Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: psyminEveryone should get on Mastodon or another federated social media system :)

Well, except for those of us curmudgeons who don't do social media at all.

And yet, here you are in a comment section.

I am very intelligent.

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Games I just tried:

A Castle Full of Cats: Charming little hidden object game, but a bit on the easy side. Probably aimed at a younger age group than I'm in. Could use more interactive elements, and the style of character dialogue boxes clashes badly with the style of everything else.

Protocorgi: Cute SHMUP featuring a cybernetic corgi. All the stuff you'd expect, missiles and weird enemies. Controls very smoothly. A bit hard on the eyes though, but that's normal for SHMUPs for me.

The Palace on the Hill: Point and click life sim, set in what seems to be India I think, about a young painter whose family farm is failing and he takes on odd jobs including at a tea house. On paper it sounds great, but the mechanics don't grab me at all. Controls feel awkward too, with the character not moving in a really smooth fashion.

Deadeye Deepfake Simulacrum Demo: Low-graphics hacking/espionage game where you're a robot deep in debt after being damaged, and required to work it off. Doesn't seem too in-depth, but hard to tell since I only played the tutorial. Does have a certain charm though.

Quadrata Demo: Minimalist sliding box puzzle, where you're moving the box on two different grids at the same time. You get a very limited number of moves to hit one target on each grid. Gets tricky very fast, but controls well and seems like a good challenge for those into puzzlers.

Verses of Enchantment: Deckbuilder with Romantic era artwork and a poetry-based system where the cards you play are used to generate Romantic poetry, and the types of keywords can affect the effects of cards you play. It works very well, although the battles can be kind of long, and I'm not quite sure what the overarching goal is.

Diluvian Winds: 2D town builder with mechanics similar to Spiritfarer, with cartoon animals building a place to survive a world in ecological catastrophe. Takes a little bit to get the idea of it down, but the turn-based gameplay allows you to take some time making decisions. My big complaints are that you don't really get any lore about how the place got this way, not being able to undo a misclicked command and thus can waste precious time and get fewer resources, and it opens fullscreen on the wrong monitor and there seems to be no way to change that (running on Unity). Generally good though.

Pretty certain all except Diluvian Winds are native Linux. And that one is listed as supporting Linux for the full game, so we'll see about that.

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Quoting: tgurrAnd meanwhile there's a fork for Python 3 compatibility at https://github.com/Ryochan7/sc-controller [External Link] as upstream still requires obsolete end-of-life legacy Python 2 in 2022.

Oh right, the developer got all testy when told that he'd had loads of warning that Python 2 was end of life, and even though he was told just fix it up to work on 3 he had this whole thing about how he was going to rewrite the entire thing in C.

That was in 2019.

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Quoting: iiari

Quoting: Boldos

Quoting: iiariAnd regarding the top 10 list, still very impressed NMS is still there. What a comeback story.

NMS? Is it still the beautiful, yet stinking pile or crap, full of flawed game mechanics it used to be?
(Honest question).

This is off topic, and I haven't played it in quite some time, but apparently it has duel mindshare as one of the games that promised the most and didn't deliver in history, but one which the devs stuck with to create one of the most compelling games in history as well. They've apparently really fleshed it out and the ongoing additions to the gameworld and function have been terrific. Lots of written and TY video content about it out there if you're interested...

I play it and like most of it. The devs have, bit by bit, been overhauling most of the major parts of the game. Ground combat, space combat, base building, planetary vehicles, and how freighters work so far, plus adding a lot more to do around the Anomaly hub and getting multiplayer worked out. I'm hoping at some point they re-do the main storyline, which to me is one of the primary weaknesses of the game at this point, incentivizing just hopping from system to system without exploring them in order to get to the center faster. I expect that settlements and space stations will get re-done first though.

Not sure what "stinking pile of crap" is defined as here, or what game mechanics in particular, so it's hard to address whether they've been dealt with or not.

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If Linux isn't gonna be a second-class citizen, I guess somebody's gotta be. :tongue:

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Quoting: Mountain Man

Quoting: JacksonI have faith that Disney won't let their IP go down with microtransactions.

That's a bet I won't take. Disney is in the business to make as much money as possible, and the "pay to win" market has proven to be highly profitable.

I've heard people say "but they're only going to sell cosmetics" and I'm like my dude, the game is cosmetics. That's the whole point.

But there's no way they'll leave it at that once it's in full release and they've got a fat stack of reviews saying there aren't bad mtx.

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Quoting: Philadelphus

It's also currently a paid game but once it leaves Early Access it will be free to play.

Huh, that's an unusual model. I guess it's the on the principle of "make sure you get only the really dedicated people to help beta test in Early Access".

It's a good way to sell "founder's passes" and "ultimate editions" and build hype/get good reviews before full release. Then the microtransactions will get applied in earnest, once the sunk cost really sets in.

They've laid the groundwork for it, with their in-game currency, although I'm surprised it's only one so far. Maybe they'll add "dream gems" or something later. If you see something like that, you'll know what's up.

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Quoting: CatKiller

it's a thoroughly odd selection

I suspected from looking at the list, but the bundle page mentions it explicitly: those are all franchises that have been gobbled up by Disney.

And thus the "Starlight Bundle" is to promote Disney Starlight Valley, their new cash grab totally legitimate game that won't be riddled with microtransactions a week after it comes out of Early Access.

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Apparently "Stealth" is not a category.

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Eh, I prefer word games and stuff like Hexcells. Never been a big Match 3 person so I'll give this a miss and keep playing Wordle and Quordle instead.

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