joey/ blog/ entry/ Osmos

I love this game.

Love that it's so abstract and beautiful and meditative.

Love how it plays with fractal scale. Am I a planet or a unicelled organism?

Love that this basic game idea could have been written at any point since Spacewar (1961), and could be said to be recycling ideas from everything from that to Pac Man ... but instead seems entirely new, pure, and fresh.

Love that I can be playing it and it makes me think about things right out of a Greg Egan novel. Like about how it's most efficient for conciousness to be slow and not care about the passage of time. So you don't have to waste much mass on delta-v. Until carnivorous life enters the picture. Then you have to be bold, and fast.

Love that it has a linux port.

Love that it's hard.

A screenshot can't do it justice -- the video on its site gives a better idea.

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games in open source

Dear all,

First of all i am strong Debian adept and like all the open source software world has to offer.

That being said i still bought the game.

Why?

  1. I like the game for the very same reason Joey does like it. It's a jewel in the land of orginality and conceptual design.
  2. Open source doesnt mean always totally free. Good work deserves a payment.
  3. I am not a passionate gamer but now and then i cherrypick the good ones out of the huge pile of crap.
  4. Help the compagnies that stick there necks out in developing for the linux platform, they deserve it.
  5. I am hoping for a new concept for profitable use of open source in the gaming industry, something like 3 years closed after that timespan it should be donated to GPL. The timespan of the closed time is flexable, it depends on the investment made by the very same compagny to make a reasanable amount of cashback for there effords. That way all benifit.
  6. I hate pirating games to the guts !!!

So, before you run over me like a rolling train. Consider one simple thing: live and let live.

Have a nice time with this excellent game.

dutchfish

Comment by wil —
Awesome game

I am about to buy the game. The demo rocks and frankly I spend way more on games for my xbox that aren't actually as much fun to play.

non-free content on linux only helps promote linux as an OS, as at the end of the day if there are no games for it then you can never woo gamers over to the platform.

Of course, I love open source games too, but if you want to make a career out of writing games you have to ask for money for them!

Comment by anton —
Osmos demo
I played the Osmos demo and I can actually take my Workrave-mandated typing breaks without dying. So my carpal tunnels say I should spend the $10.
Comment by dmarti [myopenid.com] —
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