ioquake3 1.36 Goes Gold 176
Time Doctor writes "The de-facto standard in Quake 3 engine technology, ioquake3, has hit version 1.36 recently. It includes a garbage bag full of improvements: in-game VOIP; optional external Mumble (voip); OpenAL; IPV6; anaglyph stereo rendering; Full x86-64 architecture support; Rewritten PowerPC JIT compiler, with ppc64 support; new SPARC JIT compiler, with support for both sparc32 and sparc64; improved console command auto-completion; persistent console command history; improved QVM (Quake Virtual Machine) tools; colored terminal output on POSIX operating systems; multiuser support on Windows systems (user-specific game data is stored in their respective Application Data folders); PNG format support for textures. Of course, there are even more fixes for security holes and other bugs in there. So, if you don't like ads and queues in your Quake 3 experience, get a copy of Quake 3 off Steam and copy your data files and key into your ioquake3 directory."
What, no torrentz? (Score:2, Funny)
I requested a built-in torrent app as part of that 'garbage bag' BUT NO, THANKS A LOT.
Well, at least it's got 3D support natively. About damn time.
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Why the hell should a torrent client be part of a game engine?
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I'm pretty sure he's joking... but that said, it would be good for sharing custom maps & game assets between multiple players on a server, without hammering the server's bandwidth too much. If it were implemented in an appropriately hands-off, transparent fashion, anyway.
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If you hacked the games to download assets via http, then you could probably just use apt-get :)
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to distribute maps and other assets, which in a download-from-server approach use up precious bandwidth of the server. You know, the machine that you want to have maximum throughput and minimum latency to at that precise moment in time.
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Spring (springlobby, really) does this.
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10 years old now... (Score:2)
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my issue with UT was a very local one, that people continually only wanted to play on the "low gravity" maps.
that, and Q3 being mostly 1vs1 duels, and the only team game people wanted to play was CS, made me give up on FPS games fully...
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Re:10 years old now... (Score:5, Insightful)
The irony, of course, is that in the wider battle for the online gaming marketspace, both Q3 and UT lost out very badly indeed to a free mod for an aging game based on a hacked around version of the original Quake's engine (ie. Counter-Strike).
I think looking back, Quake 3 was the point at which id went from being the undisputed industry leaders in the fps genre to "one among many". With the original Quake and Quake 2, if you played fpses online, you basically played one of those games, or one of their mods. There were a few other minor niche games, but none of them really had much of a wider community. Counter-Strike was the last game to really unite a majority of the online fps scene under a single banner and, as it starts to fade away, there doesn't seem to be any single successor (on the PC at least), but rather a broader fragmentation.
I wonder if the same will happen in the MMO market once WoW jumps the shark? If, rather than having one all-consuming leviathan in the market and a few minnows trying to snap up a few hundred thousand users around the edges, we'll end up with a situation with multiple MMOs well up in the millions, but no clear pack leader?
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And that's why GunGame Deathmatch was invented for CS.
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That's why I started out in TFC, skipped CS, and moved straight to CZ....I loved rockets too :)
Honestly, what attracts me the most to CZ GunGame is that skill with every gun is required and you can still enjoy small maps with alot of people (its harder to do that with rockets).
More importantly the damage feels more realistic. A grenade actually has a 5 foot kill range (in 1.6 a grenade could blow up in someone's face and do 70 dmg), pistol headshots almost always kill the person, the m249 can mow people dow
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slow? every time i played it, people was just about run and gun, no plans, no tactics, just "GO GO GO" and shoot from the hip while rounding the corner in a jump...
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WoW launched riding a jetski over a tank of sharks with lasers on their heads
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The irony, of course, is that in the wider battle for the online gaming marketspace, both Q3 and UT lost out very badly indeed to a free mod for an aging game based on a hacked around version of the original Quake's engine (ie. Counter-Strike).
Counter-Strike was a Half-Life mod. It had nothing to do with Quake, other than being in the same game genre.
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valve started developing half-life using the quake1 engine, gradually porting in code from the quake2 engine, and writing some of their own.
