I think for me, gaming in the retro-ages were a bit more exciting since well, the social aspect is much different than it is today. For instance, I have fonder memories of playing games at the arcade or on the home console, in person with the other players. As in, we weren't playing with anonymous people we didn't know. We also had a certain code of conduct of how you acted when playing with friends or even people you didn't know at the arcade. You would show good sportsmanship (most of the time), something that you don't see online much of anymore. It was actually a healthy thing back in the days of the atari, nes, snes, n64 because you *were* being social. You were hanging out with your friends in front of the tv/arcade machine. Now it's practically anti-social. You lock yourself away in front of the tv or computer alone, you don't give a crap about the person you are playing with, and you hear nothing but people just being flat out rude. I think this is why things like the Wii sold so well. It encouraged family and friends to come together and play together. Bringing back that old social aspect. Parents playing with kids, kids playing with their friends, etc. A reason why people were all loving games like Guitar Hero/Rock Band was getting 4 friends in the same house playing together. Same with how successful the Halo lan parties used to be. A room full of people all playing at once brought much excitement. Like the Successful Daytona USA series having 2-8 arcade machines all linked together for some exciting competition with a room full of energy. Something that is missing today really with online gaming. The energy, the spark, the togetherness. Another thing that made the games exciting was back then, hardware was evolving FAST. Something that is pretty stagnant now. I mean, from the Nes/Master System to the Snes/Genesis/NeoGeo to the Playstation/N64/3DO/Saturn/CDX then to the PS2/Dreamcast/Xbox we saw HUGE advances in hardware and game quality, but the last few years have been pretty boring. PC wise it has been fun (6 core cpu's, 32gigs of ram in a system, 2-3 video cards in SLI, terrabytes of hard drive space, multiple monitor setups with huge resolution), but the games aren't coming out that utilize the full potential of such a system. So well, we just wait, bored, for the consoles to catch up so we can get some more ports, while they want to carry on with the same old hardware for another decade to save money on R&D. Every once in a while we get a gem like Skyrim or Rage to keep us busy for a week, then we sit bored again just playing some crappy mmo for a while.
Actually now that I think about it, when darkplaces added it's own real time lighting engine they made it so you could make a.rlights file for each map by adding real time lights manually to a map in the game engine. But that would be a huge undertaking. See they added a new lighting engine because well, quake 1 didn't have a RT light engine, and well, doom 3 does to a point. If they could magically add darkplaces lighting engine (which requires MUCH more system requirements than doom 3's), then that would then be possible.
That kind of requires the source maps to add the light entities, then to upload those levels which are not free. So I doubt that would happen. Though a mod could come out with new levels that could have more light in them but they couldn't be the same levels unless those levels are also opened. Just because the game's source code was open sourced doesn't mean the game data is free now. Not that it is that hard to make some single player missions with some light in them. We saw plenty of scenes in quake 4 (same engine) that were bright. They made the game dark and gloomy to hide the 4 zombies SLOWLY walking towards you. Duct tape mod helped a bit with the situation by giving you a flashlight "duct taped" to your gun. Though I think an interesting mod would more be splinter cell style Infra-red/NVG's. Mostly what the game source covers are things like network code, graphics engine, sound output, input, resource loading, how the console works, how it loads scripts for the game data to do what it is meant to do. Like you can't edit "how a gun looks/how many monsters are in a room/how many lights are in an area/what the startup videos look like/how many shots until you have to reload/what sound the cyber-demon makes when it dies" in the engine source.
Off the top of my head... For linux, pulseaudio and alsa support. Blender model support (and not needing an aftermarket plugin for blender). Android port (separate team I know:( ). Motion blur. Ambient occulsion. Different measures to prevent such things as aimbots (somehow magically people can't make aimbots for serious sam games, might be something to look into) and servers that don't send you positional data of other players unless they are within your view area. Desktop resolution autodetect at startup that lists all resolutions possible on the system.
TBH Valve wouldn't have found the intrusion if the forums weren't defaced. If the hackers were smart they would have left the site unscathed. Who knows how long they had all of our info. Kinda scary really.
Pretty sure in 6-12 months or so we will see another COD game, and it will sell 20 million copies on the first day, and we'll get another Battlefield, and the same will happen with it. And 400 new and catchy indie games will come out then have to be donated to the humble bundle because no one is buying them. 1 or 2 Indie games might catch on and make the creator millions like minecraft. Maybe someone will actually finish a mod for a game that will catch on like Counter-Strike did or DoTa and take these CoD/BF games out of the news with something new. One can only hope. Hrm, maybe a mod for rage *drools*.
