So killing combat orges with a sawed-off shotgun in a computer simulated battlefield contributes to free market space exploitation.... OK, that works for me.

Trickle down economics...duh! :)

Great. That gives me a couple weeks to finish "Far Cry", "Full Spectrum Warrior", "Splinter Cell 2: Pandora Tomorrow", "Rainbow Six 3" and "Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay".

What's great is that Linux users like me have created enough demand for them to give us a native version albeit a bit delayed.

It's fantastic how developers are now starting to produce native Linux versions.

Probably not just demand from linux users that's done that GR. The growing importance of middleware means more and more games can be developed without regard for platform. And with OSX Mac versions and linux versions aren't going to be that far apart, so the Mac people are helping your demand in a big big way.

It is also possible that publishers may regard a linux version as paying for itself as a prophylactic against piracy, rather than catering to valuable demand. If you don't do an official linux version, then your game may well be cracked and ported anyway, with cracked versions finding their way back into the main marketplace.

GH - its more difficult to deploy cracked versions of Games onto Linux platforms as you often need to emulate the various DirectX type libraries upon which most games are based.

You are right in saying however that there is a link between the Mad OS X versions and Linux versions. Their not a million miles apart in terms of their structure.

You forgot: computer hardware manufacturers work round the clock to meet unprecedented demand for new graphics cards, CPUs and motherboards as geeks around the world upgrade their PCs in anticipation. (What with this and Half Life 2 I expect nVidia and ATI shares to do rather well in the near future...)

I played the game very briefly, sad to say I wasn't all that impressed. I think it's more a showcase for the engine than anything else.

Admittedly my computer, which I thought wasn't bad at all, groaned and whimpered for mercy while playing it, so the framerate wasn't so good...

I'm worried D3 will be a slow and boring game.

The original Doom still stands out from all other shooters past and presents by dint of the intensity and excess of its action. It had rooms filled with dozens of enemies and was very fast paced, whereas today the standard is one or two baddies in each new location, with plenty of uneventful corridor crawling in between.

It will be interesting to see how good D3 is in the end. Because its ID, its been over-hyped. However, saying that the engine should be damn good and ID software do make their games work well.

Let's just hope they actually manage a plot this time.

Keep in mind, Carmack has released Linux ports of his engines/games for years now. Quake III runs on Linux, you know.

The best games are all on the Half-Life platform.

Make sure you check out:-
DoD - Day of Defeat
and
NS - Natural Selection

They're awesome and FREE (with a copy of half-life) and sometimes the enemy "AI" isn't bad as well.

I finally got permission to use a pre-release graphic. Enjoy!

What luck I have to be on vacation from 01 Aug to 14 Sept. But how do I tell the wife that I have cancelled the trip to Hawaii for Doom3

I predict a wave of people hurredly putting together the dosh to purchase a machine capable of running this beast.

In case you hadn't read it, PC Gamer has released a review for Doom 3, 94%, which if you know that mag means the game is great. The only "downside" they saw was that some jokes fell flat in the game...what with the topic being a demonic invasion and all. Oh yeah, and it requires a beast of a system to run. To the poster who said he had played it and wasn't impressed, I bet he was running the v0.2 Alpha, which was obviously neither optimized for good performance nor had all textures in place. BTW, if you absolutely can't wait another 2 weeks, you can the fanboy repaired "Beta v2" through BitTorret D/Ls at places like www.suprnova.org. It has a bunch of new maps, and intro, and *supposedly* the graphics core is far more stable now.

Oh, and if you couldn't tell i'm kind of eager for it too....

It was some dodgy Russian copy (friend of mine visited Moscow, Corruptus In Extremis), and it put me off.

I'll have a peer at the requirements on the box, and possibly buy it.

I'm more interested in the spinoffs that will inevitably ensue from the new engine. All the Half-Life based games were excellent, from Natural Selection on down. I look forward to similar stuff based on Doom3 over the next few years.