of time wasted between commercial breaks. If you're looking to record your own similar antics, amateur-style, Casio's time-stretching shooter the EX-FH20 is for you, delivering decent image quality and a bevy of burst and slow-mo modes that will capture 7 megapixel stills at 40 fps and 1000 fps video at 224 x 56. However, if that sounds rather gimmicky to you, according to PhotographyBLOG's full review there's really nothing noteworthy about the machine which, at $600, is out-paced and under-cut by other, similar SLR-lite options like Canon's PowerShot SX10. 'Nuff said.

Filed under: Digital Cameras, Portable Video

Casio's EX-FH20 reviewed: perfect for YouTube slow-mo junkies, nobody else originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 19 Nov 2008 10:17:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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div align="center"a href="http://www.photographyblog.com/reviews_casio_exilim_pro_ex_fh20.php"img hspace="4" border="1" vspace="4" alt="Casio's EX-FH20 reviewed: perfect for YouTube slow-mo junkies, nobody else" src="http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2008/11/fh20-top-002.jpg" //abr //div The key to any good pseudo-educational show featuring demonstrations that typically result in explosions (i.e. a href="http://www.engadget.com/tag/mythbusters"Mythbusters/a) is super-duper slow-mo sequences that expand those fleeting instants of incredibly expensive pyrotechnical glory into multiple minutes of time wasted between commercial breaks. If you're looking to record your own similar antics, amateur-style, Casio's time-stretching shooter the a href="http://www.engadget.com/tag/fh20"EX-FH20/a is for you, delivering decent image quality and a bevy of burst and slow-mo modes that will capture 7 megapixel stills at 40 fps and 1000 fps video at 224 x 56. However, if that sounds rather gimmicky to you, according to emPhotographyBLOG/em's full review there's really nothing noteworthy about the machine which, at $600, is out-paced and under-cut by other, similar SLR-lite options like Canon's a href="http://www.engadget.com/2008/11/17/canon-powershot-sx10-is-gets-reviewed/"PowerShot SX10/a. 'Nuff said.pFiled under: a href="http://www.engadget.com/category/digitalcameras/" rel="tag"Digital Cameras/a, a href="http://www.engadget.com/category/portablevideo/" rel="tag"Portable Video/a/pp style="padding:5px;background:#ddd;border:1px solid #ccc;clear:both;"a href="http://www.engadget.com/2008/11/19/casios-ex-fh20-reviewed-perfect-for-youtube-slow-mo-junkies-n/"Casio's EX-FH20 reviewed: perfect for YouTube slow-mo junkies, nobody else/a originally appeared on a href="http://www.engadget.com"Engadget/a on Wed, 19 Nov 2008 10:17:00 EST. Please see our a href="http://www.weblogsinc.com/feed-terms/"terms for use of feeds/a./ph6 style="clear: both; padding: 8px 0 0 0; height: 2px; font-size: 1px; border: 0; margin: 0; padding: 0;"/h6a href=http://www.photographyblog.com/reviews_casio_exilim_pro_ex_fh20.phpRead/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.engadget.com/2008/11/19/casios-ex-fh20-reviewed-perfect-for-youtube-slow-mo-junkies-n/" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent link to this entry"Permalink/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.engadget.com/forward/1376849/" title="Send this entry to a friend via email"Email this/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.engadget.com/2008/11/19/casios-ex-fh20-reviewed-perfect-for-youtube-slow-mo-junkies-n/#comments" title="View reader comments on this entry"Comments/a pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/nVluNlaz1zJ-8DSHqpm6eSgYhsg/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/nVluNlaz1zJ-8DSHqpm6eSgYhsg/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/engadget?a=jcFMeXzM"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/engadget?i=jcFMeXzM" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/engadget?a=AaqZRnb5"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/engadget?i=AaqZRnb5" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~4/7FkOiqw0R_k" height="1" width="1"/

Le tout premier FPS pour l'iPhone/iPod touch ne sera pas « Quake » ni « Zombie Mansion », mais... « Cube » ! Ce jeu de shoot dont on a déjà causé dans ces colonnes (tu m'étonnes) lance donc le bal, et de belle manière : multijoueur, open-source, basé sur un moteur performant, on en passe et des meilleurs. Seul souci, l'application s'apparente plus à une démo technique des possibilités de ce moteur...br/ br/ Merci de passer nous voir pour lire cette actu en entier ;-) pa href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/iTrafik?a=LgrEKw"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/iTrafik?i=LgrEKw" border="0"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/iTrafik/~4/458444308" height="1" width="1"/

The first real first person shooter is finally out. Yay!:) It's called cube, and it's free! It's a 50 mb download so I suggest doing it on your macs or pcs, although I did it on my iPod, it just takes a while. The game is pretty nice. Some levels have frame rate issues but others are golden. There's the ability to edit and create your own levels, but that takes time, so I just use the ones that are built in. Happily for us iPod touch users all the levels are downloaded, so you don't need wifi. I say get it. It's well worth the free price. Also, there's multiplayer, I haven't tryed it out but will report back when I do.

