Introduction
Rage is a post-apocalyptic first person shooter/racing game hybrid. It is set in the year 2135, 106 years after the impact of the extinction-level asteroid, 99942 Apophis. Humanity's best and brightest, including our protagonist, US Marine Nicholas Raine, are sealed in cryogenic suspension in shielded underground Arks.
The game is id Software's first new intellectual property since 1996's Quake and consequently was met with high expectations. This was definitely intended to be a benchmark title, shipping on three dual-layer DVDs containing over a terabyte of uncompressed data. And make no mistake, the game is incredibly pretty - character animations and faces are smooth and natural, and the environments are surprisingly beautiful for such a desolate wasteland.
I think the technical achievement of the game led to it receiving undeserved praise. As of this writing, Rage is sitting at 7.9/10 from critics, and 4.4/10 on Metacritic, showing the great divide of opinion. It's very much a polarizing game.
For my part, Rage shows a lot of promise - the weapons are noisy and satisfying, and the shooting gameplay is a lot of fun. However, the game is small and linear, with the so-called "open world" amounting to nothing more than narrow canyons railroading you between combat sections. The races are not nearly deep or involved enough to justify cutting out a significant amount of combat sections.
This will be a normal-mode run through the game. It's fairly brief and linear, so I'll be showing off all the sidequests and combat areas, and explaining the mechanics as we go. Race days will be segregated into a separate video, marked with a classy checkered flag instead of the Rage A - feel free to skip them if you're not into the racing, as there will be no story elements. Just hardcore racing action!
I'll also intersperse the regular updates with a video showcasing the Wasteland Legends modes. These are co-op side stories playing out scenarios spoken of only in rumours in the main game.
The font used in the images and videos is Maneater BB by Nate Piekos
99942 Apophis is a real asteroid discovered in 2004. Apophis was named for a persistent villain from Stargate SG-1. Roy Tucker and Daved Tholen, two of the co-discoverers of the asteroid along with Fabrizio Bernardi, are reportedly fans of the show.
The character's name is the Greek version of Apep, the Egyptian snake-god of darkness and chaos, who fought a daily battle with the sun god Ra during the night. Layers upon layers of double meanings!
There was a brief panic as initial data suggested that the asteroid was on a collision course with Earth, and would impact in 2029. Later data suggested that this would not be the case, however there is a risk that the asteroid could pass through a Gravitational Keyhole (a half-mile wide area of space that could bring the asteroid around for another shot at us in 2036). The odds of this, of course, are astronomically small, so no worries there! It's expected to be a very bright and very exciting event, so bring your kids!
As far as physical characteristics, Apophis is estimated to be about 350 metres (about 1,150 feet) in diameter weighing an estimated 27 billion kilograms. NASA's most recent estimate (according to Wikipedia) is that should Apophis hit earth, it would impact with the force of about 510 megatons of TNT.
To put that in perspective, the Tunguska event was estimated to be equal to about 10 megatons of TNT, while the extinction-level Chicxulub event (believed to be a major factor in the extinction of the dinosaurs) is estimated at about 100,000,000 megatons.
In short, if the real Apophis were to impact the earth, it would fuck up a large radius around whatever it hit, but would be unlikely to cause an Impact Winter event.
However, I'm really happy to see a post-apocalyptic story that isn't the result of nuclear bombs or zombies.
Arglebargle III drops the science like Galileo dropped the orange
Arglebargle III posted:
If you want to be really nitpicky the shot of Apophis grazing the moon was inexcusable. It looked like it was about 1/10 the size of the moon which is, of course, crazy bananas. Apophis in that shot would be like 300 km wide. The Chicxulub asteroid (the one that killed the dinosaurs) was only 10 kilometers across.
If an asteroid that size hit Earth it would shatter the continents like glass and burn off the atmosphere. There would be nothing left. Maybe some bacteria might survive deep in the crust, but an impact like that would set life on Earth back a billion years.
So, y'know, that's a sort of nitpick-able point from the video.
Fun facts: take an impact calculator and plug in a 300km radius metallic asteroid, like Apophis from the intro, and you get an impact energy of 5.4 trillion megatons.
Try out the Impact Estimate Tool here- Skippy
I get the feeling the calculator's not designed to handle impacts of this size, because the seismic and thermal effects are relatively tame. Remember this is 5000 kilometers from impact and is still inside the fireball. Everything is fucked.at that ejecta. 200 meter wide balls of molten rock impacting at hypersonic speed. You would be so dead.
Oh BTW the real life Apophis is 270 meters in diameter. So literally a thousand times smaller than in the intro video.
Youtube videos are in HD, Blip mirror includes a download link
Agent Slade joined me on an adventure through the Legends of the Wasteland. I like to think that we became legends ourselves.
Weaponboy kindly shows off some of the unique perks you would have gotten if you'd preordered the game.
Tired of HDR Poopy Light Bloom? Maxwell Adams has your prescription.
Maxwell Adams posted:
You can actually de-brown the graphics on the PC version. Add +com_allowConsole 1 to your launch options to enable the console. Pull down the console in-game with the ~ key and enter this command:
bind x toggle r_skipglare
Where 'x' is the key you want to use. Then you can use that button to switch HDR effects on and off.
P.M.F. Made a bunch of animated animations showing some of my more inadvertently hilarious kills. Here are my favourites:
P.M.F. posted:
Glad to see a LP of this game. I didn't get it after release because of all the bad reviews. At least now I get to see someone to shoot and rob a man on fire.
P.M.F. posted:
"Oh, god"
Good stuff.
P.M.F. posted:
Nice new look, same old carnage.
Loxbourne posted:
The Wasteland Legends only make sense if you view them as drunken tales told around the Wellspring bar at closing time, by broken-down sots who've lost half their eyesight and 70% of their marbles.
"Yesh, mate. Me an..and..an...that dude. We totally killed like...20 Authorororititity dudes. And I had a rocket launcher. Was awesome. Ya shoulda been there."
P.M.F. posted:
"...and he 'ad the biggest fuckin' colleshion of clown faces you'd 'er seen!"
"Also, he drove like a mole..."
"...knew a man who could fly, briefly..."
"..owned a wingstick possessed by Chucky!"
Let's listen to John Carmack talk about the guts of games
Mr. Fish posted:
Funny thing, John Carmack did a commentary on Wolfenstein 3D recently where he also talked about Rage, link.
He sounds so delightfully geeky like always.
Maxwell Adams posted:
Anyone interested in the tech behind Rage should listen to John Carmack's QuakeCon 2011 keynote. The guy stands on stage for an hour and a half and just jabbers non-stop about the game. Notes? No, fuck notes, Carmack doesn't need any notes.