I'm not the writer. I was just summarizing. In retrospect, I perhaps should have said "Let me summarize [in the voice of the reviewer]" or some such indicator that I was writing in the voice of the reviewer, despite not being the reviewer.
1) Steam is bad, yes, but the shiny Half-life 2 box was so pretty I overcame my compunction. 2) I'd already installed Cedega 4.2 from CVS, so I don't know how new users would do it. Good luck. 3) Half-life 2 didn't load the first time. 4) The game loaded the second time, but I don't know how long because I took a nap. 5) I changed the resolution and the game locked up. 6) I couldn't see the cut scenes, so I skipped them. 7) Graphics were rough, framerate was low, sound skipped. It was a fine experience. 8) Hacking my video card settings hung my machine. 9) I'm a little bit disappointed.
Also, I should have clarified that the source and some game assets are included, but music and FMV are missing. Whether the game would work without these, I don't know yet. Sorry.
...but I am more comfortable with the progression I've used on my own site:
First impressions - After an hour or two with the game, putting down just what things are like early on, and useful for comparison when I'm finished with a game.
Updated impressions - After several days with a game, revising anything from the first impressions, and starting to really get into the things that are working and the things that aren't.
Review/Final impressions - If I finish a game, I write a review that summarizes all previous writings and gives a plain English summary of my opinion. No score is assigned, since that seems pointless to me.
On the other hand, if I decide a game's not worth finishing, I just put up some final impressions and a summary of why the game wasn't worth my time to finish.
To really see how I feel about a game, you'll generally want to read all the parts, and I've tried to keep them as brief as I can. I try not a give laundry lists of features, but instead focus on the experience of playing, story, and quality of the gameplay (e.g. is it fun driving game, does this particular fps work with a console controller, is that puzzle game addictive, etc.) I will also knock a game for crappy production values, load times, and other annoyances that we shouldn't have to deal with anymore.
The real down side is that I often won't finish writing about a game until several weeks after it's been released, if not months later. They're not always timely, that's for sure.
If a real publication did something like this, I'd be impressed and more likely to read it regularly.
Here's an example with Ace Combat 04: First impressions, Updated impressions, and Final review. The game is old (it was an early PS2 title), the total process took from 10 March to 6 May 2004.
Wasn't Steam being designed long before the source code theft? Seems like revisionism to say "Steam was a reaction to the source code theft" when there doesn't appear to be any causality there at all. If anything, Steam had to be revamped to adjust for the theft, not created because of the theft.
So assume you find yourself lugging around 2 IBM A31P laptops...
Assume you are the ultimate dork, with two laptops, and you manage to get a brag about it on the front page of Slashdot, under the guise of "One bag...or two!?"
I just skimmed the comments rated 3+ and saw no mention of H. P. Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness". It's a tale of an expedition to the Antarctic which finds a range of very high, jagged mountains. The adventurers find not only a city clinging to the peaks of these mountains but also the bodies of the former inhabitants. Unspeakable horrors are uncovered and...well, read the damn book.
Any mention of an expedition to a previously unexplored region of Antarctica should bring up a subsequent mention of this novel. While Lovecraft's style is, undoubtedly, thick and verbose, his imagination was really quite remarkable. I found AtMoM to be a fantastic tale that actually stands up to a second reading.
You can probably find a copy online, but I am not sure about whether it's actually in the public domain or not. I think some of this writings genuinely are in the public domain, but others aren't, so YMMV. Regardless, the books are generally cheap. You can even get an annotated version of this story, which tries to explain the background and ties it to other stories in Lovecraft's works.
To demonstrate my support for my preferred presidential candidate, I went by the local headquarters and made a donation and picked up a yard sign. I put it out with some trepidation, since I knew that mine was the only sign of its type in my neighborhood: there were about a dozen signs for the opposition in yards I pass on the last two miles of my trip from work to home, and not one like mine for at least five miles that I had spotted.
