I recently resigned my position at the company I have been working at for the past two years. Compiler development, and the team I was on were great. And, it was definitely interesting work — if you ever get the chance to work on a piece of software as big and complicated as a multi-platform compiler I highly recommend it. That said, an opportunity came up with a new company, one that was too hard to pass up. So, instead of compilers, I’m off to work for a company that helps bring gaming from PCs to Macs and Linux; something that I’m proud to be a part of, as a gamer and a full-time Linux user.
Although that’s big news for me, it’s not actually the point of this post. As it happened, I ended up having a bit of time off between when I left my old job and when I start the new job. It wasn’t enough time to go anywhere, so I thought I’d park myself on the couch (or in my chair) and play through a game from start to finish in a few epic marathon sessions. It’s not something I’ve been able to do in… a decade or two?
So, my first task was to find a game I actually wanted to play. This was no small feat in and of itself. Honestly, most games these days are regurgitated garbage, and amount to little more than Doom clones, or a clone of some other high popular game from a time when people were actually creative.
As an aside, I should say, this is partly why I like the casual game scene so much these days, especially on the iPhone. People are doing a lot of inventive things in that space, but the problem is very few of the casual titles have the gameplay depth (or length) that you find from a AAA release. I wanted something much heftier… plus staring at an iPhone screen for more than a few hours bugs my eyes out.
So, I tried everything I could think of. I looked at all the current new releases, I resubscribed to Eve Online, I picked up the Humble Indie Bundle, I looked through countless old game lists. I kind of wanted to pick up a new MMO, but honestly, as much as I love the idea of an MMO, I simply have yet to find one with the depth of gameplay of any of its non-MMO counterparts. Yes Eve Online is ridiculously deep and complex, but when it comes down to it, it’s still largely a grindfest, where you’re repeating the same tasks over and over again to accomplish some menial feat. Regardless of how complex the game rules are, the act of playing the game is really no different than any other MMO: go kill X of Y, travel from A to B to A, rinse, repeat.
Oddly enough, I’m actually a fan of loot whoring games, and grindfests that are the Diablo and rogue-like type games, so I often wonder what makes me enjoy those games but not MMOs. There’s a subtle distinction but in rogue-likes, the grind is not the purpose, nor a requirement. You’re simply exploring and the beasties you encounter are obstacles, the loot is a secondary (but important) reward. The push to keep going, for me, comes from discovering new and unique environments, and from some overarching goal such as killing a massively evil monster and saving the world.
After contemplating this stuff for a while, I decided it was time to go back to some old-school dungeon crawling, and ended up picking up a copy of Torchlight. It’s a shameless Diablo clone, but it is a fresh take on the genre. I won’t go into a review of it, since plenty of others have done that already, but I will say that it’s a great game. It’s got a unique graphical style, great level design, well thought out skill progression, is extremely mod-friendly, and addresses all of my complaints that I had with the Diablo series (mainly convenience issues).
Again though, this isn’t exactly the point of my post. After finding a game I wanted to play, I decided to see if I could get it work under Linux using Wine. The game has been given a “platinum” rating on Wine’s app database, which means it supposedly runs nearly perfectly. However, this simply isn’t the case. The game crashes on startup, and only works if it’s run in safe mode with a lot of the graphical niceties (like fragment shaders) turned off. Ultimate I ended up having to reboot into Windows to play it — a huge inconvenience 
.
So, to come full circle: I suppose the point of my post was related to my new job after all. The state of gaming on alternate platforms like Linux and Macintosh is definitely improving, but it’s simply not where it could and should be. I am really excited to be working for a company that’s working toward being a part of the solution.
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