Mattiesworld

Portal: Prelude triggered me to finally try out Portal under linux / wine. Actually the only games I played since I’m on linux are Urban Terror and … Peggle Extreme. Don’t laugh, it was a Steam test. And I didn’t have any space to install anything bigger. Until I bought that 0.5TB drive a while ago, still didn’t fill that one up, so today I decided to try it out under opensuse 11.0 with KDE 4.1 and wine 1.1.6. I somehow messed up my steam install under 10.3 and since I got 15GB free on my suse 11 partition and up to date video drivers (since it is also a kde 4 tryout install), this seemed like an ideal environment. Indeed, it actually went very smoothly.

• install latest wine from build service
• install iexplore gecko replacement by surfing to an url: wine iexplore http://winehq.org
• download steam msi (exe no longer needed!) and run: wine start steaminstall.msi
• see the update fail and resume it manually: nice -n 19 wine Steam.exe or wine steamTmp.exe SelfUpdate “Steam.exe” 14
• create a desktopshortcut from steam. you have to use kde 4.1 folderview if you actually want to see it
• run!

Some screenshots to prove

 

While framerate seems okay and my savegames and profile seem intact, I did experience some graphical glitch: when looking through portals, sometimes white flicker occurs. I didn’t investigate any further as it’s late enough.

As a huge portal fan, I’m delighted to read we can already taste some prequel goodness through this great mod.

Apparently, the author worked on it very secretly for some time so obviously he was very disappointed when Valve announced it would also make a prequel. However this motivated him to finish it as soon as possible. Also, Valve didn’t see any problem or violation in this project and even offered its help.

Thanks to Klaas for the tip.

I discovered this great game site: The Independent Gaming Source which is all about indie games. While those games really feel back-to-basics, they also feel back-to-roots; you know, what gaming really is about. While I admit to be colored by some nostalgia, it really makes you ponder what good games really are about.

Due to the size of big game companies and the money involved, refreshing game concepts are too risky to try out. But this doesn’t affect the indie game developer who has nothing to loose. So we actually shouldn’t be surprised to find some very entertaining game concepts in the indie camp, be it maybe somewhat less polished or technically advanced as its ‘commercial’ siblings.

I just played “You made it” (runs fine under linux/wine) and although the concept is so simple, I was surprised how addictive it was and how I loved the added difficulty induced by a non clearing backbuffer.

try it for yourself

yes, if you’re concerned about global warming and feel guilty about that webserver that’s running all day 24/7, you can do something about it nowadays.

(referenced site is in Dutch)

I was just having another look at the airing start date for Battlestar Gallactica season four and was pleased to finally see some lift-off. But I made another shocking discovery: it seems prior to season 3 (which I am watching right now), there was a series of official short webisodes filling in the gap between season 2 and 3! Not that nothing major happens there, but you know, it’s scary to know you would actually have missed a second of battlestar’s gallacticness.

Anyway, of course, when you want to view this outside of US of A, you get a nice message telling you it’s not allowed. Luckily, we can always count on a few friendly americans to share all the goodness.