Well darn. I've been following this one forever. I suppose the one silver lining I can find is I can stop being confronted by that weird-ass first non-word of the title: "Shiness". It looks like it should be pronounced the same as "shyness," but what does it mean? Does it have something to do with the word "Shine?" It looks like the bastard child of a ménage à trois involving the words "shines," "shininess," and "shins."

Gahh. Good riddance to a weird name!

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Quoting: scaineAll that happens when you die is

a) You get a new, randomly generated crook, who inherits all the unlocks previous crooks enjoyed but...
b) You lose every dollar you'd collected on that "day" and
c) Your "experience" is reset. Experience is solely used as a multiplier on the funds you collect each day. So a crook who has survived two heists will have a 1.2 experience multiplier.
d) That's the end of that day.

That sounds great! Thanks for the detailed response. Definitely going on the wishlist!

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It sounds brilliant! Your well written review answered all of my questions but one: what flavor is the permadeath?

As I understand these things, broadly speaking, there are two main categories of "permadeath:"

• Permadeath the First: Dissolution. Game Over. Return to the Main menu.


• Permadeath the Second: Reviviscence. Begin at the beginning (of the level or game) again, with some / none / all of your belongings/skills intact.

My Learn-By-Dying-A-Lot (Pat. Pend.) method of gameplay is ill-suited for the Dissolution type game. What's the perma-death in The Swindle like?

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Quoting: M@GOidFor a more easy way to change the settings, install the package "indicator-cpufreq"("sudo apt install indicator-cpufreq" for those of you in Ubuntu). It will show a icon in your taskbar were with 2 mouse clicks you can change to the Performance governor and back. I use it for both AMD and Intel CPUs for years and it works great, for any DE.

Hmmm, perhaps I'm doing something wrong, but near as I can tell, nothing named indicator-cpufreq is available to Manjaro Gnome through either the repos or AUR. Could someone confirm or correct me about this, please?

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At first I was like, pfft, JRPG things, not my cup of anything. But then I saw two games that I own: Lisa and Splatter: Blood Red Edition, and I thought "Oh, okay. That is cool news." Maybe we'll see a slew of RPGMaker games ported to Linux soon.

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Quoting: Hamish"I'm sure that play style matters in this case ..."

I've had such a varied reaction to the turn-based rpg games I've played that I wonder if what Hamish said couldn't be applied to the genre as a whole. I never finished Shadowrun Returns, only barely started Jagged Alliance: Flashback, and never-finished-but-started-four-times Divinity: Original Sin.

I bought and tried Shadowrun and JAF at about the same time and my soporific experience convinced me that turn-based games and I just didn't have enough common interests for our relationship to have any real future.

Divinity: Original Sin changed all that though. In fact I was enjoying myself so much that I thought "Clearly I've been too narrow minded about TBRPGs, maybe it's time to get back up on that horse and ride again." So I bought Hard West, but I've yet to try it. (I'm still a bit burnt out from my four unfinished Divinity not-really-play-throughs.)

I can't really tell from what I've read here whether I'll enjoy my time with Hard West. This has nothing to do with shortcomings of Hamish's review, which was excellent. In fact it was Hamish's excellence that made it so difficult to tell if I'll enjoy Hard West. All the things he mentions --- high difficulty curve, learning-by-dying, capricious saving, and wholly unreliable stability --- are all things that have driven me from some games, yet challenged me to persevere in others. Time will, as they say, tell.

P.S. Apropos of nothing other than not wanting to miss out on the recommend-a-Western-video-game game, I'll mention the rootin' tootin' twin-stick shootin' gun-toting gobbet-fest: 12 is Better than 6 [External Link]. While not a TBRPG, it was one of those games that challenged me to persevere, and I highly recommend. (Quite coincidentally, it's currently on sale at 75% off.)

Bang! Bang! Ka-Pow!

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Hmmmm ... Teslagrad ... Teslagrad ... Let me think. Nope, I give up. I remember the name. Ah, after a quick glance at Steam, I do remember this game. I never bought it, though. Mayhap because of my entirely irrational prejudice towards dimensions lacking Zulu coordinates. Looking back at it, though, I've decided to add it to my wishlist. After all, I own and enjoy all of the Trine games, even the dimensionally challenged ones.

Purchasing World to the West is a no-brainer. It looks beautiful, clever, poignant, and --- most importantly --- it looks fun. It promises everything Teslagrad did, and an extra dimension to boot! I so love to love them that love Linux. :)

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Oooooo! I usually interpret the word "combo" in video games as "hammer on the X button until someone dies," --- typically me. But that isn't what's going on here at all. I love that Hyper Knights assigns certain combos to certain enemies and those combos float above each enemy's head as colored circles. It frees me from relying on my rebellious and recalcitrant memory to keep track of whether "X+X+Y" or "X+X+(pause)+Y" does the overhead smashy thing that mows down great bloody swathes of the little blue guys, or whatever. (A smile inducing side effect of Hyper Knights' approach to combos is that all those little round button indicators makes the field of battle look more like a field of flowers; albeit flowers that explode into bloody gobbets.) A very clever approach and a steal at $2.99.

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Normally, when I read that a game will be released "after the Windows version," I think "Ah, good, they'll get to it sometime before the heat death of the universe!" and delete it from the "Things to Look Forward to" file in my brain.

But I must say, I'm heartened by Kalypso's track record of Linux support and fully expect WoM will be released shortly after the Win version. I've had it on my wishlist since early last August and have really been looking forward to it.

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Croteam's efforts put to shame all those developers who can never manage to deliver on their promised Linux ports. Thanks go to the Croteam crew for having the will and competency to keep their word!

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