Quoting: GuestI found The Cat Lady to be really catastrophic from a usability point of view. Most (all?) AGS games are broken anyway.

It's true that AGS games have issues, like the cursor being locked up on Alt+Tab, not being able to Alt+Tab at all or failing to reset screen resolution on crashes. When The Cat Lady first launched for Linux on Steam you couldn't progress past the first chapter because an issue with the Steamworks plugin for AGS made the game crash when you were supposed to get an achievement. In their defense though, only a handful of volunteers are working on the Linux version and it's constantly being improved. What AGS games really have going for them is a large and dedicated community of talented designers, artists and writers, and that pretty much ensures that great games are going to come out of it every now and then. Either way, I found The Cat Lady to be very easy to play, once the mentioned issue was fixed shortly after launch, and I think that catastrophic is a major exaggeration. In my opinion the keyboard only controls made the game more immersive since it removed the usual need to swipe the screen for hotspots.

Quoting: HipsterRichMe either besides Simon the sorcerer but my friend introduced me to the Cat Lady and trust me you do not want to miss out on it, this game and The Cat Lady is something you aught to get.

Simon the Sorcerer is pretty close to the LucasArts classics in style, so I imagine you'd like those too if you haven't tried them already. The series went down hill fast after the first installment though, and the third game is infamously bad.

If anyone is considering buying The Cat Lady, you might want to hold off for a bit as the publisher tweeted yesterday [External Link] that it will go on sale on Steam soon.

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Quoting: liamdaweJust a shame I can't be around for it now my boy lives with me!

Yeah, these streams are always too early in the evening for me too.

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Yeah, that's a risk you have to be willing to take every time you back a crowd-funding campaign or buy a game on Steam Early Access. I think it's worth it even if I don't always end up with the game I (or the developers) hope for, because it allows for games to be made that wouldn't otherwise have a chance with the traditional publisher model.

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My top pick was one that really surprised me by being way better than I had thought beforehand. It has an interesting story that handled very intelligently and has great puzzles that rivals, or maybe even tops those of Portal.

1. The Talos Principle
2. Full Bore
3. You Have to Win the Game
4. Super Win the Game
5. MouseCraft
6. Hexcells Infinite
7. Hack 'n' Slash
8. The Last Tinker: City of Colors
9. Elliot Quest
10. TRI: Of Friendship and Madness

I decided to not include unfinished games, so no Kentucky Route Zero, Broken Age or The Journey Down, Chapter 2, even though I really liked all of those and would have found room for them in my top 10 list.

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I think the developer was right in flagging that "review". It's one thing if the game has issues and they refuse to fix or just ignore the issues. Steam users using the review functionality as a vent for their rage over a game not working off the bat, without giving the developer a chance to fix the issue first however, seems really unfair to me and ties in with the recent "one star review" trend on the Google Play store. I'm a developer myself (backend systems; not games) and in my experience it's very rare for a project to not contain at least a few corner case bugs that haven't popped up in testing, even when you have the resources to have a QA team assigned to the project.

I haven't looked into this particular game though, but if the user hasn't at least reported the issue on the Steam forums for the game and given the developer a fair chance to fix the bug, then I think it's a shitty thing to do before posting a "review" that isn't at all a review in the traditional sense, and thus manipulating the game's average rating.

Sorry about the rant, but I guess it's a sensitive topic for me. ;)

EDIT: That said though, I think it would be better if a review could be flagged for reclassification to a forum post. The way things work now, developers don't really have many options when it comes to troll reviews, even if their intention isn't to hide user feedback.

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I'm hoping for one of the LEGO games. If not that, then Unmechanical, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, Alice: Madness Returns, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, Q.U.B.E., Dishonored, Mind: Path to Thalamus or Viscera Cleanup Detail. Or most of all really, the upcoming A Hat in Time.

That aside though, my bet is on LEGO: The Hobbit. Would be an insta-buy for me.

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Quoting: Hamish

Quoting: liamdaweSadly, this year I shall not be out getting merry on rum as I have my little one now living with me, but it does mean I am here to post stuff.

See everyone, GOL is on record as supporting responsible parenting. ;)

Yeah, I've had pretty quiet New Year's Eves since I became a parent too. Tonight I've mainly been playing The Talos Principle and having a beer after the kids went to bed.

Quoting: StyromaniacMaybe soon I'll contribute more and put more effort in my writing. I'm thinking we need some hardware articles and I'm gearing up for it.

That would be great. :)

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Quoting: LK901There is no way my miserly laptop would even run it on lowest settings D:

Can't wait till I get my new gaming PC...

I'm running it on my two year old mid-range laptop just fine, but I definitely recommend checking out the free public test first to make sure. I have a GeForce GT 630M with 2 GB dedicated RAM and I get a stable 40+ FPS with mouse sensitivity turned down, and I consider that perfectly satisfactory, but of course it depends on personal preferences.

Really enjoying the game so far, and it's up there among my top five games this year, and it's the only high budget game on the list.

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Looking forward to giving it a try once it's available.

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Quoting: SeredI disagree with their last point. There are over 1000 games on Linux and that's only Steam. I mean, I do enjoy gaming but I don't have the time to play all of those, nor am I interested.

I know it wasn't meant seriously, but still. I was kind of shocked when I saw that there are 1153 titles on sale on steam and these are just the ones available on Linux. (Which I find nice btw. Friend of mine was surfing on Windows and there it were ~6000 games or so. Sure, many smaller indie games, but still plenty! :))

That's including things like software, DLC and soundtracks though. If you filter by just games, you have 857 Linux games on Steam at the moment. That's of a total of 4,290 games, which is almost exactly one fifth of the games on Steam. I remember commenting on the ratio earlier this year when it was 1:6, so it has improved dramatically over the last few months either way.

Feral's current offerings on Linux unfortunately don't interest me much. I got Empire: Total War as a "thank you" for supporting Linux when they brought that over though, and they've been teasing LEGO games a whole lot, which is a franchise I'd buy pretty much anything from, given the chance.

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