T w e n t y S i d e d
It’s been ages since I played any sort of deathmatch game, but to this day when I see photographs like this I think, “That would make an excellent level”. In fact, this one looks as if it was a deathmatch level from Unreal Tournament, using the popular ShaneChurch texture set.
That large open hallway would be a little dull, but you could liven it up with some criss-crossing bridges on the upper levels. Those steps in front of the stained glass window look incredible. The top of those steps would be a fiendish place to employ the biorifle. Underneath the steps would be a great place to put the shield belt. And if someone was on top of the steps I’d try to nail them with a grenade by banking it off the back wall just above the window and then follow up with…
Ahem. Sorry.
Anyway. Pretty pictures. (Via.)
Top 64 Videogames
Lists of 'best games ever' are dumb and annoying. But like a self-loathing hipster I made one anyway.
Another PC Golden Age?
Is it real? Is PC gaming returning to its former glory? Sort of. It's complicated.
Bad and Wrong Music Lessons
A music lesson for people who know nothing about music, from someone who barely knows anything about music.
TitleWhat’s Inside Skinner’s Box?
What is a skinner box, how does it interact with neurotransmitters, and what does it have to do with shooting people in the face for rare loot?
DM of the Rings
Both a celebration and an evisceration of tabletop roleplaying games, by twisting the Lord of the Rings films into a D&D game.
Shamus, don’t feel bad. After getting acclimated with the Unreal Editor, I would see several places around Dallas/Ft. Worth that I just wanted to model. There is some really nice architecture out there! (Pardon my spelling)
All the freakin’ time!
In fact, several employees of a company i worked for long ago made a DOOM level out of the building’s layout (and yes, it was long enough ago that DOOM was still big…). The BFG was in the Vice President’s office, IIRC.
“In fact, several employees of a company i worked for long ago made a DOOM level out of the building's layout”
Back when I was in high school (circa 1994) when Doom was young and the first level editors started popping up, one of my friends made the Admin building at our school, and put a minotaur in the room of a particularly large and mean teacher…
I also remember back in college I thought the library would be an awesome FPS level, especially w/ all the stair corridors and different floors and such. Probably be more of a RS3 or other “tactical” FPS type level rather than something actiony like UT or Quake.
I actually thought that the first five or six photos /were/ game screenshots.
Uh, I had the very same thoughts.
But then again, I tend to go around and see “levels” everywhere. “This shopping centre might make a brilliant 3rd person action game”, “this castle looks ancient. It could be a part of a Castlevania RPG.”
Then I start orgasming about Castlevania using the Oblivion engine and people look at me as if I’m psychotic.
That would make a better CSS level then quake cause the big open area works fine.
de_justice.
That’s the old Cuyahoga County Courthouse. The new one, of course, is a modernist nightmare skyscraper. That is because, when the Roswell craft crashed in 1949, the impact caused a sort of mental EMP pulse which destroyed the world’s aesthetic sense. We have subsequently been stuck with sixty years of hideous public buildings. At least we can still take pictures of the old ones.
I’m with Zerotime. I thought those were game shots, and that there was going to be a “Click here for more” with a big reveal that they were, after all, game screenshots.
Even if that is a real place (Debatable, I say!) whoever took those photos must have done a really bad job at the HDR — The colors look very unnatural.
I think of that sometimes. I used to think my church building would be a great setting for a Myst-style adventure game.
And, most recently, I finally decided to play Hotel Dusk for the Nintendo DS – and the very first thing that sprang to mind was making a Doom 2 map out of it.
I actually had to stop playing online Quake (not joking, feel like I’m admitting this at an AA meeting or something) because every time I went outside I’d be scanning the environment for possible hiding places… those that might contain some grappling-hooked sniper camping a vulnerable junction of hallways, or places I could duck into if things got rough. I realized this was a problem when I could no longer go to the local bank and use the wall-mounted ATM because bright lights halfway up the wall created a shadowy nook further up, perfect place for enemies to hide and here I’d been so foolish as to venture outdoors without my grappling hook and gun.
I think playing Unreal 2003 taught me one aspect of self defence: being on the look out for trouble.
That’s the most beautiful building I’ve ever seen.
When I worked in the Intelsat building I always thought it would make a great level, or a great set for a Spiderman movie.
I don’t know what type of equipment he was using, but I have to chime in with the others that there’s just something wrong, and it really does look like VR shots from a game or other VR program. Perhaps he was using a wide-angle lens or something? Anyway, SOMETHING about them is wrong (though getting shots like that of real objects makes those VR problems a little more understandable).
I will also heartily agree with Sartorius. It is a rather sad statement that the bench there is “the most ornate woodwork” he’s ever seen (not an exact quote, but close). Even more sad is the fact that the vast majority of Americans would have to agree with him…
Many years ago, I was actually working on building my high school in the original Unreal Editor. It had a very interesting layout. It was nicknamed “The Prison” by kids from other school for it’s exterior and interior appearance. Then Columbine happened and I dropped the project.
Re: Looking odd – he shot all of those with a tripod in ISO 200 – so they are most likley all longer exposures and a bit oversaturated. Also, he wasn’t using super pricey Cannon or Nikon lenses but rather the much more sensible for amatuers (like me!) Tamron lenses. They are decent lenses but do have some issues – notably they tend to have a bit of a probelm with spherical abberation. That’s usually not a big problem for amatuer photographers as the vast majority of shots are of out door subjects and far enough away to make any abberation either unnoticeable or at least unnofensive. The problem here is it’s all inside in a place with lots of vertical lines and curves – these serve to accentuate the effects of spherical abberation and can make some folks feel like there is something wrong with the image… which technically there is. Still, I find his composition skills to be excellent and can easily forgive the abberations caused by not being able to afford $1500 lenses! (I can’t afford ’em either!) These are great shots of an even greater subject.
Also, the little blcony in the court room would be a great place to drop grenades from :)
If I’m ever tried for anyhting I hope it occurs in a setting as regal as this. A place like that just has to make you feel like justice will be served.
“notably they tend to have a bit of a probelm with spherical abberation.”
Thanks – that’s EXACTLY what it is, I just didn’t know the term for it.
I have a co-worker who did that once.
We were deployed at this old ghost town that our superiors were under a lot of pressure to protect ‘cuz half the place had already been burned down a few years before, by a motorist’s cigarette of all things. It was just a political addition to our patrol and the place where we took our lunch breaks mostly.
Anyway, our second day on this fire he comes up to me and says, “Don’t you think this town would make an awesome level for a shooter game!?” (He pretty much speaks in exclamations.)
At first I was kind of caught off guard, being more of an RPG or platformer fan, but I quickly saw what he was getting at when he pointed out how the various pieces of old mining equipment and houses contributed to the level and the ways they created cover for various fields of fire and made good spots to put hidden health pickups.
His conceptual level ended with storming a giant dredge (It’s sort of like a a small sawmill, but instead of pulling in logs and spitting out boards it sucks up river soil and spits out gravel with less gold in it.) by climbing in on the scooping mechanism (which resembles a giant chain saw bar with big steel buckets for teeth.) to face a boss who would have been sniping at you with rockets for the duration of the level.
The only problem was that we couldn’t think of a reason why terrorists would hole up in a ghost town in Idaho, let alone a historic site that has weekly tours.
The town had been dead for decades and the buildings were over a century old, but the was a lot of cool stuff in it. Rusted machinery, graveyards with unintentionally hilarious headstone writing, and houses that had been sold and modified and resold before they were abandoned. It would have been really cool to put that in a game so people could see it without having to drive up into the mountains.
Photo link is dead. Waah.