• They are much cheaper even at US dollar or Euro rates
• You can browse and buy from the comfort of home without a visit to the store
• No stuffing around with disks, ie non-pirate no-CD functionality.

There’s also some problems;

• I have yet to see a provider of these services deal with the issue of game access once they close, for example. All that money and gaming goodness? Goodbye most probably.
• You have to actually download the games. If your connection is slow this is a very long delay, if you have bandwidth limits this is costing you extra.

There also some interesting developments. Digital Rights Management (DRM) is one of the least exiting of course, but it does show a changing landscape from games being cut and dried products to games being services offered. I expect this to continue until we simply buy game time at a very low rate but we don’t actually own the games. Games as services started long ago thanks to the internet with such simple things as patches and forums. Now these are often automatic or integrated. This is happening more with expansions and mods and extra content of various sorts. In a sense the Massive Multiplayer Online software (MMOs) such as World of Warcraft are miles ahead in this games-as-services development. I expect we will see the same with other software.

Socialised gaming is also a development which shouldn’t be ignored and this includes the ‘achievement’ systems, twitter-like info feeds, chats and voice services.

More exciting are the new blood of Indy developers getting their hands on exposure and thus money as well as the revival via smaller devices such as mobiles, iPads and netbooks. These can’t run the usual new games. That new game market has ossified into the same old FPS or other cookie cutter genre offering and so a lot of clever, interesting and dare I say fun ideas have been coming into such non standard games on those platforms.

Anyway back to the topic at hand. There are several digital download games providers of note;

Steam is probably the most popular. To use steam you have to run extra software which is essentially a games browser, social and download tool. I can’t say I like that. Games on steam are well presented and quite numerous. There appears to be a younger focus. As I have reported before steam support is very slow. The real Steam killer for me though is it installs games a bit differently and so many mods will not work with games from Steam.

Gamersgate is not as well known. It also has a very large range of software which is very simple to download and install. It’s often cheaper than the competition too. Gamersgate support is even worse though. One game bought had a payment issue due to their credit processor where funds left my account but no game was delivered. Gamersgate, while fast responding, did nothing to help and I had to go through the bother of a charge reversal to solve the problem.

Direct2Drive is the one I probably use most. This is more because it rarely seems to have problems with it. Simple to use, decent range and no issues.

Good old games known as GOG are a specialist one who have, as their name suggests, a bunch of old games available. In the context of old games GOG has the best range. I do think GOG are a bit overpriced.

The last major competitor Impulse, requires software to be installed to use and frankly I haven’t given it a go nor seen reason to.

There are many other digital providers. Specific companies such as EA or MMO ones have their own digital download services. There is certainly a lot of competition which is good for prices and improvements too.

If anyone knows a reliable Australian one let me know.

Better because it’s more freedom oriented and not nearly so slow and also better because anyone can contribute to creation in the game world. Therefore it has a plethora of objects, clothes, houses etc and if you’re not happy with it you can make your own.

To some people calling it a game is unwarranted and they take the idea of it being a true second life quite seriously but most people are more casual participants. To those that desire this rebirth into a new digital life there’s an escapism experience that is relatively rich compared to anything I’ve seen before, the closest being Project Entropia. In a sense this is a bit like the Matrix and in many ways even more insane. For the severe escapism naturally attracts people with issues who want to leave them behind to be happy.

There are actually quite a few things to do in SecondLife (SL) and I’ve given a few of them a whirl myself. Anybody who is at least slightly aware of this MMO knows that the optional sexual element is very strong in it. Let’s face it, it’s a risk-free way to explore any fantasy you like, even ones which are simply not physically possible on this planet. But you know once you pass 18 or so sex can’t really fill the whole day any more, can it?

To alarmists it would seem sex is all there is on SecondLife but actually the main activity is social networking. It’s like a 3d Facebook really letting you connect and chat and share with other people online either anonymously or matching the real you.

Another thing many do is shopping. Both sides of the coin. Which means buying the stuff other people make as well as selling the stuff you make and actually creating it and the shops you flog it off in. In case you didn’t know already everything bought in game is done so with ‘Lindens’ which are currency exchange matched with real US dollars. The shopping is truly extensive. In some ways even more than the real deal on Planet Earth. The marketing ideas I’ve seen are really rather advanced.

There’s also exploring which I enjoy thoroughly because I like to see the clever, flashy or beautiful things people can create in such a medium. And I have indeed seen some wonders. Holodecks, theme parks, a model of a computer, hypnotism balls and a remarkable project showing you how a schizophrenic experiences life. These are just a few.

There’s a strong presence of education here and even some real employment. I haven’t delved into that such. So far it seems to me the education aspect is too quiet and they are building it up in the hope of bigger things to come. A kind of online classes experience where you can become educated anytime anywhere.

During my time I’ve also delved into religion which has long been of interest to me. Many are represented. Universal Unitarianism, Paganism, Wicca, Christianity in various forms, Buddhism, Hinduism and Judaism for example. These are seriously spiritual places where people attend services, pray, preach, meditate and connect to others of their religion, especially where the religion is not locally popular enough for real life interaction. Some of the places of worship are spectacular.