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and their insistence on using opengl may have allowed platform flexibility, but at the same time the engine that really took of was as much a direct3d tech demo, namely the unreal engine.
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A garbagebag full? (Score:2)
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Go STEAM yourself ... (Score:2, Interesting)
Steam is terrible and you can't sell your old games bought via that dreadful system.
And I still have my old QuakeIII CD ... somewhere ...
Re:Go STEAM yourself ... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Go STEAM yourself ... (Score:5, Insightful)
This got modded 'funny', but I think 'insightful' would have been a lot better mod.
Seriously, the 'you can't sell the game' argument falls apart for so many reasons.
1) If it's a good game, you aren't going to sell it anyhow. At that point, Steam's easy and free replacement policy (just redownload it!) is much better than a physical CD.
2) Even if you -can- resell it, you won't get the original price. You'll be lucky to get 1/4 of the price simply because you took the game out of the store.
3) How many people have sold a used PC game lately? No stores will buy them back to resell because it doesn't work for PC gamers like it does for console gamers. That leaves other gamers via EBay or Craigslist. Personally, that's such a bloody hassle that I'd rather just lose the 1/4 of the cost I might get back from it.
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Stores take back console games? Opened ones?
Nah, seems like anything remotely disc shaped and flat is sold "as is" with no ifs, ands, or buts about it.
Ever try returning pancakes? Same deal.
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He said buy back, not return. Walk in to blockbuster/gamestop/[insert your local used game store here] with a bunch of console games and you'll walk out with cash (albeit not nearly what you paid originally). Walk in with a bunch of PC games and you'll walk out with... a bunch of PC games.
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Local stores here take back console games, for exchange only.
Of course, you can trade in your old console games for cash at many stores, and doing so with PC games is nearly impossible.
Personally, its not worth it and I just keep my games usually but my wife recently sold off $100 worth of my old PS2 games I don't play anymore.
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I have got quite a few second hand games off these kinds of people and have never been disappoint
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Those people are why renting is so popular for console gaming. I'd love to see a version of Steam that offered renting tbh.
Oh well.
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But then again he keeps buying a xbox then selling to get a ps3 and trading that in for a wii which he then sells on ebay.... Perhaps he is not the best example to use.
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1) As soon as the Steam servers go down, this argument goes down with it. ^^
By the way: I can not remember having a Steam login, and I bet it does not exist anymore. But I have HL2 as a Steam game, which came with my old graphics card. So how exactly do I download this again?? (Hint: I can't!)
2) Even if yo don't get the original price, you get some money, and the *other* person can own and play it too!
3) That argument is irrelevant, because it's not about the money. It's about being able to actually *own* a
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Your Steam login still exists, they don't delete accounts with paid games for inactivity (that would be retarded). You forgot it (hint: what e-mail address were you using at the time, you can recover your password that way), but GP poster forgot where he put his Q3A disc, so whatever.
And I have a feeling that your game discs will decay before Steam's servers go down.
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You didn't buy the game through Steam. You bought the physical CD, then it installs Steam.
Buying a CD of a Steam game does indeed hurt the buyer, since it's the worst of both worlds.
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This got modded 'funny', but I think 'insightful' would have been a lot better mod.
Seriously, the 'you can't sell the game' argument falls apart for so many reasons.
1) If it's a good game, you aren't going to sell it anyhow. At that point, Steam's easy and free replacement policy (just redownload it!) is much better than a physical CD.
And when Steam goes out of business, you have nothing at all to show for any of the games you have purchased.
At least with the physical media, what happens to id does not affect the physical media.
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Time for some of us geeks to make some good inter-country VPNs for these authentication sites that verify your IP address.
A Squid-like proxy network that allows you to identify yourself as any participating country.
Sigh.
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Steam is a good service most of the time. But there are severe shortcomings even if they don't rear their heads often. Know what you're getting into.
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I think it's more to do with pricing games differently in different markets.
There was a huge issue with people buying games from Russia (or getting someone else to and then give them the cd-key) and then registering them on Steam.
Prices may be like 50% cheaper in Russia I don't know, but Steam decided to crack down on it to allow them to continue selling games to growing markets at a prices the market can afford.
