I think it’s the work that goes into it, at least for me
Money abstracts it too much. Sure that game cost $20, let’s say an hour of my job time. But because it’s the weekend and money has obfuscated this fact a bit I just buy it and move on.
But a game that takes an hour or more to find, download, install, and properly get running? I just did that work on my own free time with no obfuscation, so I’m more likely to want to reap the reward of it
For example: spent a couple hours turning my old hodgepodge of emulators I’ve been using since 2014 into a nice Retro arch installation that my steam deck can also fully utilize a couple weeks back. Because of that I spent some time downloading old games to play, mix of old faves and ones I never got around to.
After all that work it’s all Ive really been playing lately, and the cycle shall repeat I’m sure
Oh sure, if you count the emulator libraries I’ve installed on a retropie in bulk then this number changes, that’s every NES, SNES, N64 and SEGA Mega Drive game ever, but I mean games I specifically sourced. I find if I compare full price individual game purchases versus individually pirated games, the pirated ones still have a better hit rate.
Honestly these days it’s much more difficult to find a good pirate copy compared to getting a working copy you pay for that yeah, if I put in the effort to pirate a game, I’m going to play it. Though I do enjoy having a really large steam library, so I usually just buy something just so it grows.
Judgement - this is basically just Yakuza Kiwami reskinned as a light detective game. I love the Yakuza games so I’m enjoying this. I wish the detective elements were a bit deeper, but they always do a great job stuffing the world with different weird side quests and characters.
Stellaris (console edition) - first time playing. This is Civilization in space. There’s a learning curve of course, so I started out on easy. I like the bit of detail they add in descriptions of strange sci-fi events, although this probably gets repetitive after your first game. They did a great job with the controls for console. Overall I’m enjoying it but it’s very much like Civilization where AI civs hate you for no reason.
Sea of Stars - this is good. I’m around 10-12 hrs in. The story picks up a lot after the dull intro thankfully. I’m slightly disappointed with the music. It’s fine, but none of the tracks are something I really want to listen to again. I’m impressed with the amount of detailed artwork and animation. I like the verticality of the world which adds interest to running around and provides good ways to hide secrets. The battle system is good. The only thing is I wish there was a bit more to the character customization. It’s pretty standard physical/magic attack and defense and there are very few armor and weapon choices so far. Overall, I’m enjoying it a lot.
I don’t see anyone mentioning it, but TVs differ from Monitors in one major way: the pixel representation on the TV is downsampled. This affects the rendering of text on the screen, but it is usually just the red channels that do this, so the human eye doesn’t pick up on it terribly well in most cases.
Personally, I can tell with Windows font rendering on a TV. Windows already uses that weird blue-red shift thingy to anti-alias the fonts and I don’t like that either.
All that said… does it matter? No, not at a distance and with the font size jacked up to 200%.
You can absolutely use a TV, even for FPS games. If the response time is terrible it might impact FPS games, but every other genre should be fine even if the input lag is significant.
I used a TV myself for 2-3 years at one point. I was playing Destiny 2, an FPS game, when it finally died on me lol.
Consider containers. Gluetun makes it easy to establish a wireguard connection to Nord, then use qbittorrent docker on the network that glutun provides, same for all your *arrs. Safer, faster, self-contained. Connect your web-browser to gluetun’s proxy. Just sayin’
A TV will do, for a child. He doesn’t NEED anything fancy. Will it be a great experience? Absolutely not. Others here have already gone over the issues. That being said, if cash flow is an issue (relatable), it’ll be fine. Console gamers have been doing it for literal decades. I also used to do it, back when I was a kid, when we had an old 480i TV. Your kid should be grateful that he can play his games. People can spend too much time worrying about not getting the best experience (especially when giving advice to others), when it’s often not needed.
I like their work a lot but I wish they didn’t use dwarFS, simply because it’s not easily installable on most distros.
