Eastern Mind: The Lost Souls of Tong Nou and Planescape Torment. I think both helped me think about death and reincarnation - what would it even mean to have a “soul”? Would it mean some sort of unbroken consciousness, or are we bits and pieces of different segmented ideas and thoughts loosely connected together?
The answer is you’re a meat robot! We’re all just chemical gradients that learned to think.
A lot of people find this really existentially problematic but I think it’s fascinating. It’s even more fascinating that the meat doesn’t like thinking about it’s meathood, and developed bits of brain meat specifically to think about souls & gods instead of reality.
Tong Nou offers some interesting explorations of the idea of dharma, which I don’t think it got in the same way before playing it. Even if we are ultimately electricity flowing through meat, we all end up with an idea of “purpose”? And the ultimate despair re: materialist atheism is that the answer to “why do some people just suffer and suffer and suffer?” is that things just suck.
In Tong Nou, there is a dharma or purpose underlying each life. There are some lives you instantly die when selecting, or whose purpose is to die. There’s one where you sacrifice yourself and become a sacred torch. Suffering given meaning.
Planescape has an afterlife, and your character is going to hell at the end of it. Forever. All of your actions only lead you closer and closer to maybe a moral redemption? But what’s really the point there? You’re going to suffer endlessly after all of this anyway.
There’s also a really good series of Oblivion mods - Ruined Tails Tale, and The Tears of the Fiend - that have captured this in a personally inspiring way too. You find out that you are a demon who stole the soul of the body you inhabit, that you cursed them to an eternal afterlife of wandering and suffering. Your attempts to fix everything make things worse. But what do you from there? Try to live a life which makes up for it?
Half-Life 2. It brought me into PC gaming, as well as introducing me to Garry’s Mod, a relatively simple sandbox tool for creativity, complete with a wide array of assets to use.
I also really appreciate its moody world design that doesn’t often explain things directly to you.
Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice stayed with me for quite a while. It’s a walking simulator with some mild puzzles and fun combat, but the real experience is something I’ve never seen before. They really made the best of the medium to tell their story. Also there is a short documentary you should watch after finishing the game.
It was segmented so it wasn’t really at the ending for battlefield one but the beginning that has fucked me up for a long time. The game opens to a black screen, utter silence, and a description prints out of how wide and brutal the first world world war was. The last text that appears on the screen was, “What you are about to experience is front line combat. You are not expected to survive.”
What they were describing was that they didn’t expect you to play one character and that you should be dying to respawn in a new section of the map with new features. This was the most accurate depiction of the war possible, even if it was just meant to describe the mechanics of the level. It went further! Every time you died they showed a real name of a real soldier that lost their life in the war and their birth and death date. Most of these ages are under the age of 24.
After the final death, it plays a cut scene where two soldiers are pointing rifles at each other and they both break down and chose not to kill each other…I believe all of this gameplay and the cut scene are being played off as a PTSD nightmare he’s having while recovering in a hospital…one of those ‘stare at a blank wall and rethink how fucking good our lives are’ moments. Also a deviation to the standard which is having a good guy-winner/bad guy-loser. They instead opted for the “we’re all losing because of this” realization…I don’t think we’ll ever see anything like it again.
That’s impressive. I know a lot of games struggle to find a good balance between gameplay and simulation. But to heap historical accuracy and storytelling on top of that, and have it be a worthwhile experience, is a feat.
How is thst compared with a regular no Vm gaming rig?
How is the multiuser support on that?
I find the project super interesting and it is under my radar but I don’t know how it will work with multiuser/ multisession and some first hand experience would be appreciated
It’s been shockingly good. If you are at least somewhat proficient with Linux and Docker it’s not too difficult to get going. If the game runs on Linux / SteamOS it should just work on Wolf without issue. I think the project also requires you to have Intel or AMD GPU and I would highly recommend an AMD. I have only run into one game that doesn’t work and that is Doom Dark Ages.
Performance is pretty near native, but that is very much YMMV since you are sharing a single host. My Proxmox has about 20+ LXCs and VMs on it, my biggest contention is GPU Memory. I tend to have transcodes going, Ollama, other light AI stuff, etc. It really leaves about 8-10GB of VRAM from my 16GB card.
Wolf wants to be multiuser by default, and it requires some configuration to do it the other way. Every device you pair via Moonlight gets its own unique “home” directory. So each device is its own copy of Steam, your games, etc. I am the only user on here and wanted to share one profile for my devices. It requires you to edit a config.toml for Wolf and change the profile for each to device to the same string. IE: change the profile of each device to “gamer1” and they get a shared home directory.
More about Moonlight. To get your pin for pairing you will have to log into your Wolf server and look in the docker logs of Wolf, this is the only place the PIN is available. They do have a Web GUI for Wolf but it is very early stages, it works but can be buggy. Once paired the experience is pretty great, when you launch Steam in Moonlight, Wolf will start a containerized version of Steam for you with the display matching what your client requests. This for me is the greatest feature since I have a 165HZ Ultrawide desktop, a 4K TV, a Handheld, etc and it just works.
Besides Doom Dark Ages not running I do have a few other issues. Wolf currently doesn’t support any fancy display features like HDR or 4:4:4 display, so the quality is great but if you’re used to playing native on an HDR display it does feel a tiny bit lacking. Moonlight clients on the Mac and PC are amazing but have been hit or miss on other devices. I have a few Onn Android TV boxes, oddly enough they have really high latency and decode times with H264 and H265 but work amazing with AV1, they also don’t seem to like anything above 1080p. This also requires me to have a card that support AV1 encoding, which luckily I do. I side loaded the Moonlight app on an LG TV and it works great at 1440p with H265 but absolutely falls apart with AV1. Moonlight also does not support microphones. If your game requires in-game voice you are out of luck (IE: REPO, that one got me).
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