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.
Well if you liked PoE I doubt you’ll like D4. It’s a much simpler game. Sadly my only advice is to try GD and Last Epoch again. I’ve got hundreds of hours in the former and I just got 10 hours into the latter.
Last Epoch feels like a more approachable PoE. I thoroughly enjoy how the skills interplay with one another, but I still prefer the itemization in Grim Dawn.
The only reason I’m not playing GD currently is because I have too many QoL mods installed so my cloud saving doesn’t work, but I can cloud save for Last Epoch for my steam deck lmao.
Season 4 is a lot more fun, but I still think D3 is a better game. But if you compare D4 to what D3 was like at after release, D4 is in much better shape. It’s definitely heading in the right direction, and I suspect that the expansion in August will make it much better, similar to how D2 and D3 did.
Back to season 4, I leveled to max level, maxed out the battle pass, and experienced all of the content and that was good enough for me. I want really interested in sticking around to switch to better build and get the best gear.
is it really that hard. I have to search for posts about a game to see things about the game on the whole and most things specifcally about a subject are pretty good about spoiler tags and even then usually the subject will indicate to you if its dangerous spoiler wise.
I uninstalled whatever version of it was around a few years ago when it spoiled the f1 I was planning on watching later by sending a push notification with the result the moment it finished
I am not ready to play it due to life stuff, but I absolutely have to because I know my friends will be playing it day 1 just like before, and if I didn’t join them I would have missed out on some of the best online gaming I’ve had in probably 10 years.
I’ve had laptops, consoles and a steam deck. Nothing comes close to sitting at a desk and gaming on my pc. I don’t know what it is I just like my desk. Even when I’m using the steamdeck I sit at my desk.
this is such a mood. I was playing Mario Odyssey earlier on a big screen tv, and… it still didn’t feel great, hahahaha. even though my monitors are smaller, I just prefer it.
I love making things and trying to figure out new ways to improve my experience. So I spent half a day making my lounge perfectly comfy, big 60inch 4k TV, pc hooked up, controller If I needed but also mouse and keyboard. and I played for 30mins before I realized it sucks compared to sitting at my desk.
I’m with you on wanting the big, upholstered chair, but also liking the desk.
I kind of wish that easy chairs at desks were more of a thing. As it is, a typical desk doesn’t really fit them: you have “office chairs” and “living room chairs”, and the two don’t meet much. Couple problems:
A big and top-heavy chair is gonna tip more easily, so you have to extend the base and casters.
A big chair isn’t gonna roll as easily, so you can’t push back from a desk.
For years, I’ve been thinking about switching to a table or workbench with a higher top or something.
I think that the answer probably has several elements.
Maybe the desk can just…go away. Desks are important for paperwork, were important for supporting heavy CRTs, but I rarely actually need one now.
Monitor goes on an table/desk/floor-mounted arm. I’ve been diong that, and I’m happy with it, but still have the “cubbyhole” desk from the CRT era. Maybe just swing the thing into place every time you sit down.
Keyboard and mouse need to be attached to the floor or chair, not the desk. This is a bit harder. There are keyboard and mouse trays, but if one reclines in a chair, they also tilt the tray, which I don’t want – the mouse surface has to remain horizontal. If you can live with a trackball or trackpad, that might be tolerable. It might be possible to have some kind of leveling attachment that fits over the arms, or have a free-standing keyboard/mouse tray that fits over the chair, pole on each side of it. Something like this. If reclining adjusts the required height of the keyboard/mouse and the mount is freestanding, then it has to be trivial to adjust the height.
A big sofa chair that wheels would be perfect. Even though my desk is empty and only has a keyboard, mouse I still like the space incase I need to solder or draw or store rubbish.
The new items stuff in particular seems like QoL considerations for “we just added a hundred items to the game for players coming back to it after months away.”
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