Happily, my sign has stood proudly in the yard, untouched by anyone else, as far as I can tell. During that time, more signs for the opposition have sprung up, and only one for the same candidate as mine.
On the other hand, the local news apparently carried a story about a local whose signs had been repeatedly stolen. So she put one up and hung a sign underneat it that said "Every time you steal my sign, I make a bigger donation to my candidate." That apparently stopped the rascals from stealing any more signs.
Finally, I have watched with interest the signs people put up in the median of the road, on what is clearly public land. It appears to me that people find it acceptable to put their own signs on that land, and also that others find it acceptable to take down a sign and put up their own opposing sign. I've never seen anyone taking one down, however, so perhaps it is the state authorities coming along and cleaning up their land.
Good heavens, yes. I'm sure you can turn it off, but that's not the point. By default a new user's desktop should be like a blank slate with some well-marked, obvious signposts to where you can find the tools you need.
Back when I was insane^H^H^H^H^H^Hcompiling Gentoo every couple of weeks, I remember that I was really pleased to see what GNOME 2.0 looked like out of the box, without all the stuff Red Hat was putting on the desktop. Simple, powerful, easy to configure (from the point of view of a long-time configuration file editing user). I switched to KDE a couple of times (although I can't recall if I did so under Gentoo...I think I did) and was blown away with all the stuff that was sitting in the way of recognizing the desktop's important features.
Call me a GNOME zealot, if you must, but I really think they've hit just what I want from a desktop.
Here's the kicker: I still wish I had a way to make MacOS X on my Powerbook more like GNOME 2.6. By default the dock had about twice as many applications as I could reasonably want. I want more keyboard combinations, and I want to configure them as I wish (like I can in GNOME's configuration editor). On the other hand, I'd like GNOME's nautilus to pick up some tips from Finder and I'd like to have application groups in Metacity. (Or whatever they're called where you Atl-Tab to an application and then Alt-` among the windows for that application. I think Metacity has something similar to this, but I'm not sure how good it's working and last I checked it wasn't on by default.)
I don't know about other Mac keyboards, but on my Powerbook I can Fn+Ctrl+Up (i.e. PgUp) and Fn+Ctrl+Down (i.e. PgDn) and navigate tabs both directions on Firefox. Does that help?
Are you saying that this allows you to tab among links in a page using Mozilla, Firefox, or Camino? Because I have had those on since I got my Powerbook, and it doesn't help a bit. Is there some other keystroke, besides Tab that allows you to navigate links in a page? If you know otherwise, then perhaps you could elaborate...
The links to MozillaNews are dead currently, so I can't check, but here goes my biggest complaint with Mozilla/Firefox. If you know how I can do what I want, by the way, please reply so I can start using Firefox more efficiently.
Sure, it may render pages on all platforms exactly the same, and give the same Javascript behavior. That's great, and I appreciate it.
But what is really getting me down is that I cannot, to my knowledge, browse using keyboard navigation on MacOS X like I can on both Windows and Linux. I use Find-as-You-Type and navigation among links with the Tab key all the time on Linux and Windows, but when I start using my Powerbook I have to give most of that up and use the touchpad.
For example, in the administration portion of a website that I work on, if I'd like to be able to make a new entry into the database, I can do it all without a mouse on Windows or Linux. I tab among the text entry boxes, dropdown boxes, and buttons and do my work. I can get to another tab and grab some text or a link, and then back to the tab where I'm doing data entry and paste the retreived information. All without the mouse.
Unless there is something big I'm missing, you absolutely cannot do this on MacOS X with the same efficiency.
I now work from time to time on all three major platforms: Windows, MacOS X, and Linux. While I like various parts of all three, I have to say that I find the keyboard accessibility of GNOME and Mozilla on Linux preferable to anything on the other two. Then again, Linux is also where I've spent the most time, but it sure was easier to find the keystrokes and customization options I wanted there than it is on Windows (and, so far, MacOS X).
