Latest Comments by Hamish
Helena the 3rd The Grande Finale
21 July 2011 at 7:35 am UTC

Quoting: "Eddward, post: 1962"There are several games that were Wolfenstien/Doom clones, but Duke Nuke'em and Redneck Rampage (to name two) were more than clones because they each had a unique personality.


Well, Redneck Rampage did have personality, I will give it that. Blood will always be my favourite Build game though. :D

Helena the 3rd The Grande Finale
20 July 2011 at 5:30 pm UTC

Hey, if you are on Linux, you should never get sick of hearing about a native game. ;)

Puzzle Moppet now on Gameolith!
19 July 2011 at 8:31 pm UTC

Desura has the advantage of already having considerable contact with the Indie community, but thanks to excellent level of service that Gameolith offers, including custom packaging, sales tracking and the like means it might just be able to corner the market on smaller Indie titles. I doubt we will see the likes of Penumbra, Amnesia, Shadowgrounds, or Trine on their service anytime soon, but games like Puzzle Moppet and the like do seem a good fit.

Gameolith Announced Launch Titles
13 July 2011 at 7:29 pm UTC

I am guessing that is a legitimate typo rather than an actual factual error, since he has demonstrated that he knew the difference in the past. Larabel's real problem when it comes to his Linux gaming coverage is because his hardware review background lends him to still have the Windows mindset about AAA titles and developers, causing him to have a larger blind spot when it comes to Indie titles.

After all, he was late in recognizing the first Humble Indie Bundle (though he never made that mistake again, to be fair), and only ever mentioned Frictional for the first time (aside from Overture as part of the first bundle) about a week before Amnesia's release, when you would have thought they would have been right up his alley. Both Penumbra and Amnesia sport pretty damn impressive graphics for an Indie title (I was just playing through Overture again last night, going to have a go at Black Plague again later today) and the physics implementation one would have thought would be intriguing to him. Instead, he worships Valve and the other big Windows or Console developers and just's prays they come around, rather than celebrating what we do have.

He used to be better, back in the days when he was covering what LGP, Icculus, and TTimo was up to (which granted seemed to be more back then than now, for various reasons) and when he was one of the first to mention the work of IGIOS on Shadowgrounds, which in the end has served us and the community well. But the apparent Indie revolution we have been experiencing seems to have flown straight over his head.

Gameolith Announced Launch Titles
13 July 2011 at 5:14 am UTC

Looks like Michael Larabal of Phoronix has pissed quite a few people off with his coverage, and rightly so since he was being something of an ass:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OTY2NQ
http://www.phoronix.com/news2forums.php?view=OTY2NQ

Dungeons of Dredmor release date
8 July 2011 at 5:58 pm UTC

Complaining about problems with electronic commerce being the problem with regards to Loki seems to be laughable to me; the main problem as far as I could tell based on what I have read and what guys like icculus in the past have said seem to indicate a large part of the problem with ventures like Loki or LGP was that they inherently were too based on on traditional shrink-wrapper physical publishing. Like when they ordered way too many units of a supposedly "special edition" of Quake III Arena which they were never able to fully ship. Granted, back in the days of Loki it would be insane to expect anyone to download a full game reliably (though Loki still complained about piracy, hmm...). A good example of where icculus commented on this was his SouthEast LinuxFest talk in 2009:

Video: [URL='http://ia311037.us.archive.org/2/items/SouthEast_LinuxFest_2009_Videos/Greg_DeKoeningsberg_SouthEast_LinuxFest.ogv']http://ia311037.us.archive.org/2/items/SouthEast_LinuxFest_2009_Videos/Icculus_SouthEast_LinuxFest.ogv[/URL]
Audio http://ia301515.us.archive.org/2/items/SouthEast_LinuxFest_2009/Icculus_SouthEast_LinuxFest.ogg

Granted of course, that aside was coming from a former employee, so what do I know?

Dungeons of Dredmor release date
7 July 2011 at 10:27 pm UTC

As long as they do eventually get it on a more platform agnostic solution, I do not really care. And yes, there is very little chance of them abandoning Linux in the future, as their lead programmer is a former Loki guy and a good friend of icculus who actually has contributed to the OpenGL specifications. So I doubt we would get any problems from them in that regard.

Still, all the more reason for Desura to come about.

Interview with Keith Poole from Desura part 2!
3 July 2011 at 8:54 am UTC

Well, I understand his reasons for not doing the mod support, but I still hope that at some point they can get that working on Linux. That said, I am still interested in Desura and they responded to my question well. So well done Keith and Scott and of course well done Liam for the interview. ;)

First teaser trailer for Dirk Dashing 2 and July Newsletter
1 July 2011 at 3:12 am UTC

Interesting, though I can not help but feel the music undersells it a bit. Just a suggestion, but in my experience an active music track helps any side-scroller. :)

Gameolith The Linux® Game Download Store
12 July 2011 at 8:46 am UTC

Well, they seem to be serious, they now have a list of the games they will be selling at launch and a timer indicating when their service will open it's doors for good. I like that they seem to be big on making sure that they cater to as much as the major distributions as possible, even though I tend to prefer to keep my proprietary games separate from my package manager. Still, compared to the closed nature of the USC it is kind of refreshing.