All of us, apart from a few misguided individuals, know that Linux is horribly inadequate for the average computer desktop. (Litmus test: can your granny use it? Answer: no). Now, I’m not some big Windows advocate - guess what operating system this web site was developed on? - but the fact is that an operating system that can be used comfortably by ‘developer’ types is far, far removed from an operating system that’s suitable for public consumption. Anyone who claims that Linux is “ready for the desktop” just means that they can use it - but as they generally turn out to be experienced computer users with slight masochistic tendencies, that’s not exactly a ringing endorsement.

What’s brought this mini-article on, anyway? Two things: first, the BBC’s Click Online programme has been showing off the power of the supposedly newbie-friendly Linux distribution, Mandrake, over the past few weeks. Their hardened technology journalists have been unable to get it working. “Incompetent fools!”, you might scoff, but the point is that these people are just the kind of incompetent fools who use computers, day in, day out. They want it to work, and work straight away, not after they’ve spent hours recompiling their kernel until they find a setting that works, or editing XFree86Config because their mouse wheel actually causes the pointer to skitter across the screen like a frightened bee.

Secondly, I’ve just had to edit php.ini to turn the security hole disguised as a feature, register_globals, off. That wouldn’t normally be worth shouting about - I’m not the most competent administrator in the world, so overlooking that for over a year wouldn’t be a big thing - but the thing is, it was definitely off before. Yet when I upgraded my PHP installation, using the handy Debian package manager, it decided to overwrite my old configuration with this new one. Not the most intuitive of things to happen, but this illustrates one of the major problems with Linux today. Either you do everything by hand (something your average granny isn’t going to be too happy about), or you abdicate some of the responsibility to the package managers, which manage to be inconsistent, over-reaching and often impenetrable, all at the same time. With a thousand and one different versions of various applications, all dependent on a billion other libraries, which are of course, in turn, dependent on other things too, you can’t blame the package managers for sometimes throwing their hands up in the air and overwriting half your stuff just to make things sane again.

Linux is a programmers’ and a developers’ operating system. With all its many and varied distributions, braches and versions of the core applications, no computer novice can keep up. Linux zealots are wont to call these people “idiots”, but the truth is that they’re normal people going about their lives, unwilling to spend hours learning the intricacies of their operating system just so they can get on with some Web surfing, email or whatever. They use Windows because it works for them - they don’t have to recompile their kernel or upgrade bintools every few months - but the Linux programmers, writing the operating system for themselves, fail to see that not everyone is like them. That’s no problem - it’s the evangelising “Linux is for everyone, honest” people that annoy me. Linux is not for everyone. Fact!

N.B. OK, I wrote this a months or two ago while I was preparing the site on a Linux system - nothing compelled me to post it now other than laziness. Anyway, it’s just as relevant as when I originally wrote it for testing purposes. :-*

I meant to post this a lot earlier, but one thing led to another and it ended up taking me, well, until now! Whoops!

Want a really cool deathmatch map for Half-Life? One that’s a beautifully well-done 3D representation of Melee Island from the Monkey Island games? Then get over to the SCUMM Bar immediately, where you can download it in its original form, or in the form of a handy installer made by the illustrious Benzo.

But I’m not content merely to offer up this helpful linking service! No, Melee 3D deserves more. But what? A trailer that performs a combined Melee 3D and MIGC-pimping role? I think so! ;D

Hope you like it - I think it’s turned out rather nicely. Download it here. You’ll need the XviD codec again, or, as ever, the rather useful ffdshow!

As someone who’s played Counter-Strike for years, but never been any good at it, this tickled me. Not that I’m implying there’s anything wrong with Counter-Strike, of course - no, it’s just the people I play against have a supernatural ability to take a hail of bullets IN THE FACE before calmly pulling out their sniper rifle and sticking a chunk of lead expertly through my nasal cavity. I hate those people. :~

Is the headline a veiled reference to the defunct email ‘magazine’ that mysteriously happened to look kinda similar to this page, or just an innocent coincidence? You decide!

