I have played a few of them (including Choice of Robots) and I generally like them. The writing is a bit wonky at times, though, and dependant on the game (since there's a couple of different writers).

On GNU/Linux, both the JSON files the game uses and the source .txt files that are parsed by the ChoiceScript preprocessor are plain files in the scenes/ subdirectory of the installation path. Likewise, the interpreter is written in JavaScript (the game binary is just a thin wrapper around the Chromium Embedded Framework), so that's also human-readable. If you like snooping behind the curtains, looking at how the sausage is made, that might be of interest for you.

(On Windows, that's a bit more difficult, because there the files are inside a ZIP file embedded in the resource fork of the PE EXE. No idea about Mac OS X, but could theoretically be inside the HFS+ resource fork?)

The game automatically saves your progress on each page, overwriting the save file each time. I've written a quick-n-dirty script that monitors the save file (using inotifywait, Debian package name is inotify-tools) and copies the file somewhere else on each change, with the current time attached. That basically gives you a way to "save scum".

If anybody is interested in that script, I put it in a gist on GitHub here [External Link]. It's a bit hacky, so beware. As parameters, it needs to original save file (inside ~/.steam/steam/userdata/$yoursteamid/$appid/remote/ (substitute the ID of your steam account and the ID of the game in question), the file without the temp attached), a directory where to copy the saves and a prefix to add to each file. It then continues to monitor the save file and copies it on each change, until you kill the script with Ctrl+C.

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Quoting: liamdaweThis is why I find their earlier comment about no one in their dev team doing Linux, how did they do their previous Linux testing?

Contractors.

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See the github work-in-progress pull request for the Vulkan work here.

A pull request that adds 30k lines (and is far from done). I'm glad I'm not the person who has to review this.

(mirv, your xoreos OpenGL renderer rewrite will not take 30k lines, right? :))

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VA-11 Hall-A also apparently takes places in the same general universe as Read Only Memories [External Link], which is a bit more like a traditional point & click adventure game. I can recommend that one.

From what it looks like, one character of ROM, Jess Meas, also appears in VA-11 Hall-A.

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Quoting: rustybroomhandleGet off the GG train - they are anti-games, anti-gamer, anti-developer, anti-progress

At least we now know who's responsible for it taking off:
View video on youtube.com

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Quoting: EhvisBut the practice is that the cheap Russian purchases get put on G2A for the rest of the world to buy. It sucks, but there is no good solution for this.

...You can region-lock the key itself, so that it's only usable in Russia?

Just to name one other solution from the top of my head. Just because you can't think of anything else than your silly idea, doesn't mean there aren't any other solutions.

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Quoting: EhvisObviously they need to allow paying full price for the international version.

That's...the opposite of a good fix for this issue.

The price differences exist because of the different cost of living in certain places. A non-native-Russian person living in Russia, who would like the "international" version, will not magically earn more than his native Russian co-workers.

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It's more like that they use stolen credit card information. The "oops, not really" is the original owner later discovering that a charge was made with the card that was stolen, and directing the bank to charge it back.

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Quoting: EhvisFor instance, let the cheap Russian version only have the Russian language

Limiting language selection is pretty crummy for expats living in places where they don't speak the local language well enough.

Or for people who prefer the original over a potentially bad localization. Hell knows I'm pretty annoyed with the TV situation here in Germany (though it is getting a bit better, partially), where I have to wait a year to see a show in a badly done German dub, with no option to even get the original (apart from waiting another year for a physical copy).

And seeing how abysmal German, which is in theory relatively close to English still, translations of English games can be, I'm sure Russian translations are very often very very bad.

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As of right now I am only seeing 11 titles in the UK

Same in Germany.

hopefully more to come soon.

Won't ever happen. International movie rights are a mess.

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