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Latest Comments by namiko
Spacebase Startopia is the next title from Realmforge and Kalypso Media, coming to Linux
19 Aug 2019 at 10:52 am UTC Likes: 2

Wow, if they even do half the job Mucky Foot did, this could be a real treat.

I hope Arona (or his descendant?) are in this game, very badly. VAL and Arona were the heart and soul of the first Startopia, and lent the game its strong English-humour character.

This is one of the only RTS games I played because it tricked me into thinking it was a management sim instead. Good though, because it meant that the mechanic was introduced slowly enough that even someone averse to RTS games could enjoy it.

Gods, the times I remember the mayhem of sandbox mode, eventually encroaching on my opponent on the other side of the station, security forces fighting one another, turret guns firing, the chaos!

The former Paradox Interactive CEO thinks "platform holders" 30% cut is "outrageous"
3 Jul 2019 at 2:54 pm UTC Likes: 6

Quoting: Mal
Quoting: MunkI will never buy your game on EGS, Origin, and likely not on GoG.
Careful, that exactly the message that Epic is trying to pass. Which is blatant lie.

The day Steam competitors offers the same/equally worth/better features, people will naturally buy games from there too.
There are also other considerations. AAA developers and publishers think (mostly correctly) that they have people by the balls, that they've gotten people hooked on a franchise/dev team/genre and the only thing to do is follow them wherever, however, they go.

I'm not like that. I'm still pissed at EA for Mass Effect 3 becoming an Origin-only title. I'm still pissed at developers acting like they can stomp on their customers because a series is beloved, so they get lazy and fuck up the game, insult their customers, give it too many DLC so that you have to pay over $100 total to have a complete game, change the mechanics, the characters, because they know people need their "fix" and will buy the game in droves anyways.

In this specific case, Epic has made a dick move doing exclusivity deals. I understand devs wanting more money up-front, but in the long run, they've probably lost the good will of people like me who deliberately watch what they do in the long run.

Steam looks a lot better in comparison, the only exclusives they have are their own games and any games made from their own assets (ie. Black Mesa, Portal Stories: Mel). (For the record: I'd buy from GOG, itch.io or maybe Nutaku if I had no other choice of storefront for a game.)

Munk is making a good point, there are people that are extremely loyal to Steam and I'm also one of them. But it's more nuanced than good service for me, because I want to punish bad actors in the industry with a lack of money. I believe Steam is the best overall, the best storefront for Linux gaming, and Valve themselves support the development of software and hardware that greatly benefits we Linux gamers, though Steam is definitely not perfect (censorship, reducing the sometimes-warranted effects of review bombs by legitimate customers).

Even if Epic does grow to a big storefront that also supports Linux, I'm not going to forget what they did now. They're banking on people forgetting in the long run, but I won't be one of those people.

The former Paradox Interactive CEO thinks "platform holders" 30% cut is "outrageous"
2 Jul 2019 at 5:54 pm UTC Likes: 3

Edited for clarity. - Nami
Quoting: tonROpen steam > Click: Publisher link > Click: Option (Gear Icon) > Click: Ignore this creator
Don't act so quickly. This is Paradox Interactive's former CEO, not their current one.

Don't blame former employees for being dicks. If this guy heads up a new company and reiterates what he said in the past, then yeah, ignore that developer/publisher.

DOSBox is still alive, with a new bug fix release available
28 Jun 2019 at 1:44 am UTC

Quoting: denyasisOutnumbered was one of my first games as a child on our green screen 8086. I still remember the music of the TV station. Treasure Mountain and Gizmos and Gadgets were also a blast. My parent recently found our old floppies and copied them over (along with Lemmings!).

Ps, if your using the num pad, you can "hover" over Telly by jumping over him and just going back and forth with the 7 and 9 key. It made 5yoa me very happy. You couldn't do that in Treasure Mountain (the elves could steal you gold) or Gizmos and Gadgets (I think you'd get hit).
Right, the "math one" is "Super Solvers: Outnumbered!" and the "reading one" is "Super Solvers: Midnight Rescue".

I'll try out the other games you mentioned, too. :)

It’s a tough time to be an indie developer, with Steam’s new sale event causing wishlist deletions
27 Jun 2019 at 6:25 pm UTC

I didn't really get the way the recent sale works when gifting you games off of your own Wishlist, either.