Incidentally, I have also tried Safari (has the Option-Tab keystroke for navigating a page like I want, but even with Saft it doesn't have good Find-as-You-Type) and Camino (same problems as Firefox) and Mozilla (same as Camino and Firefox) all without any luck. Oh well.
Microsoft talking design and technologies out in the open with other developers who aren't Microsoft employees? Even talking with Free software advocates? Man, that's good to hear, honestly. If this were system-wide, I bet it'd be good for both sides.
Reading Miguel mention that many APIs (Avalon, Tk, Swing, GNOME, Xview, Motif) at least gives one the impression that he might actually know what he's talking about. Let me give him the benefit of the doubt. It makes me wonder how many Microsoft employees have that much understanding of non-Microsoft APIs. Probably plenty, but the few I have encountered seem so immersed in Microsoft culture that they appear to have little understanding of what's going on outside of the Microsoft sphere.
Now, I should say that I'm no real programmer, but I've done some. The "real" programming I've done is computational code that runs in the console, with a couple of GUI front ends. So, I'm not going to claim any kind of serious perspective on this.
What might be interesting is if Codeweavers makes this work on Linux with their WINE-based CrossOver product then both iTunes and MSN Music Store would be available to Linux users. While I'm not a big fan of WINE, philosophically, I am not so against it that I can't appreciate the irony of Microsoft and Apple having made products that Linux users end up having access to, despite having been specifically excluded by the creators of those products.
I sure hope Konami doesn't try to go 3D the Castlevania game. If they simply continued with the type of increasingly high-quality 2D game they've put into Castlevania: Circle of the Moon, Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance, and Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow, they will have something quite special. Add in some features that really exploit the DS hardware, and the press will fall all over themselves promoting it for you.
Konami's had their three strikes in 3D with Castlevania 64, Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness (N64), and Castlevania: Lament of Innocence (PS2), and should just stop trying, for now. (I guess it's three-and-a-half strikes if you count the aborted Dreamcast game.)
Not that the Castlevania games couldn't use some work. Harmony of Dissonance had some less-than-stellar musical tracks. All the GBA games have had a nearly useless map function that needs some serious enhancements to avoid driving players mad with backtracking insanity. And they could all do with a new set of artists and creative thinkers to get beyond the same tired enemy types that have existed since the very first games.
Anyway, I do think that Castlevania DS with a map screen that switches to an enemy profile when you're attacking would be neat. Let's hope they're doing it right so that we're not left saying "No special DS features? This could have been done on the GBA!"
I had been worried that future id Software games might not be released as Free software (like Doom, Quake, Quake 2, and soon Quake 3) because they were incorporating third party libraries for physics. Sure, John Carmack and crew ripped out some sound code from Doom to get the source released, but a whole physics engine is a completely different beast, and I doubt that Carmack would be up to coding a decent one in order to make the Doom 3 source something he could release in a workable state.
Anyway, good to see they're at least thinking about tools that are open enough that they might be usable in a few years when Doom 3 is made Free.
As another example: I doubt that UT2k3 could be released as anything resembling Free software when it is a true legacy product and Epic's newer tech is attractive enough to keep people licensing the new instead of going for the old. It's got a physics engine that they depend on someone else to build for them, last I heard. (Can't remember the name of it right now. Karma? Ah well.)
Not that I'm waiting for Doom 3 to become Free: it's many years out and for now id's getting my cash as soon as the GNU/Linux binaries for Doom 3 are released. It's the least I can do for a developer that continues to give its source away when it's done with it. Of course, I'd like to see the new game too.;^)
Well, FWIW, I thought your post was not worthy of that moderation. I do agree that GNU/Linux should be pleased that it's gotten important enough to warrant drivers, even if they are binary-only. On the other hand, this shouldn't deter the GNU-believers from continuing to lobby for completely Free drivers.
