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Latest Comments by oldrocker99
GOL’s first monthly hardware survey EDIT
8 Sep 2014 at 1:00 pm UTC

Done. While there may be better survey sites, this is certainly a good start. I personally describe my system (AMD Phenom II 965, 16GB PC1333, nVidia 650ti, Kubuntu 14.04) a "hardly high-end" when I see b*tching from people with nVidia 770s about their "pitiful" frame rates of "only" 122 fps. Every Steam game I run runs just fine and dandy; the only game which crashed was X-COM, which was fixed by the 3.40 nVidia drivers. Y'know, just like Windows.

BTW, "Crash Time," from the Indie Bundle, is one fun little card game that I've been having some fun with.

Steam Hardware Survey For August 2014, Linux Slips
7 Sep 2014 at 12:06 pm UTC

1% of 75,000,000 is still a hell of a lot of users, and that's why there is a market for Linux games on Steam. As we've read on this forum, devs are satisfied with the sales they're getting on Steam. I'm not worried by the low percentages; we've always been a minority compared to the closed-source OS users.

Screencheat Is A Genius New FPS For Linux & It's Fun
6 Sep 2014 at 5:01 pm UTC

Would *I* be bad at this game...

Planetary Annihilation Officially Launches, Linux Is Polished Up
6 Sep 2014 at 4:54 pm UTC

One of the game I backed on Kickstarter has a release version! Halloo-Hallay, it's a lovely day!

GOL World Tour: Linux Gaming From Norway
5 Sep 2014 at 11:26 pm UTC Likes: 2

chrisq's post was oddly reminiscent of the kind of things we in the US hear from Fox News, Rush Limmbaugh, Sean Hannity, etc.

Yeah, this is a gaming site, and there are some fine looking games here, and that's what this page was intended to show.

The Witcher 2 For Linux Released On GOG
5 Sep 2014 at 9:58 pm UTC Likes: 3

berillions, wow!

VP, which took several metric tons of abuse on the release of W2, has made good on their work, and major props to them for making their latest eON available.

So, VP, Aspyr and Feral should be held up as exemplars of Linux porting. I'll also add the folks at Paradox, whose Crusader Kings 2 native port was excellent, and who released Europa Universalis IV for Windows, Mac and Linux all on the same day. Not to mention the several other games they publish.

In the Hall of Fame is Bioware, who released a still-good native port of Neverwinter Nights back in 2003.

Feral Interactive Wish To Know Why You Game On Linux
4 Sep 2014 at 2:57 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: Apopas
Quoting: neffo
Quoting: cdnr1Better qeustion wy do people play on mac
Because they think different.
Or because they don't think at all.
Samsung's phone commercials ridiculing iPhone fanboys ("The iPhone 5 needs an adapter to use your iPhone 4 accessories." "Yeah, but Apple makes the coolest adapters!")) were right to the point. I began noticing, in the 1980s, the Apple Phenomenon: that people would pay any price to get that cute little multicolored apple on their boxes. Yes, the hardware was nice, if you never ever wanted to upgrade a component, but, essentially, Apple relies on the old Planned Obsolescence model that Detroit ran into the ground in the 1950s. And Apple decreed that the only way you could get their clearly superior-to-Windows OS was to pay a premium for their machines; fighting an Amiga Mac emulator in 1987, fighting the "Hackintosh" in the 2000s cemented my view of them as the new Evil Empire. These days, Microsoft, which not so long ago ruled the waves, is now moored at the dock, and taking on water. Evil Empire no more; Apple has taken their place.

The most interesting point about Mac gamers (and they are a small minority of Mac users; although there are many, many more Mac games on Steam currently than there are Linux games, and, to put it simply, Mac users aren't as farking hungry for games as we Linux users. Their percentage of Steam users is not much higher than Linux users, and there are many more people who use OSX then use Linux) is seen in Aspyr's pleasant shock and surprise at a thread on the Steam CIV V forums devoted solely to thanking Aspyr for their nearly perfect native port of a AAA game. For all the many games Aspyr has ported to the Mac, they never had seen such a thread from Mac users. One of them said that when they saw it, they were grinning from ear to ear all that day (6/10/14). That thread has 28 pages of effusive thanks, showing the devotion to gaming Linux users have.

