When you request a website over http your ISP can intercept the request (this is how captive portals for free WiFi work, and the reason for the existence of pages like captive.apple.com to be HTTP-only). IIRC they can also insert whatever they want to on the web page, I believe there was a case a while back of ISPs doing that.
Oh, right. I forgot American ISPs are allowed to pull shit like that. I don’t think this would fly where I live. I also don’t use public WiFi, because why would I even
Sometimes you are in the cult of a cult classic, and so that game feels like one of the best ever. I will still come out and say the same about my old faves, like Guild Wars 1 or Phantom Dust. I exaggerate to express how good I think these games were!
Everything is of course subjective. But it was a unique concept and execution. With solid gameplay and decent graphics in an era known for originating the boomer shooter and all its clones.
If you crave run and gun, probably not. But if you enjoy the kitschy, retro James Bond, Secret Agent aesthetic. And very early, but decent female protagonist. It's a lot of fun.
The writing, setting and concept were charming and the art direction is good which means despite being polygonally challenged I don’t mind the way it looks. Great soundtrack too. That being said I tried playing it earlier this year for the first time and it just struck me as one of those games that have aged like fine milk mechanically. It really really wants you to be a stealthy spy sneaking around and being non-lethal yet the stealth gameplay felt terrible, and going guns blazing wasn’t particularly fun either as gunplay in these old games is hard for me to enjoy having gotten used to modern FPSes. And it doesn’t help that the guns blazing approach forces you to listen to a constant soundtrack of blaring alarms, which frankly was hard for me to deal with.
I couldn’t make myself finish it despite really wanting to be able to say I’ve played it, but maybe I’ll give it another go some day. At least I don’t think it’s all that long.
That can definitely be said about a lot of classics from that era. Things have changed a lot since then for better and for worse. It's an absolutely unique experience, though. I would love to see a more modern take on it if it were possible.
For me in general I think FPS games have aged the worst. There is such a big part of the pleasure that comes from animations, gunplay, recoil implementation, enemy AI, ragdolls, hit effects… I have a much easier time playing something like Fallout 1&2 - which are even older but have mechanics that are more timeless.
But yeah it was definitely a time in gaming where technological advancements felt like they were happening at an exponentially increasing pace. Comparing games from 2000 with just a few years later is like night and day. Splinter Cell came out only two years after NOLF and that’s a stealth game that’s aged spectacularly. And even Monolith’s own F.E.A.R. came out in 2005 and feels like one of the first truly modern shooters - one that still really holds up well.
This actually makes a lot of sense. If none of these companies are willing to claim ownership of the IP, then “pirating” the games has no risk… since nobody is willing to claim ownership of the IP. Well played!
Also, I’m stoked to play these games! I never did when they came out but the reviews were so good I wanted to.
ehhh i hear you, “abandonware” can be defined as “software which is no longer supported or updated”, but that is a very broad definition. I think one could also define abandonware as “software which is no longer supported or updated, and which has no clear IP owner anymore”, and I think that that is the colloquial definition for a lot of people. I think we need a new word for one of these two definitions.
Fair point. I think there needs to be a legal definition of IP’s that no longer have a claimant and therefore go public domain by default. If nobody can show ownership then nobody owns it.
Other than being in existence longer than pretty much any other game review platform, ign still isn’t that great, or accurate. Reviews have been meh for the last decade or more.
I still have most of my old next Gen issues, with the demo CD roms. I think I have the entire run of PC Accel, which unfortunately was just way too ahead of it’s time. Look up the story if your can find it, it was pulling in more and more subscribers every month but the publisher scrapped it because basically, it was subversive, it was 18+, it was viciously critical of games and the industry when warranted but also gave the best praise to those that earned it. It was the non-douche precursor to Maxim(if you can believe such a thing exists).
It’s a sad story, after they got shuttered, the lead editor and several others put most of their own money on the line to try and restart the company publish new issues, but this was long before the Internet had any social immediacy. Subscribers mostly didn’t hear about them trying to restart, there was no real forum or community where people could keep up on the topic and join the cause. I found out like 4 months after they tried to restart and was devastated, I had no idea and would have resubscribed in a heart beat.
It’s also really shady how the publisher discontinued it. I had already subscribed for the next two years and I think they canceled it with like a year and a few months left and so then I just started to get PC gamer, not even a refund.
I’m not going to pretend that I read many of the zombie outlets.
But understand that games media (and most other news media) has been getting gutted for closer to 20 years than not. The only reason so many outlets are even SLIGHTLY good is because of people like John Davison working their ass off to fight for every single inch.
