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Postal 2 - Share the Pain Demo for GNU/Linux
fredan writes "Icculus has posted this news on his site: 'Just in time to relieve all that Holiday stress, a demo version of Postal 2: Share the Pain is now available for GNU/Linux systems.'"
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Games for linux? What's next? Games for Macs?
Direct link to bittorrent: http://www.3dgamers.com/torrents/games/postal2/Mis sions/postal2mpdemo-lnx-1407.tar.bz2.torrent
Just played the demo. It's very nice and runs smooth. Multiplayer is very funny :)
Wouldn't this sell better if it were labeled a sim? Also did anyone notice the character at the top of the site in the link? It looks like someone's sac.
...for linux users finally have a game where you can beat a puking person down with a shovel after you pee on them, and then light them on fire!
The world will finally be a better place...
I'm sure all game makers will now take light of your wise statement and rename their games so as not to offend anyone.
All games now will be named "Super Fantastic Happy" and a version number at the end.
If I can't smoke and swear I'm fucked.
Great....
A bunch of geeks with antisocial tendencies duking it out through the eyes of a buch of characters with SEVERE antisocial tendencies....
Something tells me that one of these days we'll see a headline stating: "Geek goes postal, chokes 10 lamers with cat-5 cable"
> They're a senseless tragedy and I refuse to play any game that makes light of them.
Since the first requirement of tragedy is hubris in the face of the gods, and there's little chance that your favorite uncle is both a mail carrier *and* a follower of the old Roman ways, I posit to you that the whole problem here is that you're a humorless, hypersensitive cunt.
Sit on *that* and spin, you asshat.
This game does not make light of postal worker shootings. The main character 'Postal Dude' starts the game working at Running With Scissors.
"The United States has no right, no desire, and no intention to impose our form of government on anyone else." - Bush 05
You can go and get stuffed, you hyper-sensitive twat.
And fuck the Cubans and Haitians, too, for their whining about GTA:VC.
... you take yourself too seriously. Games are not meant to be about life. That's the thing... they are meant to be fun, and poke fun at the hard stuff.
Video Games are like comedy; they are there to relieve stress.
is as funny and entertaining as The Sims with a shotgun. You can do what you like... so what? Where is the reward? In the empty clip/magazine?
Tried SP-Postal2... didn't find anything funny in it, well, the one part where I did urinate on one eye-witness until she puked. That was fun for one time, and then the fun was out the window...
-Is the meaning of life vanity, or is vanity the meaning of life?
is that the simulation of the WindowsXP install process?
Since the first requirement of tragedy is hubris in the face of the gods, and there's little chance that your favorite uncle is both a mail carrier *and* a follower of the old Roman ways
I would like to gracefully bow my head and stand in awe of you. You are officially the only Slashdotter more sarcastic and thick with archaic knowledge than myself. I salute you, sir.
El riesgo vive siempre!
Seemingly they don't like us using wget.
I'm not denying that the handful of shootings by postal workers is a tragedy -- but it's only a video game. I played Postal 2 quite a bit, and it pokes fun at all sorts of things, including groups against violence in games, life in the trailer parks, and a whole slew of sterotypical figures (arab grocery store owners, etc. etc.).
I think it's fairly obvious that the authors take nothing in the game too seriously. (Heck, one of the weapons is the guy throwing an unlimited supply of scissors at people. How realistic is that?)
IMHO, it's really a pretty humorous little game, if you don't get all worked up and offended over parts of it.
Then the title is perfect. Postal 2 is a senseless tragedy itself. We should all refuse to play this game since that will save us the five minutes it would take to realize we should have refused to play this game five minutes ago.
Happy penguin.org is one of the best places to go to learn about the latest Linux games, heres the article
Just change it to shooting spammers--no one will object to that.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
... but wait until Linus gets sued when some 13-year-old Linux user shoots up his school.
I definitely think Inculus is going for the "lowest common denominator" audience with this one:
Icculus was not going for the lowest common anything. Running with Scissors might be, but Icculus is a programmer that ports games to linux. He's done more for the linux gaming community than just about anyone else out there. Alot of the stuff he's done, ports, maintaining icculus.org etc. he's done because he's just a good guy. Many of the ports he's done are because he gets paid to do them. Who gives a shit what some people think about the morality of certain games that are labeled with an appropriate rating anyways?
