It’s an okay game, but far worse than the first two. They forced an open world onto it, and made it pretty repetitive. The DLC is more linear and feels a lot more like a typical Mafia story telling.
Oh man I remember the open-world obsession era. It’s still sort of with us, but a few companies are daring to stick with linear narratives that don’t allow as many branching paths, like Control or Alan Wake 2. Even non-linear narratives are being pulled off in non-open-world games like Baldur’s Gate 3.
Few Eastern and Southern Europeans give a shit, Northern Europeans are all in, way more votes per capita. Sweden rallying together a whopping 0.13% of the country.
Looking at this map there seems to be at least some correlation. There really needs to be popular advocates for each language and country, particularly for the smaller ones and those with a low english speaking population.
It’s almost certainly a matter of reach. Eastern and Southern Europeans are poor compared to the others and we definitely do give a shit when somebody steals our shit
Most people who liked balatro will probably also find dungeons & degenerate gamblers interesting which is coming out tomorrow. It’s a similar take on blackjack but with a few other ideas mixed in. I’ve played the demo and I’m looking forward to the full version
there don’t seem to be that many on Steam that catch my interest.
I don’t know the situation on consoles, but on the PC…
I am not a pinball expert, though I do enjoy video pinball, but none of these are what I’d call the major PC pinball engines with reasonably-realistic physics, things that do a lot of tables. Look at these:
Visual Pinball. I was not able to get this working on Linux the few times I’ve tried or to successfully get access to the forums that distribute tables (some kind of broken registration system). This is, as I understand it, what a typical person uses if they just want to make and distribute a free table. It also has many bootleg implementations of commercial tables. Open-source Source-available, though only runs natively on Windows.
Pinball Arcade. IIRC, these guys used to have a license for some major physical table distributors, like Williams, and had it expire. I have this, and the engine hasn’t been updated in some time. I run a high-refresh-rate monitor, and IIRC it has a limit of 60Hz, probably because the physics engine also runs at that rate. I don’t think that it’s getting a lot of updates, and I had some trouble running it last time I tried. This would not be my recommended engine unless it’s the only place to get a table that you specifically want.
Zaccaria Pinball. Good if you want elderly pinball, pre-solid-state-electronics era, electromechanical pinball tables. They have some tables that they developed, not copies of real-world tables, that I personally like more than their real-world tables. They don’t have implementations of real-world tables for some major popular US manufacturers.
Pinball FX3 (less old than Pinball Arcade). Not bad, but replaced by the below Pinball FX.
Pinball FX (despite the name, newer). This is the only one off the top of my head that can do high-refresh-rate, and it’s also being kept current. It has a lot of stuff that I’d call fluff and would rather not have, like toys that animate more than on the real-world tables and sometimes obstruct your view, animations to wait through, and such. Also has some kind of online-DRM system that takes a sec at startup. Some of this can be turned off. Places a lot of emphasis on this virtual pinball basement full of virtual trophies. Has occasional very brief stutters for me. Many of the non-real-life board are wide, designed around a present-day portrait-orientation computer monitor, which feels weird but is more friendly to, say, a laptop with a fixed orientation monitor, though maybe not what you want if you’re going to set up a dedicated pinball computer with portrait-orientation monitor. Lots and lots of non-real-world licensed tables associated with movies and the like that I’m not really enthusiastic about; I would recommend trying those tables before buying them. This is probably what I’d look at if I were aiming to get one today, as the engine’s the newest.
I think that all of these let you download the engine and try out some basic play (IIRC Zaccaria has time-limited plays on tables that you don’t own, and Pinball FX has a rotating collection that you can try for free), so you can just install them and see what you like, but if you’re looking for a starting point with something reasonably modern and with a bunch of tables, these are probably where you want to look.
If you don’t have a strong preference as to tables and are also just feeling around for something to try, I personally like some classic real-life Williams tables, Medieval Madness and Tales of the Arabian Nights. Neither is too rough in terms of draining down the side channels, in my humble opinion. The Addams Family is also a popular table.