Anyway, sorry you got modded that way. I thought "Funny" was more appropriate.:^)
Whether it's a truly meaningful distinction or not, I tend to classify game software as entertainment (and then I don't care as much about the binary-only nature) and drivers as an essential part of using hardware I've purchased (in which case I'd like the Freedom to use it fully, in the GNU sense of Freedom). As I said, a personal choice to classify those differently, and I can certainly understand people being more or less radical than that.
Wait for the Xbox version to come out. An Xbox plus Doom 3 will set you back $200, plus tax. If you don't have anything against Microsoft's console, it's obviously the best choice.
Personally, I'm waiting for the Linux binary, since my Linux box it appears to have sufficient specs. I do regret that binary-only drivers (for my ATI or NVIDIA card) will probably be required.
While developing Angel of Darkness, Core Design actually quite a lengthy story/script to span three games. Angel of Darkness was just the first part, and by their accounts (as far as you can trust them), not the best part and by no means giving away the scope of the whole. The work put into giving Angel of Darkness a real story was pretty significant, and the characterization of Lara as a person was an important step forward for the series. It's a shame that people got so hung up on the faults of Angel of Darkness that they couldn't see these truly positive things: a good story and finally a three dimensional Lara that was more than just an a pair of adventuring breasts.
So, I say they should stick to the script (or improve it, as needed) and give us the rest of the story, and continue to refine Lara as a character. After the degradation in the second through the fifth games, where Lara becomes more of a mass murderer than an adventurer, let's not lose sight the real benefits of the sixth game just because it was rushed out the door by the publisher, Eidos, in a buggy state.
And, while you're at it, how about having a vision for a series that's larger than a single game? That was part of the Angel of Darkness plan too, and I'd like to see more game developers approaching their franchises a little less like discrete, unrelated points and more like a continuum.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not the writer. I was just summarizing. In retrospect, I perhaps should have said "Let me summarize [in the voice of the reviewer]" or some such indicator that I was writing in the voice of the reviewer, despite not being the reviewer.
Yep, that overexplains it nicely.
1) Steam is bad, yes, but the shiny Half-life 2 box was so pretty I overcame my compunction.
2) I'd already installed Cedega 4.2 from CVS, so I don't know how new users would do it. Good luck.
3) Half-life 2 didn't load the first time.
4) The game loaded the second time, but I don't know how long because I took a nap.
5) I changed the resolution and the game locked up.
6) I couldn't see the cut scenes, so I skipped them.
7) Graphics were rough, framerate was low, sound skipped. It was a fine experience.
8) Hacking my video card settings hung my machine.
9) I'm a little bit disappointed.
That's about it. Have fun.
List of mirrors, please don't link to individual archives!
Also, I should have clarified that the source and some game assets are included, but music and FMV are missing. Whether the game would work without these, I don't know yet. Sorry.
- First impressions - After an hour or two with the game, putting down just what things are like early on, and useful for comparison when I'm finished with a game.
- Updated impressions - After several days with a game, revising anything from the first impressions, and starting to really get into the things that are working and the things that aren't.
- Review/Final impressions - If I finish a game, I write a review that summarizes all previous writings and gives a plain English summary of my opinion. No score is assigned, since that seems pointless to me.
To really see how I feel about a game, you'll generally want to read all the parts, and I've tried to keep them as brief as I can. I try not a give laundry lists of features, but instead focus on the experience of playing, story, and quality of the gameplay (e.g. is it fun driving game, does this particular fps work with a console controller, is that puzzle game addictive, etc.) I will also knock a game for crappy production values, load times, and other annoyances that we shouldn't have to deal with anymore.On the other hand, if I decide a game's not worth finishing, I just put up some final impressions and a summary of why the game wasn't worth my time to finish.
The real down side is that I often won't finish writing about a game until several weeks after it's been released, if not months later. They're not always timely, that's for sure.