So maybe, just maybe, we could avoid “Whatever, they suck so fuck 'em” levels of posts? Focus more on what got games media to this state rather than self-righteous apathy.
IGN and Gamespot were basically the legacy (text) web media in the US. And they definitely both tried to rely on ad revenue for a lot longer than The Internet would tolerate it.
So basically every single youtuber trying to make a name for themselves attacked it. Because old media are corrupt and you can only trust this new channel who would never try to sell you anything so let’s play some Raid Shadow Legends". Which then ballooned when we had folk like totalbiscuit and gamergate both actively arguing that all these old game journos are corrupt because they… speak to the people they interact with on a daily basis or whatever that nonsense was.
We saw similar with the rise of twitch streamers where they would be really quick to paint all the youtubers as corrupt shills because they take sponsor deals and totally only say positive things about games because they are getting money under the table. Now time for twelve ads in a row before grinding to take part in the twitch rivals event next month!
Whoa, what the hell. How are you throwing Totalbiscuit and the entirety of GamerGate’s scandals and social furor into the same, offhand pile?
John was strongly opinionated and enjoyed being a bit of a smug ass as his online persona, but he was mainly about making games more accessible by advocating for more, and more inclusive, settings for all the games he played.
“Ethics in games journalism”: Bain 100% spearheaded the “All of old media is corrupt and lying to you because of sponsorships” and the gamergate crowd used him to legitimize them. Plenty of webcomics of the era did a “I am not a bad person and I don’t condone what all these angry people saying the exact same thing are doing but… maybe you should listen to us. Err, me” style joke with the mouthpiece looking a LOT like Bain
He would pretty regularly do “I am gonna get cancelled” level jokes on his podcast with Cox and Dodger and would go off on wild ass tangents about how it is “okay for women to look pretty” and so forth any time someone complained about oversexualized male gaze wank fantasies.
“Let’s look at the options menu”: On the surface this is really good. In practice it was yet another case of “Those evil devs are trying to fuck us” because he was active in an era where PC games were very much third class citizens for all of what we would now consider “third parties”. Like, we were genuinely lucky to even GET a Sands of Time PC release and much of the “lazy devs” rhetoric goes back to people like him
His legacy is a complex one. I’ll fully admit to loving his videos because he was speaking as a PC Gamer at a time when it felt like all the major publishers were abandoning us. That said, even as a young’n in the software development world (and a hobbyist gamedev) most of his rhetoric felt unnecessarily meanspirited and like it was focused on the people coding the games and not the people paying them and setting deliverables (one of the early hints that I leaned a hell of a lot more left than right…). And I mostly dropped his podcast because it increasingly felt like he was doing the same shit whichever dipshit at Penny Arcade was doing where the slightest pushback led to “I AM THE GREATEST VICTIM THIS WORLD HAS EVER KNOWN!!!”. And… he was very much a well to do British man when it came to his stances on LGBTQ and there was a LOT of transphobia that we’ll just pretend was ignorance.
But Bain wasn’t the only influencer I enjoyed content from. And as gamergate increasingly kicked off, it became painfully obvious that the guy who still insisted “ethics in games journalism” was the true divider was saying almost the exact same talking points as the people who literally put someone I semi-regularly chatted with on IRC into hiding. Not to mention some of the biggest targets of the hate movement were people he had “feuded with” for years. And when he finally DID address things, it was very much a “They have some good points but I don’t agree with how they are going about it”. Its unclear exactly when he knew about his cancer but many people (self included) suspect the reason he never really spoke out against gamergate is because he didn’t want to risk his money train and… I get it but also he was still profiting off the suffering of others to an obscene degree.
Skimming through it, forbes.com/…/totalbiscuits-legacy-and-the-collate… is a pretty good summary of a lot of the controversies of Bain’s career written shortly after his death. And I vaguely recall Eordogh being a regular contributor during the good years of Vice/Motherboard for what that is worth.
But yeah. I think the general take is that, at best, Bain was a useful idiot. At worst… he was the asmongold of his time right down to constantly framing things as people trying to steal your gu—err games. But there is very much a reason he is often considered the face of gamergate.
We totally didn’t do that! Valve and other merchants obviously kept receipts.
I almost love how normalized flagrant lying has become in the corpo-political sphere. They’ve become so emboldened by just telling whatever unbelievable lie they want and expecting to get away with it. If it’s not catastrophically illegal to do so, they just lie. I don’t take anything not said under oath seriously anymore, and even then, I take it with a grain of salt.
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