It's weird. I couldn't get into the Bomber Crew "atmosphere" - most world war games leave me cold. But space ships? Sign me up!

Same thing happened with Company of Heroes. Couldn't get into it. But Dawn of War 2? Basically CoH with space marines. Boom! Played the hell out of it.

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This looks absolutely insane! Completely over the top, but still with some nice "hidden" mechanics, like shooting the stair-release mechanism for an instant multi-kill. Love it!

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I don't mind jamming weapons in game, provided it's driven by a story mechanic. I'm not a fan of breaking weapons entirely though. I hated Dying Light early game for all the broken, but decent weapons you end up throwing on the ground while you hunt for a broken pipe instead. Getting the bow was a godsend.

So story-driven, yes. Randomly breaking to make the game harder, no.

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Well, just reporting in to say how absolutely incredible this game is. The gameplay is excellent, but you "dip into" each session, rarely lasting more than 20 minutes or so per play. In between plays, not only is there a deep progression of character unlocks, skills and upgrades, but also a wonderful, often heart-wrenching, story about the game's protagonists, the family Bergson. The narrator is particularly excellent, and much of the story is revealed through unlocks during your playthrough, invoking instant in-game cut-scenes, later expanded upon when you return to the house.

It's superb. It's... top ten material, honestly. I'm blown away.

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This has been on my wishlist for months. No more - just bought it. I'll give it a shot tonight.

Edit: Well, it's excellent. There's a beautifully presented story here, superb graphics and fluid, satisfying gameplay all tied into a progression tree throughout what looks like about 6 characters. The (excellent) narrator is seamless throughout gameplay too in a very Bastion-like way. The occasional interlude/scene-setter pops up in very Transistor-like way too. So Dead Mage is taking some great inspiration from Supergiant here.

Brilliant stuff. Very happy this has happened!

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Quoting: psycho_driver

Quoting: JuliusWorks fine here on Manjaro as well. Graphics take some time to get used to, but the game is a solid loot driven ARPG. The main problem is that it is way too easy. Even on legendary mode you can just walk through it at least with my character build. Maybe I got a strange unbalanced skill combination by accident?

I have a feeling it's just pretty easy, at least for a while. I started a berserker last night and so far can just face tank everything.

Unless something's changed in the past couple of months, the default "Normal" mode is pretty easy. However, "Heroic", the next level up doubles monster health and gives them a 50% damage boost. At this level, you'll have to start kiting some of the tougher monsters or die. Epic doubles it again, and Legendary doubles it to an 800% boost in monster health. Early game here can be a bit tedious, as every monster needs massive kiting until you unlock stronger spells/abilities/gear.

I play on Heroic only. It's a SUPERB game that I've sunk nearly 40 hours into. Big thanks to Liam for helping the dev sort the Linux launcher script, because that stopped me playing this for over a year (I was on Ubuntu 18.04 at the time, but only 18.10 and later were supported, until Liam noticed that the dev was calling static libraries instead of targeting the Steam runtime libraries).

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Quoting: GuestI just noticed the team had reached the one billion points mark. :smile:

https://stats.foldingathome.org/team/245680 [External Link]

Not only are you now 7th, but the top contributor accounts for over a quarter of that billion! Some incredible effort here. I haven't re-installed since I got my new AMD card. Time to start again, I reckon!

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Quoting: dpanter

Quoting: scaineMangoHUD is pure aesthetics

Not so.
Displaying MangoHud is optional, it can now start hidden and be revealed with a single keypress. It can log detailed fps data and upload to flightlessmango.com [External Link]. By the way, a Flatpak exists if you're into that sort of thing.

Sorry, I meant it's pure aesthetics for me. I don't really have any interest in benchmarking, beyond a vague finger-in-the-air, "is this smooth enough to play for more than 10 minutes". I get that lots of people love their 144Hz, or 120fps, or whatever. For me, I stop caring around the 45-50fps. 60 is a nice to have.