The good thing about the Mac ports is that, once a game has been ported to OpenGL, most of the heavy lifting has already been accomplished for a Linux port, for obvious reasons.

The explosion of games for Linux which we're all enjoying is still only the beginning. I'm glad (at 66) that I've lived long enough to see this!

Feral Interactive Wish To Know Why You Game On Linux
4 Sep 2014 at 1:24 am UTC Likes: 5

First of all, thank you, Feral, for the excellence of X-COM.

My first distro was Ubuntu 8.04. At that time, there was exactly one easily purchasable native Linux game: Neverwinter Nights Platinum. The purchase of that (a game I'd been playing since 2002 anyway) with all its expansions set me back $16.95. Bioware's site explained how to install the Linux client, and I was happily playing, with all the mods working perfectly (once I learned to lowercase all the .HAK files). I'm still playing it, too, on the original installation.

Then, in 2009 came the first Humble Bundle, with some cool cross-platform games, including the classic World of Goo, and the interesting phenomenon of Linux purchasers always making a higher donation than Windows or Mac users, a phenomenon which has continued to this day. This did not escape the notice of game developers, fortunately.

Desura was a godsend. Suddenly we had a Steam-like service with great games, and when the Dominions series became available, I was ecstatic. Prepurchased Dominions 4 from Desura and have been having nothing but fun with it since.

THEN:Steam for Linux. Gabe Newell's disgust with Windows 8 has been one of the best things to happen to our beloved OS, and the hit games keep coming, along with some very cool indies.

We use Linux because it's (in our opinions, and not just ours) the best OS available, by far. I also think that the more you know about computer hardware, the more you'll appreciate Linux, the ultimate tinkerer's OS,and it has a certain appeal to the kind of people who like to swap out parts in their desktops, overclock, etc. And it's free, and by that, I don't mean "gratis." Yes, all the distros cost nothing to download, but this is free as in freedom, the freedom to use our OS to make our computers behave the way we want them to, from display managers to window managers, from minimal window managers like Enlightenment, Openbox, LXDE and others (MATE is pretty light, too) to the big, full-featured desktops like KDE, GNOME, and Unity. If we don't want closed-source software on our machines, then we don't have to install it.

We are also,demonstrably, hungry for games. Our presence on Steam is tiny (but 1.4% of 75 million is still a whole passel o' people), but we apparently have no compunction against buying closed-source games, even at full price.

Feral and Aspyr, and even the originally-despised Virtual Programming, whose eON wrapper has improved quite a bit since its somewhat rocky opening, have become heroes by this gamer's reckoning, and I, for one, can hardly wait to see what's coming!

Borderlands 2 Also Looks Like It's Coming To Linux, UPDATE: Confirmed
4 Sep 2014 at 12:15 am UTC Likes: 1

Yah-freakin'-WHOO!

This is one of the games I asked Aspyr about, and, having already ported it to the Mac, a lot of the heavy lifting is already done.

The other game I asked about is Bioshock:Infinite, which a number of other users here have expressed a desire to see. It was also ported to the Mac by Aspyr.

Life is good and getting better!

Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition For Linux & Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition Linux Update
2 Sep 2014 at 6:25 pm UTC

I play mostly arcade, action, fighting, adventure, puzzle, survival horror, and RPG, and I just can't stand pixels. I think they look OK with scanlines or in very small screens because the pixels get hidden and they look more like rudimentary drawings, but on clean LCD monitors they look absolutely horrendous to me. I really don't get this "retro" "pixel art" revival thing. I've always adored chiptune though.

Looks alone won't make a decent game, but gameplay alone also won't IMO. I like simple and 2D graphics (in fact, hand-drawn graphics are my favorite), just not ye olde ugly pixels.
Well as I stated above, Torment and Pillars of Eternity are just that kind of games!