http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gg-E2WZzQxE

This looks pretty cool! The most convincing eviromental damage I've seen yet...

Also seems to have a TF2-esque quality to the graphics overall! 

I did have a quick play on the creature editor and its pretty fun. I'm kinda tempted to buy the full game, we will have to see how the demo is.

The 35 minute demo on youtube had me really interested, and its funny to boot :) 

The creature editor is a pretty neat toy, but I remember getting bored extremely quickly with Black and White.

Have to wait and see. 

Yeah I'm not really so interested by this game, will try it though.
But imagine having your kid playing it, and he reaches a planet populated by the creature I posted above (cause iirc your creations are propagated randomly online to appear on planets in other peoples games), that would be quite a laugh. 

Seems very cool but I think for many people the seemingly huge scope of the game might end up being a turn-off. 

I can see where your coming from, but I think a fairly major area where Spore is different from B&W is that the gameplay changes dramatically with each stage of evolution of your creature(s).

I imagine this will keep things fresh for a lot longer than in B&W, where in all fairness, after the first level you had kinda seen it all.

Its a neat concept for a game at least, perhaps a tad "kid friendly" for my tastes but im definitely going to give it a shot and see what happens.

Now the moral difficulty is "do I give EA my money"... BLEUGH! 

Well I'll probably read the reviews (carefully ignoring any numerical values) to see if I buy it or not.

I was a big fan of Populous (especially :the beggining) because although you were a god you weren't omnipotent and unkillable.

Black and white just got boring for me because there was no apparant goal or a way to fail - the belief continued to inscrease and expand no matter what I did.

It had its moments (I wasted alot of time teaching my tiger to throw its shit around) but the lack of a straight line progression lost me.

So its a balence between concept (good) gameplay (wait and see) and giving EA money (can I give money to islamic extremists instead?) 

For me the problem with B&W was that it felt like either you spent time on playing with your creature or you focused on getting through the missions - the two aspects of the game never really mixed well together. 

omg so fun :D

still using the free version with only 25% of the bits too.

Genius marketing to be honest - releasing a cool mini-game for free where you can make stuff to import into the full game. This is going to make a shitload of money. 

B&W: creature = fun, building villages etc = fun, pissing around with all the options and spells and stuff = fun.

doing the missions and trying to progress != fun.

Better as a sandbox than a game. Still had some amazing features tho. 

I think my greatest achievement in B&W2 was teaching my creature to throw my villagers at the enemy army. It was a lot of fun but I agree that the game kinda failed to link all its elements together.

In other news, I tried out TF2 with the new Pyro update that just got released, the rebound ability of the flamethrower is awesome! But currently there are so many players choosing the pyro class the game is kinda broken :(

Valve should really release a few class updates at a time to avoid this behaviour, the game atm is no fun :( 

Yeah, as much as I enjoy this new content, it does always break the game for a week.
Try playing Engineer, sentries still own pyros. 

ok, finished it, quite short really although I suppose it takes a long time to do each mission due to the nature of the game.

stealth gameplay isnt my thing but I was surprised to like this more than I was expecting. The AI, as usual in stealth games, is a bit spotty so some scetions got annoying pretty quick.

Otherwise fairly solid, if unexceptional stuff. 

Try playing Engineer, sentries still own pyros.

Yeah, if you can get one built in time. Every time I've tried this I'm banging away at it as four pyros come at me, and as soon as it's done it fires two bullets and then we're both dead in a horrible inferno.

Fucking pyros. 

ie "a game about the one color of the rainbow nobody needs"

http://www.lunaran.com/page.php?id=198 

pretty cool so far although I dont really get the combat. How long is this game? Just want to get an idea of the hours I'll be wasting :) 

If you do all the quests and side missions / activities it can last well over 20 hours.

From what I remember the combat is turn based but plays out in realtime until you pause it to queue up new actions for your characters.

I found it very fun after it clicked for me! 

LGP are adding copy protection to their games.
http://www.linuxgamepublishing.com/press_releases/200806241.txt
And that's because the people who are pirating are more than those who are buying their games. And of course adding copy protection will make more people buy.
It is an online activation system. From the sound of it you cannot install/play the game on a disconnected PC. On the other hand they say "Contingencies are made so that if no internet connection is available, the
game will never lock out legitimate customers.". Wait, what? So that copy protection is cracked as simply as locking the game into a sandbox or something? Or will people with no internet have to send them a postcard requesting a password? ...

One part I love:
We obtained this estimate by seeding the download sites with a number of broken copies of our games, and monitored the number of requests for technical support that referenced the known bug we had inserted.
Did they upload a buggy pirate version? Or did they plant a deliberate bug into all versions?

I toyed with the idea of getting Gorky 17 from them, but with this idiotic attitude they won't see a cent (and no, I won't pirate it either). 

Piracy is a well-known problem in the Windows world. Now, in the Linux world, people are even LESS inclined to pay for games because they are so used to free software, meaning that without copy protection involved, the piracy % on Linux is going to be even higher then that on Windows.

So what exactly would you rather have, games with copy-protection or no games at all? 

we've been through this. Copy protection doesn't protect you from 'piracy', but it's awful for the legitimate customer. 

There are a lot of copy protection methods that can be very intrusive and annoying. However, it most definitely prevents "casual piracy". For the more advanced users, getting a pre-cracked game copy off Bittorrent might be trivial, but for a lot of people it is not. Whether this prevented piracy results in that person paying for the game or not playing it altogether is a whole different discussion. 

http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3168396

Stuff to see! 

Yes, rampling. *sigh* 

We are talking about like 500-1000 copies of old and mediocre games. With such a nichee you are a complete *** to throw copy-protection at your paying customers. 

Like Danny?

(that made sense I assure you ;)


Oh, and;

However, it most definitely prevents "casual piracy". For the more advanced users, getting a pre-cracked game copy off Bittorrent might be trivial, but for a lot of people it is not.

We are talking about Linux games here, I very much doubt that anyone capable of installing Linux is capable of warezing a game.

(I haven't actually decided what I think of this issue yet, it's too early in the morning to jump off the fence, will think+post later)