The problem is that linear is cheapest.

That's wrong. What I see is that lineal is just easier to understand. Management decides what game you're making, and they don't want the stress of thinking of complicated ones.

The cost is the immaterial - they can spend as much money as they want, basically. But most anyone who reaches a level of control where they can decide the direction of a company really doesn't give a flying fuck about quality, just getting it over with and advancing to the next one. 

Not having a pop at you Tronyn - but as you can read, I've been in the industry too long. But to be honest, maybe a year is too long. 

I just meant that if the game is single player, and the player's expecting maybe 20 hours of SP gameplay, making one 20 hour game is easier than making more than one, which would be the result of having branching episodes, more player control, etc. I guess this relates more to game design than level design, but I think a similar principle applies. The other classic flaw of Doom3 was that they wanted to maximize detail, so the map design couldn't be interwoven with lots of areas visible from each other. 

pretty arbitrary judging system they've got there. Sometimes it's popularity (WoW) sometimes it's because it's bundled with your computer (Minesweeper), sometimes it's because it's a programming achievement (Spacewar), sometimes because it's got groundbreaking gameplay (Half-Life).

In summary, this list is invalid because it doesn't contain Spider Solitaire. 

one of their top ten is a console game. 

Tkspider (download screenshot), Knetwalk, Kmines

Linked projects need Tcl. My chess project is the hugest thing eva, and the reason i'm such a shitty Q coder.

Hmmm... solitaires or shooters ? Probably 50-50. 

what? 

checked out #2 on the "strategically ripped shirt" and had to close the window as soon as the guy said "but you've been targeted for DEATH for committing MASSIVE ATTACKS against the NAZIS!" and the girl nonchalantly replied "Of course. blahh..."
of course?? of course?? WHAT THE HELL.

I'm starting to wonder (for a number of reasons) whether the benefits would outweigh the drawbacks in a sort of copyright anarchy, as long as proper credit was given. 

in their defense, maybe those are stand-in voices from the devs. Can't think of an excuse for the dialogue though. 

however you perform it, it still sounds like a new level of retarded. Congratulations to those who canceled this, a rare example of a game company NOT insulting its customers intelligence. 

Seriously... the mere thought of such dialogue lines in a sci-fi action shooter with Nazis and superpowers is absurd, grotesque even. The genre is better off without this unsophisticated pulp fiction! Fair is foul, and foul is fair. Hover through the fog and filthy air! Nice destruction though. 

 

funny as it might sound, by arguing that cultural tradition ought to be relevant to the man on the street, at least in the west, I'm constantly having to defend myself from people who accuse me of being lowbrow while I simultaneously am called highbrow by you. Regardless of all this cultural posturing my POV is, shit's retarded or it's not. Yeah in my view education makes which is which clearer, sure. That video was fucking retarded. You might have some kind of abstract disagreement with my POV but you certainly, sir, cannot disagree with that. 

give me RTCWF not RTCWTF. 

That waird Nazi game clip - GFX looked O.K. but it seemed retarded. I can handle a bit of humour, or even subtle humour, but that seemed to have no depth whatsoever, and was gratuitously controversial at the same time as not really showing much new ideas, just hijacking other ideas (gravity gun) and trying to make it the centre of the dynamic of an otherwise retarded game.

MY 10p 

but that's just textbook shitty game writing. If you're gonna make a shallow popcorn-flick equivalent of a game, at least admit that to yourself and drop the pretentions, you don't have to crowbar in philosophical ideas you just looked up on Wikipedia. You can revel in the stupidness, make it something glorious.

I mean dude... for my sins, I've seen 6 American Pie films. I've seen more Seagal and Schwarzenegger than any man should see. None of that ever insulted my intelligence because it knew it was dumb. It never tried to lecture me on the inherent evil of man or some bollocks. 

After all, it's about the "drink beer and shoot stuff" thing, not about expanding one's cultural horizon.

Now, if you've been called both low-brow and high-brow, it's pretty neat - makes you 'unibrow', the best of two worlds, free to do (play) anything. 

None of that ever insulted my intelligence because it knew it was dumb.

And how do you know what intellectual potential was wasted while watching this?

I'd argue that most stuff knows it's dumb, but still hurts you. 

ROFFLMAO 

Unibrow indeed, I like it and I certainly place myself proudly in that category.

I agree with all you're saying. You should be able to put on high-brow AND low-brow hats, both have their time and place... but I don't like when the baseball cap pretends it's a top hat.

Megaman, I don't really like the intellectual-potential-wasted thing. I think you can strike a healthy balance of messing about doing dumb shit with all the good intellectually-stretching, cultural-horizon-expanding stuff. I'd hate to feel guilty because I'd spent an evening winding down, taking the piss out of Roidplosion IV : Gun-pocalypse Now with some buddies.

I also know that if I didn't have any slightly more high-brow reference points than that, I would probably lose a battle of wits with the cast of Jersey Shore. 

http://i.imgur.com/yOo7u.jpg 

 

So, what's the latest hotness on playing quake on linux? I've been using wine + fitzhack for ages, but sound has stopped working and surely there's something better by now. Ubuntu Maverick + shitty intel graphics, if that matters.

(The next fun would be trying to get it to run on my ARM developer board I guess :-) 

http://quakespasm.sourceforge.net/

it's basically a fitzquake sdl with various bugfixes and a few handy extra features. most sold engine around atm 

'sol[i]i[/i]d'