"Hardcore" is perhaps the wrong word. But I was referring to the "Triple-A" titles, the ones with storylines and high production values, as opposed to "casual" games which require a lot less investment (monetary, temporal, and emotional). Wasn't referring to violence or fantasy setting or whatnot. I would categorize The Wind Waker as a hardcore game.
And while those games might have female fans, they're a vanishingly small percentage of players. That's where the mystery lies. I don't know a single woman who has played Assassin's Creed, but I know dozens who play Angry Birds. So the question is, how would you make a game like AssCreed more appealing to those lost 49 percent or so of the market? Having a female protagonist in there would do squat for sales, I believe. It would still be men buying it, playing it, and enjoying it. Look at Tomb Raider. I think it's all down to what culture says you can or can't do. Angry Birds - ok. Assassin's Creed - for kids and manboys.
I don't agree with it. Neither do these fangirls of which you speak. But we're not representative of society in general, and it's society in general which needs to change if women are going to start playing "Triple-A" games.
I really don't think adding a playable female lead character to everything is the answer. I'm a man and I have very little in common with the usual muscle-bound he-man videogame protagonists. You can play as a female in plenty of games (WoW and Mass Effect, for instance) but the overwhelming majority of players are still men. So I want to know what the article thinks those mythical "needs and preferences" are for female gamers. From the available data I'd say they're actually pretty well catered for - only we call them "casual gamers". Browser games, smartphone puzzle games, word games, etc - they're all at 50% or more female gamers.
This discussion seems to crop up every now and then and the question needs to be rephrased - why don't females play "hardcore" games? What is it about them that makes them inherently male? Me, I don't think it's about what your avatar looks like or how story-driven the game is. I think it's all down to culture. Same culture that tells us videogames are for 13 year old boys. All we need is for games to be great, immersive, well done, and for the shift to happen. It's gonna be slow, though.
Ryan Giggs. Not Gibbs. Agile but hairy Welsh player who's been playing for Man U practically forever. Or maybe the spelling mistake was a bid to avoid a superinjunction?
This is actually an EU directive, to be implemented by every member state. Governments need to store at least 6 months of logs. Costs to be borne by individual ISP:s. So if any brits were looking to the mainland for escape from this idiocy, think again.
By the way, the man responsible for the creation of this law is one Thomas Bodström, former Swedish Minister for Justice. He's moving to the USA. Please make sure he doesn't get to hold any public office...
Yes, that level of profit is automatically bad! A capitalist society is supposed to provide the cheapest possible alternative for the consumer, because if - and this is the case in Sweden - the current players are gouging their customers, the market can easily be won by a leaner and meaner newcomer until profits are down to as low as they can realistically go. If that's not happening and the incumbents are still turning good profits, you have a clear indication something's wrong: in the example of Sweden's power market you have an oligopoly strangling competition by raising the barriers to entry so they can squeeze more out of consumers. Nothing to do with "realistic" pricing there, just good old-fashioned collusion.
I'd certainly like for it to open doors but features like these won't really matter unless IE pick up on them, too. The sad reality is that most sites need to work 100% with IE and the attitude towards Firefox/Safari is "if the site's legible, then it's ok". Maybe it can get some headway in some specialized areas, libraries or job centers or some other place where accessibility is a real priority, I don't know. I do however know that the one and only thing that will help Firefox dethrone IE is browser stats. It needs to hit some serious percentage. Only then will people stop "optimizing" for IE and start building their HTML according to standards.
Great job on the DHTML patch, though! This sort of thing is why I use Firefox:)
I think Tycho from Penny Arcade pretty much nailed it:
"Maybe it's just because we've done comics on the topic for nearly seven years, but it's getting harder and harder to understand why violence in electronic games warrants such brazen showmanship. Presumably it's all about the kids, but they always trot out a line of dirty-faced kids when they want to get their own shit through. It's like bringing your son to a restaurant, and then saying it was his birthday so you could get the free Mile High Mud Pie. Maybe he gets a bite or something, but mostly you'd really like to eat five pounds of frozen cake and chocolate ice cream, and there's not really any nobility associated with that."
Some sites will try to foist an unsigned xpi on you, and this goes way back... can't remember when I first saw it but I'd wager it was almost a year ago. Example is here (NSFW), try to download a file if you want to see what I mean. It's a cracking site so maybe you deserve what you get, but I've had some seemingly harmless lyrics sites try it as well. Us moz users have had a nice free ride for a while and things are certainly going to get worse - we all know the huge window saying "warning, this might be unsafe" won't do a bit of good - but at least now your mother's spyware-infested wreck of a browser will have proper PNG support!
