Quoting: Liam DaweSomewhat expected to wake up to find fights in the comments but people behaved, you did good GOL community.

I'm keeping my mouth shut for the sake of a quiet life.

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I finally sunk my teeth into Two Point Hospital, which I got last summer. (For reasons we needn't go into here, Fun With Hospitals isn't really something that's appealled to me for the last six/seven months or so.) It's... yeah, it's Theme Hospital. But better. Not too demanding, but with a surprising depth under the surface. You can get into difficulty, but never too much. Just the thing for unwinding of an evening.

Quoting: TcheyFarcry 3, via Proton, no technical issue beside the annoying Uplay registration process.
I cleaned the maps, all towers, all camps, but the story is too stupid, i hate QTE scenes, i hate unskipable scenes, and i disagree with the "mind" of the game (like, you have missions : find and kill rare animals to progress. I don’t care killing stuff, but the idea of "oh it’s rare, let’s kill it", i dislike). So i don’t feel i want to go further (i only have story to complete, and then "mini games"). Still, it was about 20 hours of fun + 5 hours of struggle because of cutscene, QTE and stupid AI you have to escort a few times. The same gameplay, but with a real open world not attached to story, i’m in.

The moment that really killed it for me was one mission where you have to infiltrate a big enemy base. Still in “FC2 mode” at this point, I thought if I could sneak behind this one guard, I could get in without firing a shot. But you can't.

Or rather, you can, but you instantly fail the mission. It's hard-coded that you have to walk right up to the guard in broad daylight and be seen so that he can alert all the others and it turns into the big set-piece action sequence the writer wanted. For me, that's just not Far Cry. What I loved about FC2, the one thing that made me overlook its flaws (those respawning checkpoints... grr...) was the way it embraced its open world. All you had were objectives, and it was entirely up to you how to achieve them. Sneak in stealthily like a Splinter Cell game, snipe the bad guys from a distance, go in all guns blazing, even set fire to the vegetation as a distraction while you come in from the other direction. All were equally valid. But not in FC3.

I haven't played a Far Cry game since. Apart from Blood Dragon; at least it doesn't take itself seriously. It's worth a look. (And if you haven't played FC2, it sounds like you'd prefer it too.)

Quoting: EhvisI've been building stuff in Planet Nomads. The survival stuff is rather easy now. The story bits are ok, but the most interesting part is still building crazy things.

With a bigger budget and a better sense of direction, it could have been great. It's obviously a very different game, but I can't help thinking of the way The Talos Principle revealed its story. I think that's the sort of atmosphere the developers were aiming for, but they just don't quite pull it off. It's still pretty good though, in a Minecraft-ey sort of way.

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Quoting: MaathSince I was a kid I've always wanted to make video games. Too bad I'm not an artist. No matter how easy these engines make creating a game, the art assets will probably always be the major hurdle. Sure there's sites like opengameart.org, but that can get you only so far.

You're not wrong, but that's why you see so many lone developers and small teams doing retro-style graphics. It isn't just an affectation; there are only so many ways you can arrange pixels in a 16x16 grid, especially in a limited palette, and that makes things so much easier. Although I've never released anything, I've always tinkered with graphics (and audio, and code) since the 8-bit days, and I well remember how much more difficult - more like “real drawing” - the jump to 16 bits was. And that was before we had to worry about 3D modelling, normal mapping, lighting...

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Quoting: kaimanI kinda wish for a steering wheel and pedals (my old set has long since been trashed), but it seems an excessive investment for just one game, so a gamepad must make do.

Oh, I hear you. I mean, for me it would be F1, Project Cars and Dirt Rally. And I'd probably end up playing them more than I do now. So I'd get a lot of use out of them. But it's still a lot of money to sink into what is, when all's said and done, a toy.

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Fallout 4. I dunno. I tend to agree with Shamus Young [External Link]: it's a decent enough game, but it's not Fallout. I came to the series with F3, but even in that game I could see that Bethesda's take on it doesn't make sense. It's 200 years after the bombs fell. Who are these feckless morons who haven't even cleared away the skeletons from the buildings they're living in? Sheesh. And after the Big Plot Twist (which I won't give away, although you can see it coming a mile off), I kind of lost interest in the main questline. There's certainly plenty of other stuff to busy yourself with though, and I thought Far Harbor was surprisingly good. They should have made that the main game.

I bought South Park: The Stick of Truth over the weekend, on sale. (For the price of a sandwich, as Ross Scott - Freeman's Mind, etc. - puts it. It's a good way of looking at it, I think. :) ) So far, I'm seeing Costume Quest with fart jokes. Sounds good to me.

And slightly OT, because it's about as far from Linux as it gets, but for some reason I found myself going back to Mirror's Edge, Rez HD, OutRun Online Arcade (offline these days, of course), and Space Giraffe on the XBox 360 yesterday afternoon. I hate to admit it because, well, Microsoft, but that's definitely my favourite console of all time. It just is.

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So, you might say... “Bloody good show”?

I'll get me coat...

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Quoting: dubigrasuI finished it first on PS3 and when it showed up for Linux I played it once again.

XBox360 for me. I think I got it for free in their “Games With Gold” thing (as I said, not really a zombie fan, so it's not something I would have gone out looking for). And yeah, when it came out for Linux it only seemed fair to actually pay for it. :)

As for Dying Light, if you enjoyed DI, you'll love DL.

I can't say I hate what I've seen so far (about two hours in), although I can already see why people who disliked DI prefer it. And, for me at least, that's not necessarily a good thing. But yeah, it's not bad.

Those "piss poor" ports from VP, Aspyr, Feral and the like, were available for us back then when the alternative options were limited, and when they mattered the most.

There are still a few ported games that don't work in Proton. So we still have a lot to be grateful for.

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Quoting: KimyrielleIt's not very noticable with smaller cities, but as soon as a city grows large, the game becomes both laggy and unstable. And I am not even talking about the 81 tile mod. Superficially, it seems to be a similar issue as with Stellaris: Too many Cims doing too many things.

Yes, and it's been getting worse over time. I have 80k+ cities that worked (reasonably) well, on a lower-powered machine, four years ago that I can barely even load now.

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Nice. I'm one of those weirdos who liked Dead Island (although it's probably telling that it's the only zombie game I ever did like) and thought Dying Light didn't sound as good. But hey, I'll give it a go over the weekend...

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Great work, guys. Now do Cities: Skylines. (Yeah, I know it's not in-house, but surely they could give Collosal Order some tips?)

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