Thursday, Mar 24, 2005
One of the things that has always got me about Gamespot is that, for all their talk about the IGF and how cool independent games are, they really only review boxed games. This disappointed me back when I was a big player of Puzzle Pirates, which IGN reviewed back in 2003. Gamespot, however, is waiting until the Ubisoft retail release in a month or so. Guys, a hint: The game's available now. Just not the box.
What spurred me to write about this, however, is looking at the final box art for Puzzle Pirates. There is apparantly a pre-order bonus of pirate themed playing cards, which for a US$20 game is a pretty good pre-order bonus. It's almost half of the regular purchase price, and they can get away with this because the regular purchase price is aimed to avoid the bargain bin while still not being a total rip-off, because the game content that you'll spend most of your time playing is available for free. But that's not what I'm writing about.
Looking at the box art at http://store.ubi.com/item.jsp?item=PC_PIRATES&category=19, you can just make out a separate little penguin icon to denote the game is Linux compatible. And it is - it's a Java game, tweaked to within an inch of its life to run acceptably, so it's playable on any computer you care to mention. Mac support for Java is horrid at the moment, though, and it can't run some of the game. But they've also got on the box the standard black and white "Win/Mac CDROM Software" block, which leads me to wonder if Ubisoft has ever released a Linux game before. It almost looks like they've had to make up a logo for this one game, and so they put Tux the Linux Penguin on there, because heck, everyone using Linux knows who Tux is. I can almost imagine the phone call from the marketing guys trying to work out how they're going to represent Linux on the box, and the slightly exasperated voice on the other line saying to just put Tux on there, everyone will know what it means, I'll e-mail you a picture of Tux so that you don't have to go looking.
I see that the marketing guys put "Linux" underneath Tux, too, just in case the bloke on the other end of the line was wrong.
What spurred me to write about this, however, is looking at the final box art for Puzzle Pirates. There is apparantly a pre-order bonus of pirate themed playing cards, which for a US$20 game is a pretty good pre-order bonus. It's almost half of the regular purchase price, and they can get away with this because the regular purchase price is aimed to avoid the bargain bin while still not being a total rip-off, because the game content that you'll spend most of your time playing is available for free. But that's not what I'm writing about.
Looking at the box art at http://store.ubi.com/item.jsp?item=PC_PIRATES&category=19, you can just make out a separate little penguin icon to denote the game is Linux compatible. And it is - it's a Java game, tweaked to within an inch of its life to run acceptably, so it's playable on any computer you care to mention. Mac support for Java is horrid at the moment, though, and it can't run some of the game. But they've also got on the box the standard black and white "Win/Mac CDROM Software" block, which leads me to wonder if Ubisoft has ever released a Linux game before. It almost looks like they've had to make up a logo for this one game, and so they put Tux the Linux Penguin on there, because heck, everyone using Linux knows who Tux is. I can almost imagine the phone call from the marketing guys trying to work out how they're going to represent Linux on the box, and the slightly exasperated voice on the other line saying to just put Tux on there, everyone will know what it means, I'll e-mail you a picture of Tux so that you don't have to go looking.
I see that the marketing guys put "Linux" underneath Tux, too, just in case the bloke on the other end of the line was wrong.
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