Quoting: callcifer

Quoting: scaineI mean, from the review: "Though the whole game is angular, the character models are in a particularly low-res, polygonal style that stands out against the crisp backgrounds. The intention here is to make you consider the uncanny valley that emerges when people become digitalised and the digital becomes humanised." Frankly, what a load of arse.

Did you play the game? Because I think that observation fits very well with the game, particularly the last ~30 minutes or so.

While it's not a meaningless claim, I don't see how anyone could confidently say, "The intention here is to make you consider the uncanny valley that emerges when people become digitalised and the digital becomes humanised." I mean, you can say it had that effect on you, but there's no way of knowing if the creators in fact intended that or if they just liked how it looked, or they had some completely other aesthetic or thematic thing in mind. The chance that that particular sophisticated thematic notion was the intention behind the art style seems actually pretty damn unlikely on average. And whatever the intention, the art is certainly not going to make you consider any such thing--nearly all people playing the game will not, in fact, be considering that.
In that sense the passage is sort of conjuring into existence a large group of cognoscenti who would of course be made to consider the uncanny valley etc. etc. by art like that--a group who, if you are a dummy who doesn't belong to them, you should at least have the decency to tug the forelock to those with the true interpretation, or else pretend you see those awesome clothes the emperor is wearing.
So yeah, kind of a load of arse.

Quoting: callcifer

Quoting: scaineApparently State of Mind juggles "six or seven themes of posthumanism" and the reviewer suggests that it should simplify to just one or two?!? What does that even mean??

The author spells it out at the beginning of the review. Here, let me quote it for you:

The following is an abbreviated list of the events that are happening at the start of the game: the emergence of a Skynet-esque AI; the colonisation of Mars; robots coming to consciousness; a robot uprising; a luddite humanist revolution against tech; an evil tech firm trying to copy and paste consciousness; some kind of Matrix thingy; a plot about memory fragments that is inexplicable; and, you know, another Skynet AI coming to consciousness in China.

There are nine cyberpunk and/or posthumanist tropes mentioned there so I think it's pretty clear what he means.

Well, fair enough then.
Mind you, some of those are dupes--like, two "Skynet AIs" coming to consciousness isn't really two separate themes. And, a robot uprising seems unlikely to happen without robots coming to consciousness, so those aren't really separate themes. For that matter, a robot consciousness is just an AI in a physical body, so all four of those are really just "AIs coming into existence and doing things". The colonization of Mars isn't a theme of posthumanism at all, and I'm not sure Luddites are either. So what we're left with is, stuff about AIs coming into existence and having their own agendas, plus maybe Luddites, copy-pasting consciousness, memory fragments, and "some kind of Matrix thingy", which makes three to five themes of posthumanism depending what "some kind of matrix thingy" means.
But that's "events that are happening at the start of the game". Are all of those events part of the actual plot, or are some of them just setting? It's nice to have a rich background.
But I'd have to agree that whether or not that criticism is actually right (and for that matter, whether or not you agree with a taste for sparseness in themes), it does actually mean something and they did indicate what it was they meant, so I think Scaine's wrong there.

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Quoting: callcifer

Quoting: scaineRPS can be extremely arsey (is that a word?) with their reviews. Pretentious - that's a better word. They're trying to be intellectual critics, and often over-analyse. I don't mind that per se, but sometimes it's kind of like a film critic having a go at an action film for not having a political message. They're missing the point - play the game, enjoy it, have fun, first and foremost. They sometimes forget that.

In my experience when people say something is pretentious, they actually mean "it's too high-brow for me and that makes me feel insecure so I will attack it".

I dunno. You make it sound like there's no such thing as actual pretentiousness, or at least that it's very rare. I don't think that's true. There's an awful lot of people out there, whether in business or academia or the media, trying to dress up little or nonexistent ideas to sound big and significant.

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Quoting: wojtek88

Quoting: ewertonuriasSteam Play <3

With this I bought games that I hadn't played for years:

-Bioshock;
-Bioshock 2;
-Borderlands;
-Cuphead;
-GTA San Andreas;
-The Last Remnant;
-Spore;
-The Witcher -Enhanced Edition-;
-Worms Armageddon;
-Worms Ultimate Mayhem.