Zym

Category: Games
Released: Nov 19, 2008
Price: Free

Description:
Cube is a singleplayer and multiplayer first person shooter that provides satisfying and fast oldskool gameplay. This opensource game is built on an entirely new and very unconventional engine. Cube is a landscape-style engine that pretends to be an indoor FPS engine, which combines very high precision dynamic occlusion culling with a form of geometric mipmapping on the whole world for dynamic LOD for configurable fps & graphic detail. Most of the engine design is targeted at reaching feature richness through simplicity of structure and brute force, rather than finely tuned complexity. � This iphone port is provided by fernLightning is a technology demo that supports all of the functionality of the desktop version including multiplayer, in-game editing, cooperative editing, demo recording, etc (though some of these are impractical on the iphone) - please visit the official Cube homepage http://www.cubeengine.com/ for more information. Furthermore we encourage people to check out the newest version of Cube - Cube 2: Sauerbraten - a far more powerful and modern version. fernLighting thanks Wouter van Oortmerssen of dot3labs for his permission to release this port.

Website: http://fernlightning.com/doku.php?id=iphone:cube:
Support Website: http://fernlightning.com/doku.php?id=iphone:cube:

Note: The description above is the official one supplied by the application developer and does not necessarily represent the views or opinions of this site or its staff.


Get it on iTunes: Cube

Both next-gen gaming consoles now have sequels to their most acclaimed exclusive shooters, so how does the first person alternative action of Resistance 2 stack up against Marcus Fenix and...

Cube is approved on the appstore!! omg.. can't wait =]

Cube is a first person shooter game, search for it if you don't know what i'm talking about!

Quote: Cube

for free! 19th Nov'08, v1.0 approved for AppStore - should show in next few days.

19th Nov'08: We are rushing to ship the update (v1.2) to Apple to address many of the know bugs!

just a few more days =]

website: http://fernlightning.com/doku.php?id=iphone:cube:start

News via Nintendomax

Weeaboo just upload a new version of its shooter Shooting maniacs "Touhou DS" which is now in version 0.7.

bugfixes:
- Shows an error message instead of silently crashing in the case of a
broken installation.
- The current score was added to the list of high-scores twice if you
used restart or quit after losing all your lives.
- Pausing the game stopped the music, it now only stops sound effects.
- After completing all stages, the game sometimes crashed.
- Script errors in courses other than the first were shown to the user.
- After a boss' spellcard finishes,-all-enemy projectiles are now
destroyed, not just those of the ENEMY_SHOT type.
- Instead of overwriting the default textures, user-specified textures
were added-after-the existing textures. This limited the max. texture
memory to 32KB.

improvements:
- Internal script now does compile basic type-checking.
- Meaningful error messages in the script compiler.
- Added (beta) support for downloading additional characters from within
the game using wifi.
- Rewrote a large portion of the manual scripting.
- Support for multiple routes per game. Roads are commonly used to create
a selectable difficulty setting.
- The score overview shown at the end of every stage works now.
- Both stages and routes can now be locked / unlocked. Read the manual for
more info.
- Added a third stage.Download and Give Feedback Via Comments
Attached Files TouhouDS_0.7.rar (6.63 MB)

Everyone's got their favourite console, and usually that choice goes arm-in-arm with the games they grew up with.

Some machines were better than others, but what's really important is what gave rise to today's enormous gaming landscape.

Raise a glass, then, to 10 landmark home gaming machines. Some were smash hits, others were dismal failures - but they've all earned a proud place in history.

1. Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K

A singularly British machine (it was Sir Clive Sinclair's finest hour), its graphical and sound limitations made it, on paper, more a computer than a gaming platform. Everyone still bangs on about copying its cassette-based games and the horrible loading noises, but that's doing its great legacy a huge disservice.

It clocked up well over 10,000 games during its long history - it was the first home to the likes of Manic Miner, Dizzy and Rebelstar, and received ports of most of the major arcade titles at the time. Never mind that its keyboard felt like zombie skin - the thing was relatively easy to program for, and as such was something of a training ground for many of today's big developers and unrepentant geeks. Hell, people are still making games for it even today.

2. Mattel Intellivision

In 1980, the Atari 2600 reigned supreme - which inevitably inspired a slew of other technology companies to seek a piece of home videogaming pie.

Perhaps the most successful was Mattel's 'intelligent television', with its infamously hyperbolic ("the closest thing to the real thing") ad campaign that shouted about its technical superiority over the incumbent Atari machine.

The Intellivision sold an impressive 3 million units, despite a games library of just 125, before becoming one of the major casualties of the 1983 videogame crash.

While the history books give it less space than its major rival, it's notable as being the first 16-bit home games machine, the first with 16-way directional controller, the first with real-time voices (so long as you had the Intellivoice add-on) and the first with downloadable games - which vanished when you turned the thing off, as it lacked writeable storage.

