Actively, I’m on my second Baldur’s Gate 3 run. Recently made it to act 3 and I couldn’t be more excited about rearranging Gortash bones with my monk.
Also playing Disco Elysium and enjoying it so much. However, I feel it requires dedication or else you lose track of what you’ve got to do, which is a struggle for me.
Got two more games on the “paused” pile, but I won’t say which ones to avoid awakening the shame neurone because the pause has lasted a whole year.
Disco is easily one of my favourite gaming experiences. But I agree, it does require your attention. I’d say, give it the time you can, let it consume you and enjoy the ride
The best way to play Disco is to just approach it as a good book. Explore as much as you can, exhaust dialogue options and submerge yourself in the world. Don’t be afraid to fail checks, don’t be afraid to pick wacky dialogue options.
The game is pure art and it’s the most meaningful, thought provoking and emotional experience I’ve had while playing any video game. Granted the themes really resonated with me personally.
Most of my gaming time recently has been The Finals. Of all the new shooters released over the past couple of years, I feel The Finals has been the one that tried the most to be its own thing. And I think that is why its earned its own dedicated fan base. I normally try play a couple rounds a day and keep it casual.
There is also a !THE_FINALS community. It would be cool to see a Lemmy Finals community grow.
Playing some more of DA: Veilguard. My wife is desperate for me to finish it so she can discuss the ending with me. I’m really enjoying how dynamic the combat is definitely the most fun from an action perspective on the series, less tactical but more technical with the parries and dodges. I’m digging the found family vibes too, it’s just nice to hang out with some good mutually supportive people sometimes rather than loads of conflict drama.
Just finished Yakuza 0 and am psyched to start Yakuza Kiwami (which is a remake of the first Yakuza game). The action is soo good. Beating the shit out of enemies is already satisfying enough, but where it gets really good is when you build up something called a Heat meter as you’re fighting. Once it builds up, you get access to Heat Actions and they are nuts.
Because traditionally there were few Linux devices.
Android 15 is going to change that: it comes with a virtual machine API and a Linux Terminal running Debian for ChromeOS compatibility.
Soon, the most popular consumer OS in the world will be Linux:
3.3 billion: Android / Linux
2.2 billion: Apple iOS/macOS *NIX
1.6 billion: Windows
400 million: Windows 11 + WSL 2.0
250 million: gaming consoles
"millions": SteamOS Linux
Wine might still make sense to keep things standardized for some time, and as a compatibility layer for older games, but native Linux games will also work on the Linux solutions for Android, Apple, and Windows.
I’ve started playing a game called Yaoling, which is a monster taming/collecting game. The battling system is much more like Yo-Kai Watch than Pokémon - you’re not really bossing them around, they kind of do their own thing once you’ve made preparations and started.
Absolutely spectacular gameplay so far, I’m really impressed. Love the artwork and monster designs. It’s in early access right now and it warns you to expect some bugs, but other than a lot of typos in the English translation I’ve only come across a couple minor issues. Official release planned for mid-July I think.
Disclaimer first: I work as a coder, everything I say about publisher interaction is second-hand knowledge.
We have made one Linux game. It was the first one of our two “indie” titles (quotation marks, because both of them ended up being partially funded by a publisher, so they weren’t really indie in the end), where we had promised a Linux build on Kickstarter, long before a publisher got involved.
The main reason why we did not do native Linux in our publisher-funded games is quite simple: Our publishers didn’t pay us for it.
There are actually some publishers who are very keen on getting native Linux versions for their games, but we sadly have not released a game with any of them yet…
The publishers we released games with did not agree to the buget that we think is needed to do a Linux port of sufficient quality. If we would lower the price for doing a Linux port to the point where our publishers would agree to it, we would take on a lot of financial risk ourselves, so this is sadly not an option.
If everything worked as it is advertised by engine developers, making a Linux version would be quite cheap: Just click a few buttons and ship it. This is, sadly, not the case in real-life, as there are always platform specific bugs in game-engines. Our one Linux game was made with Unity, and we had quite a few Linux-only bugs that we forwarded to the Unity devs (we didn’t have engine source code access), and had to wait for them to fix… For the engine we mainly use nowadays, Unreal, we have a rule-of-thumb: “Engine features that are used by Fortnite are usually well maintained.” There is no native Linux version of Fortnite… (We did try Unreal’s Vulkan RHI in Unreal 4.26 for Steam Deck support in one of our games. Let me put it this way: The game in question still uses Direct3D on Steam Deck.)
So, from experience we expect that the chance that we would have to find and fix Linux-specific engine bugs is quite high. Therefore we have to budget for this, what makes offering a native Linux version relatively costly compared to the platform’s market share. Costly enough to make our publishers say “no”.
This, by the way, also answers the question why publishers are willing to pay for the way more expensive console ports. There are also way more console players, and therefore potential customers out there…
(I can only guess, but I would expect publishers to be even more reluctant to pay for native Linux, now that WINE works so well that getting a game running on Linux needs typically zero extra work.)