Some of us do have to earn a living you know.
"If they have both, tell them we use Linux. And if they have that, tell them the computers are down." -Dave Chapelle
Oh course, since the original meaning of tragedy is "goat song", this is all probably some goatse troll.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Which is somewhat ironic...
The profit margin on a game is pretty small if you can ever get one to publish. Add on support and testing due to N combinations of drivers, and games are very labor intensive. Now, throw on N combinations of N programs for N linux distributions, and you have yourself an absolute nightmare. That's why you see console games more quickly - less testing on bad hardware.
Compound on the fact that game players are PHB's in their own right in the sense they can ask for features, features, features, and not demand another cent out of it.
The only way you'll see games on Linux is if someone does the following (and if someone has, we need better marketeers...)
- A somewhat standard architecture (OpenGL springs to mind)...
- A standard *BSD* toolkit using that architecture. People should be able to try to make a buck from it. This implies a somewhat standard language (or at least a standard messaging protocol (CORBA)). Candidate would be C++, although it would be nice to see others.
- A dedicated group of people to do it with.
- Someone comes up with some neat ideas that they would want to work for free on.
For only 2% of the market, you'll rarely see stuff in the stores. Best Buy carries zilch and MicroCenter carries a handful of Linux apps. If 2% of 2% wants to buy a game that only 2% of that target group wants, you'll have a hard time finding 2% of the developers willing to contribute.
That said, it is more possible if Linux picks up market share and attitudes change. In the meantime, we're stuck.
T.
This space for rent.
There's a bugzilla for it too, here.
'cos it sure wasn't on windows...
Last year, a disgruntled postal worker went into his post office in a town nearby and flung poo on his co-workers. The question is: does the Postal game have a poo flinging mode?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I'd really hate to break this to you.. but the term has nothing to do with the character being a postal worker. At some point after the iniital string of postal workers going off the long end of a short pier the term 'Postal' came to mean ANYONE who flipped out for no apparent reason.
This game is hardly new.
When you think about it, it's not really all that surprising that open-source games are all too often not paticularly good. Among those that are even remotely good, many are clones (FreeCiv -> Civnet, TuxRacer -> MarioKart, etc). The fact is that a game remains one of the more difficult projects that someone can code. It's extremely expensive to come up with not only a good engine, but graphics, interface design, story, audio, etc, especially when the potential monetary gain is nil, and your audience is restricted to 5% of all computer users.
---
Take it sleazy,
-The Shockmaster
Postal 2: Share the Pain demo for GNU/Linux (posted 2003-12-25 05:16:36 by icculus):
Just in time to relieve all that Holiday stress, a demo version of Postal 2: Share the Pain is now available for GNU/Linux systems.
"Share the Pain" adds multiplayer gametypes to the previously single-player only Postal 2, with its mature-rated attitude (Capture the Flag is called "Snatch", and involves stealing the other team's, uh, mascot...you get the point). The multiplayer gametypes are fully network compatible with the Windows players.
The package contains a complete DEMO version of the game, featuring one abbreviated single player level, and a few multiplayer maps for your enjoyment. The full, commercial version of Postal 2 for Linux will be available soon (and rumor has it there will be a Linux boxed version, so please don't run out and buy the Windows version in preparation just yet). The package also contains the Linux dedicated server.
Postal 2 has some rather explicit content. Don't download it if you're a small child or easily offended.
File: postal2mpdemo-lnx-1407.tar.bz2
Size: 168 megabytes compressed
md5sum: 99b28380fcef88e8a4c418ca5894b8f3
Known mirrors:
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
The whole point is to be totally off the wall, not politically correct, push boundries, go far outside acceptable.
Look at GTA, people don't like that game for its violence, but its the best selling game series out. My state even passed a law against it, lucky it was declared unconstitutional by our WA state supreme court.