All working perfectly with my Desktop NVIDIA!

I'm still selecting more games to buy

Many thanks to those responsible for this! Continue!

Worms Armageddon is working perfectly for you? In fullscreen? I couldn't even switch resolution from default one (640×480)...

Quoting: Cyba.Cowboy

Quoting: GuestNo Feral port, no money. At some point, we need to support those who support us, dude. I love the Tomb Raider reboot games but won't play Shadow without a native port, unless 3 or more years pass and Feral decides not to port it.

This.

They've already ported the first two games, so it's pretty likely they'll port the third game at some point... I don't like the fact that they're (the reboot "Tomb Raider" games) not on GOG.com, but I'll absolutely buy the other two games because Feral look after us, so the least I can do is look after them, by purchasing a full-price copy of the second and third games (with only rare exceptions, I refuse to purchase Linux games at a discount)(unfortunately, I was still-booting when I bought the first game though!).

In theory I agree with you guys. Feral is a company, that we owe most of the AAA titles. We need to support them as much as possible.
But...
Without clear agenda of releases it's not ok to expect from us that we're not going to buy new games, that just works, because they may have port in next 2 or 3 years.
We need to adapt to new reality, so as Feral.
I also don't like "No Tux, no Bucks" approach for Proton titles at the moment. Valve invested money in Proton / Wine / DXVK. Now very often I read that people are going to use Steam Play only for titles that they already have in their libraries. Personally I think this is the worst approach that you can imagine. Of course while testing Proton that's fine, but when it's released, only buying new titles that are meant to be run on Proton will generate real money return for Valve's investment.
Sure, we can buy 3 years old titles to achieve that, but very often 10 titles that are 3-5 years old will cost less than just released game.

So maybe it's good idea to buy few titles that are not so old and run well with Proton instead of writing everywhere "No Tux, no Bucks".

I think if you want to continue "no Tux, no bucks" approach that's fine. Steamplay isn't, directly, about us anyway. Those of us who are Linux gamers already and Steam customers already were going to buy games on Steam and we were going to spend more or less whatever we were going to spend. There are plenty enough games already on Linux that there would be nothing stopping us from blowing that budget. It doesn't matter to Valve if we spend $X buying native Linux games or spend $X buying games we can play using Steamplay, they get $X * 30% either way.
It doesn't even matter to Valve in immediate dollar terms whether Windows users can readily switch to Linux or not. Same deal--they spend $ on Windows, they'd spend the same $ on Linux.
So to be spending money on Steamplay, their objectives have to be strategic--hedging against the prospect of Windows stores killing their business, the possibility of getting a bunch of extra money from sales on console-like Steam Machine thingies running Linux, stuff like that. The fact that it makes existing Linux customers more pleased with Steam is a very minor perk, and whether those existing Linux customers decide to diversify their game portfolio to Windows titles matters not at all.

But it might matter to actual game developers at least a little bit, and game porters such as Feral. So there remains a point to "no Tux, no bucks" and there's no tactical downside, so for those who are willing to continue with that attitude I think that's a fine thing. I myself am probably in that category kind of accidentally--I'm far from a hard core gamer, I currently own more Linux native games than I can play, have more Linux native games on my wishlist than I can buy, and most of my knowledge of other games I might buy or put on my wishlist in the future comes from reading GoL so I'm largely unaware of all the Windows-only titles I ought to want. So no Tux, no awareness I should spend bucks. I'm fine with that.

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Quoting: lucifertdark

Quoting: Dunc

Quoting: lucifertdark32bit Prefixes for those games that absolutely need it.
.NET working in 64bit prefixes if possible, we wouldn't need 32bit prefixes that way.

Definitely. .NET's a big sticking-point for a lot of games. And it really shouldn't be.

No more 0byte downloads every time I fire up Steam.

I was getting a lot of those for a couple of months before Proton dropped. Whether it's related or not, I don't know. But they do need to figure out a better way of updating Proton itself.

An easier way to configure prefixes than Winetricks, or a proper gui for it that makes sense.

I don't know if that'll happen, given that the whole point is to make it seamless so you don't have to configure anything.

Something in the Beta channel, to help users try out and suggest fixes, wouldn't be a bad idea though. But I expect Valve probably assume that anyone doing that kind of thing already knows how Winetricks works.

