There are a host of open source remakes of old game engines that fix bugs and update them for modern systems as well as add support for higher resolutions and widescreen aspect ratios. Here’s a few off the top of my head:
OpenMW for The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. This is probably the most famous one.
OpenRA for Red Alert, Tiberian Dawn, Dune 2000, and (in pre-alpha form) Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2 (the latter requiring extra fiddling with Github repositories).
OpenJKDF2 for Dark Forces 2 and its standalone Mysteries of the Sith expansion.
Arx Libertatis for Arx Fatalis, though IIRC the version sold now integrates an older build of it; one without the fixes for glyph drawing - it’s worth upgrading for that alone as spellcasting is a nightmare without the fix.
Tfix, T2Fix, and the Sneaky Upgrade for Thief 1/2/3 respectively. These are mods, not wholesale engine replacements, but serve the same purpose.
These are just the ones I know of. There are probably loads more.
Edit:the Ur-Quan Masters for Star Control II. I can’t believe I forgot about this! Star Control II is one of the best and most influential games that most people have never heard about.
OpenRCT2 is 100% the definitive way to play Roller Coaster Tycoon 1 & 2.
But I would never recommend a new player try OpenRA. The game has stellar multiplayer support but they just can’t figure out the campaign scripting at all. Go with the remaster collection instead.
Still? I haven’t played OpenRA in several years and assumed they would have fixed it by now.
Then again Red Alert 2 is even less supported than it was the last time I checked, so I’m guessing their focus is mostly on the multiplayer side of things.
I could argue that experiencing the Groundhog Day bug builds character but… no. Nobody should have to deal with that.
Admittedly, a few tactics like filling your base with laser rifles to make attacking aliens spawn unarmed no longer work. But honestly, an experienced player treats base attacks like bonus levels anyway so it’s not like much of value was lost. Besides, you also now get all the loot from big missions and not just the first 128 items.
Also, UFO now actually remembers your difficulty setting and doesn’t revert you to Beginner after the first mission. That’s different but better. I probably should’ve mentioned that separately in my first comment.
If so, beware:
I haven’t bothered verifying this (because I try to keep “persistent” game data in my home dir and backed up), but as far as I know, deleting games that run through Proton also removes their data in the steamapps/compatdata directory - which almost always includes the data people usually say Steam doesn’t delete.
I forgot about that. I lost that too. Thankfully anything I wanted was backed up to Steam Cloud (So game saves mostly). I mean, I lost some ScreenShots from Alan Wake 2 I would have liked to keep, along with Silent Hill f. But I’m not attached enough that it’s a major loss.
It looks so good, and the music is great, and story is apparently fantastic, but I just can not get the hang of the counter/block mechanic in combats, and without it the battles are pretty much impossible.
I came to depend less on the visual cues which are often deceptive and more on the audio ones or counting in my head for dodges/parries. Also invest heavily (basically all your points) into defense/vitality which makes Dodge/Parry misses much more forgiving.
Eventually, even if you only do a smattering of side quests/areas, you’ll get powerful enough to basically ignore the timing mechanics altogether.
Also set it on story mode + auto QTEs. I did that on my first playthrough and had absolutely no regrets. The mechanics of the game are definitely secondary to the experience of the story.
Clair Obscur for me too, but because of the AI art controversy. I can’t stand AI, even if temporary, even if just store banners, I just can’t trust the company from then on not to sneak it into other areas.
They didn’t sneak anything and they never will. Looked into it deeply. They used AI assets as placeholders during development. But everything in the shipped game is human-made. No further use of generative AI is expected, since the game awards controversy the company’s management published a statement of banning AI use entirely in their company.
The whole controversy around indie game awards was also blown beyond proportions. A company used a new technology at a time when the tech was new and the debate around it’s use was still inmature. Then dismissed it for it was not good enough. They failed at quality assurance and a couple of textures weren’t deleted. They replaced them as soon at they found out. By all intents and purposes, this controversy does not qualify sandfall as an AI using company, and to affirm so is ignorant of the context of all that went down in reality.
I understand their reasoning, but still, it soured me on the game. GenAI models being built from non-consensually mass-scraped art was known from the very start, and yet the devs thought it was ok to put it into their game… They could have just used stock textures as placeholders like developers have been doing for decades.
But anyway, we are free to just not agree and draw the line in different places on what we consider ethical conduct 🤷
the devs thought it was ok to put it into their game
That’s the point. They didn’t thought it was OK and didn’t.
They could have just used stock textures as placeholders like developers have been doing for decades.
That is exactly what they did, any texture left in the first version of the game was a mistake that was promptly fixed as soon as they noticed it. We have the advantage of judging four years later with new info something they did back then and have since corrected. Ethical considerations must include intent and context, and here there was definitely no intent to harm.
You said a whole lot of words, but the fact remains that they did use AI during development, released a game with AI textures, and told the award organization they never used AI at all.
They, and you, can make excuses all you want, but for some of us they simply have lost some of their good reputation. We will see what they do next though, and I’m hopeful.
I found it rough near the start, but it gets a lot easier as you go on, once you get more of a feel for when attacks are coming. Eventually you’ll be dodging things you’ve never seen before just on instinct.
