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Latest Comments by scaine
Blasphemous confirmed to release for Linux on September 21
17 Sep 2020 at 9:19 pm UTC Likes: 1

Been looking forward to this one. I still need to buy Carrion, then this is next.

Dicey Dungeons, the innovative and great fun deck-builder has a huge update out
16 Sep 2020 at 2:26 pm UTC

I think Slay the Spire, Dreamgate and Dicey Dungeons are all weirdly similar in core design. I say "weirdly", because they're all wildly different in aesthetic. I'd also rank them in that order for the amount of RNG that affects gameplay. Some Dicey Dungeons runs can be very "samey" (in a good way) which reduces RNG only to your dice throws.

It's a great game, but full disclosure - I've played 108 hours of StS, and I loved it so much, I ended up dropping another 40 hours into Fate Hunters. Its sequel, Dreamgate has 25 hours. Meanwhile, I only have 15 hours in Dicey Dungeons.

I'm completely sure why, but I think it boils down to this: in the previous titles (especially StS and Dreamgate) there's the potential for truly, exceptionally bizarre builds. Like, almost game-breaking builds. It's INCREDIBLY satisfying. Dicey doesn't have the same scope for this.

Example, in Dreamgate, I had an Elemtalist throwing her fireballs for 6 damage at the start of the game. By the end, she had three overload cards which double all spell damage, a Rampage skill which doubled all card damage, and a Mage skill which added two damage to all spells. So that fireball was now dealing 8x2x2x2x2 damage. Yep, 128 damage a card. The final boss only has 450 health! It was beautiful. I didn't even need my Meteor card which dealt 35 damage... it would have landed 592 damage if I'd been dealt it in my opening hand...!

Dicey can be very, very satisfying, but not quite in the same way.

Amnesia: Rebirth from Frictional Games confirmed for launch on October 20
16 Sep 2020 at 11:21 am UTC Likes: 2

Frictional are (for me) the absolute masters of horror. I hate horror games. I love Frictional games. Really looking forward to this! In kind of the same way most of us look forward to doing a bungie jump!

Albion Online continues pulling in record player counts
15 Sep 2020 at 8:53 pm UTC

Quoting: hagabaka
Quoting: Purple Library GuyFunny . . . everyone here seems to hate it, but someone must like it for it to be gaining a bunch of players at this late date. I wonder what's attracting them.
Speaking for my own experience, this game was very good at getting me hooked, but it felt like a bait-and-switch. When I first signed up I got a ton of bonus learning points which makes things not very grindy even though I was f2p. But after the points ran out, I noticed how much p2p made a difference, so paid for a month subscription. But then I got to high enough level in things so that most of the resources I need were only in PvP zones, and that made the game completely uninteresting to me.
This, very much. All the good resources after level... 4? They're all in red or black zones which are all PvP, resulting in this horrible, tedious harvest/ambush/run cycle. It's a PvP game and any pretence it's not is entirely misleading.

Manjaro Linux 20.1 'Mikah' is out now with a theme refresh
15 Sep 2020 at 8:47 pm UTC Likes: 2

Well, I downloaded the Cinnamon remix of Manjaro via torrent today, checked its SHA1 checksum, burnt it onto a live USB and booted up. However, for some reason, the liveUSB doesn't see my USB ethernet connection. Even weirder, I can browse the internet via Firefox, but I can't ping 8.8.8.8.

Honestly never seen anything like it. When I unplug the USB, the whole networking stack crashes.

If I reboot without the USB Ethernet plugged in, the wireless kicks in fine and the installer appears to work.

It's not filling me with confidence, I have to say. Still, it's my secondary PC, a Dell laptop, so I'm willing to sacrifice it to the distro gods to see what blessings might be bestowed. I'll finish the install tomorrow and report back on first impressions.