Actually, having completed the excellent Beyond Good and Evil (far too quickly) I was pondering what to play next over the forthcoming, probably rainy, weekend. Eternal Darkness on the old Gamecube device, which I picked up for £5 at Toys-R-Us and got stuck on within about half an hour? Should I suffer more indignities at the hands of 1337 d00ds in Counter-Strike? Dream of one day having a computer able to run Unreal Tournament 2004, never mind Doom 3, properly? Or should I have a change of pace and play Broken Sword 3, which I picked up for full price soon after release but never… even… installed?

Or Wing Commander Kilrathi Saga or Freespace 2 or System Shock 2, all currently being ‘acquired’ from the excellent site for old and underappreciated games, Home of the Underdogs? Or the budget-priced Deus Ex or Broken Sword 2, bought but never touched, or the equally cheap Discworld Noir and Red Alert 2, similarly bought on impulse but barely played?

Or should I just conclude that I buy too many games and do something else? Aside from hopefully a few online games on the Melee Island map for Half-Life, that may well be a good idea!

Remember a few years ago when that Steve Gibson fellow, who has the makings of a charletan, was ranting on about how including ‘raw sockets’ in Windows XP was a really stupid idea? I totally agreed with him - despite the hysterical tone of his bleatings - but apparently Microsoft didn’t.

The world failed to melt, but Microsoft did cough up SP2, concentrating on security. And guess what’s been quietly disabled, or at least severely crippled? Yes, raw sockets. Oh man. People may say that Gibson is nothing more than a charlatan, but at least he always was, apparently, a correct charlatan.

Channel 4’s cunning and insidious plan is evidently to force me to watch television for the entire summer. Sadly, I think their foul scheme is going to work.

Yes, top satellite channel E4 is screening the first episode of the fifth season of The Sopranos tonight, which, despite becoming more of a soap opera and rather less of the incredibly stylish drama it was in its earlier incarnations, is still one of the best things on TV today. Then on Thursday, they bum me in the gob with the new series of Six Feet Under, which despite what some misguided people may say, is the best thing on TV at the moment - bar none! What will happen to poor Nate? Do I care? Sadly, thanks to SFU’s mastery of slow-burning plot and character development, yes I do. I’m not (too) ashamed to admit that the finales of each series so far have really depressed me. :~

Possibly in a merciful attempt to give me some spare time away from the goggle-box, E4 have thankfully abandoned their absolutely terrible policy of screening two episodes ‘back-to-back’. Yes, that great satellite channel institution, which forces you, in your weakened state, unwilling to submit to another hour of the same programme, to bust out the videotape. Then guess what! You forget about it for a week and have to record the next two episodes to avoid viewing them out of order! Before you know it you’ve got a pile of tapes the size of the Eiffel Tower waiting for you and you record over them in a rage, regretting it immediately. :~

The above may or may not describe my Blake’s 7 experience. :~

I promised it, and here it is - an over-long gushing review of Beyond Good and Evil! Feel free to stop paying attention around about now.

Why is it that great games go unnoticed while other, rubbish games, like Dri3ver (such is my contempt for its silly 1337 name, I’ve spelt it completely wrong!) manage to top the charts despite apparently being crapped out as an unfinished, shoddy mess? I presume it is because there is no God - or perhaps there is, but he’s a bit of a bastard. Admit it God! You could make people buy Beyond Good and Evil and Grim Fandango and Hardwar in their thousands if you wanted! So why don’t you, arse features? Yeah, strike me down and smite me if you want, but you can’t, because you don’t exist!

Apart from proving conclusively the non-existence of God, or at least that he’s a bit of a git, Beyond Good and Evil is a brilliant game. Everything about its superficial little surface oozes originality and general coolness, from the themed music in its various locales (”prrropaganda!”), to the expansive and beautifully drawn world inhabited by the characters.

