Loki Files For Chapter 11 Protection

yamla writes: "Loki is dead!" and points to a Linux Review article which says the gaming company has filed for protection from creditors under bankruptcy laws. Yamla continues: "Read about it here. This is terrible news! I have paid for some of their games and they were always at least as good as the Windows versions. I hope Loki can pull out of bankruptcy and keep going but if not, it will be our loss." There is also a story at LinuxToday (pointed out by reader Beee) which draws from the Linux Review report. Meanwhile, the Loki site appears business-as-usual. Filing for bankruptcy protection is not the same as being "out of business," but it's uncomfortably close.

Comments

My I switched to Mac OS X for Gaming

[winterstar]

Why I went Apple Macintosh OS X for gaming:

DESIRED QUALITIES FOR GAMING

1. Games need to be written to open APIs like OpenGL, OpenAL, OpenPlay, and so on. Games that are written to open APIs are more portable to different operating systems which supports consumer choice and are more accessible to open source development.

2. UNIX gaming. I love UNIX because it's elegant, powerful, widely implemented, open, and standards-based. I want to game on UNIX, I don't want to dual boot.

3. Wide availability of games.

HOW MAC OS X SUPPORTS THESE

1. Apple isn't pushing a lot of proprietary APIs needlessly. Sure, there are some, but in general, games on the Mac using 3D graphics use OpenGL, games that use 3D sound frequently use OpenAL, Apple is pushing for an open API for networking called OpenPlay, and because it's UNIX, POSIX and standardized UNIX APIs are bound to be widely used for threading, sockets, filesystem I/O, and so on.

2. OS X is UNIX. Huge chunks of it are even open source. (Not as open source as Linux of course, but a lot better than nothing.)

3. The Mac has a wide variety of games available to it. The following is a small sampling (this list also includes games scheduled to come out for the Mac):

FPS
Doom 1-3
Quake 1-4 and Quake: Team Arena
Unreal
Unreal Tournament
Rune and Rune: Halls of Valhalla
Alice
Oni
Halo (widely believed to be coming)
Deus Ex
Descent 3
Heavy Metal FAKK 2
Tomb Raider series including Tomb Raider: Chronicles
Max Payne (coming sometime)

RPG
Diablo 1-2 and D2X
Baldur's Gate
Baldur's Gate: Tales of the Sword Coast
Icewind Dale
Baldur's Gate II (coming in a few weeks)
Neverwinter Knights

MMORPG
Shadowbane (widely considered to be the most promising MMORPG)
World War III Online

RTS
Starcraft and Starcraft: Brood War
Warcraft 1-3 (including WC2: Beyond the Dark Portal)
Age of Empires 1 (and 2 coming this fall)
Total Annihilation
Summoner
Black and White (coming later this year most likely)
Myth 1-3
Tropico
Giants: Citizen Kabuto
Sacrifice
Earth 2140
Majesty

TBS
Heroes of Might and Magic III (and the two expansion packs)
Civilization 2-3
Civilization: Call to Power
Alpha Centauri
Masters of Orion 2-3

ADVENTURE
Escape from Monkey Island III
Myst 1-3
Realmyst (coming sometime this year)
Vampire: The Masquerade>br> Star Wars games (Pod Racer, etc.)
Star Trek games (like DS9: The Fallen)
Rogue Spear/Rainbox Six
Dragon's Lair 3D

OTHER
The Sims (and most of the other Sim-series like City/Theme Park/Tower/Ant/...)
Railroad Tycoon II
Soldier of Fortune
Tony Hawk
Driver
4x4 EVO
a ton card/boardgames (like Monopoly, Monopoly Casino, etc.)
a ton of arcade games (Centipede 3D, Atari 2600 action pack, and other arcade remakes of classics)
and a ton of educational games and kids games which I don't really get into and don't know the names for

Anyway, the only game I seriously miss on the OS X is Everquest and it looks like Shadowbane should satisfy that (and Neverwinter Knights).

The Mac also gets a lot of games simultaneously (Blizzard in particular has gotten progressively better and better about this and is 100% simultaneous now).

A NOTE ON HARDWARE

The Macs have both the Creative Labs Soundblaster Live and the Nvidia Geforce 3 cards available to them which are more or less the state of the art in PC gaming.

SUMMARY

Again, what's really important is that games get written to open APIs. Supporting both Linux and Mac gaming both accomplish this.

I bought my first ever Mac 5 months ago (because of OS X) and haven't looked back since. It's worked out a lot better than I thought and I've since become quite the Apple fan surprisingly enough. I've also found that I really enjoy the Apple community (read a couple of issues of http://www.appleturns.com for an example).

The Mac isn't perfect, but I've been really happy with it.

I also want to say that I think that the whole WINE approach to gaming is horribly flawed in my opinion. We need games written to open APIs!

I'm not advocating that people ditch Linux for the Mac, but I do think that people who genuinely care about open APIs should at least CONSIDER the Mac if they're currently playing their games under Windows.

Re:Unite! Go buy a game!

[jandrese]

I know what you mean. I just played through the demo of Kohan and was going to check out Loki's site for more information on it. So I pulled up Mozilla and my homepage (Slashdot) loads and what do I see: Loki is dying! Gah! I really hate dual booting to play games, and the Kohan demo ran great on my (fairly meager by todays standards) system.

Now it seems like the only thing that will save Loki is either a killer title or just a sudden surge in Linux gaming popularity. I'm not enthusiastic about the second possiblity, but the first has happened before (although as a game porting company Loki is not going to have an easy time making any sort of killer app).

By the way, for those of you who don't know, Loki's demo system is pretty cool, it keeps a list of all of the available demos in a central app and lets you automaticaly download, install, play, and uninstall them. It's really quite nice.