FPS

The biggest news in the EVE Online World recently (and in my opinion, some of the biggest news in gaming) is the announcement of DUST 514, a console FPS/RTS being developed by CCP and based in the EVE Universe.

On the surface DUST looks a lot like a slightly grittier Halo 3. Basically a futuristic first person shooter with a strong focus on vehicles. The big point comes from it’s interaction with the EVE Online universe. The combat in DUST will take place on the surface of planets in EVE. As a consequence the result of battles will effect EVE. How big this effect will be (and in exact nature is not yet known). What we do know is that it will tie in with the upcoming changes to sovereignty in the Dominion expansion to EVE.

A few people have responded with horror to this,  worried that control of their systems will now be at the mercy of some crazy twelve year old console dude. Although it’s probably wise to have a little concern, DUST has been in development for two years and EVE Online is CCPs flagship product - I don’t think they began this endeavour without some serious thought.

Personally I think it’s an amazing idea, creating a universe that can entertain two rather disparate audiences (PC MMO players and console FPS players) at the same time and hopefully make them both more fun because of it.

More info should be forthcoming at EVE Fest, on October 1st.

I’m not entirely sure why you’d want to - I mean I can’t imagine what the controls are like for instance - but you can now get Doom for your iPod.

Unfortunately it requires you to install iPod Linux making an unsuitable option for more people. But I think it’s one of these things that more impressive than practical from the beginning…

After discovering a universal binary patch for Quake 2 (a friend has an Intel Mac), I’ve started playing it again.

We had fun with deathmatch for a while and then figured we’d give coop a go.

Since Quake 2 doesn’t have coop built in I had a look around for a mod. There were quite a few but unfortunately I couldn’t get any of them to work. It seemed they were all designed to work with version 3.1, but we were running 3.2 (and 3.21 - a fix of OpenGL support to make it work on Linux and the one the Mac patch was based on).

The reason why was mind blowing. Apparently in their last update, id software actually added native coop support. Bring up the console and type “set coop 1” and voila, multiplayer single player gameplay (rolls nicely off the tongue eh?).

Although Quake 2 was definitely not designed with coop in mind though. A lot of fighting in corridors where one person can’t fire for risk of blowing his partner(s) up. Although we certainly tried from time to time - occasionally with dire consequences. But fun nonetheless :)

Oh yeah, one more thing. Make sure you change from the default skin as it looks just like one of the enemies…