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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Quoting: chancho_zombieI don't see google as a negative monopoly in this case it is a positive monopoly if they were that evil, they would work with the Chinese government to control everything because that would be their wet dream right?

Heh, I'm veering wildly offtopic here, but, er: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/02/google-working-on-censored-search-engine-for-china [External Link]

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It'll certainly be interesting to see how this works in the long-term. I'm excited that it's presumably at least getting some companies to get their games to run on Linux (although I wonder how much porting work is being done by Google as well), which I'd hope should be a good thing for "real" Linux ports in the long term.

That said, I just can't fathom the mindset of someone willing to buy a game on this platform. Spending $60 to buy a service-backed game from Google, of all companies, the absolute kings of just shutting down services that aren't profitable enough with a few weeks' warning. I admit that my overall outlook on the longevity of the service remains gloomy, since I can't imagine there's that many people willing to spend money on such a dicey gamble, given Google's history. Though of course it's attitudes like that which make the thing's seemingly-inevitable shutdown all the more likely.

Anyway, with luck we'll at least have some new developers/publishers who have some more Linux skills under their belts, and we can end up with some more real games in the future.

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