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Steam isn't that bad, as it keeps all my games in one place forever and I never have to worry about finding the disks later when I want to play for 15mins and then get over the nostalgia I was feeling before.
If Steam goes down and away forever? Then oh noes I have to search for 30 seconds to get the game I bought and paid for on Newsgroups.
What is bad about Steam is that there is no built-in torrent support to make the damn games download faster. That should be a GD requirement for any of these online-based
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I still have an unopened l33t tin edition for Linux. CD was shipped separately so it would arrive before christmas, so I never needed to open the tin.
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When what doesn't? Can you give me a date when Steam implodes and goes out of business? This seems to be the main anti-Steam selling point. Under this theory, you also shouldn't buy a car (or anything, for that matter) because eventually it will break.
I tend to agree, I'll probably have lost the CD long before steam goes out of business.
That or the game would be so old that I wouldn't want to play it anymore anyways (ie. Quake 3).
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For this car analogy to work, your BMW or Ford or whatever would need to disable itself the day BMW/Ford when out of business. You would not be able to drive to garage to get "fixed" and you wouldn't be able to buy any parts for it --ever. Furthermore working out a way to get it to work again, without requiring the built in authorization, would be a crime (a la DMCA).
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Your faith in steam--a DRM server-- is far greater that I would give a company that just needs to turn a profit. Sooner or later some games will get phased out or they will go under or their server will not be upgraded enough etc etc. Its happened before, it will happen again.
Why the shot at Quake Live? (Score:5, Informative)
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Compounding that sad fact is Quake Live seems to preform much worse than the original. Sure it still works fine on newer machines but just try playing it on that 2000-era PC that you used to use for Quake 3 back in the day. When I play I try to keep my fps locked down at 125 but that can actually be non-trivial with Quake Live.
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Make something original contest... (Score:2)
Whereas I truely admire the effort that those teams put in, I think it's a shame that, few exceptions withholding, almost none of the games made with this source is truely original.
Most of the times it's just games that have all the assets replaced, maybe a few weapons added here and there, but always exactly the same gametypes (or small variations) from what we've seen in Quake 3.
When is some team going to stand
Re:Make something original contest... (Score:5, Insightful)
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You're reminding me of all the reviewers who complained about how 'sluggish' Killzone 2 feels.
Its not supposed to be Quake, you're not supposed to be able to run 40 miles an hour with a full kit on, and turning around while carrying a rocket launcher isn't as easy as you think it is :-)
Personally, I enjoy having to think before just running into a room firing blindly.
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Urban Terror isn't a clone of CS, it's origins are the Quake 2 mod "Action Quake 2" from 1998. The first beta release of CS was in 1999. Furthermore they feature entirely different styles of gameplay, their only real simularity is they both feature realistic weapon models.
Dear id Software, (Score:5, Insightful)
Please officially (re?)release hordes of Q3A CDs all across the globe. Its a fine game! Kids and grown ups alike all across the world would enjoy it. It can easily be the de-facto standard in entry level serious gaming.
You can cut down on support explicitly. Its OK. Quake community is very smart and big. It can easily support newcomers. But the legit media is something always desirable - it is convenient and trustworthy. But please sell it cheap. Around 4-5$. You will easily find lots of CD pressers and distributors to take away all the logistic pains from you.
And there would be assured buys of millions of legit cheap Q3A CDs by enthusiastic gamers worldwide. Its already a must-have game in your game collection anyways. Every body will be happy.
Maybe, its a business decision to stop issuing more Q3A CDs. So please make another one to start issuing it again. It won't make you losses. No way. And gamers would be happy.
The core game is awesome & kick-ass. 3rd party mods, addons, maps, etc make it ever so expandable. The community will always have some innovative way to modify it. Look at 'WoP'! Amazing!
In the end, I can only make a request. Please start selling Q3A: Gold Edition CDs again.
Over & out!
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Please officially (re?)release hordes of Q3A CDs all across the globe. Its a fine game! Kids and grown ups alike all across the world would enjoy it. It can easily be the de-facto standard in entry level serious gaming.
