If not vanilla Ubuntu, I’d still suggest trying an Ubuntu derivative like Linux Mint or POP! OS. Ubuntu has a huge community, so in the event you run into issues it’ll be easier to find fixes for it.
What you’ll find is that Linux distros are roughly grouped by a “family” (my term for it anyway). Anyone can (theoretically, anyway) start from a given kernel and roll their own distro, but most distros are modified versions of a handful of base distros.
The major families at the moment are
Debian: A classic all-rounder that prioritizes stability over all else. Ubuntu is descended from Debian.
Fedora: Another classic all-rounder. I haven’t used it in a decade, so I won’t say much about it here.
Arch: If Linux nerds were car people, Arch is for the hot rodders. You can tune and control pretty much any aspect of your system. … Not a good 1st distro if you want to just get something going.
There are many others, but these are the major desktop-PC distro families at the moment.
The importance of these families is that techniques that work in one (say) Debian-based distro will tend to work in other Debian-based distros… But not necessarily in distros from other families.
My most played Steam game is Dishonored, at 127 hours. I have replayed it a lot. A rarity for me, but I really liked that game. Dishonored came out in 2012. It’s taken me 12 years to accumulate that many hours.
HeliBoard keyboard is an improved fork of the now-unmaintained OpenBoard keyboard. It does not require internet permission, allowing it to be used 100% offline....
In order to add their names to your dictionary. You don’t have to allow it. But given that there’s no internet access for the keyboard - it seems pretty safe
This game is a blatant… homage to OG Legend of Zelda. But IMHO it does almost everything better.
The game begins with Link Kelesis entering a cavern where an old woman tells him to take a sword - and some boots because our boy can’t even dress himself.
After that, you know the drill. Top-down action rpg mode, slaying monsters, leveling up, finding secrets and better equipment.
Where it improves on the original LoZ is that the Master System was more powerful than the original NES, so the graphics here are brighter and more detailed and the audio is crisper.
The structure of the world is more linear than LoZ - but that means it’s a lot harder to get lost. Also, as you unlock gear and powers you can backtrack to discover new secrets in old locations.
The game’s characters vary wildly in tone from angry old ladies berating you for lacking the funds to shop to meandering fairies commenting on snow cones.
I replay Golvellius every few years on whatever the handheld platform dujour is. …I think it’s about time to give out a spin on the steam deck again.
Anyway. If you like that classic Zelda vibe, give Golvellius a spin. It’s seriously one of the best games I played on the old Master System.
Self-replying to add a couple other classics that aren’t already in the thread:
Penguin Land: A Mr-Driller-like puzzler where you are trying to carefully bring an egg safely to the end of the level - but it can only fall one block distance without breaking. Also, there are polar bears you can crush with boulders.
Zillion: This game has no business being as good as it is. Side scrolling adventure game where you are tasked with rescuing your captured spy-buddies. You have to loot secret codes from the bodies of fallen enemies, use them to unlock laser doors and progress further into the enemy base. It uses exceptionally large and detailed sprites for the time and is a surprisingly “mature” game for the Era. (Not meaning nudity, just that it is more interesting to someone auth the patience to map out a base and write down secret codes)
Skip the sequel, however. Zillion 2 sucked. a lot.
No - but it is the game based on the anime that inspired the phaser design! Er, more directly both the phaser and the Zillion game were based on an anime named Zillion.
The Master System phaser was such a slick design. Perhaps not as iconic as Nintendo’s blaster, but I think it’s much cooler looking.
Mechanically - both games are puzzle games in the same rough 3d-platform-puzzler vein as Portal. Instead of solving puzzles with teleportation however, you’ve got laser beams and force fields.
On a more metaphysical level, the first game is a philosophical investigation of what it means to be human - to be alive and an individual.
The sequel is a meditation on what makes societies succeed or die.
Both games are fun, the puzzles are just hard enough to be interesting with a sprinkling of well-hidden secrets. But the real reason to play The Talos Principle is if you’ve got an interest in philosophy - the storylines are deeply interested in asking some very big questions. … and they don’t provide answers either - the game poses questions and allows you to answer as you see fit.
It’s a lot stronger mechanically than 3 or NV - shooting is a lot less janky and the gun customization adds some great emergent quests.
The Boston of FO4 has its moments - a certain duck pond stands out to me in particular - but aside from Nick Valentine the questlines are largely forgettable.
Still, the core game loop is a lot of fun - go here, blow stuff up, scavenge bits to upgrade your stuff.