I would care if the local television stations decided that in order to continue serving their watcher base that were slightly out of town, they would either get more powerful towers or even setup a transmission repeater system. I mean when you name your station "wXXX serving Evansville and Owensboro" yet no one in owensboro can get your signal at all outside of cable, are you still serving Owensboro? TBH I can't say being without live tv has been too terrible. I can still get news from the internet, and all the shows/tv I want from netflix for a pretty low rate. In fact the TV blackout here has shown me that netflix is a generally better service than having to be bothered with annoying advertising and such.
I mean I would if they didn't decide to switch to all digital which for some reason doesn't seem to get to my tv since there are no tv stations close enough to get solid signal... Perhaps my weather radio will go off?
Mod parent up:
No point on getting something she won't use. Perhaps show her a few things and ask her if she likes them for something to do through out the day. She might just ask you for a deck of playing cards and a bed table (at least my great aunt did at 90 when we were taking care of her). Or she might just want some old school paperback books or just a nice remote with large print buttons. Just because they aren't playing a game doesn't mean they aren't using their minds. Many old people love watching game shows because it feels like a game to them to play along answering the puzzles on jeopardy or wheel of fortune or the price is right. Maybe you could show them a wheel of fortune tiger game and see if they would like that to do in their spare time if they are really into that show. New tech isn't always the answer to every problem:)
I went through something similar, though my father was a single parent (mother left father from physical violence but married a child molester instead so couldn't keep us, so both were pretty horrid parents), and it started with beatings (getting slammed against walls, punched, whipped with belts, sticks, thrown down stairs, malnourishment, smashing or selling possessions), then moved to sexual abuse to my 13 year old sister. Now that I am a father, I respect my own children that punishments are usually along the lines of a long talk about the issues at hand, what the real problem is, and how we can fix it. Though I daily have to fight my own internal rage from my own childhood and the temptation to just hit my sons can get high with aggravation of different situations, but I fight it and win. The problem is the abusers forget the pain over time and think it's alright to just go crazy on their children. That's what I see in this man, is someone who himself was abused severely by some drunk dad or something along those lines and was brainwashed to believe that it was OK for their parents to do that because of things like, "The bible says it's OK". Or "my daddy did it to me, and look, I'm a judge now, so it must have been good". Or "I got beat because I deserved it". All classic things that abusers use to make their children think that it is their fault their parents are raging lunatics. I do believe though that if she really wanted to do something, she should have ASAP. BUT true abusers can brainwash these kids into thinking nothing will happen if they step forward, that every child on the planet gets treated like that, and that the parents are being abused by the children first. In the end, leaving the abused to think that they might as well forget raising any charges because it will just anger their parent(s) more and if they lose the case they will just get abused more by said parent(s). In the end fear is a powerful weapon.
"or just that this Haught guy had his face mushed into the dirt." -- Yeah, Haught said there was a god, and Coyne merely said, "Prove it". Enough of the Christians telling me to prove there isn't a god. They fail to recognize that it is not our job to prove them wrong, it's their job to prove themselves right. Something they can't do because they believe a story written long ago by men that wanted to control the barbarians. The scary stories are not needed today as now we have something called prison for people that don't want to follow the rules passed down from the government, and religion is no longer needed to scare people to do right.
Same here, doom taught me about serial network interfacing (null modem), and quake taught me TCP-IP:), quake 2 taught me how AWESOME 2 voodoo 2 cards were compared to software rendering, quake 3 taught me that mods can be better than the actual game (actually quake 1 did with team fortress, but at least quake had good single player), quake 4 taught me to play before I buy...
I just logged out of borderlands online play to see this, so it is a good surprise. One thing I hope they do is realize the PC version can be much better than the console versions. The pc version was defaulting to directx 9 mode with none of the special goodies the unreal engine can do in DX10 mode. Luckily someone figured out how to edit the config files to remove the console feel and make it look like a real modern game for the most part. I hope for their next game they put full detail options into the options menu instead of having to make us track down config file switches to make it run like a modern pc game, instead of a straight console port. Also, press to talk on the voice chat would be more useful than keeping my mic on the entire game while you can hear my kids in the background, or phone calls, or the sound of my shooting in the microphone. Hrm, also if you could, fix it so I can buy game of the year edition on steam after I bought it after it first came out, so I can get all the dlc for cheaper than actually buying all the dlc separately or making another steam account just for 1 game. Other than that, Borderlands is a good game for me, I like coop play, and i do like the randomness of weapon drops.