Dodges are a lot easier than parries, even if you don’t get the extra AP from it. Fights last a bit longer, but you can definitely plough through most of it even with bad timing. Explore thoroughly in act 1, otherwise you’ll probably be underlevelled for the last boss there. Not really any need to grind mindlessly, but you can if you really need the extra levels.
I haven’t played since I beat it. But I did look into this after I did…
In general, every time the screen zooms in, you need to act. What type is something you learn, but that cuts down on the timing aspect There are also audio queues, like a sort of woosh effect. I don’t play a lot of fast response games like this, so I never noticed until it was pointed out.
I just can’t do anything with games that don’t allow me to pause (or go idle) as I just have constant interruptions.
It doesn’t help that many PvP games also have sweaty tryhard metas that put you on a different level if you’re not reading up on forums or discussions.
I’ll straight up admit that I can’t compete in most pvp titles; and I don’t want to be a loot goblin for the high school kids who are going to 360 no-scope headshot me from across the map and then tea bag my corpse.
Arc Raiders took this trope and turned it on its head. The game is entirely about being a loot goblin around other people in a no-rules environment but if you don’t pick fights, you will gradually get matched to servers with other people who don’t pick fights, and you start to meet people and have adventures together, it happens very organically and pleasantly, and if you ever DO run into a PvPer the game doesn’t really give a huge advantage to sweaty try-hards, a newb with a basic gun can defend themselves just as well as some well-equipped player hunter.
About 100% of shooter/survival games made with open PVP turned on all the time become kill-on-sight instantaneously, and those games usually give players a PvE mode for people too scared or annoyed with PvP, the segregation has been normal in gaming since the early days of online gaming. So it’s not as simple as saying it’s “supposed” to be PvE, it’s that they tuned the mechanics and themes to encourage more cooperation in an unprecedented way.
I only accept the 1989 Nintendo version of Tetris as “Tetris.” Anything else is incorrect.
That said, there was a flash game in the early 2000s called Supertris that was amazing and held global high score lists. I played the shit out of that.
I would love to get an audio player on my old Powkiddy V90. It sucks as a gaming handheld. But it’s small, has a headphone jack, and a physical volume wheel. That would be awesome.
because of the anti-competitive price restrictions that Valve often imposes on game developers and producers (the Price Parity Obligations). This means a publisher or developer would not be able to list a game on another platform as well as Steam, unless the prices offered on Steam is the same or lower. This applies to games on all other distribution stores (including online and physical stores) not just those distributed by Steam Keys
Textbook anti-trust lawsuit. Different from what Epic does, I doubt they impose such rules on developers.
I haven’t really looked deeply into this issue but what caught my eye was the claim that a 30% fee was excessive. I’m no insider into video game publishing but 30% is the standard retail markup for many things. If you bought a candy bar today, it probably cost the mini mart you bought it from 70% of what they’re charging.
thats what apple forces and imposes on any developer that uses the app store, which is most of them since on ios alt stores are only a thing on eu and japan afaik
Depends if you’re a big developer or some indie one. Big developers commonly don’t pay fees or have special deals (Uber, etc.). Smaller ones pay 15% up to 1 million downloads, then it’s 30%. So if you want to pay less, get really rich first.
That being said, this is on top of the VAT, not part of it. Still charging 30% in 2026 feels criminal and greedy. This applies to nearly all big corporations, including Valve Corporation with Gabe’s fleet of yachts and company making more money per employee than any other company. It made more sense to take 30% cut when 100Gb of HDD costed thousand dollars, internet was metered in megabytes and the whole infrastructure was just not there yet, but this “industry standart” tax never changed even tho for them distributing apps has become far, far cheaper than it used to.
Retail needs a location to store and sell their product. They need employees as well. One small Walmart has as many employees as steam does. Retails also buys the product in bulk, there is a bigger risk involved if it doesn’t sell or even sells slowly.
and steam needs data centers and servers and power and all the stuff to keep those running. ultimately though it didn’t matter. if steam thinks that their ecosystem is worth charging that much, then it’s up to the dev to decide if what steam provides is worth it to them
We don’t know how much it costs for their servers but I doubt it’s anywhere near what they charge devs. Gaben having an 11bn dollar net worth kind of points to that.
The biggest problem is that it isn’t up to devs since steam has market dominance. Not putting your game on steam is basically suicide, they have close to 90% of the PC market…
market dominance is not a monopoly. market dominance is a label given to the most successful product. and the product is successful because they offer a service that none else seems to be able to or wish to fulfill.
devs can choose to sell their game on steam, or windows live, or gog, epic game store, playstation, nintendo online, android app store, ios app store, on their own site, eb games, or the back of their car, what ever.
are all of these equally effective? nope. when you put your game on steam you get, the vast user base cultivated by valve, server space to host your game, massive server upload speeds, a built in store front, the discussion boards, steam game cloud, the stream overlays and stream input, steam workshop, community hubs, steam achievements, global money processing, themed sales, two special discovery windows. blah blah blah.
again, it’s up to the dev to decide if they want to pay 30% for these things.
to put it in perspective, when epic game store has a sale, steam makes a profit.
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Aktywne