3. Sega Dreamcast

The turn of the 21st century does, of course, belong to the PlayStation 2, but Sega's final console was the first of that sixth-generation of home gaming systems, and to this day inspires unbelievable loyalty amongst its fanbase.

Hardware shortages, mediocre marketing, the lack of EA's otherwise omnipresent sports games and Sega's bad rep off the back of the preceding Saturn and 32X consoles meant it couldn't compete with the PS2's eventual blitzkrieg.

It was a pioneer of online gaming, however - the shining light of the modem age. Its MMO Phantasy Star Universe still runs to this day. It even had a web browser and supported keyboards (the latter was also memorably employed in bonkers spelling-shooter The Typing of the Dead).

The Dreamcast might be long off the shelves, but its scene continues to thrive - which is at least partly due to the crazy ease of running pirated and homebrew games on it.

4. Nintendo Gameboy Advance

The heyday of pre-3D home gaming in your hand. While Nintendo's portable consoles' huge success tends to rely on the kiddie market, the third-gen Gameboy really hit all the right beats for nostalgics and the hardcore.

Gorgeous remakes of classic Marios and Zeldas made it seem like the NES/SNES golden years never ended, while new sequels to beloved series kept 2D gaming very much alive in an age obsessed with 3D. The GBA still lives to this day, its design simplicity and lack of gimmickry lending it an appeal its follow-up, the DS, never quite managed.

5. Atari 2600

The flagship of the first big home console boom, the Atari 2600 popularised the idea of games appearing on swappable cartridges (the more costly forerunner to today's CDs and DVDs) rather than being built-in to the hardware. In 1977, home gaming was Pong, Pong and more Pong: the Atari (as it was simply known to most) changed all that, reinvigorating the market with ports of arcade darlings such as Space Invaders.

The Atari was everywhere in the early 80s, and it spawned a raft of competitors - including Nintendo's first console, the NES/Famicom. The 2600 both partly caused and was primary victim of the 1983 videogaming crash, but you could still buy one new as late as 1992.

6. 386/486 IBM compatible

PCs had been around for years, but it was the early 90s 386 and 486 processors that really defined the system as the thinking man's gaming platform.

This was the age of Doom, of Monkey Island, of Sim City, of Civilization... PC gaming never looked back, and the level of invention and intelligence birthed in those crucial years still continues in today's thriving indie and mod scene.

7. Nintendo Entertainment System

The Phoenix from the ashes of the 1983 crash that almost killed home gaming. The NES (or Famicom, as it was known in its home Japan) was held aloft by a fantastic port of the arcade smash Donkey Kong, but it was the likes of Super Mario Bros and lightgun classic Duck Hunt that booted it into the public consciousness.

Zelda, Metroid, Final Fantasy, Castlevania and Mega Man (amongst a raft of others) all began life on the NES, and its classic controller remains the essential template for today's gamepads. The NES might not have been the great innovator of the machines that preceded it, but it's the major root of today's consoles. History would be entirely different without it.

8. Sony PlayStation

Sony's first console would be the best-selling home console of all time, were it not for its even more successful follow-up, the still-popular PS2. Incredibly, it began life as a planned CD-ROM add-on for Nintendo's then-ubiquitous SNES, but contract arguments saw Sony go it alone.

Its CD-ROM drive, a technology Nintendo remained resistant to with its competing, cartridge-based N64, was one of the major causes for its success. Loading times may have suffered for it, but discs were dramatically cheaper to manufacture than cartridges, which were fast proving a turn-off to third party manufacturers.

Couple with that the PS's shift into being the first major 3D home console and the fact it soon proved remarkably easy to pirate its games, and you have yourself a landmark machine that eventually cropped up in most every gamer's home.

9. Amiga 500

Before the IBM compatible (the template upon which today's PCs are still based) became dominant, the Amiga series was the main name in home computing.

Its graphics and sound were ahead of the competition, it was astonishingly versatile at creating graphics and music (even Andy Warhol was a fan), and many of today's big game names - including EA, Rockstar, Peter Molyneux and Will Wright - cut their teeth on the platform. The 500 may have been the baby of the bunch, but it remained the best-selling.

10. Nintendo 64

Far from Nintendo's biggest commercial success - it was quite the flop compared to the SNES that preceded it or today's Wii - but, like the rival PlayStation, it was one of the major blueprints for modern console gaming.

The Nintendo 64 pioneered the shift from 2D to 3D, the likes of Mario 64 and The Ocarina of Time proving that the third dimension meant so much more than simply graphics, while the analogue stick and four controller ports gave rise to Goldeneye, one of the main parents of the first-person shooter deathmatches that dominate today. Nintendo might have dropped the ball with the N64's tiny catalogue of games, but it did define the future.

http://www.techradar.com/news/gaming...=all&artc_pg=2

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