As a longtime Fallout fan (came for the isometric apocalypse, stayed for the 3D googie architecture) I still put 80 hours into FO4.
It’s a good fuckin’ game. It’s just competing with the legacy of a lot of other great games in the series.
Also… A big part of playing Death Loop was figuring out the proper order to kill everybody. … and sadly, there’s only one order that will work. So once you know the order, a big part of the challenge is eliminated.
It would have been really cool if the game selected a random ordering for your character at new game start and each target’s vulnerable timing changes accordingly. Something similar to how some of Dishonored’s missions could have multiple solutions.
… but I get why they didn’t. Dishonored had mission variants just switch up some text which is relatively cheap compared to having fully different behaviors and speech and so on that would need to be created just for the tiny set of players that not only finish but replay a game.
As someone who played through Dishonored 1,2 and all their respective DLCs multiple times, I was sad that Death Loop didn’t have the same level of repayablity baked into the overarching structure, but I still quite enjoyed the game itself. I just finished it once and moved on.
If you don’t already know… the “corrupt” text in the terminals is where a lot of the semi-secret story clues are - especially in the beginning. If you want to know how to read it, lemme know and I’ll tell you what you need. Otherwise, no spoilers.
That said, the puzzles in the game are pretty consistent throughout, so if solving 3d spatial arrangements of laser beams isn’t fun for you - it’s not gonna get any better.
I loved it. The mechanics of The Scene is still one of the most amazing bits of storytelling I’ve seen in a video game. I think about it frequently when I’m considering how video games can tell stories in ways that movies or books just can’t.
The game as a whole is good, but a little uneven IMO. But I’d put that scene up there with Braid for the sheer impact of storytelling-via-videogame-mechanics.
Well - I played both and I quite enjoyed Heaven’s Vault as well.
I played HV through twice - once for the story and then a second time to see how far I could alter that story with different choices. My wife even played a third time to try for a really particular set of events.
The translation game in HV goes much harder than Chants’. After the first playthrough, you get longer and more challenging texts to decipher.
Also - there’s no backtracking really required. The game is pretty strict about telling you where you can and cannot go and reacting to what you found or didn’t find. You can cut whole plot lines in HV and it’s no problem.
Which makes it one of the better games for replayablity in my mind.
Funnily enough, Diablo was originally a rogue-ish game inspired by the likes of NetHack. The engine was even (technically) turn based - there’s a pretty cool anecdotes about how they made it real time over the course of a single weekend with some clever hacks.
I don’t know if it was ever supposed to have permadeath outside of the hardcore difficulty setting though.
I got into it back when SC-II was the only game in the arcade I could beat on a single quarter.
I have played every game in the series - even the awful ones.
I love the stupid, overwrought storyline.
I love the wild assortment of weapons the characters bring to bear.
Though… I’d be okay if Ivy calmed her tits. Just a bit. Lady is one good sneeze away from a traction bed.
I’m hoping Bamco makes enough $$$ from Tekken to throw a few dollars to their other fighting game franchise… but I kinda doubt it.
Check out this amazing covering of a lot of aspects of this truly gem for Nintendo DS, which thanks to Wimmfi can be played online yet either with original hardware or through emulation, he kindly shared.
I’m quite enjoying it. I like the addition of the Heat systems, both giving an opportunity for special attacks without waiting to be nearly dead first and giving (healable!) chip damage. Making it timed - but triggered - adds a layer of strategy for when to kick it off.
It’s fun!
Whether it’s the “best” in the series is gonna be a matter of taste, but this is definitely a stronger game all around than 7.
It’s always been a muscle man soap opera with stupid hair. (Though, in the realm of fighting games it still has one of the most fleshed out storylines.)
Visually, Tekken 8 is definitely for the fans of “bitchin van art”. Admittedly not everybody’s cup of tea.
But… if you like that sorta thing it’s got some pretty badass moments. Lightning, lava, giant demons - it’s the whole package!
Adding a bit more to the discussion on whether game subscription can be “the future”, it looks like despite the heavy push made in the past decade, subscriptions only make up 10% of total video game spending in the US....
I’ve owned every PlayStation generation since the original. I don’t consider myself a Sony stan, but with the exception of the Xbox 360, I’ve felt each generation of the various PSX’s have had a better lineup for my tastes. (Halo is great, though)
This time around, not so much. After three years, I have purchased five titles for my PS5. And, by FAR, the game that gets the most play is my PS4-version of Minecraft, so my kids can play multiplayer.