From TFA: is personally responsible for as much as $200,000 in losses to the industry Business Software Alliance, which represents several software manufacturers, examined the two computer servers linked to Desir and reported that each contained client titles exceeding $2,500 in retail value. The $2,500 value is a benchmark in the federal criminal code.
This is, of course, complete bullshit. It's like Adobe always trying to claim that 12-year-olds warezing Photoshop are thousands of dollars worth of "losses" when there's no way in hell they would be able to buy the software. In many instances the widespread warezing of their software actually helps Adobe, since in a couple of years those 12-year-olds are going to enter their professional lives trained on Adobe's product, not their competitors'. Doesn't matter, though, piracy is wrong and you shouldn't do it (like doom2 said, if you're playing a pirated copy you're going to HELL) but these claims always strike me as ridiculous. Sure, send him to jail for a couple months or whatnot, but don't yell about how one pirate cost you bullions and bullions of dollars because it just isn't true!
Replace one finite, polluting resource with another? Uh, I kind of fail to see the logic there. The only way to wean the US off oil is to reduce total energy consumption. Get people in urban areas to stop driving around in assault vehicles, encourage geothermal heating, research better ways of burning fuel, etc etc. But with the current interests in the White House, that's obviously not going to happen -- as long as there's good money in burning more and more oil, it's just going to get worse. Nuclear isn't the answer.
Okay, so I suck, all I had to do was look at the title page of Apex Designs to see the release date: seems it'll come out this October. GameSpot has some more screens. Why would anyone get the GTA game when you can get stuff like this?
Okay, so with a dev time that long, why does the game still look like ass? The GBA can do a lot better - I was in the GBA development scene for a while, and found a game by Apex Designs (which is pretty much a one-man outfit, a crazily talented programmer by the name of James Daniels) called
Payback. It's in 3d with weather effects, night levels, explosions, the works. The gameplay is much the same as GTA, it's just a beautiful game - and of course, since it's on GBA and doesn't have a big-name license, it doesn't have a publisher. Looking at the GTA screenshots I'm not impressed and IMO they should've hired James or maybe just bought his engine outright. There's no excuse for graphics that crappy this late in the life cycle of the GBA.
By the way, if anyone knows what's happening with Payback, if he's found a publisher or just given up... feel free to reply here. I'd buy that game in a heartbeat if it was available.
Well, I certainly HOPE you're alone in that desire. My bank, for instance, locks you to an IE-only security solution (well, it does work with Netscape 4.7 as well, but that's not even a browser in my eyes) and there are plenty of sites with crap CSS layouts and javascript errors due to IE's lazy rendering. Don't even get me started on the PNG support. These problems will pretty much go away overnight if Moz takes off for real.
Also, The more popular Firefox becomes, the more people will want to contribute and fixes will come faster. The Internet has absolutely nothing to lose by Mozilla browsers gaining market share. If nothing else it'll spur competition a little, make Microsoft realize that their browser just ain't good enough.
Yeah, it's a pointless metric. You can't measure fun. I had a blast playing both Max Payne games, they were supposedly "short" but had great production values. Then again, I spent... um, countless hours with Chrono Trigger. Because I had to complete all the quests and see all the endings, you know. And I won't even get into my old Diablo 2 addiction. But I honestly don't know why anyone would use "gameplay hours" as a reason to buy a game. If we draw the movie analogy (everyone's always dragging out movies as the base unit of entertainment per currency so I might as well), I really don't care if the movie is one or three hours long... all I care about is what it delivers: if it's good, if it gets me thinking, if I laugh, things like that. Same thing with games.
I'm actually in the silent minority who thinks modern games are too long. I'm not in school anymore and I don't have weeks upon weeks in which to slog through games that demand hundreds of hours of play time to complete the story. That's why I'm more into sports games and free-form action games like GTA these days (ironic how the GTA designer is claiming 150 hours, isn't it? just goes to show what a useless figure it is) - you can boot 'em and play for fifteen minutes without having to remember what quest you were on. Give me quality, not quantity.
Hm, that's actually a great idea. The franchise has to go back to its roots: climbing around in old caves. For some reason the developers think Lara needs to visit exotic new locations in every level and kill dozens of other humans, which just feels contrived and wrong - but trapping Lara in some ancient Mayan complex with an elder god/demon or whatnot trying to kill her is a perfect Tomb Raider setting. A little darker, a little more claustrophobic than the previous games, fewer but harder encounters and supernatural elements here and there, none or very few outdoors levels... it's a winner. Not all-out survival horror, but IMO making Lara the hunted rather than the hunter is just what the series needs.