Note that if you haven’t touched video pinball for a long time – like, I played a few games in the late 1990s and then was away from it for a while), these engines also simulate nudging the machine and doing so is expected during play.
EDIT: If you’re willing to hit Reddit for information, /r/videopinball and /r/pinball exist; they were where I got some information back when. If not, there’s !pinball – not a lot of life yet, but, hey, each additional person adds to it!
EDIT2: My understanding from past reading of said forums is that Visual Pinball is considered to have the best physics, but is fiddly to get working and get tables working on (and I don’t think that this was said from the standpoint of someone trying to run anything on Linux, just Windows).
EDIT3: I would also recommend not purchasing a great many tables unless you’re sure that you’re actually going to play them. Yes, you can buy the equivalent of multiple arcades full of virtual machines at one swoop thanks to modern technology, but…I have tables on all of the commercial engines here and personally find that I play a very small percentage of the tables that I have. Pinball, I think, benefits from becoming familiar with particular tables.
As someone using Windows who decided to check out Visual Pinball after reading your post, I’ll agree it’s pretty fiddly. It seems like if you have the patients/ focus to get everything set up it’s really good, but if you just want to download and play something you’ll probably want to go with something else.
Other people have mentioned Paradox several times, and they are unquestionably the big name of the grand strat genre. Their main games are:
Hearts of Iron. WW2 setting, pretty much exclusively about war. If you want to flex your strategic skills, this is the one to get.
Victoria. The 100 years before WW2. Primarily about industrialisation. Victoria games have by far the most in-depth economy systems.
Europa Universalis. These ones are about the era of European colonialism, spanning three to four hundred years with the Napoleonic wars at the end. EU4 is pretty the most like a Total War campaign map in feel.
Crusader Kings. 700 years of feudalism. The map in these ones is limited to Europe, the western half of Asia, and the north of Africa. Distinct in that you play as a dynasty rather than a country. These ones are the most roleplay-heavy
Stellaris. This is the only one I haven't played, so I'm afraid I can't say much about it
Of the 17 games I’ve played over the past 9~ months since installing mint Linux and steam proton, only 2 base games have had issues and 2 games I’ve had trouble modding. I think it’s a discussion worth having so let me go through the few issues I’ve had in regards to games on Mint Linux (Ubuntu based). 2 problems were resolved without issue, 1 was a qualified success, and one I gave up on trying to mod.
To be clear this is all on an intel Intel 7700HQ CPU and nvidia GTX1060 GPU. It’s not the newest or top of the line anymore but it’s still plenty capable.
Foxhole: there was a week about a 2 months ago where I had to launch it through lutris because proton was having an issue with loading in to the map. As far as I could gather, the devs had updated shaders or some libraries to fix a glitch with small trains hovering at max map height, and this caused issue with proton being unable to load shaders. Using lutris (which I think uses wine?) fixed the issue and the devs fixed the issue with proton about a week later.
Helldivers 2: extremely bad frame rates and straight up locking up the computer part way through the intro or tutorial. I think it was an issue with the graphics card memory just getting filled up and not clearing. I don’t remember exactly what I did to fix it, but it involved caping the FPS at 60 FPS. It works now but only with low settings and I still get a bad frame rates when the map gets crowded.
Then there was modding games that had some issue. Both of them were older games that relied on patchers.
Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines: Worked great as the base game. The patcher for the unofficial fan patch was a .exe though, so I added it to steam and ran it with proton, it couldn’t find the game files and I had to manually direct it to the files in proton’s mock windows file structure, but after that it patched and worked fine from there.
Fallout: New Vegas: The base game ran flawlessly (well as flawlessly as base game New Vegas can run), same procedure as above, opened patcher and mod manger by adding to steam and opening with proton, directed them to the weirdly placed files, but this time they didn’t recognize the game files and refused to patch. I fiddled with it for a bit, but gave up because I didn’t care that much.