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Quoting: callcifer

it's an attempt to blend aspects of The Witness and Talos Principle

I'm torn. I really, really loved The Talos Principle but was completely turned off by The Witness so now I don't know what to think about this game :smile:

The Witness was a bitter, bitter disappointment. After the inventiveness of Braid, I had such high hopes, only to see this repetitive, bland puzzler botched with obscure mechanics (mid-game mechanics at least... it's pretty simple at the start). The island is pretty... and that's about it.

Comparatively, the Talos Principle is a near-masterpiece. Wonderful immersion, stunning graphics, difficult, but intuitive puzzles and an engaging, if drawn out, plot structure. The inter-puzzle puzzles were glorious too. The only bit I didn't like was the spurious block-puzzles they threw into each level of the Tower. God those were tedious. You could almost complete them by trial and error, and in hindsight, they're oddly reminiscent of the entire Witness experience. I did at least two or possibly three puzzles in the Witness by total accident. Hadn't an actual scooby what was going on - press a button, hear a noise, see a lift-thingy move, try another, try another... try for about 20 minutes until magically I appear to have solved... something. Since all the buttons are now inactive, and presumably a new part of the island is available? Maybe? Who knows.

So yeah. In summary, Braid good. Witness shit.

I still fondly remember Zero Punctuation reviewing Braid and hoping it would be terrible, so that he could make a joke about Jonathon Blow's game both sucking and blowing. But he liked Braid. I wonder if he liked The Witness? Spoiler! He did not [External Link]. But at least he got to use his aforementioned sucks and blows joke! Result!

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Quoting: pmadzik

Quoting: scaineI wonder if this will ever get deb/ppa support. I'm just not a fan of "locally" (i.e. non-managed) installed software. Such a cool project too.

My dirty hack for deb package:
In source dir (from git or tarball) after installing all required dependencies:
 
meson build/meson64 --libdir lib/mangohud/lib --prefix /usr -Dappend_libdir_mangohud=false -Dld_libdir_prefix=true

CC="gcc -m32" CXX="g++ -m32" PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/usr/lib32/pkgconfig:/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/pkgconfig:/usr/lib/pkgconfig:" LLVM_CONFIG="/usr/bin/llvm-config32" meson build/meson32 --libdir lib/mangohud/lib32 --prefix /usr -Dappend_libdir_mangohud=false -Dld_libdir_prefix=true

DESTDIR="$PWD/build/release" ninja -C build/meson32 install

DESTDIR="$PWD/build/release" ninja -C build/meson64 install

cd build/release

tar cvzf ../../../MangoHud-0.5.1-bin.tar.gz . --owner=0 --group=0

cd ../../..

./tar2deb.sh MangoHud-0.5.1-bin.tar.gz mangohud 0.5.1-1
Last step execute shell script tar2deb.sh with such content:
 
#!/bin/bash
set -x

# $1 - tar.gz file
# $2 - package name
# $3 - version
# $4 - section
# $5 - architecture

control=$(mktemp -dt)
data=$(mktemp -dt)

tarfile="$1"
pkgname=$2
pkgver=$3
section=${4:-misc}
arch=${5:-amd64}

cat "$tarfile" | (cd $data; tar xvzf -)

size=$(du -s $data | cut -f1)

cat > $control/control <<EOF
Package: $pkgname
Section: $section
Priority: optional
Architecture: $arch
Version: $pkgver
Installed-Size: $size
Maintainer: $USER
Description: Deb-package made from $tarfile
 This package is made by tar2deb by $USER at
  $(date) from $tarfile
EOF

(cd $data; find -type f | xargs md5sum ) > $control/md5sums
(cd $control; tar cvzf control.tar.gz * --owner=0 --group=0)
cp $tarfile $control/data.tar.gz
echo 2.0 > $control/debian-binary

ar -cr ${pkgname}_${pkgver}_${arch}.deb $control/{debian-binary,control.tar.gz,data.tar.gz}

rm -rf $control
rm -rf $data

Nice - I guess that give me an uninstall, but I still don't get updated, of course, unless I go through that each time there's a new release. Definitely better to wait for that PPA mentioned in the github issues tracker, I think. MangoHUD is pure aesthetics. I don't need it for anything, other than to satisfy my curiosity of what's possible. Thanks though! Great to have options if I decide to give it a go.

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