Won't spin off into politics, but I wish we had more anarchy like this. People should be able to do whatever they want, even its totally untasteful, politically incorrect or against your religion. This goes for everything. Legal consenting adults should be able to do whatever they want in the privacy of their homes. Play videos games, listen to music, read books, or watch porn.
Police should be peace officers, not moral guardians for the majority.
-
Happy Holidays, I would say Merry Christmas, but thats not politcally correct.
Is it the fact that it's for Linux? I suppose it would normally be good news for a game to get ported to Linux, but Postal 2 is a bad game. If I were a Linux user, I'd be downplaying this news as much as possible.
Rob (would've rather seen the editorial on Nintendo on the front page)
You are absolutely right. I think if a game has the word "Postal" in the title, at the very least it should involve making snap decisions on whether to deliver unwanted bulk mail to the wrong people or lose important packages -- kind of like the mail carrier version of "Paperboy." You could gain extra points avoiding frisky pets, raising rates, and delivering final notices before the original bills.
The nice thing about it is that even old guys like me could play because there would be frequent, regular breaks, plus weekends and all major holidays off, and you could move at a snail's pace without losing the game. I'm sure this would be far less offensive than the current version.
Well, if mail carriers did their job properly, then perhaps the rest of the world would not make fun of them. I mean how hard is it to NOT bend/shove/force large packages into a standard size mail box?
And don't blaim the shipper. The packing I am talking about was a package of Priority Mail supplies mail BY the USPS. The envelope was so ripped that I had to carry everything into my house. Is it that hard to walk up to my door (no animals) and put the package on my doorstep?
I love Rockstar Games and the GTA series remains one of my all-time favorites. I respect the fact that Rockstar makes its living being as controversial and over-the-top as they feel like, and generally don't compromise. To some extent, I can even get behind the fairly brainless conceit of this game (you're a psychopath, go hit people in the head and light them on fire... mission successful!)
But I've played this demo, and it's pretty much junk. Dated graphics (and I say this as someone who is not a graphics whore), clunky control scheme, animations which are satisfyingly gruesome the first time but quickly grow repetitive... all in all I think I liked the first Postal better, and honestly that was not very much to begin with. Sure, peeing on everything in sight is fun for awhile (just like in real life!), but the novelty wears off pretty fast. And I say this as someone who's killed many, many hours running over people in GTA3 and trying to find all the hidden jumps, etc. -- so I have a pretty high tolerance for repitition.
If this demo is representative of what the final version of Postal is going to be like, the game is going to be a serious failure. I hope that's not the case, because it seems like the fine folks at Rockstar could do much better than this (and have, years ago now).
Funny; a friend of mine and I actually use the phrase "going codal" to describe just such a situation, although I don't remember ever hearing about that. We generally use it in a "much more of this crap, and I'll go codal!!" sense.
Perhaps I'd get tired of it, but offended? No; I have much more pressing things to get offended about, personally, like strangers swearing at me in the street for the way I'm dressed (all black, boots, long coat - "hey, no, no-one else has ever shouted 'Hey, Neo!' or 'Fucking wanker!!!' at me, how clever of you to think of that")
Hell, there's a chance I'd use it to my advantage - "You'd better be nice to me, and stop making such unreasonable demands; you know how.. twitchy... us programmers can get...!"
It's official. Most of you are morons.
No, being egg troll makes him a troll. Hell, he's so famous (for a troll) that even I've heard of him.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
I can't count the number of times I wanted to dispose of a particularly stupid Sim, and a shotgun would have done nicely, instead of drowning them. I only played the game because my GF at the time made me. Man, the things we do for, er um love, yeah. She got really angry when I finally got the naked women sims to kiss and stuff. Now, I got a new GF who likes games like GTA and naked girls in UT2003. WooHoo!
President Bush to Liberate Alaska!
I just downloaded the demo, and it ran flawlessly on my FreeBSD box (4.9-RELEASE, latest nvidia drivers, linux-7.1_5 compat from ports). The only "tweaking" I had to do was set the __GL_SINGLE_THREADED environment variable to 1 (as described in nvidia's docs). After that, it was smooth sailing. This means that all us BSD people can be senselessly violent as well ;)
This is one of the worst PC games of the year... it's too bad more people will now buy it due to lack of choice on Linux.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
When it came out, this was immediately hailed as one of the worst games ever created. (And the reaction wasn't purely based on its violence; Computer Gaming World gave Grand Theft Auto 3 five stars, but Postal 2 zero.)