Again I want to emphasize that these are 4 out of 17 games, only one of which had persistent issues, and one that I gave up on trying to mod. None straight up wouldn’t run and none were unplayable after a bit of tinkering. This is about the same rate of tinkering I was doing back in windows to get things running the way I wanted with games.
There is a lot of work left to do here, but playing games on Linux is absolutely doable even if you’re not particularly tech savvy. if you don’t have the patience to trouble shoot, you will be fine 9 times out of 10. I’m more tech savvy than the average bear, but I don’t work in tech nor do I have a formal education.
Linux and nvidia have a strained relationship. There are a couple nvidia specific distros that might do you better. I am on Pop_OS and so far have had zero issues. The only game we have in common is Helldivers 2, and it runs perfect. Granted I have a 2080, so that might have something to do with it, but the gap is mostly ray tracing. Bazzite also has an nvidia specific version, but I have not used it. I have heard it is great, though.
Yah, I had to manually install the driver in mint for the nvidia card, and had to change a setting in the bios to get the system to even see the card. But it works fine other than that. I’m considering going with an AMD card next time I get a computer, largely because I hear they work a lot better with Linux.
You don’t need to add the exe of whatever mod tool to Steam, use Steam Tinker Launch. It lets you add an exe to run instead of the game, concurrent with the game, or injected after the game is up, and it will run in the same prefix that Proton uses for that game. It also has tools for installing and using several mod managers, and generally a ton of good features for tinkering with the game.
The main issue I haven’t solved is getting something like the Nexus mods “open in manager” to work. My guess is I might have to install, run, and configure a web browser inside the prefix, but that sounds really annoying so I haven’t tried it.
I’ll second that STL will make FNV work on Mint, I’ve made many comments extolling how much better it runs that way than it ever did on windows
that being said RED ALERT:
You need a version of YAD not from the stone age (so not the distro software manager version) to install STL. The instructions for making your own YAD from the GitHub assume you’ve done it before and can understand what phrases like “do the usual” mean. It’s not hard but it took me 45 fucking minutes to find a comment 5 months ago on Reddit that said “do this exact command” and made it all go smooth. If you’re familiar with GitHub and the make command: you’re good homie.
If you have any issues with FNV you can PM me as I finished my playthrough recently and did everything you can do in modding to it, LoD and all, no issues. Ok, that’s a lie, but the issues were my fault, not the system.
I mean, base game FNV ran fine for me. Which is kind of funny because my friend who was playing it for the first time was having a bunch of issues with it constantly crashing while playing on windows 10 and I had to walk them through getting fan patches and the like running.
I always thought the GameCube controller was ridiculously comfortable and ergonomic, so that’s my choice. The C stick might not be for everyone though.
Any Dreamcast fans here? Those controllers had similar ergonomics in the hand, although the lack of a second analog stick was a pretty big drawback in hindsight.
Honestly the 2nd analog stick I didn’t mind too much because the face-buttons made a decent D-pad for the tiny handful of shooters on the DC. The bigger flaw was the lack of shoulder-buttons.
Also that putting a screen into a controller has always been a solution looking for a problem. It was on the DC, it was on the Wii-U, and there’s a good reason they abandoned the idea to put a screen on the PS4 touchpad controller.
The older ones defined the genre. They’re still fun to play albeit a little dated. No idea how good the Switch ports are.
Doom 3 is slower and more focused on horror than the others. It’s a good horror fps but not a good Doom game.
Doom 2016 is the first of the modern Doom games. Fast, brutal, super fun through and through. If in doubt start with that one.
Doom Eternal is the second of the modern Doom games. It’s even faster than 2016. But it has more focus on using every mechanic at your disposal. Learning those mechanics is a little bit tedious at first. But once everything is available it’s an adrenaline pumping high speed 4D chess. When you’ve mastered everything every fight lets you enter a trance of violence that’s absolute bliss.
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