Latest 30 Comments

Piranha Bytes games are in a league of their own. IMO, you have to play them with their unique UI and controls or you're not experiencing the games fully.

I started out playing open world RPGs with Morrowind. I toyed a little with Gothic 2 when it first released but found the UI and controls just too perplexing. What can I say? I was used to the Morrowind approach, even if the third-person view was clunky at best.

I finally played through Gothic 1 a few years ago. It was an amazing experience and I didn't find the UI or controls to be all that difficult to adapt to after all.

The experience also helped me to realize that when it came to RPG feature development, including animations and such, Piranha Bytes was way ahead of the game compared to Bethesda. In fact, from what I can see, Bethesda stole most of those ideas from the Piranha Bytes games.

Oblivion's Radiant AI (daily NPC schedules)? Gothic 1 was doing that before Morrowind. Same with better combat animations. Gothic also had better animations for jumping, climbing and just walking up stairs.

Yes, the controls are a bit clunky but that is part of the experience of the game. IMO, Germans liked their RPGs on the challenging side and the nature of the controls adds to the challenge.

The remake is unlikely to run on my hardware. I watched the demo playthrough. It felt more like an interactive movie and less like the classic video game it is based on.

Liam, don't lose the premium experience you will get from playing the original. It won't work on a handheld PC though. You need a physical keyboard.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: GustyGhostHonestly, they should just mainline LMDE and drop the Ubuntu derived version. Mint team spend way too much time correcting for Ubuntu's interesting choices.

Just to be the contrary one here, personally I am quite happy with the Ubuntu base. I get access to LaunchPad PPAs and numerous Ubuntu repositories. Mint smoothes out everything I dislike about Ubuntu and just makes it better.

LMDE is okay (I look at it from time to time) but I'd have to learn how to navigate in a whole new ecosystem and I'd lose the Ubuntu advantages. For now, Ubuntu is still the commercial baseline for most developers (although, SteamOS and Bazzite seem likely to change that in the future).

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

they're currently thinking on "changing that and adopting a longer development cycle". It does make sense, six months is a pretty rapid release schedule, especially for a distribution that doesn't have the vast resources of Canonical or Red Hat.

I have no problem with this. I can barely keep up with the current release schedule as it is. I finally get things stable again and a new release is out...

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

I was a big fan of Diablo 2 "Classic" back in the day. Couldn't stand Battle.net, however. I mostly played offline. I only stopped playing D2 after Dungeon Siege came out.

I would have been all over Resurrected if it hadn't been for Blizzard's Always-online / online DRM obsession. The 30-day check-in aspect of the D2R DRM is not a positive -- it's still online DRM! Some of us don't have 24/7 Internet access, Blizzard!

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: CatKiller£70/€80 is way too much for the base game of Death Stranding 2. That's $95; although European customers are subsidising US customers because they're only charging $70 in the US. £50/€60 would still be an expensive game, but not insane.

These games are getting so expensive that even on an aggressive sale i wouldn't consider purchasing. At best id watch a play through in 4k 😄

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Thank you for the tip. The game is fun. Will see what will come by the end.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Yes, I am well aware of Stenzek, including the PS2 emulation drama.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: suchDRM in fn Dino Crisis? Just install Duckstation, problem solved.

And using the right combo of setting it probably looks better. There are also texture packs for the PS1 game that will run via duckstation..

However.. Look into the drama surrounding duckstation and the main Dev. He is literally blacklisting certain Linux Distro's in the source code ( Which by the way is not fully FOSS & has a strict license )
Not to mention not supporting AUR or Flatpak. At some point i would not be surprised if he entirely stopped supporting Linux altogether. Fortunately before it was locked behind a restrictive license the code was essentially all complete. So a Fork will be possible at some point, even if it takes some time to get upto Duckstation's quality.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

LOL ... also with links to Palantir, the company which uses social media profiles to murder innocent civilians.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Insert goal celebrating British kid gif.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: robvvThe Enigma DRM has been cracked several times recently. Hopefully it will be cracked again, and even legitimate users may be able to play the game!