Edit1: The installer isn't hiDPI aware, so it looks awful. Resizing it helps a little.
Edit2: The full-disk encryption option doesn't have a GUI, so it dumps me at an hiDPI full screen console screen and (if you have a magnifying glass), you see that it's asking for the key. Pretty terrible experience. Even more bizarre - when you enter the password, it prints (still tiny) "opened slot0", then weirdly appears to reboot - I see the primary Dell logo again, only this time, it boots to my lightdm login! So freaky.
Edit3: No sign of Dropbox in the Add/Remove programs. So I reckon, it's in the AUR. I enable the AUR, refresh the database, sure enough, now I have an AUR tab. I click on that, click on Dropbox, click on "Build" (weird, but it's the only option I can see), after a minute, I have "Failed to build Dropbox". This isn't going too well! :grin:
Edit4: It just keeps failing, an error about "one or more PGP signatures couldn't be verified". Oof. Well, I'm not giving up quite yet, but I'll google it in the morning. I've had enough for one hour of distro-hopping! I have to say though, it's going better than last time I tried Manjaro on my main PC - that just kept rebooting lightdm without letting me login (after three separate attempts to build from two separate USB keys - very consistent!). That was about 2 years ago though, and it was an Nvidia box back then.

Manjaro Linux 20.1 'Mikah' is out now with a theme refresh
14 Sep 2020 at 9:55 pm UTC Likes: 3

I quite like the idea of Manjaro, but I'm also leaning towards trying Endeavour because it offers a Cinnamon download as an installer option. I think I might just have to install them both and see which one "fits" the best. I use a lot of work-related proprietary tools for my day job, so they'll all have to be well supported - things like Teams (boke!), Horizon, Zoom and Dropbox. And of course the usual suspects like Discord, Spotify, Steam and Mame will all be well supported regardless.

Albion Online continues pulling in record player counts
14 Sep 2020 at 5:11 pm UTC

It's great to see it succeeding, but I'm with Tchey and Julius - the zoning and endless grind make it super-tedious. And the whole game still revolves around this weird cat and mouse PvP system where high level mobs wait in the "black" zone (where all the good stuff is) and try to ambush the harvesters. It's... just not fun.

I had some good experiences joining random groups outside co-op dungeons, but good groups are hard to find and tend to break up when the dungeon run is over. If you're not in an active clan, you might as well give it a miss.

But as I say, great that people are finding this fun, as it's good to have a successful MMO with native Linux support.

The weekend chat - what have you been playing?
14 Sep 2020 at 4:58 pm UTC

Quoting: g000h
Quoting: ghiumaI am obsessed with 7 Days to die, too bad my DS4 malfunctions after a while, it only happens with this game ..
You *might* not already know this - but 7 Days To Die has released Alpha 19.1 Experimental and it has some good new stuff in it:

- 10 Toolbar Slots (up from 8)
- More HD Zombies
- The Dynamic Music works on Linux now
- and other stuff

I've started a fresh game on that, myself.
We were just chatting about this in Discord a couple of days ago - can't wait to try give it a try myself! Also, all the ladder changes. Will ladders finally be usable!? :grin:

The weekend chat - what have you been playing?
13 Sep 2020 at 7:50 pm UTC Likes: 1

A bit of Left for Dead 2 with Sin & gang on stream, but otherwise, I'm still horribly addicted to Dreamgate [External Link]. I've been laid down with the cold recently, so no VR for me for a while!

Linux gaming optimization kit 'GameMode' has a new release up
13 Sep 2020 at 10:42 am UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: SalvatosI think I had to disable it for Shadow of the Tomb Raider or the game wouldn’t run, so it hasn’t seemed very helpful so far :tongue:
Ultimately I have no idea what it does or why I would need it.
From the article:
the point is to have an easy place for anyone and everyone to kick their Linux system into the highest performance possible
Basically, it sets your processors into "performance" mode, and configures a few other settings to maximise the game's performance. Especially useful on laptops, since they might the use the "powersave" mode of the CPU (although most use "ondemand" these days).

This is actually pre-installed on Mint, although I don't get the notifications. I might look into enabling those, as sometimes I forget to add "gamemoderun %command%" in my Steam game's launch options.