If a real publication did something like this, I'd be impressed and more likely to read it regularly.
Here's an example with Ace Combat 04: First impressions, Updated impressions, and Final review. The game is old (it was an early PS2 title), the total process took from 10 March to 6 May 2004.
Wasn't Steam being designed long before the source code theft? Seems like revisionism to say "Steam was a reaction to the source code theft" when there doesn't appear to be any causality there at all. If anything, Steam had to be revamped to adjust for the theft, not created because of the theft.
Sheesh.
I just skimmed the comments rated 3+ and saw no mention of H. P. Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness". It's a tale of an expedition to the Antarctic which finds a range of very high, jagged mountains. The adventurers find not only a city clinging to the peaks of these mountains but also the bodies of the former inhabitants. Unspeakable horrors are uncovered and...well, read the damn book.
Any mention of an expedition to a previously unexplored region of Antarctica should bring up a subsequent mention of this novel. While Lovecraft's style is, undoubtedly, thick and verbose, his imagination was really quite remarkable. I found AtMoM to be a fantastic tale that actually stands up to a second reading.
You can probably find a copy online, but I am not sure about whether it's actually in the public domain or not. I think some of this writings genuinely are in the public domain, but others aren't, so YMMV. Regardless, the books are generally cheap. You can even get an annotated version of this story, which tries to explain the background and ties it to other stories in Lovecraft's works.
To demonstrate my support for my preferred presidential candidate, I went by the local headquarters and made a donation and picked up a yard sign. I put it out with some trepidation, since I knew that mine was the only sign of its type in my neighborhood: there were about a dozen signs for the opposition in yards I pass on the last two miles of my trip from work to home, and not one like mine for at least five miles that I had spotted.
Happily, my sign has stood proudly in the yard, untouched by anyone else, as far as I can tell. During that time, more signs for the opposition have sprung up, and only one for the same candidate as mine.
On the other hand, the local news apparently carried a story about a local whose signs had been repeatedly stolen. So she put one up and hung a sign underneat it that said "Every time you steal my sign, I make a bigger donation to my candidate." That apparently stopped the rascals from stealing any more signs.
Finally, I have watched with interest the signs people put up in the median of the road, on what is clearly public land. It appears to me that people find it acceptable to put their own signs on that land, and also that others find it acceptable to take down a sign and put up their own opposing sign. I've never seen anyone taking one down, however, so perhaps it is the state authorities coming along and cleaning up their land.
As long as I can search other people's conversations, I don't see the problem with Google IM. Should make for some entertaining reading. ;^)
Thanks for the tip. I'll give it a try over the next few days.
Good heavens, yes. I'm sure you can turn it off, but that's not the point. By default a new user's desktop should be like a blank slate with some well-marked, obvious signposts to where you can find the tools you need.
Back when I was insane^H^H^H^H^H^Hcompiling Gentoo every couple of weeks, I remember that I was really pleased to see what GNOME 2.0 looked like out of the box, without all the stuff Red Hat was putting on the desktop. Simple, powerful, easy to configure (from the point of view of a long-time configuration file editing user). I switched to KDE a couple of times (although I can't recall if I did so under Gentoo...I think I did) and was blown away with all the stuff that was sitting in the way of recognizing the desktop's important features.
Call me a GNOME zealot, if you must, but I really think they've hit just what I want from a desktop.
Here's the kicker: I still wish I had a way to make MacOS X on my Powerbook more like GNOME 2.6. By default the dock had about twice as many applications as I could reasonably want. I want more keyboard combinations, and I want to configure them as I wish (like I can in GNOME's configuration editor). On the other hand, I'd like GNOME's nautilus to pick up some tips from Finder and I'd like to have application groups in Metacity. (Or whatever they're called where you Atl-Tab to an application and then Alt-` among the windows for that application. I think Metacity has something similar to this, but I'm not sure how good it's working and last I checked it wasn't on by default.)
Flame on!
