Coincidentally, this happened to me at the time when I was just replaying the Bioshock games again. I come back to them at least once a year (since the original in 2008).

First an update came that lost my saves (Bioshock Remastered). So I reconnected those (had to find them buried in userdata, local steam cloud saves) and continued my play through. They changed the location of the local saves.

Then this one comes along and the launcher b0rks my games. I was able to get it going again by deleting 2KLauncher/LauncherPatcher.exe and symlinking it to ../Build/Final/BioshockHD.exe to bypass it.

However, that left me cold. What happens when they come and change my game again, and Steam forces it on me. It left me with a "Not Linked" icon on my menu screen (I don't have a "2K account" to link and I don't bloody want one) and a creepy "Connecting" splash (what are they connecting to?) that wasn't there before.

This caused me to go to GoG and repurchase these games (and that's three times now for the first two) yet again. Now I have standalone, DRM free, versions of these games, divorced from all dictatorial game clients, set up in Lutris. I have the installers for these games backed up, and they will never change.

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Quoting: sourpuzI used to use Lutris with GOG windows games, but I've become a bit suspicious of some of those Lutris install scripts.

I don't use those, I just "Add Game" and choose a wine runner, create the prefix, install the game through "Run Exe in Wine Prefix" then fixed up the paths etc. after. That should work for the standalone GoG installers (it does for all of mine). I read the Lutris forums and I see those lutris installer scripts in disrepair a lot.

One exception, years ago when I installed EA Origin I used their install script because it wasn't possible to run the installer successfully. The install script manually extracts files from the downloaded Origin installer, and it also provides an ./updateorigin.sh script that does the same if it gets broken, for example on a failed update. I've still got that same Origin install and have not had to do that in years though with current Lutris wine runners, the updates seem to work even if they occasionally fail once (bombs out on writing to a file or something) and succeed the second time. I haven't seen that happen in some time either.

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The game mechanics seem really good. I'm not going to play it properly (not going to do those moves and key combos) but I was impressed with the game play physics. For a Unity game, too. They also make it so people who are only mildly interested can play it, I don't have to get carpal tunnel syndrome, I can just relax and shoot people while flitting around on roller skates. I accomplish "challenges" just by fumbling with the keys too while jumping and stuff :-)

I appreciate the cheats in the "Assists" menu. Turning off leaderboards is a feature to me, not a penalty (I hate that shit).

Graphics... barf. Some people think "Vincent Van Gogh" and the like is art too though (I am never impressed with fugly... an ugly bowl of fruit is an ugly bowl of fruit to me. Spare me the art lesson lol)

This amused me for an hour or so last night, so mission accomplished. I'll play it some more, I was enjoying it when I quit.

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Sounds amusing, I may try that just for the fact that it's unique.

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I don't have any sympathy for regional pricing of digital goods. That deserves to be circumvented for its very existence.

Data is infinitely copyable...

P.S. I'd like to elabourate a bit. I don't begrudge people in other countries getting their games for less money than we do. At the same time, I also don't begrudge people who exploit that, just like I don't begrudge people that decide to just download infinitely copyable data. Thinking that can be stopped on the Internet is what's wrong.

I'm happy to pay for games personally, I'll be there at 12:01 AM on release day saying "please, take my money" when it's a game I want. I typically don't mind, say, $100 for a Deluxe edition of a big commercial ("AAA") game for example. I've also got money for anyone else that impresses me too, it doesn't have to be big names.

There's also another side to this. Any Aussies here? I'll bet they have an opinion on regional pricing, they pay considerably more for digitally distributed games than North Americans and Europeans.

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I was looking over Arch's latest glibc PKGBUILD last night (though I didn't do it, I don't really care about this DT_HASH issue), and they have actually reverted the glibc change with a patch.

https://github.com/archlinux/svntogit-packages/blob/packages/glibc/trunk/reenable_DT_HASH.patch [External Link]

A followup just to be fair, since we were bitching about Arch.

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Quoting: setzer22I'm an Arch user, and have been for quite a long time. But I'm starting to grow increasingly worried about the sustainability of their distro model. Honestly, this obsession with dynamically linking everything and updating as soon as possible is a huge house of cards waiting to fall under its own weight.

I feel the same way sometimes, Arch likes to spin their wheels.

I also generally don't like the way Arch compiles things (I want optimizations, not hardening flags and stack canaries, and I don't want my compilers producing position independent objects by default, thank you) so I change it.

Arch really jumped the gun on glibc this time. I maintain two setups on this box, a customized Manjaro* that I mostly maintain myself, and a custom "from scratch" system that I use for more serious stuff (and I also have that one on other boxes). I also have a customized Slackware 15 on one box. I keep them all binary compatible so I can run some builds on all systems.

(* A Manjaro install is just what I started out with. I was attracted by the more delayed update cycles. I actually follow Arch and edit their PKGBUILDs. I have a bloody novel's worth of text in IgnorePkg lines in pacman.conf lol)

I'm still paying for glibc 2.36. I don't do anti-cheat in games (I only like single player) but I had a lot of compile time issues to work around when bootstrapping toolchains and recompiling/upgrading things. I haven't had any binary compatibility issues though.

While I get angry, I always come back to the mindset that at least Arch provides me with a full multilib system environment that I can work with. There's no way I'd use some Ubuntu or Fedora distro or their ilk because those distros make it difficult for the way I do things.

I don't like containers, and I won't run software like that, so Arch base it is for me.

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I already have them, but wow, those Sniper Elite games. That's a good score, they are both great games. I still replay missions over and over. I have Sniper Elite 5 now, but those other two games still keep my interest. (Sniper Elite 3 was my least favourite of them all and I don't play that one often)

I couldn't pick a favourite game, but those are certainly up there.

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Quoting: jo3fis...I just wished they had spent more time updating the core gameplay and/or the procedural generation instead of adding heaps of what feels like superficial content.

I felt the same way, I would have welcomed more planetary variety, but that's not what any of the updates did, moreover, in my opinion it got worse, not better.

Here's what I have found. If you go off on your own, charting your own courses going to random planets to get to the center, you get variations of the same 3 or 4 planet types, some of them even identical, even if you go to coloured star systems. You get better planets if you follow the waypoint paths in the galaxy map.

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Quoting: EikeThe story of No Man's Sky is astounding. I wonder if there ever was a game that dead on arrival that has risen again to such heights. Compliments to the developers and publishers who believed in the game.

Yes, part of me is happy for them, but there's another side of the coin here. I'm one of the (probably few) that liked the original game before they started adding all that crap to it. I'm glad I got to center of the galaxy at least once in the original. I hadn't seen the twitter posts that caused all the trouble, I got exactly what I was expecting from that game. After that, the first big update with changes broke my ship, changed the fuel source of ships, rendering mine useless. The next big update added base building, which was pretty much mandatory to proceed. The next update after that sunk my base into the rock.

Every time I have started a playthrough since, over the years, an update always comes along and wrecks it, every time I thought I'd try it again. I didn't even like most of the new stuff they have added and tried to ignore it. (e.g. once you've been to one of those newer types of missions, even they are just repetitious tedium for the rest)

The last recent unwanted 10 Gb update caused me to uninstall it again (instead of downloading it this time).

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