soulsource

soulsource, rok temu

At least Slack has a usable user interface… Teams is, well, I’d rather sit on a cactus. Let me phrase it like this: We have Office at work. We also have a Slack subscription, because Teams is just so much worse in comparison…

soulsource, rok temu

I have to second the mentions of OpenTTD, Battle for Wesnoth, Ur-Quan Masters and Nethack.

I’d also like to add:

• Widelands: A Settlers 2 clone.
• Chromium B.S.U.: A top-down scrolling shooter. Don’t let any enemies pass. Perfect if you need 5 minutes of adrenaline.
• Scorched 3D: It’s Scorched Earth, but 3D.
• Frozen Bubble: Hard to describe. It’s a bit like Dr. Mario.
• GL-117: 3D air combat. The graphics are “a bit” dated, but the game is a lot of fun still.
• Kobo Deluxe: A 2D action-puzzler. It doesn’t have the most stunning graphics, but it sure is fun to play.

Then there are also some open-source re-implementations of commercial games (that need the original game files) that haven’t been mentioned yet:

• CorsixTH: Theme Hospital.
• OpenMW: Morrowind
• OpenRA: Red Alert (and others)
• ScummVM: Various point&click adventure games (Monkey Island, Legend of Kyrandia, Loom,…)
• Return to the Roots: Settlers 2
• VCMI: Heroes of Might and Magic 3

soulsource, rok temu (edited rok temu)

Some games, like the Pathfinder games by Owlcat, use that initial input to determine if you are playing with mouse/keyboard or a gamepad. Depending on that, you get presented with a different UI in the main menu.

Another reason for such a screen could also be Xbox support. Nowadays it’s no longer necessary, because user-handling has been vastly improved with the GDK, but before the GDK was released a splash screen was the most user-friendly way to do user-handling in a single-player or online-multiplayer game on Xbox.

soulsource, rok temu

As a gamedev: Early Access was useful for devs, back when it was real Early Access. Think: Kerbal Space Program (the first, not the second).

Nowadays it’s mostly a marketing tool, that allows to generate the hype for launch twice… Publishers and players expect “Early Access” games to be feature complete and polished before the “Early Access” launch…

soulsource, rok temu

Yep, that’s probably the most helpful thing for devs. This sadly often conflicts with publishers’ announcement schedules. There are, however, companies that do NDA-protected play-tests, where you get the same kind of information, without publicly announcing the game.

soulsource, rok temu

I’d also suggest a Steam Deck, but for a different reason. My experiences with switchable graphics (both, nVidia and AMD) have been extremely disappointing. It’s quite frustrating to spend €1500 on a gaming laptop, and then constantly facing driver issues, tearing,…

If I were to buy a laptop, I’d therefore also go with an AMD integrated graphics unit, and no switchable graphics. Performance would be comparably bad, but at least an integrated (non-switchable) card works… And now we are at the point of having a dedicated gaming device like the Deck, which lets you have both: A performant enough gaming device, and a laptop that isn’t burdened by the price and issues of switchable graphics.

soulsource, rok temu

I’ve been playing it quite a bit on the Deck, and it’s running fine. I left the settings on default, except for upscaling, where I enabled XeSS, which makes some things much more beautiful, for instance fur.

With XeSS enabled, I had to set display refresh rate to 40 Hz though.

soulsource, rok temu

Fourth? The last real Settlers was Settlers 2.