They suggest Arch or other very up-to-date distros to play their games (and it’s true that you get the best experience with the latest AAA games) but in reality 90% of their releases are tiny indie games (that they insist on compressing with dwarFS) or older games that’d run very well even on a Debian oldstable, it’s a pity they’re kinda cutting out a lot of potential users
Lately I’ve been playing only small games on my laptop, I’ve been getting the windows gog releases (freegogpcgames.com) and installing them into Lutris, it’s super convenient
We use dwarfs in order to provide more features to the users instead of maintaining the status-quo. Even if most of the games are small, at a high scale of quantity the mounting system will be useful to people that want to seed them. There are other various advantages such as overriding game files instead of overwriting them for example when mods are used that way.
The reliance on up to date systems is mainly because outdated ones can yield different results than what was tested. We also use the new wine vulkan mechanic from wine and plan to replace dxvk with it as much as possible. This makes the scripts more reliable instead of requiring to reach github for the latest dxvk version.
We dont want to pack any of this open source software with the game files given that they receive updates and it would take away the convenience for the user to use its own compilations and so on.
Latest wine is of course available on stable distros as well.
Appreciate the response, I guess my point of view is of a patientgamer, that would not add extra pacman repos just to check out a game…
But I see how you guys have/want to keep up with the cutting edge to offer serious competition, and so from there the need of standardization and not doubling of the efforts makes perfect sense
I’m probably in the minority of gamers, but in the majority of linux users, and most of those that I know even forget they can play casually on their machine and instead rely on consoles or secondary pcs for fear of breaking their main system
In any case your collection is incredible, so if it makes people interested in installing a rolling distro and avoid that windows partition or closed up console, that’s a huge win in my book. Thumbs up 👍🏻👍🏻
We’re very patient gamers as well, when it comes to the games themselves. For example the empress cracks are made by a very sketchy person and we decided to not have any of it’s releases uploaded. This means that we’re instead waiting for someone else to crack denuvo (unlikely) or for it to get removed. The games are also very popular and we’re missing out on some pretty big names.
Also we look at the rating of games before uploading them and only take into consideration ones held in very high regard (above 85% with some exceptions). It doesn’t really make everyone happy but it makes for more healthy gaming instead of swimming through new games every day. So I’d say we’re patient in many ways.
you guys have/want to keep up with the cutting edge to offer serious competition
Back in the day there were people regularly coming to our chat just to ask us why are we bothering with it when windows repackers exist. They compress better and the amount of native games is not significant. Well even if we had the native files for every single game on our list it would barely get past a 20% ratio anyway. We started investing regularly to get native files to help with that.
Thanks for these infos, it’s very interesting to get a glimpse of what goes on behind the “scene”. Makes what you do even more impressive, keep it up 🙂
And I’m sure if dwarfs gets more popular and well maintained, it’ll get distributed more, so it’s not an issue. Also after commenting here yesterday I tried a quick tiny game (Jetstream) on a debian install and saw that dwarfs release on github comes with a dwarfsextract package that’s usable standalone, no installation required, in a few minutes I was playing the game’s exe bypassing the script.
we have a setup page for debian, and switching to sid isn’t necesarry (for now) as debian 12 is recent enough. dwarfs is easy to install from MPR (aur for debian, the hunterwittenborn ported the PKGBUILD system from arch) mpr.makedeb.org
Way back in its beta days, a couple of mates couldn’t put it down. They couldn’t explain why digging holes was fun nor placing cubes. I really didn’t get it after a demonstration from them. Eventually had a LAN with a mate that was vaguely curious but also didn’t think it was going to be interesting.
We didn’t sleep for the next 36hrs, nor notice it was a new day until my family got up and started making breakfast.
Did you two play much afterwards? I’ve played a few times with friends but I find it usually fizzles out after a couple months then it’s just me who hosts occasionally messing around.
Fully the same here. Sometimes I get bouts of inspiration to hop on the server or organize to do something with the group we have, but always fizzles out after a few months as you say. Which is fine really, a lot of other good games I tend to circle back to over time just like minecraft.