De-enigmated games don't run at all on Wine/Proton, based on my tests.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

What an absolute bunch of boneheads adding drm to this lol.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Page mentions a shareware arcade game called Last Defender by Wouter Scholten, but this old SunSITE listing says it was first listed in November 1996 so close but no cigar.

https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/docs/LSM/LSM.1999-08-30#:~:text=Last%20Defender%20demo%20Version:%201.0.5%20Entered%2Ddate:%2019NOV96%20Description

Unfortunately ibiblio does not seem to still preserve the demo, so hopefully its on an old CD somewhere.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: F.UltraThere is not a single mentioning about 30% nor about any value of a cut in the DMA, the DMA is entirely about not abusing your position as a gatekeeper, something that Apple violated by forcing in-app payments to be done by the Apple payment solution _and_ something that they violated by not allowing 3d party app stores to be installed on the iPhone and iPad.

No, it's about Apple as a payment processor because they take 30% (or some other amount). If it wasn't about Apple's percentage then the whole story would be done now - they allow 3rd party payments. But it's not because they still claim a percentage (now 30% - 3% payment processing fee = 27%).

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Buy it on GOG instead, that's a clearer message than being one of the 8 billion who also won't give Capcom any money. Voting with your wallet doesn't work if you never cast a vote, they won't notice you're missing.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

I find the framerate data interesting! Soon Valve will know more about how good games are running on many different PCs than anybody else.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: ArehandoroSmells of Palantir.

Some of that personal data is indeed being sent (currently experimentally) to Persona, a company in the Peter Thiel orbit, via his founders fund (they are on the board and a lead investor).

https://www.pcgamer.com/software/platforms/oh-good-discords-age-verification-rollout-has-ties-to-palantir-co-founder-and-panopticon-architect-peter-thiel/
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/persona-188f/financial_details

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

I do like the function discord offers (not nitro), but that function could most likely be found elsewhere.
so the question is where to migrate? a open source alternative would be very welcomed.
Because i refuse to scan my face to be able to use it..

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

I'm hopeful the new Silent Hill game is good, but honestly I've got more anticipation for the rumored remake of the original, after Bloober did such a great job on SH2. Meanwhile, I really should get around to playing some of their other games I already own, like Observer and The Medium.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

It seems to have problems with Ubuntu before 25.04 :
https://github.com/OldUnreal/FullGameInstallers/issues/27

SDL3...

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Did they overhaul the combat by now?

The rest of the game seemed interesting, but holy crap was that combat awful.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: gbudnyDid you find any commercial games for Linux published in 1997?

It's the only year when I didn't find any commercial games released for Linux. I hope it's not true because it would be depressing to wait for over a year for Quake 2 and Ultima Online:

1994 Doom, Doom 2
1995 Abuse, SimCity
1996 Inner Worlds, Quake
1997 Nothing?
1998 Quake 2, Ultima Online

Maybe someone remembers it.

This officially bothers me. Can't really say for commercial, but I did dig up the original 1997 incarnation of the Game Tome: https://web.archive.org/web/19970806044626/http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/tlau/tome/byname.html

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: gbudnyI think it would be better if Macmillan Digital Publishing were also a publisher for Quake 3 for Linux in 1999. We probably get a set of rpms packages on the CD, which is weird and problematic on many Linux distributions. On the other hand, Loki could survive as a company if it didn't publish this game.

It is true that we would have gotten Quake 3 eventually anyway, even if it took half a decade before the source code was released.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

I played UT99, UT2003 and UT2004 religiously. It's so strange seeing oldunreal support the latter but then when you think about it being over 20 years old. It makes sense. These games are so nostalgic for me.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Ah, DRM. When paying customers get a (much) worse experience compared to the pirates because publishers treat those customers like criminals.

Capcom won't see a penny of my money.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Games like this makes me smile out of pure joy = )

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

John Wick 🥳

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

I am super hyped. Not because of the Remake of Gothic 1 but because I hope it will be successful enough that they create a remake of Gothic II which is my favourite.

But yeah, I will ask my boss for vacation ^^

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: cameronbosch

Just install Duckstation, problem solved.

I agree that DRM in such old games should be not recieved well after Resident Evil 4 had it replaced and now runs worse, but Duckstation might as well be dead, because the developer has become unstable and actively seems to be hindering it, after making it not FOSS anymore.

I'd probably look at a different PS1 emulator or look at an in-development fork of Duckstation pre closing source.

Swanstation through RetroArch, then. It's a shame, because Duckstation really is that good, but it is what it is.

Wouldn't be the same without the drama.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Quoting: StalePopcornEGS Exclusive = doesn't exist [to me]

In a literal sense. I don't have a problem with EGS one way or the other, yet I haven't heard about this game even once until just now.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment