Latest Comments by apocalyptech
UK gov responds to the newer Stop Killing Games petition - no plans to amend UK consumer law
4 Feb 2025 at 6:32 pm UTC Likes: 4
4 Feb 2025 at 6:32 pm UTC Likes: 4
You can always torrent the game you once bought or if there is a title you WOULD buy, but it's not "legally" available. It's common sense that if you pay for a game with your hard earned money, it's just yours.Kind of the whole point of the Stop Killing Games campaign is that this is not a solution because the games in question stop working without the backend servers running as well. The game which kicked off the campaign, Ubisoft's The Crew, even sold physical copies on DVD, in stores, and those copies are just as dead as anyone who bought it virtually. Access to the game binaries/data isn't the problem here.
These petitions are just too soft of an approach.The UK petition is just one of many actions that the campaign is taking: https://www.stopkillinggames.com/countries [External Link] -- They've also been working directly with lawyers and governmental representatives in other countries, and more or less trying to find any chink in the armor that they can. Unless I'm misremembering, Ross didn't think that action in the UK was especially likely to succeed anyway, given the legal precedents over there (though it was more likely than anything in the U.S., of course).
Would use demonstrations and right to demonstrate in front of the associated departments there in the UK. Or can you actually gather there anymore to public places in numbers legally to demonstrate?As someone who's spent a lot of time protesting and demonstrating in numbers, I think the implication that issues like this would somehow be magically solved by gathering in public places to be laughable. By all means protest and demonstrate as the situation warrants, of course, and doing so can be quite cathartic on a personal, emotional level. But I personally take a pretty dim view as to the ultimate effectiveness. And, honestly, with everything else going on in the world these days, I personally couldn't fathom the mindset which would lead one to try and go protest this cause in person. I agree it's an important cause that I believe in, and I'd love to see games stop getting killed too, but there are currently some rather bigger fishes to fry out there.
Comedy renaissance artwork styled adventure Death of the Reprobate is out now
8 Nov 2024 at 2:33 pm UTC Likes: 3
8 Nov 2024 at 2:33 pm UTC Likes: 3
I've been eagerly awaiting this for some time now! It was great to see it pop up in my notifications yesterday. The first two in the series are utterly delightful, too. Still stuck into Satisfactory for the time being, but I've already got this installed and ready to go for when I tire of factory management.
Free Stars: Children of Infinity, sequel to The Ur-Quan Masters now on Kickstarter
17 Apr 2024 at 3:03 pm UTC
17 Apr 2024 at 3:03 pm UTC
Much as I'm looking forward to this, I always hate seeing multiplatform support locked behind stretch goals on these things. If you're not developing with multiplatform support in mind from the start, you're just setting yourself up to waste a lot of time and effort later down the line. Hopefully if that goal's hit they get that porting work done early on (and integrated into the core codebase) instead of just trying to do a porting job after the fact. Given the state of Wine/Proton nowadays I'd sort of rather they just stick with a Windows version, if Mac+Linux wasn't already in their sights.
Anyway, I guess I'll probably break my own "don't Kickstart videogames" rule and contribute to this one regardless. I can be bought via nostalgia, it seems!
Anyway, I guess I'll probably break my own "don't Kickstart videogames" rule and contribute to this one regardless. I can be bought via nostalgia, it seems!
Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri gets an in-development open source remake
11 Sep 2023 at 3:55 pm UTC Likes: 3
11 Sep 2023 at 3:55 pm UTC Likes: 3
Quoting: eldarionA pitty they will work on multiplayer before all single player features.I don't really care about multiplayer myself, either, but for a feature like that, it is extremely useful from a development perspective to bake it in as close to the beginning as possible, rather than trying to add it in after the fact. That way you don't discover right near the end that you've made some fundamental assumptions early on which make implementation that much more difficult, etc. IMO it's a good idea to be doing it so early.
Steam gets overhauled with new overlay, Steam Deck big stable update
15 Jun 2023 at 1:25 pm UTC Likes: 2
15 Jun 2023 at 1:25 pm UTC Likes: 2
Bah.
I know a lot of folks really like the new update, but for me it was the final straw which made me abandon the beta branch and try to avoid it for awhile. I know they've said they put a lot of work into making it fast/smooth/whatever, but it just *feels* dog-slow to me. Visible little flickers when a menu activates. Little rendering delays when a window closes so there's a black area visible on the main window until the client catches up. It's just so infuriating. I hate how every app nowadays is just some Electron-or-whatever webapp, and optimizing that kind of thing properly is nearly impossible. I really miss native widgets.
