Ross154   The long, uneventful wait for Elite IV

    • March 18, 2010

    Shameless Astroturfing

    Filed under: advocacy, gaming, hardware, linux, technology — Victor Tramp @ 12:24 pm
    Shameless Astroturfing

    So, another Ant email arrives. One of about 50 each day. And sure enough, it’s never the quantity of email, it’s the quality.

    One of the latest little dittys is about Razer mice! I love’s me a good mouse, especially a left-handed one, and it turns out there’s an astroturfing contest!!

    Well, let me be the 29,351st person you’ve heard it from.. Another excellent mouse manufacturer has made what looks like the market’s second fabulous left handed mouse. It might actually be better than the Logitech offering (which I won’t link to, because they aren’t the ones with the free mouse contest), since the Razer DeathAdder Left-Handed edition is actually a wired mouse.. The one real shortfall of Logitech’s wireless Left-Handed mouse; wireless = bad for gaming..

    Being that I’m left-handed, I often pick up stuff people don’t normally think about. For instance, I’m exclusively a Linux user. I feel Linux is the most ideal platform for gaming and game development on Earth. It’s too bad the gaming development scene has been held hostage by one private company for so long, the stockholm syndrome is almost too painful to watch. If game development shops gave Linux half a chance as their PC platform for gaming, we’d see a lot more, and better results.

    So, seeing that I’m a Left-Handed Linux Gamer, who isn’t on Facebook (because free (as in cost) social networks are just another corporate assault on your civil rights)(really, if you don’t understand that, don’t ask for an explanation, you wouldn’t believe it anyway), to find a company breaking the mold of “there are no left handed people”, and offering a high quality gaming peripheral like this one,  you’ll find me and my ilk first in line for the offering. You know, as we discover its availability, through aggressive, customer driven marketing pieces like this.  Now go buy one! ;)

    Thanks Razer!

    July 14, 2009

    On galaxies which don’t even exist yet,

    Filed under: elite, gaming, rant, wishlist — Victor Tramp @ 1:20 am
    On galaxies which don't even exist yet,
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    Quote:
    Originally Posted by smars View Post
    It is easy – you are fans and so rule #1 applies: Thou shall buy all possible editions in all possible languages – including the £10.000.000,00 special edition supplied in a box of purest gold and comes with a meteor fragment (*).

    Anyway, Frontier will always do what it can to supply the best interface for each platform we release on. I think a case in point actually is Thrillville: Off the Rails where we made good use of the capabilities of the Wii even though it was kind of unique in its control-scheme compared to the other platforms that we released the game upon.

    After that it is just personal opinions. For what it is worth mine is to go with the Xbox 360 version of as many games as possible. Why? Because I stick the disc in the drive and it works, compared to the countless of hours I have spent tracking down driver-issues in PC games.

    Crap.. crap crap crap..

    Why in the world would a console platform possibly be acceptable for a game which is supposed to be as deep as the Elite series has always been??

    Driver issues??? Are you kidding me? That’s gotta be nonsense, if you can’t handle drivers and configuration in your own computer, you probably won’t even appreciate, much less like, Elite 4.. unless.. it’s dumbed down… I guess.

    Also, are we to believe E4 will really be comparable to …Thrillville? I’m sure there are plenty of games which translate well onto PC and consoles, but it’s a matter of fact, not opinion, that some games are way better suited for a PC, but it’s not about that ultimately, is it? It’s about money.

    E2F and FFE were really very left handed games, which didn’t have a broad appeal like doom or world of warcrack. Hell, even for 1993, the graphics for FFE were behind. Yet the people who got it, really got it, and loved those games for vast oceans of deep space fiction they were.. It was elite fans who went to the extent of taking over a usenet group, of all things. …driver issues, indeed.

    Aiming for the big blockbuster smash hit of the century with Elite 4 will, in fact, require the game to be less than what it would be if it wasn’t being made to maximize profit. Will this sorely disappoint about half the elite fans that are still fanatical today? Certainly money doesn’t care about that I’ve been an elite fan since the first one I played as a teenager on the commodore 64, nor that I’ve followed alt.fan.elite since before even AOL had internet access. Money cares about fresh influxes and happy investors/shareholders.

    Do I think it shouldn’t be about money? Now that is the matter of opinion, I suppose. My opinion is; labors of love stand a better chance of being great to those that would appreciate them, but businesses don’t run on Love(tm), so there’s no reason to expect E4 of not being a labor of commerce, like everything else, sadly. It would be more revolutionary for me to believe a game development house wanted to make a game not everybody would like, even though those who did like it, would love it.

    Yah, I sound like a cynical crank I guess, whatever.. It’s great to have media out in the wild about E4. It’s great to know it’s not actually dead.. It’s great to see that the mother of all space flight sims might still see the light of day someday.. It’s disheartening to know my expectations shouldn’t be so high though.

    Hell, some of us still have to switch from hoping to praying it works under WINE, since it’s now clear there’ll be no Linux support, and probably active antagonism to attempts to make it work. (Not to mention the crap I’ll get for even just saying the “L” word.) Fun.

    Cheers,

    __________________
    -m
    Recycle or die.

    June 6, 2008

    Mobile Computing Standard Definitions (and handy buying guidelines)

    Filed under: gaming, hardware, linux, technology — Victor Tramp @ 10:07 am
    Mobile Computing Standard Definitions (and handy buying guidelines)

    This post was commissioned by Tom, direct all complaints to him. ^_^

    In my recent quest to decide what my next portable computing device would be, it came down to two main contenders, the Asus Eee PC, or the Nokia N810, I realized there’s a good analogy for classifying mobile devices; classes of Asian warriors!

    Often in computing circles, parallels are made between the hacking skills of techies, and the fighting skills of martial artists. So it isn’t a big stretch to see why this analogy is apt. I have no illusions it’ll catch on, but dammit it’s a convenient convention..

    So in short, my version of the three currently distinct classes of Mobile Computing Devices goes; the Samurai, the Monk, and the Ninja.

    (more…)

    January 29, 2008

    My name is Debianeer, and i’m an alcoholic

    Filed under: gaming, linux — Victor Tramp @ 12:42 am
    My name is Debianeer, and i'm an alcoholic

    The orange box runs on Linux. Just like that. I feel kind of dirty playing the games inside, but to feel like part of the gaming mainstream again is sort of worth it.

    It is merely my humble opinion, but Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is still more fun than Team Fortress 2. However maybe I’ll change my mind after a few rounds with some people I know, and a memory upgrade.

    Thank you WINE developers. Thank you very much.

    April 5, 2007

    yep, it’s teh win

    Filed under: gaming, linux — Victor Tramp @ 10:29 am
    yep, it's teh win

    Ok, so the Beyond the Red Line linux demo is out!

    (more…)

    April 3, 2007

    Beyond the Red Penguin

    Filed under: advocacy, gaming, linux — Victor Tramp @ 9:51 am
    Beyond the Red Penguin

    Oh joy! Thanks Ant!

    While Ant is wonderful at sending mails and suches about things that don’t necesarily make it to his front page, sometimes I think some things ought to. ;)

    Such as, the impending release of a Battlestar Galactica video game for Linux! Being the reigning Linux advocate on this server, I am compelled to make sure games for linux get some spotlight as this is going to be a big year for Linux games.

    People, start your hardware upgrades!