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I'll give you the inconvenience argument, but when the hell did Valve lie and deceive customers? Hell they even came clean with us all and told us how the HL2 source was stolen. If anything, I'd want to cover that gaping a-hole of an embarassment with a truckload of bullshite.

You're making Value out to be some kind of evil monster of the gaming world -- a title best deserved for others, IMO.

Someone already thought of that - certainly owners of modded X-Boxes could also try that - but it apparently doesn't work, according to the intial post in this thread at the Ion Storm boards. Shame.

This sequel was supposed to be an improvement over the incredible first game, but instead it became a straight X-Box console port.

The AI sucks, it takes 5 shots to the head to kill a guy, the ragdoll physics are ridiculous, the interface is notoriously console-oriented (you even have to use the keyboard to exit a menu screen), the graphics are bad, and as far as gameplay goes, they removed:

- Skills system
- Conversation logger
- Size-based inventory screen (12 slots...candy bar takes the same slot as a rocket launcher)
- Seperate ammo types (that's right, all guns use the same ammo)
- Weapon reloading
- About half of Deus Ex 1's length of gameplay...Invisible War is only 10-15 hours long, and you can just sneak through airvents for most of the levels

I'm fuming at Ion Storm. Warren Spector promised so many things, but he let Harvey Smith oversee Deus Ex 2 this time around, and it became a dumbed-down X-Box console game. We PC users suffered for it.

Check out the www.ionstorm.com forums which are packed with pissed-off PC gamers.

One of the coolest moments of the many GenCon Game Fair's that I attended in Miwaukee, WI was when a panel consisting of most of the premiere Origin producers including Richard Garriot and Warren Spector took a question from the crowd during the Q&A session and when the nervous speaker said, "Well I have a programming question...and...um.. well I'm from a little company in town...do you know PKWare?"

And all the members of the panel looked at one another and then started doing the Wayne's World bow and chanting, "We're not worthy! We're not worthy!"

Then Warren (if I remember correctly) made a mildly sarcastic and admonishing comment towards the poor PKWare dude along the lines of, "Hey man you guys have saved us tons of money on media. We use Zip all the time. Of course we know your company." (games of the era were beginning to approach some 30 floppy discs compressed and CD-ROM had not yet become an affordable alternative)

It's nice when a little mostly unkown (at the time) company making software compression utilities gets recognition from a (at the time) powerhouse game development company like that.

Grab a clue. There are plenty of profitable games companies around. There always will be. Just because some can't make a business model work and others are led by idiots you shouldn't conclude that there is no future. Of course, you have to be good.

PC game development is a marginally profitable endeavor anyway. For every iD, there are lots of losers. Aside from Wal-Mart specials like Deer Hunter and Millionaire, PC game development is a risky proposition at best. Retail software in general is an incredibly competitive business; the retail game software business is brutal.

Linux gamers, as a group, are willing to pay for games, but only for mega-elite titles. These are games that are already successful on Windows. In particular, multiplayer games are only successful with a large gamer population, most of which will be running Windows.

Console gaming is the only profitable market for most game companies. The margins are higher, the technology is simpler due to uniform hardware, losses to piracy are low, and there is significant revenue from rental outlets.

To those of you unwilling to dual-boot to Windows, do what I did - buy a cheap second (3rd/4th/etc) machine and a KVM switch. Or get a game console and rent software. Don't let funky OS advocacy blind you to reasonable alternatives. Hey, I love my TiVo, but the fact it runs Linux means diddly to me.

Daikatana is the worst game of the year not because it sucked itself down, not because the sidekick AI was slightly smarter than a watermelon...

Daikatana sucked because of Romero's endless spending and Eidos's decision to back them financially. This (helped) cause the demise of Looking Glass Entertainment Maker of such incredible games as Thief 1 and 2, and System Shock 2.

Its really Ironic that a division of Ion Storm managed to produce one of the best games of the year, Deus Ex. It is even more Ironic that Warren Spector, Producer of Thief 1 works for Ion Storm. And now, Warren Spector has the rights to Thief 3 (damn good thing he does too!) and it looks like Ion Storm will be releasing it.

That is a strange cycle of events...