Actually, I can see it now: left-over climbing ropes, who left them? And finally! some more ammo for the guns, they almost ran out back there... wait, the radio squawks. Did they get the SOS I tried to send, is that from the helicopter? No, there's no way radio waves could get in here... this is coming from inside the cave somewhere... a strange, tortured voice, you can just barely make out the words... whoa, is that a shadow moving over by the wall?
Why does each and every publisher need to have some grandiose MMORPG in their line-up? It makes no sense - the market is small, the maintenance costs are high, and with the treadmill setup everyone's using there really isn't room for more than one MMORPG (sometimes not even one, since most of them want you to put in at least an hour or two a day) per potential user. Totally senseless, it's been like that since the start, and I can't help but chuckle condescendingly every time a new UO/EQ clone goes down the toilet. Love seeing that herd mentality get punished, even if it probably means tighter budgets and less risk from the EA mooks in the future.
Now, if you really have to make a massively multiplayer game, why not try some new ideas? Raph Koster's word is far from law, games like Puzzle Pirates have shown that level grind isn't the only way of doing things and that it's possible to have a vibrant online community without levels, without requiring you to be unemployed and/or a college student to be successful, and without beards and dwarves. The MMORPG scene consists 99% of me-too games and we really don't need any more of those. So, I'm not crying over Ultima X. Its predecessor was revolutionary in many ways and deserved its success, but honestly - what would this game bring to the table that wasn't already there? Creativity, please!
Wait, a mahogany statue with ivory tusks, bought in Africa? If someone should be impaled, it's this kid's grandmother for buying that thing - African mahogany means rainforest and ivory means poached elephant. This is an open-and-shut case of karma and IMO that old hag got off lightly.
As for the kid getting a game, whatever, parents do stuff like that to cheer their kids up. I remember getting a copy of Master of Orion after yanking out a tooth.
Hey, what was wrong with Monkey Island 3: The Curse of Monkey Island? IMO that was a superb game, the absolute pinnacle of the series, even if Ron Gilbert wasn't involved. Great dialogue, excellent art, and both music and sound were to die for (the pirate song still cracks me up, I even have it on mp3). Don't touch MI3!
The fourth game, however, was... meh. The whole game just felt tired and strained, and the 3d look wasn't as vibrant and expressive (MI3 had only 256 colors and STILL manages to come out on top). They should pick up where part 3 left off, and in the same style.
Disclaimer: IAANF. But slow down a little there, cowboy - they've yet to prove they can make any money from the xbox. It's been nothing but a humungous money drain so far: they still have to massively subsidise every unit sold to keep their prices competitive, they've went on shopping sprees and acquired companies like Bungie and Rare ($375 million IN CASH! damn!) and only 5% of their userbase have subscribed to the much-ballyhooed Live service. Forgive me if I'm not yet convinced that's good business sense.
I also think they might shoot themselves in the foot a bit by killing the PC games market - games are a force to be reckoned with when it comes to hardware upgrades, and most sales of Windows are OEM deals with new PC's. I kind of hope that's what will happen, actually... it would be nice if the upgrade cycle slowed down a bit.
Normally I'd agree with you, but you know what? The swf format is open. If you had a lot of spare time on your hands and really wanted to, you could write your own flash player - or authoring tool, for that matter. Macromedia are actually rather nice to developers, and I'm sure that if enough people pestered them about a linux version of Flash (hey, they already have an OSX version of both Flash and Director, so it can't be _that_ far off) they'd deliver. I'd love that. But the market probably isn't big enough yet.
If you're into weird games, you picked the wrong console. Both the Cube and PS2 have quite an assortment of oddball japanese games, but the XBox is a very american machine: thus it gets mainstream US stuff and misses out on the wacky offerings from Japan. Why not buy yourself one of the other consoles? It's not like they're expensive anymore.
No, we don't, didn't you get the memo? You're supposed to back Nintendo in the console wars!:)
That said, I do find the whole Xbox concept revolting. Build a computer, brand it as a console, use your monopoly in other markets to dump it at ridiculous loss just to force yourself into the market? No thanks. Even if the machine itself appealed to me (too big, too noisy, too fragile, and... all those moving parts? m-m-mad, i tell you) I wouldn't touch it with a 3.048m pole. The idea sickens me and I'd rather have companies who actually need and care about the console market bringing me my video games. We get the companies we deserve, and if we choose to back Microsoft on this we're heading for doom and gloom in the console market as well.