Damn, I'm old. I miss Quake MegaTF, which was the last time I seriously played online.
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No. Quake live is a poor excuse for a joke. It can't hold a candle to CPMA.
By the way: There is also High Quality Quake [hqq.de.vu]. With the Chili Quake 3 [moddb.com] high-def graphics update, based on the EvolutionQ3 [quakedev.com] engine, with the impressive XreaL [quakedev.com] renderer, new high-res models and textures.
Ads and queues in your FREE GAME (Score:5, Insightful)
That little sotto voce whine about the ads in Quake Live is really lame. It's a free game. Are you seriously so obsessed with hating ads you'll pass up the opportunity to get a free game (which, by all reports from amongst my Quake-fan friends, is excellent) and cop the occasional ad?
I'd rather not buy Quake 3 again (it's not just "getting a copy" of Steam, you have to buy it) and just enjoy Quake Live.
ioquake is a fucking awesome project, but seriously
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He's wrong too. Sounds like he didn't play quake live, but just listened to some of the whingers from its first day. Quake Live doesn't even have queues any more. That was a temporary system they brought in when they went public to give them time to bring in more servers.
The ads are usually nothing more than a billboard in the background that you barely even notice. It might as well be another wall texture for the amount of difference it makes to the gaming experience.
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True, you do have to buy the copy via Steam, but they run so many sales -- when I picked up Q3, I got Q3 and TA for about $10(!). At this point, with source code freely available, I look at it as paying $10 for the data files, to do with as you wish. Pretty freakin' good deal, if you ask me.
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Yes.
I play games to get away from the real world for a while. I already see ads on TV, walls, billboards, underground and my cellphone. That's more than enough, I don't want any more of them.
I'm mostly free of them on the web,
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Quake1 is both free and more fun than Quake3. Graphics in engines like FTEQuake work with Quake1 through Quake3 maps, and have shaders, bloom, etc.
Plus you can play CustomTF. =)
http://quake.phoenixlabs.org/ [phoenixlabs.org]
Quake Live? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Uh.. What's the point of buying Quake 3 anymore when Quake Live exists?
Uh, no Linux support yet?
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For me to finally uninstall Q3 would require Quake Live to give me (in no particular order) RA3, Threewave CTF, OSP, CPMA and Defrag. Then we'll talk.
Fixed so much (Score:2)
But did they fix the exploit in Quake 3 where players with higher frame rates jumped longer? It's a known bug in the physics engine [psycco.de].
So... it's an operating system? (Score:2)
Full x86-64 architecture support; Rewritten PowerPC JIT compiler, with ppc64 support; new SPARC JIT compiler, with support for both sparc32 and sparc64; improved console command auto-completion; persistent console command history; improved QVM (Quake Virtual Machine) tools; colored terminal output on POSIX operating systems;
At this rate, we should just expand it to take over those trivial remaining functions entitled to the operating system, and give it to Apple.
Re:Steam? (Score:5, Informative)
The point is that it is the only place I could find to legitimately buy quake 3. Quite a few people I know have lost their Quake 3 disc or key.
Re:Steam? (Score:5, Informative)
What's wrong with ID software's site? Or for that matter, Amazon, or your local shops (all of which are cheaper than Steam.. Amazon is 1/5th of the price).
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I bought this off Steam when it was on sale for $50 or $45 or whatever:
Buy id Super Pack
Includes: Quake III Arena, Wolfenstein 3D, Ultimate DOOM, Final DOOM, DOOM II, QUAKE, QUAKE II, QUAKE II Mission Pack: The Reckoning, QUAKE II Mission Pack: Ground Zero, QUAKE III: Team Arena, HeXen, HeXen: Deathkings of the Dark Citadel, Heretic: Shadow of the Serpent Riders, Spear of Destiny, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, QUAKE Mission Pack 2: Dissolution of Eternity, QUAKE Mission Pack 1: Scourge of Armagon, DOOM 3, H
Re:Steam? (Score:5, Informative)
You could always play a derivative game [ioquake3.org] such as the (free) Open Arena [openarena.ws] or Tremulous [tremulous.net]
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Is it just because it's one of the most recent game engines where the source is availible? Or is there some other attribute that people like?