I gathered that the items near the top of my Wishlist would get prioritized for a giveaway, so I reordered things so that I had a solid top 20, and a titanium top 10.

If gamers are ridiculously strict min-maxers (and many are), then they wouldn't hesitate to kill their entire Wishlist for just the chance of getting the 3 most expensive titles.

I'm not like that, I prefer indies for story, unique mechanics and lack of money-grubbing DLC or microtransactions (usually). But there's a lot of "keeping up with your friends" that most (particularly young) gamers want to do. They "NEED" the latest game, and the new, cool thing is most often an expensive AAA, not an indie cult-hit.

Valve really should have worded things better for this event. If it's already confusing in English, I'd hate to see what it's like in Italian or Mandarin. :/

DOSBox is still alive, with a new bug fix release available
27 Jun 2019 at 5:50 pm UTC

I've been playing some old edutainment games on DOSBox that my partner insisted I try out.

Super Solvers is a fun series (so far), the two games I tried are reading-comprehension based and math based. The math one you zap robots with a remote control at a TV station to find clues to where the "Master of Mischief" is hiding. The reading one you use a magnifying glass to zap the robots, but the same general idea: zap the robots, do puzzles, get clues, and find the Master of Mischief before midnight, or it's Game Over!

It sounds completely ridiculous, but it's actually fun. :)

My favourites on DOSBox (so far) are probably Duke Nukem 2 (that soundtrack!), Dune, EcoQuest 1, and The Island of Dr. Brain.

OpenVIII, an in-development open source game engine for Final Fantasy VIII
25 Jun 2019 at 11:26 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: DesumI mean, we all understand running Morrowind in OpenMW is better than Gambryo Morrowind running in Wine. Right?
The newer the code base running your game (the game's engine), the better it will run an old game's assets on newer machines into the future, so far as I know...

Is that correct? Not sure if I understand precisely why... :/

OpenVIII, an in-development open source game engine for Final Fantasy VIII
25 Jun 2019 at 12:58 pm UTC Likes: 2

C# seems a poor idea, it isn't well-liked so you'll therefore get less developers interested or proficient to help. :/

Also, OpenGL is good, but Vulkan would probably age more gracefully. More work in the short term, but less in the long run.

All that aside, it looks interesting. :) FF8 had FF7 to compete with, so it was never a fair comparison. FF8's unique magic system was pretty cool, too. If you're extremely patient for a many-hours-long grind, you could even unlock late-game weapons and spells early with all the various magic and item-crafting skills you can gain.

FF8 took away the emphasis on "levelling" and turned it into a strategists' game: what kinds of stats do you buff with your characters and why? On the other hand, it did homogenize the PCs to some degree, but weapons and Limit Breaks abilities did keep things interesting ("The End" on the last boss, anyone? ;) )

Confessing my continued love of the Steam Controller, a few years after release
8 Jun 2019 at 2:09 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: Nanobang...I use the Lpad instead of the joystick for ev-er-y-thing, and the stick just ends up being used like a kinda clumsy, vestigial Dpad.
Man, took the words right out of my mouth, tend to avoid using the D-stick because I had an N64 back in the day (though I never broke my sticks, despite them being well-loved ;). Actually had to ask someone travelling to the U.S. to buy more Steam Controllers, because the Canadian distributors were (are?) sold out everywhere and Amazon sellers terribly inflated the prices! :(

Would even love to use the Steam Controller for an easy "remote" using SC-Controller once I get a MythTV-based PVR going.

IMHO, the Steam Controller is excellent for those who are always tweaking everything in their software. You can make the controller do anything you want so long as you can imagine how it would work and are willing to invest the time into tweaking the settings until they're perfect.

It's much easier on RSI to NOT use the D-stick too.

Some information on why Wine is not going to be using DXVK
26 Jan 2019 at 5:06 pm UTC

Better to not make assumptions in a potential game of "broken telephone". Just hope that they do start to talk amicably, even if it means one or both parties have to say "I can't work with you because of x." Getting that unpleasantness over with would be a good idea because there's huge demand from the community for both projects.