But I'm still curious how 11 Khz sounds good in-game as opposed to not in-game. 

 

crate icon closest we have to a heart 

This is one of the funniest things I have ever read:

http://www.efn.org/~dredmond/PP5.html

This guy is trying to paint Half-Life as a "metaphor for neoliberal market-dominated globalization." I think. Some highlights:

The rise of the 3D game played a key role in the emergence of the information commons. While film and TV productions require comparatively expensive set designs, production crews and distribution channels, videogames could be produced by small groups of programmers, and played on inexpensive console systems and handheld devices. The advent of the Web in the early 1990s spawned multinational gaming communities, wherein fans, designers and programmers from across the planet could meet, play online, and exchange game-related media and news. Videogames very quickly became a privileged site where multinational cultural forms could touch base with new types of multinational politics � everything from the anti-Maastricht mobilizations which swept the European Union to the pro-democracy struggles of the East Asian region.

I mustn't have noticed that happen. When do I get to touch base with Cambodian nationals?

By contrast, actual theme music is deployed sparingly, thereby maximizing its impact. These are often conjoined to scripted events, e.g. the running bass line triggered when players don their power-vest for the first time, the exhilarating thrash metal music during the player�s first battle with the military death squads, or the guitar feedback pulse played when obtaining the plasma rifle. Most impressive of all is the prelude to the cliff battle of Surface Tension, when the roar of a passing military jet accedes to a low bass pulse, then a metallic drum-and-brush rhythm, with very light feedback. This reprises Valve�s opening theme music, which consists of a minor 3rd and another minor 3rd, a half-step below the first � an unmistakable music reference to the sonic palette of late 1990s hip hop (e.g. Kool Keith�s 1996 Dr. Octagon album).

One of the most entertaining scripted events in Half Life occurs when the player-character dies and must start over from a saved game. During the death-sequence, players literally watch their character�s skull roll across their field of vision: one eye is still in the socket, which could either be the ironic reprise of HAL�s disembodied gaze in Kubrick�s 2001, or the Information Age update of the medieval memento mori, depending on one�s morbidity level. This is the comic parody of death, a computerized gallows humor in the grand tradition of James Whale�s Frankenstein (1931) or Sam Raimi�s Evil Dead (1981).

What the fuck game was this guy playing?

Id�s quotation of video forms is perhaps the most interesting story of all. Id�s action games fused the visceral kinetic energies of the 1970s horror and Hong Kong films with the registers of the 1980s sci-fi blockbuster (e.g. the audacious action sequences of James Cameron�s 1986 Aliens, without question the cinematic highwater mark of Anglo-American neo-conservativism). But where Aliens exorcised the grisly reality of corporate neocolonialism by means of a reactionary biologism � the monstrous hunger of the aliens for human bodies � id biologized the technologies of neocolonialism.

This has to be a joke, or else this guy is masturbating all over himself as he writes this. I was guessing that his paper was overdue because he played Half Life all weekend, but according to his index site he is, in fact, a teacher of this nonsense.

The sample in question is a glowing crystal extracted from Xen, but what is striking about the ensuing catastrophe is the displacement of the generic science-fiction trope of the mysterious alien element or technology by a threatening hypermobility � specifically, the translucent green teleportation nodes of the Xen aliens. Matter is displaced by mobility, in a manner which irresistible recalls the hegemonic fiction of the neoliberal era � the utopia of a weightless, frictionless, and bodiless information economy. The reality was that the information economy was economically profitless, socially polarizing, and deeply destructive to the bodies of consumers and workers, as Doug Henwood�s magisterial After the New Economy documents in devastating detail.

Aliens teleport from another dimension, and voila, it's a utopian information economy. Brilliant! 

There is a similar moment of qualitative transformation in Half Life, and that is the counter-mobilization of the videogame culture against post-Cold War neoliberalism. The most characteristic form this takes in the 3D action genre is, of course, the spectacular production and consumption of informatic bodies � something which includes, but is by no means limited to, onscreen violence. The informatic body is a work-process. It anchors the game-play in the same way that the complex editing techniques of the martial arts thriller anchors the canonic Hong Kong action films, ranging from Robert Clouse�s Enter the Dragon (1973) to John Woo�s Hard Boiled (1989). What separates the informatic body from its social antipode, the information capitalist or silicon billionaire, is the fact that game-players must actively construct that body, by exploring and mapping the game-world, acquiring tools and strategies, and mastering the ability to operate in 3D space. At its outer limit, the informatic body turns into a cipher of the informatic laborer: that is to say, the patient, laborious acquisition of high-technology or service sector skills.

