Category: News and rumors

02Jan

My first kickstarter pledge

Posted in Favorite games, News and rumors, Video game history | Leave a comment

A few days ago, I decided to participate in crowdfunding of a game. It’s a game I’ve been hoping for for something like 20 years now, and finally the game was announced as a crowdfunded project on kickstarter. Since this project is not yet funded, and there isn’t much time left, I decided to make a short post about it.

The game is a sequal to The elite series of games called Elite Dangerous and the kickstarter can be found here.

I used to play Elite II frontier a lot, and the game was very revolutionary for it’s time. I didn’t know back then, how someone could fit a game containing an entire galaxy on a single floppy disk, and even though I know how it was done now, it’s still pretty impressive. As I understand it, they will use simular methods now and with todays technology, this might be one of the games of the decade.

I’ve always been a fan of open ended sand box type games where you can do pretty much whatever you want; Trading, smuggling, piracy, bounty hunting etc. This was pretty much what the old elite games was like. You started out with a small ship and a little bit of money and had to make your own decisions from there. The only series that comes even close to this today is the X series, but elite felt more of a real space simulation, with real-world like physics (They at least felt real at the time) and a lot of other sciantific stuff. THe combat and overall mechanics felt very different from anything else I’ve ever played.

I’m also looking forward to the other crowd funded space sim coming out this year; Star citizen,, but I’m probably looking forward to Elite dangerous even more. Star citizen is probably more appealing to many people, after all it’s a sequal to the best combat space sims ever made; the Wing commander games. Those games are awasome, and they actually had good story-telling too.,

Well, with 52 hours to go, it looks like this game will get funded, but it will be close, unless a lot of people decide to pledge during the last two days. It probably win’t reach the stretch goals, but I’m still very excited about this game.

 

11Aug

Linux – A viable option for gamers?

Posted in News and rumors | Leave a comment

Background

Up until now, running any half-decent game on the Linux platform has been a real pain. Usually it involves running Wine to emulate windows and a lot of tweaking to make things word, and most games still have glitches that doesn’t exist under windows. Another problem has been all sorts of driver issues; I remember trying to get my sound card to work properly under Ubuntu a few years ago, as well as having some trouble with my AMD/ATI video card quite recently. You can usually find guides on how to make games work under Wine, but it has never been a viable option for the regular user.
I’ve been a proponent of Linux for home users since I first tried it about 7 years ago, and things have only improved. In my opinion, people who only uses their computer to browse the web, send email, watch videos and write documents could switch to Linux today and they would probably have less problems than they currently do. The security is much better in general and they would have less trouble with viruses and such. There may still be some problems with Internet banking authentication, but I think many banks have a solution for this today.

However, for gamers, Linux has never been a viable option, unless you have a lot of patience and at least some Linux knowledge. This might change however.

Recent announcements

In July 2012 Valve started a Linux blog. According to the blog, they have plans to port the steam client to Ubuntu 12.04. This is one of the more popular Linux platforms today. They also recently announced that they have been working on getting their Source engine to work well on Ubuntu as well as publishing some benchmark results from Left4dead 2 showing a performance increase on Linux compared to Windows 7 using the same hardware. Even if you don’t like Valve games, the fact that they want to make Steam available on Linux is a great thing. This may encourage other developers to start looking at Linux as a target platform for future games. There are already some indie developers providing native Linux versions of their game, but for the most part, the platform has been completely ignored by larger development studios and publishers.

 

Other news

There seems to be more publishers than Valve showing interest in the Ubuntu platform lately. EA recently made a brief presentation at the Ubuntu Summit in Oakland  and also release two games for Ubuntu. Even though the games are browser based it’s still a step in the right direction. They have always been available obviously but now you can find them in the Ubuntu Software center.

The future

While it will take a long time for Linux to achieve the status of a viable gaming platform the recent news is definitely good, for this to happen though, Microsoft has to make a lot of mistakes with future Windows versions. I’ve heard some rumors though, that Microsoft will begin to take the same approach with the next Windows version as Apple does i.e. providing a platform similar to I tunes where they can get a share of every application sold. I highly doubt they’ll take it that far, but if they do, I think me, as well as lots of other consumers will start looking into Open source alternative. Microsoft has done many bad things in the past, but at least the windows platform has been open for developers to use as they please, and the ability to use what hardware and software you like, has always been great.
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