If you’ve got money to burn, I’d recommend a Steam Deck + Dock and a Bluetooth controller of your choice instead. Most of the same games will run on either platform, with the advantages of PC gaming - mods, forward compatibility, access to the MASSIVE Steam store and library…
Alternately the Switch has had a great lineup of first party titles - as usual. Just pickup a pro controller too, the “joycons” develop drift so fast it’s not even funny. Every single joycon I’ve purchased (six pairs over five years) has developed drift in under a year. I know I can get them repaired, but at this point, I’m over it. Just buy a pro controller and have done with it.
(If anybody is curious, my five PS5 titles are
Spider-Man: Miles Morales
Spider-Man 2
Sackboy’s Big Adventure
Jedi Survivor
Diablo IV
All but one are available on PC. I bought the Spiderman games before the PC ports arrived. Jedi survivor had a bad port at launch and I really wanted to play it. And Diablo IV I was able to pick up used for cheaper than the PC price. …let’s just say that after hundred plus hours in D3, I’m glad I didn’t pay full price for D4.
I do also pay for PlayStation Plus, where I’ve downloaded and played a few dozen indie titles, all of which are also on PC.)
I’m pretty pragmatic. While I appreciate what Valve has done for PC gaming, I like the idea of them having some legit competition in the space. So when the Epic store started, I bought a bunch of games there to give it a shot. Outer Worlds, Control… And of course I grabbed up a bunch of free games, too!
…and then, over time, I’ve repurchased all of the games I liked on steam anyway.
Edit: for the downvoters - as OP, I officially congratulate Kecessa on their sick burn. It made me lol. So… If you were feeling conflicted here, go with the upvote.
Man. The moment in there where you have to actually do the digging… Still haunts me. It’d be a cutscene in any other game, but the impact of the change in the control scheme and everything in that moment. Brutal.
Braid is the closest I’ve seen videogames come to literature. The best literature is always about something else - not the plot, but deeper themes. And Braid feels like that, to me. Everything in that game, from the story, to the specific mechanics all tie into the greater theme.
This one was really an incredible port and although I also had the PC version, I still played a lot of this PSX port on split screen with my little brother at the time.
Using what was essentially mid-tier, five year old cell phone hardware, Nintendo delivered an incredibly detailed physics engine that gave players a frankly irresponsible amount of freedom. (I cannot imagine how many edge cases they must have had to fix before launch.)
But that physics system not only works the way we humans generally expect things to work, …it works fast as lightning and smooth as butter… Buttered lightning, I suppose. All while running AI, rendering a huge draw distance.
People give Nintendo crap for using weaker hardware… But maybe they should be turning that inside out - Look what Sony/MS have to use to mimic a fraction of Nintendo Power.
A monument to the potential of VR gaming, HL:A still stands far ahead of the pack. If you’ve only watched a playthrough or played it with a pancake mod, you’ve missed out on what makes it special. Valve made us feel like we were truly inhabiting the world of Half-Life. Ransacking rooms is a lot more fun when you’re doing it yourself vs pressing A-to-search.
It set a high water mark that has yet to be exceeded even four years after its release.
Kirby’s Adventure (1993)This wasn’t Kirby’s first game, but it was the first to include the iconic “copy” ability. Kirby’s Adventure was one of the later games released for the original NES and (for my money) is the most gorgeous game on the console. It pulls together parallax effects, detailed, multi-color sprites, clever animation cycles and surprisingly tight platforming.
I’ve never been “big” into Kirby games, but this one is the exception. It’s one of my favorite NES titles. I’d replay this over either NES Zelda any day.
I loved the original back in the 90s. But hooboy, playing it now feels rough. Mouse look hadn’t been invented yet (or at least, not popularized) and UI experimentation was still a thing. Remember, the OG System Shock released only a year after Doom (in which moving the mouse “up” moved your character forward.)
I love this reboot. It keeps so much of what made the original great and sands off a lot of the rough edges. I wish they’d made inventory management a little less clunky (it’s a little too true to the original there), but that’s really my only complaint.
If you like immersive sim games like Deus Ex or Dishonored, I highly recommend it.
Typically, the thing that sets ImmSims apart is that they have a number of interlocking systems that allow the player to solve objectives in different ways.
Stealth, Speech, and Shooting are the usual suspects, with hacking, gunplay and conversation trees well represented in the genre.
But generally, it’s a philosophy about designing for extreme player agency.