Thinking about it, perhaps they could find a way to integrate what Winetricks & Winecfg do into Steam directly but keep it under an advanced settings menu that only shows up if you choose the Proton Beta.

OK, I'm just imagining this backend data-gathering thing. Like, they do what you're saying there, right? And then they have a database so when anyone uses the options it (leaving them anonymous) records what options people tried for what games and how long they played after. So then, like, you'd create this information base where you could tell what people tried that resulted in them actually playing the game and you could record that as like a default thing that the next iteration of Proton could do to make the games work.

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Quoting: Salvatos

Quoting: Purple Library GuyBut now, nothing is written down in longhand and nobody has secretaries for doing anything except looking like a big shot. You don't transcribe things, you don't take dictation, you don't in general use your fingers to reproduce stuff. You make copies by copying the friggin' file.

Um... dictation, transcription and especially secretaries are all very much still a thing. Some going the way of the dodo, perhaps, but not there yet, and that's just considering industrialized countries. My cousin recently graduated as a stenotypist and was guaranteed a job as soon as she finished her exam.

Really? Go figure. I stand corrected.

Plenty of doctors here still use dictation and have secretaries transcribe everything for them,

Pompous bastards.

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Quoting: KelsAh, I just noticed that the Itch front page is showing me Windows-only games again. Didn't the old client filter by what OS you were running the client in, unless told otherwise? Now I get to look at all this stuff I can't play natively.

Worse, for Itch at least: You get to look at all this stuff you can only play easily on the competitor (Steamplay!)

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Quoting: DuncOddly enough, I see it as the opposite. I grew up with games whose credits could be put on the title screen: “By Matthew Smith”, or “Code by Jon Ritman, Graphics by Bernie Drummond”. I remember when games started to have rolling credits, and it was obvious they were trying to ape movies. It was the more ambitious, narrative-led (I'm trying to avoid saying “pretentious”) games

But not trying very hard, eh? ;)

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Quoting: EhvisThe game has a few bugs though. Binding the comma key messes up the input configuration. Not nice for those on dvorak keyboards.

Dvorak keyboards, huh? So yeah, I guess good keybinding is a major issue.

Haven't heard anything about them for a long time, though. I feel like the technological impetus for them is gone, or at least greatly attenuated. I mean, the point of Dvorak keyboards is that if you need to type an awful lot really fast, they're more efficient. Or rather, I guess they're more efficient period, but it matters if you need to type an awful lot really fast. Now in the old days, there used to be secretaries. They'd take dictation. There would be reams of stuff originally written down with a pen, and you'd have to transcribe it with a typewriter. Lots of stuff where typing really fast was good, lots of jobs where typing already-existing text or trying to type at the speed of speech was a lot of what you did. Dvorak keyboards were a very relevant thing and it was stupid that they didn't catch on more.
But now, nothing is written down in longhand and nobody has secretaries for doing anything except looking like a big shot. You don't transcribe things, you don't take dictation, you don't in general use your fingers to reproduce stuff. You make copies by copying the friggin' file. People use typing almost entirely to compose stuff. If you're thinking really fast and you're using hunt-and-peck your typing can be the limiter on speed, but if you're even a half-assed Qwerty touch-typist you can type as fast as you can compose. So Dvorak isn't really as useful as it once was IMO. Even typing classes seem to have gotten far less common than they used to be, even though more people are using keyboards than ever.

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Quoting: Jewgeni Filippowitsch IwanowskiI was once assassinated for creating a socialist utopia bare of any problems but rich in personal freedom and culture.

Wow! Pretty realistic game.

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It's odd . . . one thing this says to me is that the line between "(not) emulation" and "port" is fuzzier than I would have thought. Like, both tend to rely on creating various cross-platform or Linux middleware, generally open source, to duplicate the function of closed Windows-only middleware, so if you improve that replacement middleware it makes porting easier and things like Wine and Proton more effective.
And for that matter, at least in cases where the stuff isn't obsolete, presumably that middleware would become available to future cross-platform game development, making it easier to develop cross-platform in the first place. Multiple wins.
This probably seems obvious to many, but it had never occurred to me before--this article has enlightened me.

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