Daikatana is the worst game of the year not because it sucked itself down, not because the sidekick AI was slightly smarter than a watermelon...

Daikatana sucked because of Romero's endless spending and Eidos's decision to back them financially. This (helped) cause the demise of Looking Glass Entertainment Maker of such incredible games as Thief 1 and 2, and System Shock 2.

Its really Ironic that a division of Ion Storm managed to produce one of the best games of the year, Deus Ex. It is even more Ironic that Warren Spector, Producer of Thief 1 works for Ion Storm. And now, Warren Spector has the rights to Thief 3 (damn good thing he does too!) and it looks like Ion Storm will be releasing it.

That is a strange cycle of events...

Daikatana is the worst game of the year not because it sucked itself down, not because the sidekick AI was slightly smarter than a watermelon...

Daikatana sucked because of Romero's endless spending and Eidos's decision to back them financially. This (helped) cause the demise of Looking Glass Entertainment Maker of such incredible games as Thief 1 and 2, and System Shock 2.

Its really Ironic that a division of Ion Storm managed to produce one of the best games of the year, Deus Ex. It is even more Ironic that Warren Spector, Producer of Thief 1 works for Ion Storm. And now, Warren Spector has the rights to Thief 3 (damn good thing he does too!) and it looks like Ion Storm will be releasing it.

That is a strange cycle of events...

In the scope of world tragedy, I have to agree that this isn't a huge loss. In the much smaller scope of game developers, however, this sucks rocks.

IMNSHO, Looking Glass has been the only company around to produce games which were not only extremely immersive, but of uniformly high quality. These guys just couldn't write bad games (although they did release a couple of games which weren't huge hits).

As for overspending on advertising: I could be wrong, but I'm fairly certain that's a function of the publisher. Eidos. The guys who were gonna buy them, then backed out. The guys who have spent the last couple of years propping up Ion Storm long enough to get Daikatana out the door.

In the end, that's the real tragedy of the whole thing. Looking Glass released Thief, and System Shock 2, and Thief 2, all fantastic games, all within the time it took Ion Storm to get Daikatana out the door. And which company is still running? As a footnote: I distinctly remember Ion Storm running ads advertising John Romero's desire to "make you his bitch." If that's not over-spending on advertsing, I don't know what is.

When Stephenson began working on Snow Crash, he intended it to be a video game (super-interactive novel). Unfortunately, we're only getting to the point where that would be a plausibility. Or is that fortunately? If Ion Storm can succeed at Deus Ex, someone can succeed at Snow Crash...though Juanita's avatar tech is still a ways away (see Pixar's advances in this realm!)

Speaking of Pixar, it's always easier to fake tech in a movie; you get to pre-render everything. Snow Crash would make a great movie without too much trouble, because of its many high-octane visual elements. Also: the political/social satire that runs rampant is surprisingly easy to do visually: just show the Uncle Nunzio Pizza billboard and you're done.

Of course the movie would be radically different from the book, but it wouldn't be an insane adaptation like LotR--you just cut out the boring stuff, and you've got a whole bunch of cool action sequences. Stephenson's namshub mumbo-jumbo barely makes sense anyway (though it _nearly_ fits together quite neatly); the book could do with the bit of narrative tightening a movie would provide.

Snow Crash is hobbled by the importance of Juanita to the outcome of the book, and her near-complete absence from the book. A rewrite that dealt with the narrative problems caused by her would be welcome. My suspicion is the whole rewrite issue is what's killing this project: the book, while amazingly cool and smart and readable and one of my all-time favorite books, is seriously flawed by its tenuously connected plot threads.

Visually, the movie would be great in so many ways: the avatar world could be done anime-style, the Sumerian backstory (if it even entered) could be covered in a killer animation sequence like that from Todd McFarlane's Do the Evolution video, etc.

Stephenson deliberately drew on pop-culture ideas and imagery for the book, and took a lot from movies. Snow Crash could make a very good movie.

It probably would make a better computer game, but I'm not convinced we really have the tech for it.

Is Hall vs the World , with Tom Hall of ION Storm. A much more fun and humorous game, and not Microsoft sponsored.