For Roblox and Minecraft, a TV should be perfectly fine and in fact excellent. I will go out on a limb here and say that even for most ‘real’ games a TV is fine. The latency associated with TVs is most noticeable in FPS games. For other genres like strategy, third-person adventure games etc, I do not think it matters as much if at all. Many people, especially those who have not used a low response / gaming monitor, do not even notice a lag at all (Note: You will find many such people in real life but never ever on the internet). It would be nice of course if your TV had a “Game Mode” which lowers latency, but it may not necessarily be there in a 10-year-old TV (though it was not that uncommon even back then, so do look for it in your TV settings).
Regarding programming on the TV, I think the situation is slightly different. Using small text in general doesn’t work for me at all on a TV. Most TVs, other than OLEDs or recent non-OLED ones, don’t seem to handle text well enough in my experience. There’s either ghosting or some other manner of artifacts which makes the text harder to read compared to a monitor (apart from the distance from TV involved). I commonly see this issue even with office televisions used for mirroring laptop output. Maybe playing around with sharpening and other settings might get it to work well enough though and it really depends on the specific TV in question.
Overall, I feel you should be fine, at least for gaming, but probably for programming as well. I have a couple of gaming rigs hooked up to my living room and bedroom TV’s and I quite enjoy gaming on them. The much larger screens and ability to lounge about while gaming more than make up for any perceived or actual lag for me.
I hope your kid and you have a great time with your new setup. Have fun! :)
Been playing Spirit of the North this week. I’ve actually finished it, including 100% achievement completion, because it’s not a huge game. What is really sticking out to me right now, though, is that I adore this game. I like a lot of games, but it’s pretty rare for me to absolutely love one.
I’ve also just finished a run through Baldur’s Gate 2, playing a bard for the first time ever. I enjoyed the class more than I thought I would. Onwards to Throne of Bhaal next week!
What did you like about Spirit of the North? I got it with PS Plus but haven’t bothered with it because it got pretty middling review scores. Looks beautiful though.
So, yeah, the fact that it’s a beautiful game is definitely part of it! Visually it’s stunning, and the music is also really beautiful. I also think it’s superbly written: there’s absolutely no dialogue, but there is still a narrative as you play through each area, and I think that’s genuinely very hard to do well, but Spirit of the North does. I really got invested in the relationship between the two characters. There’s also no combat or fighting in the game, so it’s all focused around the platforming and puzzle elements.
I can definitely see why it’s not to everyone’s tastes. It got “very positive” on Steam, so it’s rated more highly on PC than on the PS, and the negative reviews it did get are complaining about either the controls or the game not telling you what you need to do. So the former is fair, I think: the devs focused on making a beautiful game, so it’s about the experience, not the mechanics. The controls aren’t bad as such, but they’re not as smooth as you’d expect for a platformer, I guess? You get the occasional moment of “why didn’t I make that jump?” But there’s no “miss the jump, die, restart the level” mechanics, so it’s normally 1-3 jumps that you need to repeat if you fall. I found the platforming elements really forgiving in terms of not punishing you for screwing up.
The second criticism, that the game doesn’t tell you what you need to do, I think is unfair. The direction you need to go in is always the way that feels most intuitive, either because of a path, wall, or just the shape of the terrain. Some of the puzzles need you to stop and think about them, and the game doesn’t hold your hand by going “and do this here, and that there, and then that”.
The game I’d most compare it to is Abzu, but with more Nordic and less ocean vibes. If you’ve played Abzu and enjoyed it, then you’ll probably enjoy Spirit of the North too.
Nice, thanks for the write-up! I will definitely bump this up the list then. Honestly it looks so appealing I think I’ve just been looking for an excuse to give it a shot that outweighed my wariness from the reviews.
It’s definitely worth a shot. It’s actually a pretty small game: I didn’t rush, and spent 6 hours on it the first time I played (and 16 hours for 100% achievements). So even if you find it’s not for you, it’s a pretty small time investment to find out. :)
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