There’s also quite a strong presence of dances and DJs. The dancing is naturally clever animations, no sweat broken but the DJ activity is real, streamed live via the internet.

However for me it’s true like the Sims there’s a point where it gets too shallow and boring and real life beckons. I have no idea where things will go for me in SecondLife but I can say without doubt that it’s been one of my most fascinating experiences.

The ability to use Windows based applications is very useful for many Linux users. For new users this mitigates the learning curve of so many new applications at the same time as the operating system. It also broadens the application base which can be important in areas in which Linux is not well supported, such as games, or it can make speciality applications usable on Linux which can often be useful to business.

There are 3 real ways to achieve this.

1) Run Windows as dual boot. This is my primary route and easy to do. It lets me run whichever operating system I like. The cost is the time delay of rebooting into whichever OS I desire and the waste of hard drive capacity implicit in running two operating system and often two copies of the same application, one for each operating system. I also have to pay for Windows.

2) Run Windows emulators or virtualisation software. These exist but I’ve never tried them and the drawbacks are significant.

3) Run WINE. Wine runs Windows based applications natively which, needless to say, is not trivial. However it’s got a lot of advantages, particularly speed. Speed in getting things going and speed of the running application.

Wine has a long history. Since 1995 it’s been reported to run MS Office and currently runs it near flawlessly. However MS Office has become less important to Linux users since OpenOffice is just as good in practical terms. It also has some degree of popularity and can load and save native MS Office documents anyway. But there’s more Windows applications than MSOffice.

Recently WINE has leapt forward in development and, more importantly, functionality. I am quite late on the bandwagon having only heard of it since version 0.9 or so and used it since 1.1.0. It’s now up to 1.1.14.

I’ve been astounded at how good it is, though it certainly has a long way yet to go. I play a lot of games and in my experience with using it the results have been very approximately this way;

Around ¼ of games will not run whatsoever. Around ¼ can be run but are either virtually unplayable or require rather complicated steps to get working for a non-expert. The next ¼ run with some reasonable tweaking. The final ¼ run out of the box.

I’ve also noticed some preconceptions that might need correcting;

1) Only older games and applications work well: Actually the game’s age doesn’t really make that much difference to the success rate. I’ve had old games fail on me where more modern games might work fine. The only exception to this are games that require directX10 components.

2) Applications running on WINE are slow: Nope. Since it runs natively, if there are no serious slowing bugs, the games will run at speed comparable to Windows. Sometimes a little faster, sometimes a little slower. Practically speaking I’ve only noticed slowdown in 10% of games I’ve tried.

3) Applications running on WINE are less stable: Well it’s like this. The games that do not run or do not run well are definitely not stable. But those that do I have found just as stable if not more so than on Windows. If a game is known to crash on WINE it will usually be reported.

4) WINE is hard to setup and use: Actually WINE is very easy to setup but it can be hard to use for those who have little expertise, especially if you want to get that extra ¼ of applications and games to work.

5) WINE is an emulator: No no no! This one is so hated that WINE has the acronym Wine Is Not an Emulator.

I would encourage Linux users who want to try running Windows based software to give WINE a go. I will be posting updates related to WINE in due course. I hope to cover support, how to set things up, useful information, common issues and maybe some specific games.

Dosbox

If you don’t know what MS-DOS is, thank your lucky stars and know the rest of this will probably be worthless to you.

One might wonder why you would run Dosbox on a Windows system. The short answer is that it was possible to run MS-DOS applications on older versions of Windows well but now, with Windows Vista, it’s not really possible.

Their website linked to above is quite useful including information on application and game compatibility, the progress of the Dosbox team, a wiki and other useful information. Dosbox is open source and is free to use.

Dosbox is currently up to version 0.72 and is extremely functional for games but is said to need a bit more work for more office-like applications due to weaker networking, printer and communication support. Dosbox does have cdrom, iso image, sound, mouse, joystick, modem and of course graphics support.

The basic Dosbox is easy to install but is just as clunky to use as the original MS-DOS. So it’s a great idea to run a Dosbox GUI frontend which handles launch and hardware settings for each application or game you want to run. For Linux I use the ‘DOSBox Game Launcher’ DBGL and this will work with any operating system that supports java. There are also other good frontends out there.

With Dosbox and the frontend I can complete a profile with whatever CPU cycles, memory and hardware support I need in order to install and set the game or application up. Then I can run it with just one double click. It also allows for a nice collection of screenshots if you so desire.

In practical terms I can run about 95% of any MS-DOS games I throw at it without any problems. The last 5% have some kind of flaw like botched graphics or a joystick problem. The sound is occasionally off on several games. Using Dosbox and the frontend is considerably less hassle than the original MSDOS. It’s much easier to set up, very fast to launch and easy to change from one game to another.

I thoroughly recommend it to any nostalgia ridden gamer.

Because of the unusual delivery system and the dependence on Steam I know that Steam needs good customer support because there’s no other real option to get around problems with those games.

So I tested them. Sent a simple question to technical support to see how long they would take to resolve the problem. It took them 3 days to bother responding.

That’s far too long so no Steam for me I think.