Riding the wind of rebirth

"Huh? The opponent has applied for the Clover Forbidden Move mode?" After the new game started, Mai Xiaomiao noticed that the opponent had applied for a new rule: "This player must be quite professional."

The rules for forbidden moves in Gomoku are relatively complex, especially the rules that Xiaozhi has carefully calculated and matched. These rules are based on several famous forbidden moves in history and include many forbidden moves such as fixed positions, face swaps, and double calls. Most Gomoku players on the forum find these rules too troublesome, so the game is divided into two modes: normal mode and professional mode.

"Yeah! I won again!" In the forbidden mode, the opponent persisted for more than ten moves, but still lost in the end, which made Zhou Zhi shout excitedly.

“That’s right. Xiao Zhi is the rule-maker. Who can beat him when playing within his rules?” Mai Xiaomiao thought it was only natural, while also finding Zhou Zhi’s pranks rather mischievous.

"Did you change players? The skill level is completely different now." The other person typed a line of text, sounding somewhat dejected: "Professional?"

“Not a professional.” Mai Xiaomiao typed a message, but it was in English, as her Chinese wasn’t very fluent yet, and she also avoided answering the question from the previous paragraph.

"Are you interested in joining the chess academy?" the other person asked again.

Mai Xiaomiao stuck out her tongue and quickly logged off: "Oh no, it might be one of the teachers from the chess academy."

"How could that be? The chess academy teachers wouldn't be so bored as to play Gomoku," Zhou Zhi laughed.

High-ranking Go players are actually all masters of Gomoku (Five in a Row), which can be considered an additional skill for Go players. However, Zhou Zhi did not believe that the other party would be a true master from the Go academy: "There are so many Go enthusiasts in China, how could you possibly randomly pick someone from the Go academy?"

Although some soundproofing equipment was used, the sleeper compartment was still a bit noisy. Since they couldn't sleep, the two of them simply continued eating and drinking, and also surfed the internet.

There are now quite a few highly playable computer games, such as the Romance of the Three Kingdoms series translated from Japanese games, several domestically produced role-playing games, and some arcade games ported from arcades, such as The King of Fighters. There are also some successful domestically produced games like Monopoly.

This has essentially laid the foundation for several major directions in the future development of games.

Clover Group has also invested in several games, one of which is "Xuan-Yuan Sword," which was once very popular in China.

Zhou Zhi was very optimistic about the creative framework of this story, so he invested in Softstar Entertainment to continue developing "Xuan-Yuan Sword II". However, the storyline of "Xuan-Yuan Sword II: The Dance of Maple Leaves" was much more complicated than the original "Xuan-Yuan Sword II: The Dance of Maple Leaves", and the characters' backgrounds and history were also much richer.

Zhou Zhi moved the story to the Eastern Han Dynasty, designed the protagonist as Zhang Daoling, a disciple of the Zhengyi Mengwei Dao, and added stories of slaying demons and monsters, as well as a talisman system, a demon-refining pot system, a Daoist cultivation system, a magic weapon system, and a combat and treasure-fighting system, greatly enriching the content and plot of the story.

Another game is a strategy turn-based game called "Heroes of Chu and Han," which imitates the Romance of the Three Kingdoms model developed by Hero Games.

The game allows players to choose to play as the leaders of Chu, Han, Qin, and various local warlords, strategizing across China to ultimately unify the country. The overall story is similar to "Romance of the Three Kingdoms," but both games benefit from Clover's powerful graphics processing capabilities, resulting in much more detailed and realistic graphics and lighting effects.

Based on this alone, and the fact that most players have a clear memory of history, the story of the Chu-Han Contention is almost second only to the Three Kingdoms period, which is why "Heroes of Chu and Han" has achieved great success.

Especially the vast map of China, with its waterways and mountains far more clearly and realistically rendered than in Romance of the Three Kingdoms IV, makes control of both land and water routes a significant advantage in securing victory, and also makes the game more authentically ancient. Both games achieved great success, but since they were single-player games, they weren't Clover's primary focus; Clover's main focus remained on developing online games.

In fact, games as simple as Gomoku and billiards can be called online games as long as they can involve online players. However, different games provide different levels of engagement and satisfaction to players.

So, in addition to some simple online forum games, Clover also ventured into the "serious" online game field, investing in Ding Lei, one of the four early internet giants who later achieved great success with online games, and promoting the release of domestic online games.

Both of them had their eyes on the same game – Quake.

Quake is a first-person shooter PC client game developed by id Software. The first game in the series was released on May 31 this year.

The game's premise is simple: players take on the role of soldiers fighting against enemies from a different world based on Norse mythology, protecting the human-inhabited world of Midgard.

The core gameplay of the series is first-person shooting, with a diverse weapon system and 3D scenes to create a combat experience. It pioneered the deathmatch rules and TCP/IP online technology, supporting multiplayer online battles and local split-screen cooperative modes.

This game combines 3D sound effects with dynamic scenes to enhance immersion. While maintaining a fast-paced combat experience, the game boasts excellent graphics and precise controls.

However, the game has high requirements for the 3D rendering capabilities of the graphics card. The player characters and monsters are three-dimensional models instead of the two-dimensional sub-graphics of the past. The game world is also created as a true three-dimensional space, instead of rendering two-dimensional maps with height information into 3D images as in previous games.

It also combines lightmap and dynamic lighting modes instead of using static vertex lighting in past games, and it is the first to adopt a flow control scheme to achieve more superior and realistic lighting effects in the game's visuals.

Zhouzhi chose to promote this game primarily because of its 3D rendering engine. As the manufacturer of the world's first non-linear algorithm chip independent GPU, it is widely believed that this game is perfectly adapted to the revolution of independent 3D graphics cards. The Clover non-linear supercomputing chipset and the Voodoo chipset from 3DFX became the only two graphics cards in the world capable of demonstrating the Quake lighting effects engine, which brought a rather shocking impact to the players.

This game includes a multiplayer mode, so you can play against others on a local area network or the Internet.

Online multiplayer uses a client/server model, with the game actually running on a server, and all players logging in to participate.

Because the routing from client to server varies, different clients will have different ping values. The lower your ping latency, the smoother your gameplay will be, and the easier it will be to accurately aim at targets and score points.

This places equipment requirements on professional teams and discerning gamers, greatly increasing everyone's desire to upgrade their computers to dedicated graphics cards.

Clover Group also took the lead in introducing the concept of GPUs and began selling discrete graphics cards priced no less than those of consoles. Of course, they were not targeting the domestic market, but rather showcasing the superior capabilities of domestically produced nonlinear ultra-high-performance graphics chips globally and competing with Voodoo chips for market share.

Ding Lei is a genius at game promotion. He quickly used a supercomputing matrix to build an excellent game server platform in China and opened up game member registration in the Greater China region. As a result, many excellent Thor's Hammer game clubs began to emerge in China.

This also marks the first time that "e-sports," a new phenomenon, has appeared on Chinese soil. (End of Chapter)