QUOTE(DarthMarley @ Mar 3 2008, 09:03 PM)
How many games can be made on the Quake engine?
How many Half-Life spin-offs are really necessary?
You hater!
Not all FPS games are quake.
And not all of those games mentioned are even shooters.
I agree -- the squad-shooter looks interesting -- I never got to play any of the X-Com series, for example (one of the few gaps in gaming history I actually have). Nothing wrong with Quake -- nothing wrong with Halflife, for that matter -- TFC was my game for a while (I was even a lame HW). But I bought Orange Box, went "Gee, that's pretty", shortly after that went "Gee, that's slow", and lately, I'm simply not playing many games at all. And I have them, certainly.
I want to play the new GTA. I want to play the new Manhunt (and I hope to fuck somebody hacks a way to play the original content -- the notion of censoring a video game offends me deeply). I hope Bethesda doesn't fuck up Fallout 3 -- my confidence in them is actually pretty high, considering -- the Daggerfall series could have sucked substantially more than it did and I really hate elves. I hope Spore is actually released before it becomes outdated -- I'm familiar enough with the concepts involved that I feel like I can probably dive right in and start developing a species -- I also hope that I don't actually know all of it's features as a product of watching endless trailers.
But finally, I simply have a deep-set, anti-Linux bias -- while the tendency is diminishing the more linux becomes mainstream, I cannot read about it much less talk to anybody about it without hearing echos of Commodore 64/128 users. Where linux really shines is for practical applications -- I would not use a windows platform as a web server, for example -- if I needed a paralel network for something, I would build linux boxes -- hell, I'd rip off Google hard.
But gaming still suffers from a 'me, too' problem. Windows is a crappy platform for gaming and I don't even want to think about what Vista must be like. But with Linux, you fetch up alongside the same support issues you see with it as an operating system -- how does one actually explain it's operation to a layperson? Much less Macs (which I STILL have nothing nice to say about -- if you're going to be a unix box, then be a unix box -- don't build your OS like one of those stupid crocheted toilet paper cozies just to put a pleasant face on the actual utility of the thing).
For the time being, the reality is that we're still locked in an XP holding pattern. Either Microsoft gets it's act together and figures out that their consumer-driven design philosophy produces crappy software and REALLY finishes Vista (to make something usable), or it produces Vista Bob and gives the Ubuntu folks a hand up. Who, in turn, will need to come up with a good explanation of why one's config files are scattered throughout a series of directories and naming conventions are a triumph of geek hatred for the consumer market.
Until then? XP remains the skiffy of the OS market, for better or worse.