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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 :)
...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 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 that the simulation of the WindowsXP install process?
... 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
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...
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.