Yes, it does. Runs better in Wine then it does in Windows (for me at least)
I hope you are kidding, because you might want to see how you messed up your windows setup if that is true. Granted there are a few games that do run better in linux, but those are generally older windows games running like directx 7, from my experiance, source games run much more stable and I get better framerates in windows 7. People can tell when I use wine with some games like Day of Defeat Source for sure since people think I am hacking with my jerky movement (almost like a speed hack, but more or less looks like I am lagging). Wine is cool and all, don't get me wrong, but it's nothing like running it on the real OS for many games made in the last few years. I mean, I might be doing something wrong, or wine has really improved greatly over the last year, but I somehow think that running something on it's native OS is generally better if it was designed for that version of the OS.
If distro's/admin's adopt it or not is another question altogether. For most, the basic tools of: "su -c 'make install'" or "sudo" do all the needed things. On a well built system, why would the (non-sysadmin) user need root access for anything? Most businesses do not allow non-IT staff to install software or change anything more than the wallpaper. You usally need to make a request to IT to have something special done on your machine anyway. It's generally a good setup that way.
Maybe it's because I have big hands, I owned a game gear, I normally game on pc (lots of hand space between the mouse and wasd keys makes for rather comfy gaming), and I actually prefer the old huge xbox controller I am saying this but I like this controller idea. I am sure after seeing all the complaints nintendo will probably make a smaller version so those people can happily squint at a smaller screen or something. Looking at it being used on videos, it doesn't look that uncomfy to me, I mean they are showing little asian women using this with small hands and not having a problem, I think that maybe I will be okay. I do hope though these controllers can somehow be priced in the 50 dollar area or so though. That wouldn't break the bank for me. I can't say I would hate it if the xbox players doesn't buy it though. Those of you who have had to sit though the rubbish they spew out on their headsets (not tactical data, or teamwork, but the vocal equivalent of goatse) probably appreciate a game online without voice. When they were showing the starfox64 remake with the video all I could think was, "If this was on 360, all you would see are penises)", and when they were showing off drawing stuff on the tekken charactors, "Yeah, that would be all penises and swasticas on live...".
I'm going to guess that Nintendo sticks with ATI/AMD since they have for the last 2 systems, but we shall see. I do know that Nintendo do not adhere to razor blade marketing (selling consoles cheap so they can make it back in software sales) so they will have to use the cheapest bidder to keep their console price under control so people can afford it.
That's your distro trying to shove the free driver down your throat. I personally use Sabayon since it has many flavors, and it automatically installs the restricted nvidia driver for you on a fresh install, saving a ton of hassle. I'm sure there are other distrobutions that do not push the free driver, but I am unable to think of any off hand.
Yeah, this is new stuff here. Before today, no women were slapped in music, movies, plays, books, or any media whatsoever. I haven't ever heard a person going to jail ever say, "Duke Nukem made me slap/kill/donkey punch my wife". Though I have seem some radical muslims/christians abuse the crap out of their wives because the bible/koran told them it was okay. In the real world, only those that live in a fantasy world think something is okay because of something they read/watched/heard in the media. Smart people do smart things, not so smart... well don't. If it isn't this game that causes said crazy to lose it and slap his wife, it will be another. Blame crazy people for being crazy, and leave the rest of the people the hell alone.
Oh, it's better than say... 3-4 years ago. But there's still those few games that you need to kill pulseaudio for in order to play (id engine games mostly like quake wars, doom 3, etc) that try to talk directly to alsa, but I agree that it is better than it used to be. Pulseaudio is maturing and soon I believe we won't have to play with our sound systems at all for all of our audio needs.
Too bad you threw out descent before checking out dxx-rebirth. The new open source engine runs in any resolution you want in opengl in windows mac and linux with online udp. But yeah, the old days of games having to code for specific hardware did blow. Have a sound card? Is it soundblaster compatible? Does your video card run glide, opengl, or direct3d? Those days were hell. Almost as much hell as modern linux audio... Pulseaudio? Alsa? OSS? etc...
Slashdot Mirror
My take from watching the kickstarter video he posted, was that people that donated would be the only ones to receive the DRM free copies.
