Having followed Julian Gollop's career since the days of Chaos* and Rebelstar, I have to say it sounds a lot more “Gollop-ey” than XCOM. It's funny how, although his influence is still very apparent in XCOM, you don't really notice the extent to which it isn't his game any more until he shows us how he would have done it.

Having just bought XCOM (again; I already had it on the Xbox 360) when XCOM2 came out, I still don't have the sequel. I might just give it a miss entirely and buy this instead.

*Mind you, it took me about 20 years to properly appreciate Chaos. In its final issue, the great Your Sinclair magazine named it the best Spectrum game of all time, and I couldn't understand what they were on about. It wasn't until about ten years after then that I finally “got” it. (And yes, that's the Chaos that was recently remade as Chaos Reborn.)

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Not Linux-native, but GOG is giving Unreal Gold away for free for the next day or so (26 hours left as I post this).

That's the original 1998 Unreal with all the bugfixes, fan-made upgrades so it'll play nice with modern hardware, and the “Return to Na Pali” expansion. One word of advice: although it'll run quite happily on the GPU with Direct3D under WINE, I think it actually looks better with software rendering. YMMV of course, but don't worry, it's 2018: your machine can handle it. :)

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Quoting: skinnyrafWill they ever stop publishing new excellent DLC for Cities: Skylines? I played C:S for 37 hours and would have probably passed 100 hours if I played through again after each worthwhile DLC... For now, I'm waiting for an "ultimate edition" :)

Well, considering that there's new DLC for Crusader Kings II coming soon, I think they'll be at it for a while yet. The player stats for their games are unlike anything else on Steam. Most games start off with a huge spike as people buy them in the first week or so, then tail off. Paradox's are almost the opposite: they just keep growing. Last time I looked, there were more active players of C:S than ever.

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Quoting: ElvanexI've been putting 6-10 hours a day into a Mount and Blade: Warband campaign for the last few weeks.

Have you run into the memory leak yet? Once I had about 300 in-game days under my belt, I couldn't play it for more than about 30 seconds without a crash. And I'm not exaggerating. It's really annoying, because I was like you: that game just took over my life for a while.

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Torment: Tides of Numenera on its free Steam weekend. It seems a bit wordy for my liking, although that might just be because I want to get through as much of it as I can before the time runs out. It's not something that usually bothers me too much. I don't think I'll end up buying it, though. After all, Shadowrun: Hong Kong has been sitting unfinished in my Steam library for months. (I just checked: it's been almost a year.)

I've also got back into Minecraft in a minor way over the last few weeks. Just single player, but I'm sure I'll be noodling around in that at some point too.

Also, with the Monaco GP next weekend, I expect I'll have a bash round the streets of the Principality in F1 2015 sometime this week, if not over the next couple of days, to remind myself how mad it is.

Quoting: GuestI picked up Mankind Divided last night but was disappointed with the performance, will probably end up uninstalling it tbh :(

Yeah, it's pretty poor. It's a good game though; I ended up playing it on more or less the lowest settings and had a good time with it despite everything. Those loading times, though...

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Quoting: tuubiI still maintain that "hacker" is simply what programmers/developers/coders now call themselves to sound cool. I can't help but feel embarrassed whenever someone uses the term to describe me. I might have come up with a dirty hack or two over the years, but that does not make me a hacker. :P

"Hacker" was a common term for people breaking into systems back in the eighties and nineties, whereas "cracker" referred to people specifically breaking software protections. (DRM in modern terms.) But I guess language evolves.

The first time I ever heard “hacker”, it was in the non-cracker sense, back in the early '80s. I think it might have been in the late, great, Personal Computer News [External Link]. What I do remember is that whatever magazine it was used it pretty freely to refer to its readers and staff. It was just the word that was used. Trainspotters spot trains, hackers mess around with computers. “Hackers will prefer machine 'X' over machine 'Y' because it has a built-in debugger and monitor, while 'Y' only has a rudimentary BASIC in ROM,” that kind of thing. I don't recall anyone using it in a pejorative, borderline criminal, sense at all until maybe '87-'88.

I agree that “cracker” tended to refer specifically to people breaking what passed for DRM back then, but that might just be something to do with the circles we frequented. :)

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Quoting: mao_dze_dunI still think they should some idiot proof way to install and keep this up to date. I'm on board with people on the Phoronix board who say this should absolutely be incorporated in wine. You cannot attract a bigger user base to Linux, unless you dumb things down.

I know installing DXVK seems like the simplest thing to a dedicated Linux user, but to the occasional tux casual like myself, it's too much of a hassle.

It's easy enough on Arch now that there's a binary package in the AUR, so it may well end up in other distros' repos at some point. (Has nobody done a PPA for Ubuntu yet?) It's really building it that's the complicated part. Once you have the DLLs, it's fairly plain sailing, certainly no more difficult than setting up multiple WINE prefixes.

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That's cool. I wasn't aware of this until I saw Scott Manley playing it [External Link] a couple of weeks ago, and I just assumed there wouldn't be a Linux version. Without playing it myself, I'd have to say it looks a lot like XCOM “done right”. (As Scott said, it's amazing just how much like XCOM it does look like, considering they're using Unity rather than Unreal.)

Not that XCOM is bad exactly, but... you know... Julian Gollop. :)

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Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: Duncand that's D3D9, from - yikes! - ten years ago.

There are a lot of great games which are even older than that.

Of course there are. I was talking about Paradroid the other day. I'm just surprised that it's my (second-)most recent WINE game, and that it's as old as that. I have a sort of self-imposed rule not to buy Windows-exclusive games until they're at least five years old, but it seems I've been imposing it more strictly than I realised.

Anyway, having said what I did, it sounds from other comments as if it might be worth trying some games that are available natively under WINE instead. That's a bit depressing.

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It will be very interesting to see Valve get back into the single-player gaming experience once again

Given all the people they've lost since their last major single-player releases, it'll be interesting to see if they're still Valve. I think it's possible as long as GabeN's still in charge, but who remembers when EA and Activision were developer-centred publishers who genuinely cared about quality games? Companies can change.

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