The whole shader-rendering thing is annoying as hell too; I know they'd theoretically put in some "fixes" for that but it still seems super sub-par. I was really hoping that this lousy update would've spent more time in beta to get more of this kind of stuff figured out.
Anyway, crotchety old-man talk here. Just venting, apparently. Alas!
I know a lot of folks really like the new update, but for me it was the final straw which made me abandon the beta branch and try to avoid it for awhile. I know they've said they put a lot of work into making it fast/smooth/whatever, but it just *feels* dog-slow to me. Visible little flickers when a menu activates. Little rendering delays when a window closes so there's a black area visible on the main window until the client catches up. It's just so infuriating. I hate how every app nowadays is just some Electron-or-whatever webapp, and optimizing that kind of thing properly is nearly impossible. I really miss native widgets.
The whole shader-rendering thing is annoying as hell too; I know they'd theoretically put in some "fixes" for that but it still seems super sub-par. I was really hoping that this lousy update would've spent more time in beta to get more of this kind of stuff figured out.
Anyway, crotchety old-man talk here. Just venting, apparently. Alas!
Half-Life: Alyx fully playable without VR even on Steam Deck thanks to a mod
11 Apr 2023 at 8:43 pm UTC Likes: 2
11 Apr 2023 at 8:43 pm UTC Likes: 2
Ooh, excellent! As someone who's got exactly zero interest in investing in anything VR, I'd always wished there was a non-VR version of this so I could at least play the thing, even if I'm missing out on gimmicks. Seems like I might have to take the plunge soon, then!
10 years ago Steam released for Linux
14 Feb 2023 at 7:55 pm UTC Likes: 2
It's a bit of a shame that what seems to have really broken the floodgates was Proton. I was cautiously optimistic for awhile that we were headed into a renaissance of native ports, but that proved to be mostly short-lived. Ah well! I'll take what I can get. :)
14 Feb 2023 at 7:55 pm UTC Likes: 2
Quoting: 1xokBefore that, I hadn't played commercial games for over 15 years. I've been using Linux since the mid-90s and at some point I got tired of the dual boot installation.Hah, yeah, that was more-or-less my experience as well. There was the occasional Introversion title to buy, and I'd spent some time on Minecraft by that point. I think the first few Humble Indie Bundles had been out by that time as well, which was kind of exciting, but not having games available on Linux was a pretty nice way to Not Have To Exercise Self-Control in regards to buying games. For the most part I just didn't 'cause it was an awful lot easier to not have to jump through hoops (dualboot, then-less-globally-useful-Wine, etc).
It's a bit of a shame that what seems to have really broken the floodgates was Proton. I was cautiously optimistic for awhile that we were headed into a renaissance of native ports, but that proved to be mostly short-lived. Ah well! I'll take what I can get. :)
After a long wait, Psychonauts 2 has an official Linux version now
24 May 2022 at 6:56 pm UTC Likes: 4
24 May 2022 at 6:56 pm UTC Likes: 4
Excellent, though that advice is weird.
I actually missed the Psychonauts train back in the day and never played the original until earlier this year, and then went on to play 2 via Proton. IMO it improves on practically every aspect of the original. I'd definitely highly recommend it. Though I do wonder how it would work for someone who's never played the original -- I suspect it might be weird in some unintended ways, instead of just the intentional weirdness.
I actually missed the Psychonauts train back in the day and never played the original until earlier this year, and then went on to play 2 via Proton. IMO it improves on practically every aspect of the original. I'd definitely highly recommend it. Though I do wonder how it would work for someone who's never played the original -- I suspect it might be weird in some unintended ways, instead of just the intentional weirdness.
XCOM 2's multiplayer being removed but will still work on Linux and Steam Deck
4 Mar 2022 at 4:40 pm UTC Likes: 5
4 Mar 2022 at 4:40 pm UTC Likes: 5
I still find it infuriating when game companies don't include "release the server software" as part of their game retirement plans. Like, sure, obviously you can't keep running your servers forever, but that doesn't mean you have to kill off parts of your game when that time eventually comes. Obviously that's something that's easier done when you plan for it from the start, but killing off parts of your game like this is callous and anti-consumer.
HITMAN 3 arrives on Steam and works flawlessly on Linux with Proton
21 Jan 2022 at 4:35 pm UTC Likes: 1
21 Jan 2022 at 4:35 pm UTC Likes: 1
The online requirement thing continues to bother me about this series. I got one of the HITMANs for free (or near free?) ages ago but couldn't bring myself to play more than like 5 minutes of it after discovering that despite being a 100% single-player experience, it was gonna cripple itself if I didn't let it phone home constantly. No sale from me, faceless corporation! (*That'll* show 'em, eh?)
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