It reminds me of when Loki announced that it would be making a Linux port of Postal (short before they went out of business, what a shock). Postal wasn't as bad a game as Postal 2, but how are you going to make a splash in Linux games by porting bad games, or at the very least games that are highly unimpressive?
Is the whining USPS reaction to the Mad TV sketch about going postal (the concept).
The post office should lighten up -- after all, it's only a joke. Everyone knows that it doesn't really happen.
timothy (whose father and grandfather worked for the post office and escaped bullet wounds)
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Like some other guys here I find this game a horrible example of bad taste.
I believe our civilization is digging it's grave with stuff like this. With violent video games we are teaching younger generations that killing little figures on the screen is nothing bad.
Some earlier posts said that games are not about reality. I certainly agree with them that most (if not all) people will never think about repeating actions from a game in real life.
But think again how today's wars are being fought. Pilots on a modern bomber are actually playing a very sophisticated video game. They see icons on screens. They push the button and the icon disappears. I doubt they feel sorry for that icon. When they have time to think that that icon represented fifty people it is too late. The same goes from tanks to ICBMs.
The instinct that keeps us from killing each other on the street and that tells us that hurting another one of your species is wrong doesn't work here. And guess what, even infantry is being equiped with HUDs. Soon no soldier will ever see a speck of blood. They will only shoot vectorized figures on the screen. And because they have grown up with killing people on the computer screen they won't find this wrong.
In the past you had to have a very good reason to fight with someone. Now people voluntarily join the army just to play a more sophisticated video game.
The good news: It's for Linux.
The bad news: It's Postal 2.
It kinda sucks that we get so enthusiastic over a game simply because we CAN play it, even if it sucks. That goes to show that Linux games are lacking a bit of variety.
Still, I'm happy to hear this news. Even if it's not the best of games, it's DEFINITELY a step in the right direction . . . and I want to commend the individuals responsible for even having Linux users in mind.
Hopefully this will encourage even more game developers to follow suit . . . so far, NWN, UT2003, and now this are a good start.
Open source was able to match the big boys in one swoop. Refer to winex and you'll find most all of those titles in the store run on linux.
the game sucks.
I played through Postal 2 and it was rough. It get tired and boring really quickly. Once you have played the demo you have played all the good parts.
Kind of like when all of the funny scenes of a movie are in the trailer.
yes I agree, the world is a really shitty place. Perhaps we should go postal on these guys, light them on fire and piss on them.
Yeesh, who the hell pushed your button? And what makes you think that this form of trolling is better than trolling against the game?
It didn't cross your mind that people simply don't like the game, did it? That they are against the game not because they hate things that are violent, but because they hate things that are stupid or boring?
If you like the game, fine, you're entitled to your opinion. But don't spew nonsensical and irrelevant crap over people who don't like it.
Inferring that your *BSD* comment was an anti-GNU stab, what exactly do you mean by "should be able to make a buck from it"? What is so wrong with SDL's approach and the LGPL license for toolkits? How many people would contribute to an open source project knowing that others can freeload their code? Sure, there are an altruistic few that code simply for the heck of it and need no other motivation, but the harsh reality is that they are a vast minority compared to us who prefer our free work to remain protected.
LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web
They think they're being controversial or something, but they're actually just being really stupid and immature. This game reeks of 13-year-old humor. This game has no artistic, comical, or technical value whatsoever. I like to support Linux games on general principle, but I just can't do that for this game.
Fuckin' A right. Although the game might be a wee bit immature it's a parody of itself. No one takes it seriously and what other games uses piss as a weapon? Personally I love to pee on someone in-game and then shovel them in the throat. Would I do this IRL? No but why not on the net?
There's hookers out there for guys/women who can't get any so why not murder for those who don't want to really do it because it can be a mess to clean up?
