pyscan and game thoughts

Pyscan
A little script offering a gui'ed tcp/ip portscanner, comes in handy and was fun to write.

Game thougts
I've played Aces High demo again yesterday. This was after I stopped playing Battlefield Vietnam for this evening because the spawncampers and bad teammates got on my nerves. I'm sort of a flying-nature in these games. Also I've seen a trailer of sorts for Call of duty united offensive. And I'm rememberd of my good old days of Operation Flashpoint.

I like about these games that:

• Battlefield has a good working network-code for up to 32 players, and offers a broad range of different vehicles that are fun to play with and is graphicaly apealing.
• Aces high has a very good grade of realism what goes to flight physics and world size, also it's a blast to play on a server with 300 other people.
• Call of duty has a very fine hand at constructing good atmosphere, the sounds, the animations, the interface-feeling, everything. very fine atmosphere. Also their missions are intresting. Network works good but it didn't keep me playing realy.
• Flashpoint is in a way a perfect game for what it tries to archieve, enjoyed it a lot.
  

What I don't Like about these games:

• Battlefield is very arcade like. It follows a 'downsize reality' patter of sorts. It makes every vehicle slower, planes never stall, they take off at 40km/h after 20 meters runway ( can land the same way ). The vehicles have little grip on the ground, they have no gears to switch and no motor to power-up, and so on. What I also miss are a whole lot more sprites, even Tribes 2 had more sprites then the BF-engine ( for explosions, shots, crashes, snow, rain and what no more )
• Aces high has rather ugly graphics. One can say this doesn't count, you're high up anyway, but looking at the new Call of duty screenshot, I still miss the good graphics. Also, in Aces high there's the option on driving ground vehicles, which is in my opinion a pain in the arse as you're driving over dead-booring landscapes for ages.
• Call of duty has no vehicles to realy use. Yeah it's got these tanks, with an 'almost physics', but that's only limited to very specific missions. There's no general concept of avaiable vehicles, and you never see them online. I just love vehicles, they bring so much more fun into a game.
• Flashpoints troop-leading and command never quite worked right. The graphics was a little bettern then in aces high, but it was much more sprite-poor then Battlefield. But the woods worked very good. The vehicle-physics was for me a major bummer, as it felt wrong even after weeks of playing. Worst it was with planes and helicopters. But the one and sole reason to abandom it alltogether that it has no net-community. Flashpoint would have been a real blast if it worked network-wise as good as battlefield. But the whole network-issue was totaly neglected by the developpers until to the last moment, so naturaly at first is was crappy, and this way it stayed. With no good way of browsing servers, and games that crashed and got out of sync all the time. Was no fun at all to play in the net.
  

The conclusion? I would realy like a game that would offer me the graphical finesse and briliance of Call of Duty, the good working network/vehicles of Battlefield, the reality-size of aces high and the tactics and handling of flashpoint. Add to that a little of the best other ingredients of these games, and perhaps a few role-play elements ( a bit more then in aces high ), and you got me hooked for years.