The Hitman series has always been annoying like this, wasn't it? I think I got the first "HITMAN" (in the newer "rebooted" line) free from something, or maybe part of a bundle, and I'd give it a quick go, but their always-online bullshit led me to uninstall it pretty much right away. I'm not even sure if I finished the first mission.

Definitely a shame that something like that slipped through GOG; I still don't really buy much through GOG, but I've always appreciated their relatively unusual stance about things like DRM. Hopefully there's not too much more of this boundary-pushing going on in the store -- always-online requirements may as well be DRM, even if it might be technically not. GOG's still more principled than any of the other major options at the moment, so it'd be a shame if they were inching towards the other norm.

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Oh, nice! This already ran just fine in Proton, but I do love to see native ports. IMO the game's not as good as Epistory, alas, and very weirdly it often doesn't feel like a typing game really. Instead it's much more tactical: you're never stuck in one spot anymore (like many of the Epistory "arenas"), so you can often survive pretty easily just with character mobility, rather than raw typing speed. You've also got to keep an eye on your mana bar, because using the "special" attacks (fire/ice/wind/whatever) will drain mana. An interesting twist is that you can modify those attacks with further modifiers, like "FIRE RAY LONG <enemyword>" will fire out a long ray of fire, instead of just the usual little fire bolt. The result is that you end up moving around the map a lot and picking out the best sorts of attacks that you think will work against the current enemies, but you very rarely get into a raw typing-speed fugue like would often happen in Epistory. It's almost like the typing is a mere standin for an "action bar" of abilities, like you'd see in a Diablolike-or-whatever, rather than the main focus of the game.

Still, it's nice to see Fishing Cactus being willing to mix up the formula so much, and even though I don't think it works as well as Epistory did, I'd still recommend it to anyone who enjoys a good typing game.

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Congrats to the devs! The game itself isn't my personal cup o' tea, but it's always great to see an indie studio hitting it big like this. Keep up the focus, Iron Gate! And enjoy your popularity. :)

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lol - As someone who's supremely skeptical of Google's ability to keep any of their products alive for more than like 3-4 years, it's difficult for me to see this as anything but the first nail in the coffin. Could be I'm wrong, though, but there's still no way in hell I'll pay money to Not Own something that Google seems likely to take away at a moment's notice.

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Ah, neat! I'd had this on my wishlist for awhile and picked it up a few weeks ago when it went onsale -- I must not have realized that it wasn't previously on Linux.

Can confirm that it runs great over here, and I've been having fun with it, though I'm still very early on. (shapez.io seems to have taken over most of my gaming time -- should be able to get back to Vaporum once I get my automated shape-builder up and running though)

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Ah, alas. Though the writing's been on the wall for quite awhile now; I'd lost hope for it already. For what it's worth, the game works just fine in Proton, and depending on your position on mods, you might want to have been using the Windows version via Proton anyway, to make use of the newer PythonSDK modding stuff (which embeds a Python interpreter right into the engine, letting you do some pretty great stuff to the game).

I know that Gearbox didn't have nice things to say about working with the Linux port -- I suspect that the problem was probably just them (or 2K, or whoever) not being willing to pay for the work.

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Aha, lovely! I've always loved these. Nice to see a new paint job on 'em! My one minor quibble is that the more-noticeable border on the area-effect hexes, which was in Infinite but not Plus, seems to be gone -- I'd sort of hoped that Plus would get a patch to support Infinite's style, but they seem to have standardized on Plus, instead. Well, we'll see if that ever gets tweaked to my liking. Looking forward to re-playing them, regardless.

And, not that I want to deflect attention from Hexcells itself, but if anyone liked the Hexcells series and was looking for more, I'd recommend Globesweeper: Hex Puzzler - https://store.steampowered.com/app/1121530/Globesweeper_Hex_Puzzler/ [External Link] It's sort of "Hexcells But 3D," but also adds in a bunch of other mechanics not seen in any of the Hexcells game. (There's one instance of Globesweeper using a notation which is used in Hexcells for something completely different, which will take a bit of getting used to once you run into it, but it's easy enough to adjust.)

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I'm always happy to see new options available on Linux, but maaaaan do I despise the mobileification of desktop UIs. One of the reasons I ditched Gnome once they got to v3. My desktop is not a phone, and shouldn't try to pretend to be one. I know I'm a bit of a dinosaur, but I want my desktop to take advantage of the fact that I've got a large monitor and don't need buttons to take up a quarter of the screen, or be reduced to little stylized icons just 'cause that's all that'd fit on a phone screen. Like that gigantic green waste of space on the left in that thumbnail up there, lack of proper menus, popups which insist on being in-window which don't let me take advantage of any of my Window Manager's native features... Just ugh.

As I say, I'm glad that folks who DO want that kind of stuff have more options available, but I'll personally stay far away.

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apropos! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qt8XnDfyTpc [External Link]

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Honestly, trademark disputes are at least somewhat understandable -- I believe that trademarks in particular are the thing in US law that you can literally lose the ability to claim it as your own if you allow other folks to use it. They often seem quite frivolous from outside the perspective of the company defending their trademark, but it's sort of just One Of Those Things. Kleenex was famously annoyed at the genericization of its brand name, etc.

Fortunately at least in these cases the answer is pretty trivial: just don't use the exact phrase "Choose Your Own Adventure." Ryan North settled on "Chooseable Path Adventures" for his excellent Shakespearean "To Be Or Not To Be" and "Romeo and/or Juliet" books (both of which I'd highly recommend, fwiw).

Edit: Oh, and also in this case, even if the trademark holders aren't coming out with any new official CYOA books (that I'm aware of), it is still an active brand; not too long ago they started making board game versions of some of the original titles. Unfortunately they're pretty bad, but they're not totally dormant. https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/251420/choose-your-own-adventure-house-danger [External Link]

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