I think for me, gaming in the retro-ages were a bit more exciting since well, the social aspect is much different than it is today. For instance, I have fonder memories of playing games at the arcade or on the home console, in person with the other players. As in, we weren't playing with anonymous people we didn't know. We also had a certain code of conduct of how you acted when playing with friends or even people you didn't know at the arcade. You would show good sportsmanship (most of the time), something that you don't see online much of anymore. It was actually a healthy thing back in the days of the atari, nes, snes, n64 because you *were* being social. You were hanging out with your friends in front of the tv/arcade machine. Now it's practically anti-social. You lock yourself away in front of the tv or computer alone, you don't give a crap about the person you are playing with, and you hear nothing but people just being flat out rude. I think this is why things like the Wii sold so well. It encouraged family and friends to come together and play together. Bringing back that old social aspect. Parents playing with kids, kids playing with their friends, etc. A reason why people were all loving games like Guitar Hero/Rock Band was getting 4 friends in the same house playing together. Same with how successful the Halo lan parties used to be. A room full of people all playing at once brought much excitement. Like the Successful Daytona USA series having 2-8 arcade machines all linked together for some exciting competition with a room full of energy. Something that is missing today really with online gaming. The energy, the spark, the togetherness. Another thing that made the games exciting was back then, hardware was evolving FAST. Something that is pretty stagnant now. I mean, from the Nes/Master System to the Snes/Genesis/NeoGeo to the Playstation/N64/3DO/Saturn/CDX then to the PS2/Dreamcast/Xbox we saw HUGE advances in hardware and game quality, but the last few years have been pretty boring. PC wise it has been fun (6 core cpu's, 32gigs of ram in a system, 2-3 video cards in SLI, terrabytes of hard drive space, multiple monitor setups with huge resolution), but the games aren't coming out that utilize the full potential of such a system. So well, we just wait, bored, for the consoles to catch up so we can get some more ports, while they want to carry on with the same old hardware for another decade to save money on R&D. Every once in a while we get a gem like Skyrim or Rage to keep us busy for a week, then we sit bored again just playing some crappy mmo for a while.
In a tweet, the humble guys said they were making debs :) Quote from @humble: debs and rpms should be coming soon, please continue to report any bugs.
Actually now that I think about it, when darkplaces added it's own real time lighting engine they made it so you could make a .rlights file for each map by adding real time lights manually to a map in the game engine. But that would be a huge undertaking. See they added a new lighting engine because well, quake 1 didn't have a RT light engine, and well, doom 3 does to a point. If they could magically add darkplaces lighting engine (which requires MUCH more system requirements than doom 3's), then that would then be possible.
That kind of requires the source maps to add the light entities, then to upload those levels which are not free. So I doubt that would happen. Though a mod could come out with new levels that could have more light in them but they couldn't be the same levels unless those levels are also opened. Just because the game's source code was open sourced doesn't mean the game data is free now. Not that it is that hard to make some single player missions with some light in them. We saw plenty of scenes in quake 4 (same engine) that were bright. They made the game dark and gloomy to hide the 4 zombies SLOWLY walking towards you. Duct tape mod helped a bit with the situation by giving you a flashlight "duct taped" to your gun. Though I think an interesting mod would more be splinter cell style Infra-red/NVG's. Mostly what the game source covers are things like network code, graphics engine, sound output, input, resource loading, how the console works, how it loads scripts for the game data to do what it is meant to do. Like you can't edit "how a gun looks/how many monsters are in a room/how many lights are in an area/what the startup videos look like/how many shots until you have to reload/what sound the cyber-demon makes when it dies" in the engine source.
Off the top of my head... For linux, pulseaudio and alsa support. Blender model support (and not needing an aftermarket plugin for blender). Android port (separate team I know :( ). Motion blur. Ambient occulsion. Different measures to prevent such things as aimbots (somehow magically people can't make aimbots for serious sam games, might be something to look into) and servers that don't send you positional data of other players unless they are within your view area. Desktop resolution autodetect at startup that lists all resolutions possible on the system.
Hell, at this point it's not even really news anymore. I know personally I've had desura installed in linux now for at least a couple weeks.
TBH Valve wouldn't have found the intrusion if the forums weren't defaced. If the hackers were smart they would have left the site unscathed. Who knows how long they had all of our info. Kinda scary really.
