I am one of the last of my kind. Born in the days of Pong, raised to the sound of Pac Man and grew up saving princesses in Mario Brothers, I continue to be one of the few who still plays games on a regular basis.
You look at today’s gaming culture in Indonesia and you will see a lot of online social games, such as golf game Pangya, shooting gallery
Gunbound or ridiculous dancing game Idol Street Online. I look at these games and weep.
What happened to all those kids who used to play Counterstrike or Quake or all those first-person shooters that provided an immersive perspective of the gaming world? These games not only increased your reflexes or hand eye coordination but they also promoted teamwork and a sense of community.
Of course, all games today do the same thing but something is missing.
I play games such as Team Fortress 2 or Day of Defeat: Source online, with other players across the region since there are very few in Indonesian players, and truly feel transported into another world.
Day of Defeat is a game where you play either an American or German soldier in World War II. Yet looking on the screen, listening to the crackling radio from command HQ and hearing the snow crunch under your feet truly makes you feel that you are in the battlefield. Like a digital game of capture the flag, you can spend hours in stalemate trying to capture that last 50 m to win the game, yet like in real life, sometimes you just can’t.
What’s more, other countries are playing games online and in competition against each other using top branded games such as Star Craft and Counterstrike. Unfortunately, we are lacking the human capital to compete at their level. So what are we going to do about it?
Wow, another veteran gamer here :)
Pleased to meet you sir.
Nowadays I like to play Tremulous.
It’s a very unique multiplayer game:
# It’s a co-op game : No teamwork, no win - no glory !
# RTS element : this is where it set itself apart. You need to build your base : create respawn pod, armory, generator, medic pad, etc.
And defend them - losing all respawn pod for example will make you unable to, duh, respawn. Which is kinda suck :)
Here’a picture showing (from left to right) an armory, respawn pod, medic pad, and another respawn pod
# RTS element #2 : you get credits from shooting & killing enemies, which you can use to buy equipments. Yay !
# Strategy : don’t just kill the enemies mindlessly. Scheme against them. Do something wicked, for example - destroy the generator, so none of their structures in their base is functioning. Yeah.
# Two races against each other : Alien versus Human.
The Aliens can evolve after sometime. The Humans will get equipment upgrades. Each will need to fully understand their strengths and weaknesses in order to be able to win the battles.
If I sounded like I’m enjoying this game - I am indeed, immensely. The graphic may not be the most stunning, but screw that. I care about gameplay much more. And this game delivers it in truck loads.
Good fun.
[ More screenshots ]
[ Download Tremulous for free from here ]
(available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux)
with other players across the region since there are very few in Indonesian players
That reminds me - we used to have an active Quake I community. Here’s some of the website that’s still left from that era.
And the ISPs were happy to accommodate us - rather than letting us to play in servers abroad, and consuming their (expensive, especially at 1998 / post economic crisis) international bandwidth; they’d rather provide us with gameservers instead.
That resulted in rather impressive ping and responsive gameplay, even though we were just using modem (not broadband connections) back then.
It still holds true to this day - online gaming are serious cash cow for ISPs, because the traffic is local, and the players can be online for hours. I’ve got a friend in Gedung Cyber laughing while telling me that if game servers are down, you can count that the ISPs (not the players) will be asking around and will help to get it back up in anyway they can.
If we can get some local players for Tremulous, I’m sure we can arrange to get a local gameserver up & running soon.
They grew up, dumped that childish games (hey, I can insult other games too!) and play World of Warcraft… ;)
Heh, never got into World of Warcraft. You need MONTHS to catch up to all those level 60 Paladins, plus you have to pay a monthly fee. I stopped at Asheron’s Call, although it was fun to play with friends, team/squad tactics are faster paced and more fun!
To each their own, really. But games such as Guitar Hero and Rock Band are picking up the attention of the masses, something CS and TF2 have yet to do. Which is unlikely. However, many people know about Quake and Doom, all for the wrong reasons :(
yeah, It’s hard to find a team for playing FPS team based nowadays. Reporting for duty…. but no one else to respond… sob
dude,
if u like FPS, try Call of Duty 4. this game actually makes Counterstrike like the PacMan of old…both offline and online.
i guarantee the experience.
time to lock and load bros!
cheers,
dennis
I do not like the game
It seems too much time throwing
Better Writing Blog it:)