Can you imagine if you pissed on someone till they puked and then gave 'em the shovel IRL? I bet you would get in trouble not to mention the embarassment of the crime so personally I'd have to get rid of the body so I wouldn't get caught. It's a good thing I like fava beans and chianti and my toilet is very powerful or I'd have to pull a "Peterson" and we all know how well that works.
Seriously if you don't think running around pissing on people in a multi-player environment isn't nirvana then something is wrong with you. I will also second the "cunt" comment. Get a sense of humor or stfu:D
You aren't free to do anything, until you've lost everything.
I have a Radeon 8500 and a Pentium 3 933, but this game looks like crap! I'm running Mandrake 9.2. Why can't I make this work!
"GPL2:Share the Software" would be more appropriate , at least for GNU guy.
An anti-GPL stab? Hardly.
I meant merely that there should be a license that allows commercial interests to use the code as well without worrying about the GPL. Be that BSD or LGPL as you suggested, I don't think it matters that much.
The motivation for profit is still greater than the motivation for endeavor. Gaming software is no different in this regard.
That said, it would be grand if it were all GPL, but I just don't see that happening.
This space for rent.
As a mailman myself, I just hang 'em right on the box with rubber bands if they're too big for it. My motto: if it won't hang on the box, you're not trying hard enough. If your carrier does things you don't like, just like use UPS or something. And the USPS needs to lighten the fuck up about videogames and Mad TV sketches. Jesus...
My blog can kick your blog's ass
This story demonstrates the glaring weakness of Linux; games.
It's a shame most moderators have their head's up their (or Linus') ass and modded you down for pointing that out. What you say is absolutely true, but it is true for any non-Windows computer. There is really nothing inherently wrong with other OSes that keeps games off them other than marketshare. What is interesting is how consoles don't suffer from the numbers game nearly as badly.
Is this the achilles heels of open source development? It might be, but very few people will admit it. It seems to be Free Software's dirty little secret. It can't turn out high quality games to compete with the big boys.
Actually, the "dirty secret" is that the big boys have MS Blinders on. Beyond that, they have PC blinders on. I mean, and I've said this before, it is simply a bonehead business move to release a game for the Linux market and not for the Mac market. Both are game-thirsty Unix systems with similar porting needs, with the Mac getting points on having common hardware interfaces/driver support plus a larger market. Further, Linux users are used to software that comes with source and has no cost while the Mac user is used to paying for commercial software. Any manager who would target Linux before OS X should be fired.
The question was not whether or not Linux is quicker to install than XP; the question was whether or not it is less painful to install. So you have to reboot a few times to get everything situated? Whoop-dee-doo. If you have problems installing Linux, they tend to be a lot more complicated and frustrating than just rebooting a few times.
Rob
Reminds me of a press release put out by the band Anthrax shortly after September 11. The best part is the postscript: "PS - If an Anthrax member gets Anthrax, call Alanis Morrisette. That would be ironic. Don't you think?"
irb(main):001:0>
Pay attention, son. His point was that this post is essentially an advertisement for Postal2, which Slashdot subscribers are not supposed to see. Sadly, Slashdot is not getting any advertiser's fee for this one. Someone, just remove this from the front page. This game is not worthy of any news whatsoeverg, and it really makes me sick to think some fucknut is going to go out and buy it because it was on the Slashdot front page.
...ahem, 10%. I think. Eh, 86% of all statostics are made up on the spot.
--- "To iterate is human, to recurse divine." -- Robert Heller
Seriously, it makes bzflag look polished.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
O.k. I d/l'ed the thing and must say that it actually made me laugh. I mean the stuff you can do is insane and just pure fun. Granted pissing on people to make them puke then shooting them is considered vaulgure in our soceity but hey it's fun. The pure out right beating of people can make as all better people. It's based off the Unreal engine from 2001 so this is esentialy a good MOD in my book. There are still some bugs and for $30 I would hope they have them fixed.BUT and a BIG but the demo version also has a Multi-Player function so you can play other maps and so for the demo only. That is a cool future to see how the game is online.
Over all the game is entertaining, not for $30 though sorry. I'll stick to NWN, UT2003, and Quake3 for now.
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)