Pretty sure in 6-12 months or so we will see another COD game, and it will sell 20 million copies on the first day, and we'll get another Battlefield, and the same will happen with it. And 400 new and catchy indie games will come out then have to be donated to the humble bundle because no one is buying them. 1 or 2 Indie games might catch on and make the creator millions like minecraft. Maybe someone will actually finish a mod for a game that will catch on like Counter-Strike did or DoTa and take these CoD/BF games out of the news with something new. One can only hope. Hrm, maybe a mod for rage *drools*.
I would care if the local television stations decided that in order to continue serving their watcher base that were slightly out of town, they would either get more powerful towers or even setup a transmission repeater system. I mean when you name your station "wXXX serving Evansville and Owensboro" yet no one in owensboro can get your signal at all outside of cable, are you still serving Owensboro? TBH I can't say being without live tv has been too terrible. I can still get news from the internet, and all the shows/tv I want from netflix for a pretty low rate. In fact the TV blackout here has shown me that netflix is a generally better service than having to be bothered with annoying advertising and such.
I mean I would if they didn't decide to switch to all digital which for some reason doesn't seem to get to my tv since there are no tv stations close enough to get solid signal... Perhaps my weather radio will go off?
Mod parent up: No point on getting something she won't use. Perhaps show her a few things and ask her if she likes them for something to do through out the day. She might just ask you for a deck of playing cards and a bed table (at least my great aunt did at 90 when we were taking care of her). Or she might just want some old school paperback books or just a nice remote with large print buttons. Just because they aren't playing a game doesn't mean they aren't using their minds. Many old people love watching game shows because it feels like a game to them to play along answering the puzzles on jeopardy or wheel of fortune or the price is right. Maybe you could show them a wheel of fortune tiger game and see if they would like that to do in their spare time if they are really into that show. New tech isn't always the answer to every problem :)
I went through something similar, though my father was a single parent (mother left father from physical violence but married a child molester instead so couldn't keep us, so both were pretty horrid parents), and it started with beatings (getting slammed against walls, punched, whipped with belts, sticks, thrown down stairs, malnourishment, smashing or selling possessions), then moved to sexual abuse to my 13 year old sister. Now that I am a father, I respect my own children that punishments are usually along the lines of a long talk about the issues at hand, what the real problem is, and how we can fix it. Though I daily have to fight my own internal rage from my own childhood and the temptation to just hit my sons can get high with aggravation of different situations, but I fight it and win. The problem is the abusers forget the pain over time and think it's alright to just go crazy on their children. That's what I see in this man, is someone who himself was abused severely by some drunk dad or something along those lines and was brainwashed to believe that it was OK for their parents to do that because of things like, "The bible says it's OK". Or "my daddy did it to me, and look, I'm a judge now, so it must have been good". Or "I got beat because I deserved it". All classic things that abusers use to make their children think that it is their fault their parents are raging lunatics. I do believe though that if she really wanted to do something, she should have ASAP. BUT true abusers can brainwash these kids into thinking nothing will happen if they step forward, that every child on the planet gets treated like that, and that the parents are being abused by the children first. In the end, leaving the abused to think that they might as well forget raising any charges because it will just anger their parent(s) more and if they lose the case they will just get abused more by said parent(s). In the end fear is a powerful weapon.
"or just that this Haught guy had his face mushed into the dirt." -- Yeah, Haught said there was a god, and Coyne merely said, "Prove it". Enough of the Christians telling me to prove there isn't a god. They fail to recognize that it is not our job to prove them wrong, it's their job to prove themselves right. Something they can't do because they believe a story written long ago by men that wanted to control the barbarians. The scary stories are not needed today as now we have something called prison for people that don't want to follow the rules passed down from the government, and religion is no longer needed to scare people to do right.
They probably lost the tape when a student stole it to sell for meth.
Same here, doom taught me about serial network interfacing (null modem), and quake taught me TCP-IP :), quake 2 taught me how AWESOME 2 voodoo 2 cards were compared to software rendering, quake 3 taught me that mods can be better than the actual game (actually quake 1 did with team fortress, but at least quake had good single player), quake 4 taught me to play before I buy...
I just logged out of borderlands online play to see this, so it is a good surprise. One thing I hope they do is realize the PC version can be much better than the console versions. The pc version was defaulting to directx 9 mode with none of the special goodies the unreal engine can do in DX10 mode. Luckily someone figured out how to edit the config files to remove the console feel and make it look like a real modern game for the most part. I hope for their next game they put full detail options into the options menu instead of having to make us track down config file switches to make it run like a modern pc game, instead of a straight console port. Also, press to talk on the voice chat would be more useful than keeping my mic on the entire game while you can hear my kids in the background, or phone calls, or the sound of my shooting in the microphone. Hrm, also if you could, fix it so I can buy game of the year edition on steam after I bought it after it first came out, so I can get all the dlc for cheaper than actually buying all the dlc separately or making another steam account just for 1 game. Other than that, Borderlands is a good game for me, I like coop play, and i do like the randomness of weapon drops.
