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Comment by eterm | Hacker News Reader

I can't tell if you're being serious or not.

Just seeing the word "tux" reminds me of a lot of really sub-par quality games and applications of ~2003 that people would talk about as if they were just as good as the commercial offerings.

People would seriously talk of it being "the year of the linux desktop" and "the year of linux gaming" while trying to claim that tux racer felt like a AAA game.

If the best thing the platform has to offer is ports and rip-offs of other games it's not a viable platform and it's insulting to people's intelligence to try to claim otherwise.

I'm not knocking the effort maintainers put in and I'm sure they learn from it and enjoy the process. That's not something to be dismissive of. But claiming it's superior to commercial games insults the genuine quality in games out there, and actually harms linux gaming because it reduces your credibility when talking about gaming.

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SuperTuxKart is an open source game.

It doesn't have to be AAA-worthy, the fact that it's open source is what makes it awesome. If I were looking for something proprietary and more AAA-like, I'd look at 10985 games available on the Steam store that are Linux-compatible (not comparable to 52616 available on Windows, but comparable to 18087 available on macOS).

I get your point, but please compare the ~2010 screenshots to the present ones and actually play a few rounds. For me at least, it’s more fun than a number of proprietary modern console racing games at zero dollars and open source.

If you're comparing STK to Mario Kart it's obviously going to lose.

But there are millions of kart racers out there, and many of them are pretty poor. STK is better than most of them.

You're counting the wrong thing. They're not talking about the number of kart racers out there, they are talking about the number of people who play better kart racers.

Like the reason "the year of the Linux Desktop" hasn't happened is not explained by pointing out that there are a lot of OSs and Linux is better than most. It hasn't happened because everyone is using Windows and MacOs. If STK isn't comparable to Mario Kart, then it isn't good. Everyone is playing Mario Kart; that's the standard to beat.

I mean, I was being serious.

Why would you think it's sarcasm? I don't think the game is bad at all. Modern games like action games (war, etc) cost millions to build, this is obviously a simple game, but it's on par with simple, commercial games to me.

I play propietary games since 1994, and a lot of open source games are almost as fun as the closed ones:

- Nethack.

- Everything ScummVM supports. Note that a lot of AGI games are amazing.

- Current Dave GNUKem. Addictive. A lot.

- Crack Attack.

- XUV. Ok, Ultima IV has non-free data, but it's still remarkable.

- FreeABUSE

- Retux

Technically libre games may not be on par, but fore sure you'll have jewels out there.

> Just seeing the word "tux" reminds me of a lot of really sub-par quality games and applications of ~2003 that people would talk about as if they were just as good as the commercial offerings.

How is that relevant to this game? The developers have put a lot of work into this game and you're posting about your experiences 16 years ago about things "people" said about games back then.

> If the best thing the platform has to offer is ports and rip-offs of other games it's not a viable platform and it's insulting to people's intelligence to try to claim otherwise.

It's hard to see any logic behind this argument. If you don't like like it, that's your choice, but it's ironic that you seem to think Mario Kart was an original game. There were only like a million racing games that came before.

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