Leaked: SiN 1 Source

I Love Leaks…do forgive me! As some of you might know, Nabeel is currently travelling (and with Richard knee-deep in Mass Effect), which effectively means my posts are getting through unmoderated… see! I do love leaks! What would we know of Duke Nukem Forever, at this point, if not for the leaks?

They allow us rare, otherwise altogether unavailable glimpses into singular, discrete developmental processes. That’s why it’s all the more peculiar that we never did get around mentioning how Michael Russell recently outed a Source-based version of the original SiN. Ritual worked on converting the game over as an excercise while the team sought to learn the ins and outs of a new engine.

If you guys just got your collective hopes up, I do apologize, as the leak is not really all that playable: A fair amount of the assets are missing – the more they are the further you play – and as Russell explains in a further comment, he only has access to the compiled assets, so the actual, err, SiN Source source code is still firmly under wraps.

If you do want to try it out, you’ll also need a copy of SiN Episodes: Emergence, for the assets. If you don’t yet own the game, in addition to Steam you can also often find it laying about in bargain bins for far less than the game is actually worth. It’s really a pretty solid game. Hopefully, if nothing else will ultimately come out of this interesting relic, perhaps it will function as a boost of new energy for the Unofficial SiN Episodes Multiplayer project (affectionately known as USEMP), though?

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Breakwater Crumbling Before the Narrative Flood

Since it looks like most of us are still reeling from the potentially lethal after-effects of E3, there is thus very little new press out there right now – other than the ostensibly amaranthine recaps and bullet point lists – so I thought I would just as well direct our attention to something completely different.

So. I enjoy reading Richard Cobbett. We go way back (…well, he does) as I originally chanced upon his blog, as an impressionable young man, thanks to his very questionable coverage of Sin Episodes. 1)Thank you archive.org! I couldn’t find the original post on his website. He’s cool and stuff and it so happens that he totally agrees with me on Guybrush’s new hair.

To cut to the chase, he has recently débuted an all-new interactive website called Narrative Flood, under the fantastic subtitle “Because Story Matters”; the right words indeed, in the correct order no less. I would like to be so bold as to highlight just a few intriguing topics that have already been tackled on the website, types of themes that I would hope to ultimately discuss here at the Slowdown as well:

  • A straightman take on Al Lowe’s often-disrespected but ultimately oft-reminisced and …yes, even beloved Leisure Suit Larry series and Larry’s romantic search for Real Love ™. Cobbett argues, like Lowe himself, that the “packaging … always promised much more sex than was actually in the games” 2)http://www.noisetosignal.org/2008/10/the-nts-interview-al-lowe
  • Sexy vs. Sexy, a discussion of the dangerous high-wire tap-dance that is the use and abuse of sex appeal in games.
  • Arachnophobia vs. Altruism, in which Your Hero laments the monstrous throng of spiders in games. I can’t help but mention I’ve only recently bested my own arachnophobia in video games; For instance – to keep on bringing up Sin any way I can – some years back, I simply could not envision myself playing Wages of Sin, the expansion pack, because the very first enemies in the game so happened to be spiders. I do have to add that I did ultimately conquer most of my fear during my relatively recent play-through of Dark Messiah.

A refreshing new website with a focus I can full well get behind – please do take a look!

References   [ + ]

1. Thank you archive.org! I couldn’t find the original post on his website.
2. http://www.noisetosignal.org/2008/10/the-nts-interview-al-lowe

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