Mod parent up. Way up. Appears to work, even without a browser restart.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Now I can send in gmail without the mouse. And, post this reply without using the mouse.
I don't know about other Mac keyboards, but on my Powerbook I can Fn+Ctrl+Up (i.e. PgUp) and Fn+Ctrl+Down (i.e. PgDn) and navigate tabs both directions on Firefox. Does that help?
Are you saying that this allows you to tab among links in a page using Mozilla, Firefox, or Camino? Because I have had those on since I got my Powerbook, and it doesn't help a bit. Is there some other keystroke, besides Tab that allows you to navigate links in a page? If you know otherwise, then perhaps you could elaborate...
The links to MozillaNews are dead currently, so I can't check, but here goes my biggest complaint with Mozilla/Firefox. If you know how I can do what I want, by the way, please reply so I can start using Firefox more efficiently.
Sure, it may render pages on all platforms exactly the same, and give the same Javascript behavior. That's great, and I appreciate it.
But what is really getting me down is that I cannot, to my knowledge, browse using keyboard navigation on MacOS X like I can on both Windows and Linux. I use Find-as-You-Type and navigation among links with the Tab key all the time on Linux and Windows, but when I start using my Powerbook I have to give most of that up and use the touchpad.
For example, in the administration portion of a website that I work on, if I'd like to be able to make a new entry into the database, I can do it all without a mouse on Windows or Linux. I tab among the text entry boxes, dropdown boxes, and buttons and do my work. I can get to another tab and grab some text or a link, and then back to the tab where I'm doing data entry and paste the retreived information. All without the mouse.
Unless there is something big I'm missing, you absolutely cannot do this on MacOS X with the same efficiency.
I now work from time to time on all three major platforms: Windows, MacOS X, and Linux. While I like various parts of all three, I have to say that I find the keyboard accessibility of GNOME and Mozilla on Linux preferable to anything on the other two. Then again, Linux is also where I've spent the most time, but it sure was easier to find the keystrokes and customization options I wanted there than it is on Windows (and, so far, MacOS X).
Incidentally, I have also tried Safari (has the Option-Tab keystroke for navigating a page like I want, but even with Saft it doesn't have good Find-as-You-Type) and Camino (same problems as Firefox) and Mozilla (same as Camino and Firefox) all without any luck. Oh well.
- Microsoft talking design and technologies out in the open with other developers who aren't Microsoft employees? Even talking with Free software advocates? Man, that's good to hear, honestly. If this were system-wide, I bet it'd be good for both sides.
- Reading Miguel mention that many APIs (Avalon, Tk, Swing, GNOME, Xview, Motif) at least gives one the impression that he might actually know what he's talking about. Let me give him the benefit of the doubt. It makes me wonder how many Microsoft employees have that much understanding of non-Microsoft APIs. Probably plenty, but the few I have encountered seem so immersed in Microsoft culture that they appear to have little understanding of what's going on outside of the Microsoft sphere.
Now, I should say that I'm no real programmer, but I've done some. The "real" programming I've done is computational code that runs in the console, with a couple of GUI front ends. So, I'm not going to claim any kind of serious perspective on this.What might be interesting is if Codeweavers makes this work on Linux with their WINE-based CrossOver product then both iTunes and MSN Music Store would be available to Linux users. While I'm not a big fan of WINE, philosophically, I am not so against it that I can't appreciate the irony of Microsoft and Apple having made products that Linux users end up having access to, despite having been specifically excluded by the creators of those products.
I sure hope Konami doesn't try to go 3D the Castlevania game. If they simply continued with the type of increasingly high-quality 2D game they've put into Castlevania: Circle of the Moon, Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance, and Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow, they will have something quite special. Add in some features that really exploit the DS hardware, and the press will fall all over themselves promoting it for you.