Slashdot Mirror
"Hardcore" is perhaps the wrong word. But I was referring to the "Triple-A" titles, the ones with storylines and high production values, as opposed to "casual" games which require a lot less investment (monetary, temporal, and emotional). Wasn't referring to violence or fantasy setting or whatnot. I would categorize The Wind Waker as a hardcore game.
And while those games might have female fans, they're a vanishingly small percentage of players. That's where the mystery lies. I don't know a single woman who has played Assassin's Creed, but I know dozens who play Angry Birds. So the question is, how would you make a game like AssCreed more appealing to those lost 49 percent or so of the market? Having a female protagonist in there would do squat for sales, I believe. It would still be men buying it, playing it, and enjoying it. Look at Tomb Raider. I think it's all down to what culture says you can or can't do.
Angry Birds - ok.
Assassin's Creed - for kids and manboys.
I don't agree with it. Neither do these fangirls of which you speak. But we're not representative of society in general, and it's society in general which needs to change if women are going to start playing "Triple-A" games.
I really don't think adding a playable female lead character to everything is the answer. I'm a man and I have very little in common with the usual muscle-bound he-man videogame protagonists. You can play as a female in plenty of games (WoW and Mass Effect, for instance) but the overwhelming majority of players are still men. So I want to know what the article thinks those mythical "needs and preferences" are for female gamers. From the available data I'd say they're actually pretty well catered for - only we call them "casual gamers". Browser games, smartphone puzzle games, word games, etc - they're all at 50% or more female gamers.
This discussion seems to crop up every now and then and the question needs to be rephrased - why don't females play "hardcore" games? What is it about them that makes them inherently male? Me, I don't think it's about what your avatar looks like or how story-driven the game is. I think it's all down to culture. Same culture that tells us videogames are for 13 year old boys. All we need is for games to be great, immersive, well done, and for the shift to happen. It's gonna be slow, though.
Ryan Giggs. Not Gibbs. Agile but hairy Welsh player who's been playing for Man U practically forever. Or maybe the spelling mistake was a bid to avoid a superinjunction?
This is actually an EU directive, to be implemented by every member state. Governments need to store at least 6 months of logs. Costs to be borne by individual ISP:s. So if any brits were looking to the mainland for escape from this idiocy, think again. By the way, the man responsible for the creation of this law is one Thomas Bodström, former Swedish Minister for Justice. He's moving to the USA. Please make sure he doesn't get to hold any public office...
Yes, that level of profit is automatically bad! A capitalist society is supposed to provide the cheapest possible alternative for the consumer, because if - and this is the case in Sweden - the current players are gouging their customers, the market can easily be won by a leaner and meaner newcomer until profits are down to as low as they can realistically go. If that's not happening and the incumbents are still turning good profits, you have a clear indication something's wrong: in the example of Sweden's power market you have an oligopoly strangling competition by raising the barriers to entry so they can squeeze more out of consumers. Nothing to do with "realistic" pricing there, just good old-fashioned collusion.
I'd certainly like for it to open doors but features like these won't really matter unless IE pick up on them, too. The sad reality is that most sites need to work 100% with IE and the attitude towards Firefox/Safari is "if the site's legible, then it's ok". Maybe it can get some headway in some specialized areas, libraries or job centers or some other place where accessibility is a real priority, I don't know. I do however know that the one and only thing that will help Firefox dethrone IE is browser stats. It needs to hit some serious percentage. Only then will people stop "optimizing" for IE and start building their HTML according to standards.
:)
Great job on the DHTML patch, though! This sort of thing is why I use Firefox
I mean, "Kid Sarin", that sounds like a band name or something.
Some sites will try to foist an unsigned xpi on you, and this goes way back... can't remember when I first saw it but I'd wager it was almost a year ago. Example is here (NSFW), try to download a file if you want to see what I mean. It's a cracking site so maybe you deserve what you get, but I've had some seemingly harmless lyrics sites try it as well. Us moz users have had a nice free ride for a while and things are certainly going to get worse - we all know the huge window saying "warning, this might be unsafe" won't do a bit of good - but at least now your mother's spyware-infested wreck of a browser will have proper PNG support!
From TFA:
is personally responsible for as much as $200,000 in losses to the industry
Business Software Alliance, which represents several software manufacturers, examined the two computer servers linked to Desir and reported that each contained client titles exceeding $2,500 in retail value. The $2,500 value is a benchmark in the federal criminal code.