I have no idea. But, brilliant!


Even better is the next chapter of this epic. He spends most of the thing raving about how the single player works of Niel Manke redefined the genre.

http://www.efn.org/~dredmond/PP6.html

The third Coconut Monkey adventure, Saving Private Monkey (the title refers to Spielberg�s medium-grade war drama, Saving Private Ryan) is simply outstanding. After being transported back in time to the Normandy landing, Coconut Monkey must fight through hordes of Nazis in order to return to the present.

Holy mother of fuck what? Spielberg�s medium-grade war drama?

I can't read this anymore. Some else plunge in for me and post some highlights, my eyes hurt. There's seven whole chapters. 

that is all. 

but his stuff is decent. Its not great like all reviews seem to praise it as but it's still decent stuff. 

Don't touch that stuff. It's dirty. 

Hehe, nice find :) Gee, he sure does like that "neo" word - do you think he's a big Matrix fan? 

Manke's Quake stuff is dated now, especially his early work. His later Quake level/mods weren't bad at all. Go play Star Ship again - that was cool :)

http://www.quaketerminus.com/addon.htm
(at the bottom)

I can't see why anybody would knock Neil. I've had a couple of chats with him over the years, and he always come across as a nice guy. Never went pro despite offers from the industry. If he has produced loads of free playable mods that extend the life of people's games, that's a good thing right?

Anyhoo, looks like he might be doing something for HL2 next year according to his website.

http://www.planethalflife.com/manke/ 

http://bigjim.org/slime.html 

Though it isn't brilliant. Frank Miller is brilliant. That guy just talks too much, and he is obviously gunning for some kind of tax subsidized grant with all of those neo-s and Marxoid phrases he uses. 

http://tartarus.uwa.edu.au/~wedgey/slime1/

This one is the daddy.
I can get to the psycho slime (level 4) but ive never beaten that guy. If you can, kudos! 

Whilst adding custom ambient sounds to my Q1SP, I've noticed how ridicuously limited is FitzQuake when it comes to sound files. I had a 71kb 11kz 8bit mono .WAV file and it worked just fine in Darkplaces. I tried loading the map in FitzQuake and the .WAV refused to load. I cut it down to 49kb and it STILL refused to load in FitzQuake whilst working in Darkplaces. C'mon? What is this? 

I just skimmed most of it. The guy has some interesting ideas, but, yeah, he's masturbating furiously (and looking for great significance in every random pattern of splattering sperm).

The price Half Life pays for this narrative advance is, to be sure, the extinction of the categories of Cold War allegory. This is most evident in the final Xen levels, which lack the soldier-versus-alien firefights of the Black Mesa sequences, and temporarily regresses back to the mainstream videogame culture of the mid-1990s. Valve�s designers tried heroically to compensate for this deficiency with extravagant alien worlds and memorable boss-level opponents, with mixed results. The first, Gonarch, is a giant spider-like creature whose rotund body quivers beneath an armored carapace � the postmodern update of J.R.R. Tolkien�s lurid Shelob. The last is Nihilanth, whose resemblance to a giant, mummified infant earned it the unofficial sobriquet of �the big baby.� �For even Baal/feared children,� wrote Brecht in his Expressionist classic, and the contrast between the Nihilanth�s mechanical intestines, a combination of steel girders and rusty machinery, and the fleshy, womb-like enclosure of the Nihilanth�s lair, does recall the Expressionist science fiction thriller. When the creature is finally defeated, however, its head peels open to reveal a giant, malevolent brain, a conventional reference to the mad computers and ruthless cyborgs of 1970s science fiction.

How much you wanna bet that a couple of jerk-offs were sitting around trying to come up with a final boss, and some commercial about baby wipes or something came on, and one of them said, "Hay how about a big-ass baby? That would be cool."

I think that line is probably much closer to reality than, "Gee, how can we combine Brecht's expressionistic classicism with subtle references to some of the themes from our much-beloved '70s science fiction? If we could manage that, we just might have something!" 

lol. nail. head. hit. 

according to the sampling rate and bitrate, the sound should load. something else is the problem. do you get any messages about the sound in quake? have you tried loading the sound in glquake? 

2 shots of quake IV overe here:
http://gamesdomain.yahoo.com/feature/57067
Not sure what to make of it. Very doom3. (which i guess is to be expected) 

first shot is old, second is new.

those raven guys sure are doing a bangup job, eh? ;D 

I'm more interested in XMen 2 personally... to compare the suck-levels of both games!!!!! :D 

it looks just like doom3... 