I played a bit of Granblue Fantasy Relink, I’m at the last chapter of the story. I still haven’t finished it, the story itself wasn’t particularly memorable, but the environments were gorgeous and the gameplay is fun. For the gameplay tho, I’m a bit worried about the endgame/postgame, as there wasn’t much variety in fights.
I’m still playing Fire Emblem Engage. The gameplay is overall really good, but I’m a bit confused that new units are much better than most of the previous ones. From the initial party I think I’ve kept using only Chloé and Jean, while the others had better replacements every few chapters. It’s not exactly a complaint but it feels a bit weird.
I would have tried continuing FFVII Rebirth, but I remembered I bought FFIX last sales and played that nonstop during the weekend.
I too am in the mood for Wolfenstein, I’m thinking of playing the second one.
The last page of this survey is heavy handed and full of leading questions. It feels like you’re less trying to gather research data and more trying to push an agenda; it would not pass scientific review. The fact that I agree with the agenda being pushed doesn’t change my feelings on that.
A better method would have been to ask the question in a neutral way (e.g. ‘Do you believe that storing game cartridges qualifies as preservation?’ or even better, ‘Storing game cartridges qualifies as preservation’ as a statement, with a Strongly Disagree - Strongly Agree scale), then at the end of the survey provide the information you’re providing in the links below each question.
Availability of Video Games (originally released before 2010) is approximately 13 percent, slightly above pre-World War II audio recordings (10 percent or less) and below the survival rate of American silent films (14 percent).
These are fascinating numbers, do you have a source?
What is worse, is that The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) is refusing efforts allow remote access to these old games for research and learning purposes, just like a historian would do research of events by reading and viewing any historic materials, the restrictions to access of different media because of convoluted copyright laws are a real world problem!
You may actually want to research what museum curators and the like actually do (or just communicate with them. I have never found one who didn’t want to chat about their job).
Copyright/Trademark/IP Protection is very much a thing. It is the main reason so many museums have “no pictures” (barring the increasingly rare cases where it is genuine light concerns). And that applies a lot more when it comes to “modern” history, of which video games definitely count. But even for ancient manuscripts, the answer tends to be “if you fill out all this paperwork and can demonstrate a genuine need to our board, you can come by and read that manuscript in a clean room. Or… you can spend 20 bucks on a copy in our gift shop. Hell, if you stop bothering me I’ll spot you ten bucks toward that”
And that is more or less what we see with the video game preservation efforts… that operate more like musems than hoarders with a youtube channel. They have a few actual historians who do outreach. And, in rare cases, people CAN organize visits. But “I want to play Metroid” isn’t really a compelling argument to a board that is risking damage every time that NES is booted up.
That said, I WOULD like to see a bigger emphasis on said curators documenting things themselves. But I am the weirdo who would love to see a deep dive on Star Crusader’s DLC. Whereas most people are just going to say “Ugh, they are so boring” if it isn’t pewdiepie screaming at every jagged polygon.
But yeah. If you actually genuinely care about preservation efforts, rather than just a site to download roms, I STRONGLY encourage getting in touch with your local museums and working with them (and lobbyists) to protect those museums. Because I didn’t even get into the active war on The Internet Archive in the US (and similar efforts in other countries).
Oh yeah. You totally aren’t just an obnoxious jerk with a side hustle.
Still, kudos for actually thinking “TL/DR” is a good response. It saves people who thought you might actually be operating in good faith a lot of time.
Copyright/Trademark/IP Protection is very much a thing. It is the main reason so many museums have “no pictures” (barring the increasingly rare cases where it is genuine light concerns). And that applies a lot more when it comes to “modern” history, of which video games definitely count. But even for ancient manuscripts, the answer tends to be “if you fill out all this paperwork and can demonstrate a genuine need to our board, you can come by and read that manuscript in a clean room. Or… you can spend 20 bucks on a copy in our gift shop. Hell, if you stop bothering me I’ll spot you ten bucks toward that”
This is why I appreciate the Internet. Getting insight on how stuff I do not know about—I’m not a museum curator—works.
I do not know what Star Crusader is but I’m also in the audience for deep dives as opposed to overexaggerated YouTuber-who-wants-you-to-form-a-parasocial-relationship-with-them reactions. When I do drag my butt over to YouTube, I usually find myself watching some long-form informative gaming video. There are some people with a following who get mentioned in the comments of other informative gaming videos (Summoning Salt comes to mind) so you are definitely not alone in wanting deep dives. :)
Not sure where to find deep dive articles, but wish I knew. Someone over at !pokemonprovided one and it’s stoking my appetite for them.
In terms of text articles? Ironically, you want to look at early Polygon and Kotaku. And… absolutely nobody read that and those became the hellscapes they are today. That said, Aftermath occasionally will hang out in the deep end of a hotel pool on a specific game but that is usually in the context of current sociopolitical events or a new release.
Which speaks to games media as a whole being fundamentally broken in favor of the screaming jackasses who market gambling to children (see: xqc).
