I think I first played this in like 2005 or something. I was underage and didn’t have banking credentials yet, so I bought the licence by mailing a letter full of coins to the author. Back then a lifetime licence was a few dozen euros, but I bought the major version licence for like 15€. That version received updates for a couple of years, from what I remember. I never bought the lifetime licence, but re-bought a major version licence twice and then bought the game again when it launched on Steam. In the end buying the lifetime licence would’ve been cheaper, heh, but I don’t mind supporting the developers.
I still keep coming back to it every few years. There are other games in the same genre or very adjacent to it that are better as games – Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is the first to come to mind – but there are some things about URW that no other game really does, notably the whole realistic iron age survival thing (it’s a different genre altogether with less nuanced survival gameplay, but another iron age favourite of mine is Vintage Story, which is basically a Minecraft mod spun off into its own game).
The animal AI in particular is really good. The way you hunt in this game is a pretty good representation of cursorial hunting, which is basically just running after the animals until they tire – something humans are good at thanks to bipedalism. You only rarely manage to take down larger animal like elks (moose in American; the game calls them by their European name) in one strike, which means that you have to wound them and then jog after them until they collapse from exhaustion and blood loss. Or you can dig trap pits in chokepoints and corral them into them, another real hunting strategy used in iron age Finland. The tracking in the game is also very involved. You do it by following tracks displayed on the ground rather than a compass arrow, and you often have to track animals for very long distances and they will try to lose you by moving erratically.
Damn, now I kind of want to go back and play the game again.
I vaguly remember playing some version (I think a demo) of this in the 90’s. Crazy to see it’s still going. It’s on Steam. I should probably check it out again sometime.
Up until the big UI/UX update a few years back, the vast majority of people had never heard about Dwarf Fortress outside of the sickos and the people who remember when LPs were forum/blog posts.
Unreal World has been in that same category where the people who play it love it and the rest vaguely recall their favorite youtubers maybe trying it out once.
I have never played Dwarf Fortress but I thought it had name recognition, I guess the average COD, Fortnite type player might not have heard of some niche game like that
…God I miss forum-based let’s plays. I was never a SA member (Something Awful, not Sturmabteilung, though there’s probably some degree of overlap there), but I did browse the lparchive website once upon a time. Some folks put so much effort into their presentation, I want sure where the game ended and the LP narrative began.
There was one in particular that was an LP of the Blade Runner adventure game. That’s a game I had watched my dad play on our family Compaq back in the day, so I thought I knew what I was getting into, but the combination of the game having secret narrative branches (that change based on a random seed when you start a new game, I think) and the posts being written in a first person, hard-boiled noir style, made me think that we had played different games.
Several hours after the White House post, the Department of Homeland Security put up its own Halo image with the message “Destroy the Flood,” and a link to the ICE recruitment page.
Comparing immigrants in the US to a parasitic alien life form that infects and annihilates advanced societies is not deeply offensive, it’s also rooted in the worst of human history: As seen in the untermenschen of the Holocaust and “cockroaches” in Rwanda, to name a couple recent examples, dehumanizing the “other” so you can more easily inflict cruelty, injustice, and horrors upon them is hardly a new technique, and the US government’s messaging was not subtle.
Capcom is 100% betting on their Japanese viewers, the west is just a “sad casualty”, so to speak. If this ends up working in their favor, expect this shit to expand to other companies and tournaments, just like pay2win did.
I’ll be the first to say I don’t like Linux gaming’s dependence on valve. I wish steam wasn’t the best experience, and I applaud all the effort that the FOSS community puts in to keep them honest.
But for the “gambling” monetization in particular, this is really a “don’t hate the player, hate the game” situation. It’s on people/govts to regulate this. If Valve said tomorrow, “you’re right, we’re not going to monetize gambling anymore because we think it is unethical”, they would just lose to a competitor who is less ethical.
It’s the same as saying, “if you’re rich and are pro higher taxes, why don’t you just choose to pay more? Nothing is stopping you.” Because that’s not going to fix anything, it’s just a losing strategy. What you need is a system where everyone is required by law to behave in a way that benefits the society.
To that end, Valve’s most ethical move would be to lobby the govt to ban unethical monetization. I know they’re making bank, but whether they’re making enough to out-lobby all the others who are also doing this, I don’t know…also we all know the US is not exactly positioned for effective FTC policies right now…
What you need is a system where everyone is required by law to behave in a way that benefits the society.
That’s not feasible, but it’s probably feasible to require everyone to act in a way that doesn’t hurt society, and make restitution when they do hurt society.
For example, I’m okay with gambling in games being legal, but there needs to be rules:
no kids
pay into a fund to help those with addiction
odds of winning are clearly posted in a way that’s accessible and understandable, and the odds are verified independently
there should be a way to buy something instead of gambling for it
must have a way to set spending limits to protect drunk gamblers
Valve could literally ban gambling on all Steam games if they wanted to. stop playing devil’s advocate for billionaires, Gaben has enough yachts already
You can install Proton by other means. It doesn’t have to be through Steam. And by now, since Valve made so much of the groundwork already, the development of Proton can be done by the community, like so many other FOSS projects.
And you can build your own PC and peripherals, yet every aspect of the gaming industry is funded and driven by corporations. Always has been, and Linux gaming is no exception.
I specifically acknowledged the FOSS efforts to eliminate depenence on valve, I think it’s great, but even Bazzite uses the SteamDeck UI. Do you know if there’s a FOSS deck UI replacement that unifies all storefronts/repos, and works as smoothly? I want that to exist.
Steam is just objectively the smoothest linux gaming experience for the largest number of people right now. It’d be awesome if that wasn’t the case, but for now it is.
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