modDB article

[leileilol]

http://features.moddb.com/232/Nexuiz-an ... d-to-Head/

Pretty unfair comparison actually, and it's a crap article :\

[C.Brutail]

He's sure right about the framerate... the only thing he didn't know, that it's becouse of the very high poly models... low poly models would realy make a big boost to fps.

Oh, and "spending hours playing both", and Nexuiz didn't show up anything new in gamplay... wtf, are we talking about the same game?

I'm not a bloody-eyed soldier for nexuiz, but I haven't seen so much idea in a game like in this one. Sure it has big performance troubles, but what about:

bloom, realtime lights, 5.1 sound, gloss, and the so much game-mode and the fully configurable weapons and game settings?

[SavageX]

Well, with effects cranked up framerate really can be a problem. That's why we ship with a much faster default. He doesn't really have to care for the reasons (high poly count etc.) why rtlights are slow.

What freaks me out most - however - is the "the engine is outdated, so it shall be fast" attitude. Our engine is *not* outdated. We're NOT using Quake 1, we're using Darkplaces which has little to do with Quake 1 rendering wise. He assumes it's possible to add all those nice little effects with zero performance loss. It's not.

[Ed]

A lame article. What sort of things is he looking for in gameplay? Did he even look at the options for creating a server? I begin to wonder how many people do. There is more to Nexuiz than just joining the first game you see online and standing around with a shotgun wondering why people are shooting you and accusing them of cheating.

[kozak6]

I have played a bit of Alien Arena, and Nexuiz is far better. The only two things Alien Arena has that Nexuiz doesn't is a gamemode with vehicles and a single player component.

That, being said, the vehicle gamemode doesn't seem terribly good (I only played against bots since their playerbase is actually smaller than ours), and the singleplayer component is the standard room-corridor type stuff with one broken level.

However, Nexuiz kicks Alien Arena's ass in all other categories. The music is infinitely better, gameplay is actually balanced, it is more configurable, it runs better (pre 1.5, anyways), the movement is much more interesting, the player animations are better, it has more players, and the gamemodes are generally better.

With Nexuiz, the main gamemode seems to be deathmatch. In Alien Arena, the main gamemodes are deathmatch and CTF.

The difference is that there are also bots set on super-mega-SOB-aimbot hard, and you actually have to score higher than them for the map to advance. So, in essence, you will have to play the same map about three times in a row, with someone who has been playing it from the beginning, if you want to play the next map.

CTF is poorly implemented, and it is exceptionally difficult to tell what team you are on, where the bases are, and who has what flag, let alone reclaiming and capping the goddamn flags.

Alt-fire also seems to be a very recent mod to the game, and when I played, most servers didn't have it.

[leileilol]

the truth is, if it had a gravity gun and the game had barrel/ragdoll he'd hail it as the greatest game of all time

sad, makes me wonder if he's actually played anything but hl2

[leileilol]

he just replied

apparently, he turned EVERYTHING on, with his low end system. omg! He also apparently is valve-biased

haha

[:)]

the main focus of these titles is to prove that a great percentage of games have only tipped the iceburg in engine capabilities.

iceburg
iceberg = mountain of ice (the word he intended)
iceburg = a fortified town of ice (the word he used)

I considered pointing out the other funny things, but that was the best.
Instead, I'd like to give credit to the boy, he did spend "a few hours on each title", and did write over 700 words for the article, all at the age of 16.
Perhaps "Gothax?" has a future in video game reviewing; there is certainly nothing to do but improve.


our beloved author, seriously

[KICK]

What are the ugly texture on the other game?

[KillerKitty]

Nexuiz is quite a bit different from the original Quake in gameplay, IMHO., and I've played both games. There's a laser that you can trickjump with, and has significantly different weapons that each have a useful alt-fire. And FYI, in both Nexuiz and CodeRED, there are acutally a bunch of gamemodes that are unique and not in any of the original Quake games! I prefer Nexuiz myself because I like the gameplay better and I don't like the "Alien" theme, but Alien Arena certainly is significantly different from the original Quake. There are vehicles, for crying out loud! It makes me wonder how much time the reviewer actually spent playing these games.

RTlights is a very high-end feature that only a handful of game engines support. Even Half Life 2 doesn't have RTLights! If you have a lower-end system (and I think the author certainly has one), of course turning them on will lower framerates a lot! I do agree that Nexuiz could use some optimizations, and the complaints would be justififed if Nexuiz was running on a high-end system. However, it's a fact that a graphical feature as advanced as RTLights WILL cause very low framerates on a low-end system.

I expected a comprehensive review weighing the pros and cons of both games, but instead this is a very biased article that basically states that both games suck, and appears to be based on a very short and incomplete examination of both games.

apparently, he turned EVERYTHING on, with his low end system.

What are the specs of his system exactly? Just wondering.