That said, a few of the longer form youtubers have worked with various preservation efforts in the past. I don’t think Jacob Gellar has (outside of his work on MinnMax which is more just podcasting and interviewing) but I want to say Displaced Gamers reached out to one of the orgs to get a dump of a rare edition of a cartridge once? Although, people like Illusory Wall very much rely heavily on The Internet Archive when they are researching what the deal with the Dark Souls 1 DLC was. Which gets into the other side of “what actually IS games preservation?” that makes people just shut down and start screaming that they want ROMs.
But the big issue? If you are doing a video that can justify flying out to a bunker in Texas or whatever? It is going to be about a game people know about or are interested in. Which means it is likely already available online. MAYBE you get a “deep cut” like CyClones but the vast majority of creators can’t risk a complete dud of a video for that month or even quarter
Its also why the popular history youtubers tend to have a day job as a dealer (Matt Easton) or are running not so subtle ads for auction houses (Forgotten Weapons). And there are a LOT of mixed feelings about them (especially Ian) because of how much they profit off of museum collections.
Although, people like Illusory Wall very much rely heavily on The Internet Archive when they are researching what the deal with the Dark Souls 1 DLC was. Which gets into the other side of “what actually IS games preservation?”
Based off this I’d imagine it might involve backing up the game’s release announcement and some sale pages with its description online, proof the game existed, before the page gets changed because the game is no longer the hottest and newest thing or stores are no longer selling the game?
I get the feeling you know more about this topic than I do and probably have strong opinions about it.
Thanks for the namedrops of where to find articles, and what I assume are people who make long-form videos on video games!
Actually, Illusory Wall’s “How was the Dark Souls DLC Discovered?” video is probably the best example of what preservation of games actually IS and why “I can’t play that SNES” has little to do with it.
At a high level: Dark Souls 1 was notorious for how incredibly convoluted and stupid the path to the DLC is. It involves killing a boss, reloading the area, talking to an NPC at the back of a cave you might not even see, reloading, killing a DIFFERENT enemy in a completely unrelated spot in the world, reloading, and then going back to that original spot.
And there is over a decae of discussion on how people even found that and lots of nonsense theories. And IW actually searched through a mixture of blog posts, press releases, youtube videos, and even message boards to paint a picture of what actually happened. And… it is very very different.
A friend (who actually IS a curator) watched that and immediately compared it to the idea that guns are why the concept of an armored knight went away. At a very high level… it isn’t wrong. But people assume it has to do with penetration and ignore that we were sending folk into battle in what was basically plate armor all the way up to WW1 (and there are very good arguments that a modern plate carrier isn’t that far off from what a conquistador would wear).
And there is over a decae of discussion on how people even found that and lots of nonsense theories. And IW actually searched through a mixture of blog posts, press releases, youtube videos, and even message boards to paint a picture of what actually happened. And… it is very very different.
What is the “what actually happened” that is different? You do not need to explain the entire story to me, what I mean is what is this “what actually happened” concerning? Is it about how people found how to unlock the DLC? Were you commenting a commonly-believed DLC unlock path in your second paragraph but it is actually something different?
And for how this ties back to game preservation… would this be preservation of video game history?
I used to fill surveys on r/samplesize for fun, it was a mild positive of my day to come across one on Lemmy!
I do have some issues with some of the questions, spoiled for those who have not taken the survey yet.
Issues with survey questionsFor “Do modern video games have too many micro transactions today?” giving our opinion and saying “I never paid a microtransaction” was mutually exclusive. It is possible to notice the amount of microtransactions in video games, and to have an opinion on whether that is a good or bad amount, without ever buying one yourself. Folks who never bought microtransactions might not choose “I never paid a microtransaction” because it is either that, or say if you think there are too many microtransactions. For “There is a possibility that access to your games could be revoked, as stated in the TOS,” I wasn’t sure what to put. I strongly agree that that possibility exists, so I was considering putting Strongly Agree. But I do not agree with that practice, so I also considered putting Strongly Disagree. I wasn’t sure what I was being asked to agree or disagree with here. Similarly, for “Prices of old video games may lower when a modern release of the same game is available to purchase,” I wasn’t sure if we were being asked if we agree that is a phenomenon that happens, or if we think that should be a thing that happens. Luckily I both agree that is a phenomenon that happens and that it should happen. For “Companies should make single player video games be released for a limited time, regardless if its physical or digital” I had no idea what was being asked at all so I just put Neutral.
Because a monopoly is a company that operates in their market unopposed. In this instance, it’s not Steam’s fault kinda sucks (or doesn’t quite aim to be a direct competitor in the case of GoG) but the argument is still there that Steam is sitting as the only distributor for PC.
Personally, this is why I keep wanting to root for GoG, Epic and such. Monopolies are dangerous to consumers and the markets they operate in. Right now, Steam is being surprisingly effective at remaining a “good guy” but there’s a lot of concern even among Steam fans of what the landscape will look like in a post-Gaben world. Setting the PC gaming market up to have Steam as the only option when that inevitably comes to pass (touch wood that that’s no time soon, of course) could spell a certain level of disaster in a world where the anti-monopoly law-makers have shown to not really care about upholding that standard.
bin.pol.social
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