FatBusinessman.com

General life update

So, no blog posts in over a week: what’s happened of note recently and what’s slated to happen in the near future? In rough chronological order:

Well, brain-dump over. Until next time, kiddies.

Linux gaming

This is Tux. With a railgunI made a discovery today: Linux isn’t inherently bad for gaming. Two things have helped me realise this: the first is Darwinia, the second is Doom 3.

First off, Darwinia. You might have heard of it, you might not: it’s certainly not the huge headline-grabber that titles like Grand Theft Auto 3 are (seeing as the game came out in 2001 and is still courting controversy, even if it is just a cheap play for votes), but it’s an interesting game that’s managed to sneak in under the radar. If you’re into RTS games, download the demo and have a play: if you’re not, just take my word for it that it’s very original and worryingly entertaining. Even more impressive, it has a Linux demo. Assuming you’ve got 3D hardware acceleration enabled (which I achieved fairly speedily with the help of this guide) it installs and runs very happily and doesn’t require you to log in as the root account (he says, aiming a glare at Windows software).

Having thus introduced myself to Linux gaming, I remembered that a Linux binary for Doom 3 had been released (comprehensive documentation and everything) so I decided to have a pop at it. I downloaded the binary, executed it, created a few symlinks (that’s “shortcuts” to you Windows types) to the game data files in my Windows installation and set ‘er rolling. The game ran like a charm, even placing my savegames into a .doom3 subdirectory in my home directory in true Linux style.

What really impressed me was that the performance was on a par with (if not better than) the performance I was getting under Windows. I’m not fully sure why I was expecting poor performance: perhaps I was implicitly assuming that a more modular system would necessarily be a slower system: seems I was wrong. Sadly, however, the vast majority of PC games these days are written using Microsoft’s DirectX libraries rather than the OpenGL libraries, thus restricting the portability of those games: id and Epic are the only major companies who pay any great attention to Linux as a gaming platform. This is a great shame.

On the plus side, once this PC is no longer adequate for games I’ll probably replace it with either a PlayStation 3 or Xbox 2 – depending on which is better – and not have to worry about it any more. My work needs will, of course, be served by the PowerBook that I haven’t got yet.

Ambitious goals

Black and White 2 screenshotIn an attempt to take full advantage of my ten megabits per second of bandwidth in college, I’ve been taking a look around at videos, in particular an interview with Peter Molyneux at GDC 2005. In this interview he says that he wants to “totally redefine the way we think of an RTS game” and claims his team is set to deliver “the best RTS game that has ever existed. Full stop”.

Two things strike me about this. The first thing is admiration at the sheer passion this guy seems to have about his games: not the overly showmanlike/stupid Ballmer-style passion which we all know and mock, but something much more profound. The second thing, I have to admit, is questioning whether or not Lionhead can pull it off. The original Black & White, inventive though it was, had some very severe failings (it got a bit boring after playing with your creature and teaching him not to eat his own faeces, and much of the voice acting was really atrocious) and I’m not entirely confident that Molyneux et al will be able to avoid that this time.

This seems to some extent to be a curse of Molyneux: that of having amazingly grand ambitions, but not being able to fully realise them and ending up with a product that, while good, leaves you thinking how it could have been better. This condition has also apparently spread to his former protégé, Demis Hassabis: his games (Republic and Evil Genius) have been respectively distinctly mediocre and entertaining, but faulted. I just find that these games give me the impression that they could have been so much more. I hope Black & White 2 will not.

Some doors are meant to stay shut

Alone in the DarkIt should come as a surprise to nobody that films based on computer games are, just about without exception, bad. From Street Fighter to Resident Evil to (it had to be mentioned) Super Mario Bros., they’re universally bad: there may be a counterexample somewhere, but I haven’t heard of it. The converse is generally also true: with a few notable exceptions, they’re generally lacklustre spinoffs intent on making a quick cash-in on the film. However, back to films. They generally range from bad (Tomb Raider) to astoundingly bad (the aforementioned Mario Brothers film).

You’d think we’d all be used to this by now, but occasionally a game-based film will come along which is so excrementally poor that it has to generate a smelly brown blip on our radars. Alone in the Dark is one such film – just check out the reviews and you’ll see precisely what I mean. Possibly the most definite danger sign about the film is that it’s directed by Uwe Boll, a director with an amazing record of taking game licenses and making them into shit films. So far he’s managed House of the Dead and Alone in the Dark, and he’s apparently working on a BloodRayne film (a game based on a Nazi-killing vampiress dressed in black leather – I think I sense a really bad film on the horizon) and has announced a film based on Far Cry (which is going to suck almost as badly). I think I can safely say this is one man who should never be allowed near a camera again as long as he lives.

I’m not really sure why abysmal game-based films grate on me so much. It may just be that they’re taking a licensed property and ruining it (which is also true of comic book licenses such as Catwoman or, going back a bit, Spawn), but I think it’s also the negative stigma they pin on gamers. I can imagine a “normal person” going to see one of these films and thinking “Damn, these ‘gamers’ like this kind of crap? What sad bastards”. Whichever it is, I think we can agree that some things should never see the light of day. Alone in the Dark is one. Uwe Boll is another.

I’m dreaming of a red christmas…

One copy of Full Spectrum Warrior: £15.

One copy of Manhunt (free controversy with every copy): £15.

The prospect of a session of blood-soaked Christmas gaming: priceless.

There are some things you’re allowed to do in real life. For everything else, there’s games.