Oh, characters? Yes, indeed - look below that beautiful glossy surface and you find: characters. Not something I’m used to finding in action-adventures - at least, not good characters who feel as though they’re anything more than a late addition - but the ones in BG&E are fantastically well done. One of the game’s major missed opportunities is the absense of adventure-game style branching dialogue, which I think would greatly enhance just about any action-adventure title, but especially this one. The characters all seem to have backgrounds worth investigating - particularly the kids rescued by Jade and her uncle - but all you get is a glimpse into their lives with short, linear conversations. A shame! But it’s not all bad news - the characters are realised better than in any other action-adventure I can readily think of, with each of the children having their own habits - from the foreign girl’s tendency to sleep outside to the one who prefers to sit in the corner. In addition, as you begin to turn the tide of public opinion on Hillys, previously hostile or agnostic characters begin to show their support for you. And this is without even mentioning your companions during battle, who - although they sometimes abandon you because they “can’t fit” or are suffering some other contrived difficulty - provide help rather than hindrance and help you along with their jokey dialogue.

But enough about this stuff! So the graphics are nice (so pretty!) and the music is pretty cool (”prrrropaganda!”) and all the fighting is sort of fun. What’s truly revolutionary, or at least, really dead good? I’m rapidly writing too much, so here are some things that stood out.

The boss fights - I usually have mixed feelings about these harbingers of terror, designed solely to provide an unnatural barrier to your progress. Yes, they break up the gameplay, because they’re completely at odds with the rest of the game. Well-done bosses can seem like worthy additions, involving real skill and cunning to beat, while badly done bosses are just a pointless exercise in shooting it in the eye, waiting for its arsehole to open and firing a grenade inside. Three times, of course. Thankfully, the bosses in BG&E fall into the former camp - they’re all well-designed beasts, and their defeat is usually a matter of progressively weakening them, rather than employing the same tactic time after time. The final boss in particular is just pure evil, but he’s all the more fun for it - I haven’t been so frustrated at a game for years.

The stealth elements - I think there were rather too many of these, to be honest. But the stealth sections were mainly well-designed and importantly, very achieveable - and only once did the game ask me to memorise where guards would appear.

The music - prrropaganda!

The plot - it’s a little bit lightweight, true. You, as the player and the character, know exactly what’s going on almost as soon as the game begins. It’s proving it to the population of Hillys that’s important, a rather original thought, and along the way you’ll encounter some twists and turns. As the game skilfully makes you care about the characters - rare indeed for a video game - these twists have quite a bit of impact (accentuated, naturally, by the excellent musical score) - making you want to get on and prove the conspiracy once and for all. How do you prove it? Your trusty camera.

Camera? Yes. THE most original aspect of the game is also one of the most enjoyable. You see, you’re a reporter - and you carry a camera around, snapping photographs. Occasionally you’re called upon to take photographs for a news story, but mainly, you’re taking nature photographs for money. This is a fantastic gimmick - not only does it force you to explore the game world thoroughly, it really makes you appreciate the effort that’s gone into creating the various creatures that inhabit Hillys.

Final thing, I promise. No, really, come back! I used to think that a truly amazing cutscene was only possible outside of the game engine - to produce that ’something special’, you had to drop out of the game world and into pre-rendered land. That was when I was young and foolish, and before I played BG&E (and to a lesser extent, the latest Legend of Zelda games). What I’m trying to say is: BG&E’s cutscenes are exemplary. Cinematic excellence. And of course, they have excellent music. Always with the music.

Beyond Good and Evil is a sorely overlooked game. And it’s cheap, and available for every platform ever (except the Mac ¬ ¬), so what excuse do you have for not getting it? Here’s the answer: none. God may not strike you down for not buying it, but my agents are everywhere. If you fail to possess the game within the next week or so, I’d stay in public places if I were you.