This is, of course, complete bullshit. It's like Adobe always trying to claim that 12-year-olds warezing Photoshop are thousands of dollars worth of "losses" when there's no way in hell they would be able to buy the software. In many instances the widespread warezing of their software actually helps Adobe, since in a couple of years those 12-year-olds are going to enter their professional lives trained on Adobe's product, not their competitors'. Doesn't matter, though, piracy is wrong and you shouldn't do it (like doom2 said, if you're playing a pirated copy you're going to HELL) but these claims always strike me as ridiculous. Sure, send him to jail for a couple months or whatnot, but don't yell about how one pirate cost you bullions and bullions of dollars because it just isn't true!
Replace one finite, polluting resource with another? Uh, I kind of fail to see the logic there. The only way to wean the US off oil is to reduce total energy consumption. Get people in urban areas to stop driving around in assault vehicles, encourage geothermal heating, research better ways of burning fuel, etc etc. But with the current interests in the White House, that's obviously not going to happen -- as long as there's good money in burning more and more oil, it's just going to get worse. Nuclear isn't the answer.
Dude, you said "Caldera". Not afraid of your karma, are you?
Okay, so I suck, all I had to do was look at the title page of Apex Designs to see the release date: seems it'll come out this October. GameSpot has some more screens. Why would anyone get the GTA game when you can get stuff like this?
Okay, so with a dev time that long, why does the game still look like ass? The GBA can do a lot better - I was in the GBA development scene for a while, and found a game by Apex Designs (which is pretty much a one-man outfit, a crazily talented programmer by the name of James Daniels) called Payback. It's in 3d with weather effects, night levels, explosions, the works. The gameplay is much the same as GTA, it's just a beautiful game - and of course, since it's on GBA and doesn't have a big-name license, it doesn't have a publisher. Looking at the GTA screenshots I'm not impressed and IMO they should've hired James or maybe just bought his engine outright. There's no excuse for graphics that crappy this late in the life cycle of the GBA.
By the way, if anyone knows what's happening with Payback, if he's found a publisher or just given up... feel free to reply here. I'd buy that game in a heartbeat if it was available.
Well, I certainly HOPE you're alone in that desire. My bank, for instance, locks you to an IE-only security solution (well, it does work with Netscape 4.7 as well, but that's not even a browser in my eyes) and there are plenty of sites with crap CSS layouts and javascript errors due to IE's lazy rendering. Don't even get me started on the PNG support. These problems will pretty much go away overnight if Moz takes off for real.
Also, The more popular Firefox becomes, the more people will want to contribute and fixes will come faster. The Internet has absolutely nothing to lose by Mozilla browsers gaining market share. If nothing else it'll spur competition a little, make Microsoft realize that their browser just ain't good enough.
Yeah, it's a pointless metric. You can't measure fun. I had a blast playing both Max Payne games, they were supposedly "short" but had great production values. Then again, I spent... um, countless hours with Chrono Trigger. Because I had to complete all the quests and see all the endings, you know. And I won't even get into my old Diablo 2 addiction. But I honestly don't know why anyone would use "gameplay hours" as a reason to buy a game. If we draw the movie analogy (everyone's always dragging out movies as the base unit of entertainment per currency so I might as well), I really don't care if the movie is one or three hours long... all I care about is what it delivers: if it's good, if it gets me thinking, if I laugh, things like that. Same thing with games.
I'm actually in the silent minority who thinks modern games are too long. I'm not in school anymore and I don't have weeks upon weeks in which to slog through games that demand hundreds of hours of play time to complete the story. That's why I'm more into sports games and free-form action games like GTA these days (ironic how the GTA designer is claiming 150 hours, isn't it? just goes to show what a useless figure it is) - you can boot 'em and play for fifteen minutes without having to remember what quest you were on. Give me quality, not quantity.
Hm, that's actually a great idea. The franchise has to go back to its roots: climbing around in old caves. For some reason the developers think Lara needs to visit exotic new locations in every level and kill dozens of other humans, which just feels contrived and wrong - but trapping Lara in some ancient Mayan complex with an elder god/demon or whatnot trying to kill her is a perfect Tomb Raider setting. A little darker, a little more claustrophobic than the previous games, fewer but harder encounters and supernatural elements here and there, none or very few outdoors levels... it's a winner. Not all-out survival horror, but IMO making Lara the hunted rather than the hunter is just what the series needs.
