Oh no, not more industry-consolidation - a consolidation around a famously shaky company-in-name-only this time, at that. :sad:

It's also very worrying to see an entire very-long-lived online gaming community swallowed up by this, too!

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Quoting: elmapulspeaking of it, its hard to believe they came from an complete proprietary drm-friendly platform to gog

It's hard to believe that they came to GOG from a company who used to openly auto-install rootkits via their audio CDs, to be honest! :shock:

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Ahem. :tongue:

Great write-up, as always, Hamish! :grin: I was never big into Flash games (and they didn't perform great on portable hardware of the time, which didn't help), but I did watch a lot of insane Flash animations. For me, the early-2000s heyday of Flash was all about the Arfenhouse!!!1 Teh Movie!!!!! [External Link] series, The Demented Cartoon Movie [External Link], and Alex Chiu & friends - We Drink Ritalin [External Link]. I'm sure nobody would ever have guessed that from my weird sense of humour, not at all. :tongue:

♫ TAKE THE PIG AND TURN AROUND! OUT OF THE WAY! ♫

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Happy to say that all three of the modern Bomberman games have either Verified or Playable ratings - including, for some reason, the free-to-play one that got delisted last year even though nobody will ever again be able to do anything beyond viewing the main-menu. :tongue:

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Not something I would ever use, but good to see this officially supported on Flathub as I know it's widely-used.

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Quoting: GroganI can't get the Blacksad giveaway to load. I tried a few days ago and just shrugged, but still can't, no matter how many times I reload the page. (extensions disabled, cleared cache etc.). I don't have any Chrome based browsers and I don't want to.

I found that I had to temporarily change the setting for two sites in Privacy Badger, in order to get the giveaway to work in Firefox. Don't think I'll be doing that again, honestly.

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Quoting: ElectricPrismShould I be buying this to support the company trying to deploy to PC? Are they acting in "good faith"?

Konami is making some genuinely good efforts out there (and in those cases you can definitely say that they're acting in good faith, even though those cases often still get review-bombed, though that's a whole other story), but by all accounts this is not one of them. Support the good stuff, not this laziness.

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Quoting: whizseMy bonus pick is the first Frog Detective [External Link] game (30% off, Proton). I only picked it up because it came highly recommended by some Sealand rando (and Lobster Cop wasn't available!)

And it's got a fittingly spooky theme, to boot! :grin:

Spoiler: The whole trilogy will be on my games-of-2023 list. :grin:

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Quoting: BlackBloodRumIf people don't want their saves synced, they can always disable steam cloud save sync. Generally, I prefer to sync my saves across devices though. :-)

The trouble is, you don't always want the PC settings synced along with the save-data. :wink:

EDIT: I just got ninja'd by Liam. Great minds think alike, or something. :tongue:

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I'm obligated to recommend the utterly-charming Bail or Jail (Obakeidoro!) [External Link], a cute-but-spooky-themed cops-and-robbers (or rather monsters-vs-humans) game by Japanese indie Free Style Games, and published on Steam by Konami. It's currently half-price in this sale, at £7.74, or even lower on Fanatical [External Link] at £6.97.

It was originally self-published by Free Style in August 2019 on the Nintendo Switch, simply as "Obakeidoro!" (a pun on the Japanese name for the cops-and-robbers playground game, plus one of the Japanese words for ghosts), and basically flew under almost everyone's radar. The PC version was released in July 2022 with a new name and a much better translation, along with fairly regular free playable-character DLC (including a Castlevania pack [External Link] that adds Alucard and Leon Belmont).

There's currently a Halloween event going on with a stage-gimmick that lets the Human Team jump around like catburglars from certain spots on the ground, and I got into a hilarious tangle in an online match last night with an S-ranked Monster player, and narrowly kept myself out of their clutches for quite a while. It was one of my most memorable and amusing moments with the game so far, because I initially didn't think that I could pull it off, but then did. :grin:



It's got local multiplayer as well - do give it a look. :wink:

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