On the Nihilanth, from my article 'Lovecraft In Quake':

A last creature, not one of Lovecrafts, but worthy to be ranked alongside them. The Nihilanth from Half-Life. When H. R. Giger was first approached to work on 'Alien' back in the late 70's, he was sent a letter by someone from Fox, saying of the adult creature:
"Someone has suggested that it should look like a huge, deformed baby. But in any case, you should feel free to design whatever you wish."

That was the first, last and only thing I thought of when I confronted the Nihilanth. 

So I'm reading the chapter on Max Payne. This is full of totally amazing garbage.

Max Payne marks the point at which the objective contradictions of thirty years of marketization, austerity and privatization recoil into a subjective political and cultural resistance � or put more concretely still, the moment when the global proletariat spawned by three decades of brutish neoliberalism begins to forge its own institutions and modes of class struggle.

Such corporealities are far more than just the objective reaction-formation to the emergence of the electronic commons, that is to say, informatic bodies which represent a certain class fraction or profession within the electronic body politic. Rather, they are unimaginably powerful engines of a multinational class praxis, with no real precedent in the historical record.

Lake�s storyline is structured into three parts, each of which corresponds to a stratum of the global economy. The first section, The American Dream, takes place in subways, sewer tunnels, and squalid hotels, or the realm of primitive global accumulation. The second, A Cold Day in Hell, features dockside warehouses, tanker ships and Mafia mansions, or spaces of global distribution. The third, A Bit Closer to Heaven, takes place in research labs, manufacturing plants and corporate offices � that is to say, spaces of global production.

While Vladimir is identified with his signature black Mercedes, that premier Central European export-commodity and favored transport vehicle of Eastern Europe�s commercial elites, the trope of the Russian gangster is displaced elsewhere, onto the bit character of Boris Dime. This is a subtle but unmistakable reference to the geopolitical transition from Boris Yeltsin�s financial oligarchs to Vladimir Putin�s petro-developmental state.

In retrospect, the entire second section of Max Payne overflows with references to Second World border-regions, where state-of-the-art technology co-exists with the violence of primitive global accumulation. This suggests that Vladimir is something like the Second World mirror image or structural double of Max Payne, whose presence allows Finland to catch a fleeting glimpse of its own mid-20th century prehistory as a Second World exporter of raw materials and basic manufactured goods in the mirror of post-autarkic Russia�s shotgun integration into the EU. But instead of seeking to displace or neutralize this mirror image via a compensatory neo-nationalism � the limit-point, in retrospect, of Half Life�s Xen levels, which allude to a post-American cultural space the narrative never quite crosses over into � Lake will follow Manke�s lead, and transform a non-American identity-politics into the springboard of the multinational.

I had no idea you could make a living writing this stuff. This is comedy gold.

This is the moment when the national juridical system of the prototypical global city touches base with its multinational successor. Where Nicole Horne is clearly the name of a previously nameless neoliberalism, and where the Aesir tower is the embodiment of a hitherto bodiless multinational capitalism, Alfred Woden is clearly the representative of a multinational authority somehow complicit with globalization, and yet antagonistic to Wall Street neoliberalism. This can be nothing else than the world�s first multinational democracy and newest superpower, namely the European Union, and there is a sense in which Woden�s role in the storyline is reminiscent of the EU�s mushrooming array of economic, political, cultural and regulatory agencies. These latter covertly aided Eastern Europe in its life-and-death struggle with neoliberalism in the 1990s, and did not openly intervene on their behalf until their formal accession into the EU in the 2000-2004 period.

I mean, come on! Does anyone else find the fact that this guy is trying to interpret fucking video games in terms of a global struggle with liberal economic theory, and seriously believing what he's saying, a total scream? 

everything I've read longer than 2 paragraphs in this entire page is bullshit from bullshitting attention-whores! You don't realize how much money people like that can get from Universities to work on bullshit like that too. HOW THE HELL IS LOADING A SAVED GAME A DELIBERATE PARODY OF DEATH SIMILAR TO JAMES WHALE'S 1931 FRANKENSTEIN!! That film was shit too, but as it's famous and European, and from the 1930's, mentioning it makes the article seem more respectable (pukes). 

...it's a scream. I've laughed a fair bit at the last dozen or so posts. However, it's also very sad. What have we come too?

Are you sure this isn't one of those essays auto-generated at one of those uni sites? Like this one http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern/ .