Re:Steam? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Steam? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Steam? (Score:4, Insightful)
Not the content, only what ioquake3 replaces. The data files for such games as Doom or Quake are still commercial.
Thus demonstrating the distance between Open Source and Free Software in a way RMS never could.
Is there a Free set of data files available somewhere?
Re:Steam? (Score:4, Informative)
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Thus demonstrating the distance between Open Source and Free Software in a way RMS never could.
Very true, that's actually a very viable way to marry commercial games and open source.
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Yes there are quite a few full mods based on Q3 that come with their own content. For example, you could go get Urban Terror [urbanterror.net], a very well-made full mod on the Q3 engine.
And yes, the Q3 engine is very much open source and free software at this point. Artwork and level design that came with the original game is not even vaguely related to source code and shouldn't fall into some source licensing debate.
If you want free content, talk to the artists (or their owners), but you can do anything you like with the
Re:Steam? (Score:4, Insightful)
Thus demonstrating the distance between Open Source and Free Software in a way RMS never could.
Actually, speaks much more about the distance between software and art.
As every open source fan knows, there's no point in buying a software product in itself. There is a point in paying for art and high-quality entertainment, however. I buy games because they're the form of entertainment I enjoy the most.
I don't pay for tools to do my work -it's pointless, because the tools to do the work are already out there, free-as-in-beer-and-speech. I am willing to pay for experiences, though.
There's absolutely no reason why game companies couldn't do what id Software is doing: The (retail sales) profit comes from the data and the game experience, not the software. Gamers don't generally care about engines, they care about the game experience. There's already so many great open-source components that you could build awesome games around them and not spend a bloody penny on the technology licensing. Maybe the open source engines don't yet employ the latest and greatest technological tricks, but you sure can build solid games around them.
I believe that in our global culture we have place for both art and entertainment that is "traditionally" copyrighted and "closed", and "free" art (like awesome GPLed games [wesnoth.org]). But the game industry uses a lot of open source now, and I'm hoping one day game makers realise that there's no point in keeping engines closed - any more than, say, it makes sense to pay for a text editor, when there's bazillion open source ones out there for all conceivable uses.
Re:OpenArena (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:OpenArena (Score:5, Insightful)
Much as I dislike DRM, I support Valve and Steam. Unlike some companies that use DRM as an excuse for delivering inferior service/products, Valve provides a fast, convenient service, at a reasonable price, and produces highly-polished games which have massive replay value -- and they keep producing free-to-download expansion content for literally years after release.
I have no problem with giving them my money so that they can afford to keep releasing excellent games. Because like the parent I also like games.
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(Like with that stupid fucking "you wouldn't steal a car" anti-piracy video that's at the start of EVERY. FUCKING. DVD. That is what motivates me to download movies, is so I can just watch. the. fucking. movie without waiting for half a minute for an annoying fucking propaganda vid to finish. Sorry but my wife has m
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Or you could just download OpenArena
If id hadn't released the sources to Quake 3 you wouldn't have a free game to download
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I don't understand why eating cash, in a figurative or literal sense, makes them monsters. They have done you a service - what makes you think you shouldn't have to pay for it?
Presumably because since it's information it should be free. At least that's what I read on the Intarwebs so it has to be true.
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yeah I was kidding about the ads and queue, but I don't think I should have made that joke in the first place. heh.
Re:What, No OSX Support (Score:5, Informative)
the OS X dmg is a universal binary.
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Re:What, No AmigaOS Support (Score:2)
You have to be kidding.
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This may seem a bit contradictory to you, but that's because you don't understand the Reality Distortion principle.
No, that's because you don't understand history.
For quite some time (well through the NetBurst years), POWER had the upper hand. It had more registers, better memory bandwidth, and an instruction pipeline that wasn't absurdly deep. In addition, the POWER chips (and their derivatives, such as the G3 and G4) ran cooler than Intel's offerings, making them a much better choice for the sort of space-constrained designs that Apple favored.
But times change. IBM wasn't too interested in developing small runs of