On one end you have something like, say, Tetris. As the player, you can direct blocks, but you can’t stop them from falling. The game gives the player little autonomy to direct. Blocks arrive and the player places them (or doesn’t) until the game ends.
On the other, you have something like Dishonored, where you can choose to kill everyone or no one. You can choose to accept and make use of the magical powers available to you - or reject them all and fight with only human strength and your own wits. The world itself then reacts to these choices and the flow of the game changes accordingly.
I think Larian’s Baldur’s Gate 3 can arguably be called an ImmSim thanks to its insane level of player reactivity.
Basically, if your choices as a player can actually alter the game world and your path through the story, thanks to the emergent interactions of interrelated systems… It’s probably an ImmSim.
I’ve been recently been thinking about Arkane Studio’s Prey which is a immersive sim, with a pretty good rogue like dlc, that probably has one of the strongest hooks of any game I’ve played. If you liked Halflife, System Shock, or Deus Ex it’s definitely worth a play....
Microsoft is silently installing Copilot onto Windows Server 2022 (mastodon.gamedev.place)
https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/51faa0ca-2b47-4eba-bc8c-d9edabba5ca9.png
Why there are 861 roguelike deckbuilders on Steam all of a sudden (arstechnica.com)
HeliBoard, a privacy-conscious open-source Android keyboard based on AOSP/now-unmaintained OpenBoard, is now available on F-Droid (f-droid.org)
HeliBoard keyboard is an improved fork of the now-unmaintained OpenBoard keyboard. It does not require internet permission, allowing it to be used 100% offline....
Anybody have favorite Master System games? (lemmus.org)
Why are younger generations embracing the retro game revival? (www.theguardian.com)
The Talos Principle II: The Most Underrated Video Game of the Last Decade (www.youtube.com)
The Steam Spring Sale is now in full swing (www.destructoid.com)
free: Deus Ex: Mankind Divided on epic (store.epicgames.com)
What are some good games with *zero* replayability?
I want to try and play some more games. That feels more fulfilling if you play games that you can finish and be done with....
Are there any games like Diablo but not Diablo because Diablo?
Street Fighter Vs Mortal Kombat
Which of the two fighting franchises do you prefer most? I preferred SF likely because I liked the roster of characters from dhalsim to blanka....
The Most Ambitious Manga Fighting Game - Jump Ultimate Stars (youtu.be)
Check out this amazing covering of a lot of aspects of this truly gem for Nintendo DS, which thanks to Wimmfi can be played online yet either with original hardware or through emulation, he kindly shared.
Tekken 8 Review : Why Tekken 8 is the Best Tekken Game Ever (youtu.be)
Veteran Videogame Analyst: Subscription growth has flattened [in video games] (files.catbox.moe)
Adding a bit more to the discussion on whether game subscription can be “the future”, it looks like despite the heavy push made in the past decade, subscriptions only make up 10% of total video game spending in the US....
This console generation seems skippable
I’ve never skipped a console gen starting from Super NES, PS1 through 4 plus the Switch Oled 5 years after launch of the OG Switch...
What's up with Epic Games?
I can’t seem to find that one comment explaining the issue with them…...
[Zelda II]I did it! (lemmy.world)
I’ve been determined to finally beat Zelda II and determine that I would do it without save states and without a guide....
Epic explains why it hasn't sued Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft over 30% fee (www.gamesindustry.biz)
What moment from a video game made you cry?
For me, it was Princess Rosalina’s backstory in Super Mario Galaxy.
Braid, Anniversary Edition Release Date Trailer (www.youtube.com)
April 30, 2024...
Quake II on the PlayStation 1 is an incredible port. Here is why. (youtu.be)
This one was really an incredible port and although I also had the PC version, I still played a lot of this PSX port on split screen with my little brother at the time.
deleted_by_author
How System Shock's Reboot Wrestles With Adapting Its Legacy (www.youtube.com)
Indie gaming is on the verge of an immersive sim eruption (www.rockpapershotgun.com)
What games can you recommend that didn't get the appreciation that they deserved?
I’ve been recently been thinking about Arkane Studio’s Prey which is a immersive sim, with a pretty good rogue like dlc, that probably has one of the strongest hooks of any game I’ve played. If you liked Halflife, System Shock, or Deus Ex it’s definitely worth a play....
Beautiful games?
Suggest some beautiful games. Genre doesn’t matter. 3d or 2d no big deal. Hyper Light Drifter, Satisfactory, Cliff Empire, etc....