Actually, I can see it now: left-over climbing ropes, who left them? And finally! some more ammo for the guns, they almost ran out back there... wait, the radio squawks. Did they get the SOS I tried to send, is that from the helicopter? No, there's no way radio waves could get in here... this is coming from inside the cave somewhere... a strange, tortured voice, you can just barely make out the words... whoa, is that a shadow moving over by the wall?
Why does each and every publisher need to have some grandiose MMORPG in their line-up? It makes no sense - the market is small, the maintenance costs are high, and with the treadmill setup everyone's using there really isn't room for more than one MMORPG (sometimes not even one, since most of them want you to put in at least an hour or two a day) per potential user. Totally senseless, it's been like that since the start, and I can't help but chuckle condescendingly every time a new UO/EQ clone goes down the toilet. Love seeing that herd mentality get punished, even if it probably means tighter budgets and less risk from the EA mooks in the future.
Now, if you really have to make a massively multiplayer game, why not try some new ideas? Raph Koster's word is far from law, games like Puzzle Pirates have shown that level grind isn't the only way of doing things and that it's possible to have a vibrant online community without levels, without requiring you to be unemployed and/or a college student to be successful, and without beards and dwarves. The MMORPG scene consists 99% of me-too games and we really don't need any more of those. So, I'm not crying over Ultima X. Its predecessor was revolutionary in many ways and deserved its success, but honestly - what would this game bring to the table that wasn't already there? Creativity, please!
Wait, a mahogany statue with ivory tusks, bought in Africa? If someone should be impaled, it's this kid's grandmother for buying that thing - African mahogany means rainforest and ivory means poached elephant. This is an open-and-shut case of karma and IMO that old hag got off lightly.
As for the kid getting a game, whatever, parents do stuff like that to cheer their kids up. I remember getting a copy of Master of Orion after yanking out a tooth.
SEO? SCO? Whatever, to me it's all just a load of Santorum.
Hey, what was wrong with Monkey Island 3: The Curse of Monkey Island? IMO that was a superb game, the absolute pinnacle of the series, even if Ron Gilbert wasn't involved. Great dialogue, excellent art, and both music and sound were to die for (the pirate song still cracks me up, I even have it on mp3). Don't touch MI3!
The fourth game, however, was... meh. The whole game just felt tired and strained, and the 3d look wasn't as vibrant and expressive (MI3 had only 256 colors and STILL manages to come out on top). They should pick up where part 3 left off, and in the same style.
Disclaimer: IAANF. But slow down a little there, cowboy - they've yet to prove they can make any money from the xbox. It's been nothing but a humungous money drain so far: they still have to massively subsidise every unit sold to keep their prices competitive, they've went on shopping sprees and acquired companies like Bungie and Rare ($375 million IN CASH! damn!) and only 5% of their userbase have subscribed to the much-ballyhooed Live service. Forgive me if I'm not yet convinced that's good business sense. I also think they might shoot themselves in the foot a bit by killing the PC games market - games are a force to be reckoned with when it comes to hardware upgrades, and most sales of Windows are OEM deals with new PC's. I kind of hope that's what will happen, actually... it would be nice if the upgrade cycle slowed down a bit.
Normally I'd agree with you, but you know what? The swf format is open. If you had a lot of spare time on your hands and really wanted to, you could write your own flash player - or authoring tool, for that matter. Macromedia are actually rather nice to developers, and I'm sure that if enough people pestered them about a linux version of Flash (hey, they already have an OSX version of both Flash and Director, so it can't be _that_ far off) they'd deliver. I'd love that. But the market probably isn't big enough yet.
If you're into weird games, you picked the wrong console. Both the Cube and PS2 have quite an assortment of oddball japanese games, but the XBox is a very american machine: thus it gets mainstream US stuff and misses out on the wacky offerings from Japan. Why not buy yourself one of the other consoles? It's not like they're expensive anymore.
No, we don't, didn't you get the memo? You're supposed to back Nintendo in the console wars! :)
That said, I do find the whole Xbox concept revolting. Build a computer, brand it as a console, use your monopoly in other markets to dump it at ridiculous loss just to force yourself into the market? No thanks. Even if the machine itself appealed to me (too big, too noisy, too fragile, and... all those moving parts? m-m-mad, i tell you) I wouldn't touch it with a 3.048m pole. The idea sickens me and I'd rather have companies who actually need and care about the console market bringing me my video games. We get the companies we deserve, and if we choose to back Microsoft on this we're heading for doom and gloom in the console market as well.