Postal 2 Shares Pain In Direction Of Linux

michaelsimms writes "LGP has announced that [ultraviolent FPS] Postal 2: Share the Pain is coming to Linux this summer. Featuring Gary Coleman, Postal 2 is just like Postal Plus, but fully 3D, and with many more ways to get Postal Dude covered in blood and gore! Applications for Beta Testers are now open." The official Running With Scissors press release is delightful, claiming the company "has reached deep into their hairy chest and clutched their cold, cold heart to take pity on the bastard stepchildren of the gaming world", before noting: "'My development guys wanted to finish animating Quentin Tarantino's sequel to The Passion first,' said former altar boy and RWS CEO Vince Desi, 'but when I told 'em this project was for the Linux community, they left Uma up there swingin' in the breeze and grabbed hammer and nails and got right to work.'"

Comments

Capitalizing on Personal Violation

[MiceHead]

One aspect of Postal 2 that I haven't seen in other crime-centric games is the ability to forcibly enter a suburban home. That, itself, is a step beyond the acts of personal violation we've seen in other titles. GTA-3 allows you to eject an adult from his car and take it for your own. I feel relatively safe when I'm in my car; and I'd feel relatively well-violated if someone snatched me from it. But I imagine that's nothing compared to being abducted (or otherwise intruded upon) in the sanctity of my own home. (Violation of person would be an even more extreme example.)

Postal 2's creators believe there's an appeal in the act of violating another human being. A Clockwork Orange shows us a group of people who enjoy this; their behavior is perfectly believable. The 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment shows us that the capacity for cruelty and abuse of control can exist in all of us. Games like Thief (audio/flash) distance us from this by changing the setting somewhat. In breaking into those medieval homes, there exists the sense of being somewhere I shouldn't, but I never really felt like I was terrifying anyone. Knowing what we do about human nature, would the Thief series sell even better if the victims were people from our own experience?

The consensus here seems to be that Running With Scissors will not gain much by porting the title to Linux. Would an improvement to gameplay make a title centering on home-invasion more interesting?