Yes, it does. Runs better in Wine then it does in Windows (for me at least)
I hope you are kidding, because you might want to see how you messed up your windows setup if that is true. Granted there are a few games that do run better in linux, but those are generally older windows games running like directx 7, from my experiance, source games run much more stable and I get better framerates in windows 7. People can tell when I use wine with some games like Day of Defeat Source for sure since people think I am hacking with my jerky movement (almost like a speed hack, but more or less looks like I am lagging). Wine is cool and all, don't get me wrong, but it's nothing like running it on the real OS for many games made in the last few years. I mean, I might be doing something wrong, or wine has really improved greatly over the last year, but I somehow think that running something on it's native OS is generally better if it was designed for that version of the OS.
If distro's/admin's adopt it or not is another question altogether. For most, the basic tools of: "su -c 'make install'" or "sudo" do all the needed things. On a well built system, why would the (non-sysadmin) user need root access for anything? Most businesses do not allow non-IT staff to install software or change anything more than the wallpaper. You usally need to make a request to IT to have something special done on your machine anyway. It's generally a good setup that way.
Maybe it's because I have big hands, I owned a game gear, I normally game on pc (lots of hand space between the mouse and wasd keys makes for rather comfy gaming), and I actually prefer the old huge xbox controller I am saying this but I like this controller idea. I am sure after seeing all the complaints nintendo will probably make a smaller version so those people can happily squint at a smaller screen or something. Looking at it being used on videos, it doesn't look that uncomfy to me, I mean they are showing little asian women using this with small hands and not having a problem, I think that maybe I will be okay. I do hope though these controllers can somehow be priced in the 50 dollar area or so though. That wouldn't break the bank for me. I can't say I would hate it if the xbox players doesn't buy it though. Those of you who have had to sit though the rubbish they spew out on their headsets (not tactical data, or teamwork, but the vocal equivalent of goatse) probably appreciate a game online without voice. When they were showing the starfox64 remake with the video all I could think was, "If this was on 360, all you would see are penises)", and when they were showing off drawing stuff on the tekken charactors, "Yeah, that would be all penises and swasticas on live...".
I'm going to guess that Nintendo sticks with ATI/AMD since they have for the last 2 systems, but we shall see. I do know that Nintendo do not adhere to razor blade marketing (selling consoles cheap so they can make it back in software sales) so they will have to use the cheapest bidder to keep their console price under control so people can afford it.
That's your distro trying to shove the free driver down your throat. I personally use Sabayon since it has many flavors, and it automatically installs the restricted nvidia driver for you on a fresh install, saving a ton of hassle. I'm sure there are other distrobutions that do not push the free driver, but I am unable to think of any off hand.
Yeah, this is new stuff here. Before today, no women were slapped in music, movies, plays, books, or any media whatsoever. I haven't ever heard a person going to jail ever say, "Duke Nukem made me slap/kill/donkey punch my wife". Though I have seem some radical muslims/christians abuse the crap out of their wives because the bible/koran told them it was okay. In the real world, only those that live in a fantasy world think something is okay because of something they read/watched/heard in the media. Smart people do smart things, not so smart... well don't. If it isn't this game that causes said crazy to lose it and slap his wife, it will be another. Blame crazy people for being crazy, and leave the rest of the people the hell alone.
Oh, it's better than say... 3-4 years ago. But there's still those few games that you need to kill pulseaudio for in order to play (id engine games mostly like quake wars, doom 3, etc) that try to talk directly to alsa, but I agree that it is better than it used to be. Pulseaudio is maturing and soon I believe we won't have to play with our sound systems at all for all of our audio needs.
Too bad you threw out descent before checking out dxx-rebirth. The new open source engine runs in any resolution you want in opengl in windows mac and linux with online udp. But yeah, the old days of games having to code for specific hardware did blow. Have a sound card? Is it soundblaster compatible? Does your video card run glide, opengl, or direct3d? Those days were hell. Almost as much hell as modern linux audio... Pulseaudio? Alsa? OSS? etc...