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Latest Comments by Hamish
Postal 1&2 on Desura and more!
19 January 2012 at 7:26 pm UTC

Yeah, I asked Vince to do this about a week ago and got the response that they were already working on it. :)

And the updated versions are also most welcome, since I had to jump through a few hoops to get them to run on Fedora 16.

7K:AA was also something I had been following, but never got around to actually getting working. Will be playing some of it tonight. :D

Win a full giftable copy of Humble Indie Bundle 4
20 January 2012 at 5:52 am UTC

That's not funny, that's just stupid. And tragic. :p

"rm -rf /" anyone? ;)

Win a full giftable copy of Humble Indie Bundle 4
18 January 2012 at 9:55 pm UTC

As a question, I assume it is stuck to one entry per person right?

Win a full giftable copy of Humble Indie Bundle 4
18 January 2012 at 7:38 pm UTC

Since I missed out on the last one due to lack of credit again:



I am actually shocked, most of the humour images are the same ones that were circulating since the '90s... it seems like around 2004 people stopped trying. :confused:

At any rate: hamish(at)icculus.org

Tomes of Mephistopheles gameplay
16 January 2012 at 11:29 pm UTC

I am kind of split on tutorials - I guess it depends on the game.

I know that I would never have gotten as far into Dungeons of Dredmor if I did not play through the tutorial - I would never have gotten the point of the game, and after wandering aimlessly through the first level, would probably never have come back to it again. On the other hand, you are right that some games are best played by fiddling with the mechanics by yourself. But to dogmatically cast tutorials off as a bad idea seems a little short-sighted to me.

And yes, I may not even be eighteen yet, but I started with many of the classics you mentioned (Doom, Wolf3D, Quake) as well as many others. So you can not just cast me off by saying that "I am just too young to understand."

Of course, I have no idea which camp Mephistopheles fits into - but from the basic premise it does sound like a game which could use some explanation. But it is your game and maybe you are being really clever and intuitive about the whole thing, I do not know.

I would never understand being offended by the presence of a tutorial though - even on games I have beat several times I sometimes play though the tutorial again just for kicks. Hell, sometimes I learn something even then...

Tomes of Mephistopheles gameplay
16 January 2012 at 6:14 am UTC

My initial reaction is "Oh my god, it looks like the spirit cave in Prey only you get to blow shit up!"

Good show. ;)

Desura adds free adventure games!
13 January 2012 at 7:16 pm UTC

It should be noted that some of these titles had already made their way to distro repositories (at least on Fedora) but this is probably a better fit I think. :)

Still, is Desura slowly also going to become the GoG of Linux?

Humble Indie...Store?
12 January 2012 at 10:22 pm UTC

Quoting: "motorsep, post: 3101"Native client is limited to Chrome. Also, I am seeing right now that the game is downloaded, not streamed. So I really don't see where is the advantage of games running in the browsers :(



For the moment yes, but is an open standard and fully free software, so there is nothing limiting it from being implemented in other browsers.

And the advantage is that you can develop for one platform (native client), meaning you can play it like an online game from any supported system, but at the same time it can access the system libraries and hardware in a native fashion, meaning you do not have the associated problems that online games often have.

3079 now on Desura!
9 January 2012 at 8:56 pm UTC

Tried the demo for a bit last night, but could not figure it out. Guess I need to read the games documentation a bit more?

All of these people shouting Minecraft rip-off are hilarious though; just because a game uses voxels does not make it a Minecraft clone! Sure, it also uses Java, but so do a lot of games.

I like the fact that voxels have gotten more exposure, as they are interesting technically, but to have them somehow inexorably tied to Minecraft is incredibly ignorant.

Are sales bad for games?
10 January 2012 at 7:24 pm UTC

There were some legitimate points in that Google+ post, and I do not agree entirely with how Jeffery Rosen and Co have been handling it recently either. Especially the point about over saturation and the fact that the original Humble bundle traditions have slowly been eroding. I mean, the last time we got even the hint of a source code release was really with the Humble Frozenbyte Bundle (the Introversion one does not really count since they were playing with the idea before, in various forms). Plus, as I have said before, the recent pace of Bundles has been, in my opinion, unsustainable and tarnishing the brand.

I would limit it to only three or four bundles a year; that would raise the quality, which is actually quite important if you look at the money earned. The Bundles which earned the most were the ones with the most planning and work put into them, namely Bundles #1, #2, #3, and #4. The ones in between were all considerably more sluggish, and often came across somewhat crassly. Especially the Frozen Synapse one, which seemed like a massive ego trip for one game made by one developer. What ever happened to being humble? Adding bonus games on top of these only makes things come out worse; what is wrong with these games that they are considered merely a "bonus" but the one splattered on the title page is god incarnate?

I mean, no offence to the Introversion games in of themselves, but the one from the bundle I am spending most of my time with is Dungeons of Dredmor (and thank you again for giving me that KIAaze). And yes, the first HIB #3 game I am planning on playing when I get to them going is going to be Steel Storm, and it was Steel Storm that was my primary motivation to buy it in the first place (happy Alex?). The bonus system, while maybe adding more value to the buyer, adds an inconsistent tone when it comes to which developers they feel want to support, which stinks, maybe unintentionally, of conspiracy. On the same token, in other ways the HIB developers do not seem to be using their powers of discretion enough.

Now, all praise be with them in that they have unfalteringly mandated the multi-platform nature of the Bundles, and have been giving both Ryan C. Gordon and Edward Rudd a lot of good business for the past year. But, one problem with the Bundles that I had hoped Desura was going to solve, was the fact that a Linux port appears for a bundle, and then can not be purchased from anywhere else unless the individual developers cares enough to put in some other mechanism. And then we have a whole new situation of abandonware. I wish more pressure was on them to put these games out there after the fact. There is also the recent lack of interest in source releases; I mean, Rosen, do not tell me Apple's screw up has turned you against the concept completely?

Actually, in many ways the name just does not fit any more. The games, or at least the developers, are not that Humble, they are a publisher in their own right now so not really that Indie, and Bundle, well, look at Frozen Synapse. Now, with all that being said, this is not going to stop me from buying Bundles. Looking at the history of left-wing and alternative politics, there has always been the problem of too much fracturization and arguing, meaning they had trouble moving forward in a consistent direction. The Linux community could be considered the same thing in a way, the alternative group, and we must keep supporting those which can benefit us. Gordon is not incorrect to say the Bundle's might just be the best thing to happen to Linux gaming, at least for the last few years.

But I am not going to sugar-coat it just because something is useful; you can disagree with something on some respects but still support it because it is legitimately the best offer, and the Bundles still definitely qualify as that, no question. If anything, it is because I support the Bundles that I am posting this. But the fact I had to bring up a political analogy says a lot, that I have begun to have to treat it in the same way. And, like in politics, if another camp has a legitimately better claim, you should go and support them. But, for the moment, the rest all seem corrupt and greedy. So Humble Bundle it is then.