Konami's had their three strikes in 3D with Castlevania 64, Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness (N64), and Castlevania: Lament of Innocence (PS2), and should just stop trying, for now. (I guess it's three-and-a-half strikes if you count the aborted Dreamcast game.)
Not that the Castlevania games couldn't use some work. Harmony of Dissonance had some less-than-stellar musical tracks. All the GBA games have had a nearly useless map function that needs some serious enhancements to avoid driving players mad with backtracking insanity. And they could all do with a new set of artists and creative thinkers to get beyond the same tired enemy types that have existed since the very first games.
Anyway, I do think that Castlevania DS with a map screen that switches to an enemy profile when you're attacking would be neat. Let's hope they're doing it right so that we're not left saying "No special DS features? This could have been done on the GBA!"
Ah. Thanks for setting that straight. That'll teach me to post to /. right before bed. :^)
I had been worried that future id Software games might not be released as Free software (like Doom, Quake, Quake 2, and soon Quake 3) because they were incorporating third party libraries for physics. Sure, John Carmack and crew ripped out some sound code from Doom to get the source released, but a whole physics engine is a completely different beast, and I doubt that Carmack would be up to coding a decent one in order to make the Doom 3 source something he could release in a workable state.
;^)
Anyway, good to see they're at least thinking about tools that are open enough that they might be usable in a few years when Doom 3 is made Free.
As another example: I doubt that UT2k3 could be released as anything resembling Free software when it is a true legacy product and Epic's newer tech is attractive enough to keep people licensing the new instead of going for the old. It's got a physics engine that they depend on someone else to build for them, last I heard. (Can't remember the name of it right now. Karma? Ah well.)
Not that I'm waiting for Doom 3 to become Free: it's many years out and for now id's getting my cash as soon as the GNU/Linux binaries for Doom 3 are released. It's the least I can do for a developer that continues to give its source away when it's done with it. Of course, I'd like to see the new game too.
Well, FWIW, I thought your post was not worthy of that moderation. I do agree that GNU/Linux should be pleased that it's gotten important enough to warrant drivers, even if they are binary-only. On the other hand, this shouldn't deter the GNU-believers from continuing to lobby for completely Free drivers.
:^)
Anyway, sorry you got modded that way. I thought "Funny" was more appropriate.
Whether it's a truly meaningful distinction or not, I tend to classify game software as entertainment (and then I don't care as much about the binary-only nature) and drivers as an essential part of using hardware I've purchased (in which case I'd like the Freedom to use it fully, in the GNU sense of Freedom). As I said, a personal choice to classify those differently, and I can certainly understand people being more or less radical than that.
Wait for the Xbox version to come out. An Xbox plus Doom 3 will set you back $200, plus tax. If you don't have anything against Microsoft's console, it's obviously the best choice.
Personally, I'm waiting for the Linux binary, since my Linux box it appears to have sufficient specs. I do regret that binary-only drivers (for my ATI or NVIDIA card) will probably be required.
While developing Angel of Darkness, Core Design actually quite a lengthy story/script to span three games. Angel of Darkness was just the first part, and by their accounts (as far as you can trust them), not the best part and by no means giving away the scope of the whole. The work put into giving Angel of Darkness a real story was pretty significant, and the characterization of Lara as a person was an important step forward for the series. It's a shame that people got so hung up on the faults of Angel of Darkness that they couldn't see these truly positive things: a good story and finally a three dimensional Lara that was more than just an a pair of adventuring breasts.
So, I say they should stick to the script (or improve it, as needed) and give us the rest of the story, and continue to refine Lara as a character. After the degradation in the second through the fifth games, where Lara becomes more of a mass murderer than an adventurer, let's not lose sight the real benefits of the sixth game just because it was rushed out the door by the publisher, Eidos, in a buggy state.
And, while you're at it, how about having a vision for a series that's larger than a single game? That was part of the Angel of Darkness plan too, and I'd like to see more game developers approaching their franchises a little less like discrete, unrelated points and more like a continuum.