Both NOLF 1&2 and Contract JACK are available on the website above, patched and fixed to work on modern machines.
YMMV but when I tried NOLF 1 for the first time earlier this year I sadly found the gameplay so poorly aged I wasn’t having enough fun to make myself finish it - despite the setting, theme and writing being quite fun.
I might give it another shot at some point though, it was a critic’s darling back in the day and I’d like to be able to say I have played it.
The upshot is that since nobody knows whether they own it or not there is nobody bothering to actively enforce copyright, so you can just download the games for free if you want on NOLFrevival.
Damn I didn’t see this coming, hit unexpectedly hard. I just played through all the Ninja Gaiden games just recently as well as his Samurai Jack game and was so pumped for both his next project as well as NG4. He was a legendary character and whatever you think of him he was a colourful figure on the scene and will be missed for that if nothing else.
I believe the final frontier for Linux gaming - apart from some niche cases - is multiplayer games with kernel-level anticheat. They are literally impossible to play on Linux, so if you’re into one of those then don’t bother.
The other edge case is modding. A lot of mods work just fine on Linux, but some just don’t and some - like those relying on Mod Managers and the like - might require more fiddling and specific tinkering. If you do a lot of modding it’s probably easier to stick to Windows as you know everything just works.
I love Control, I think the gameplay and level design is amazing, the world building is phenomenal and some of the side characters are great. Jesse herself wasn’t really that memorable to me though. I get that she’s supposed to act like a foil for all the craziness that’s happening, but as a result she ended up feeling kind of bland and forgettable. I always thought this was intentional, as the main focus of the game was the world building and lore and the Oldest House. Having a protagonist with a super strong colorful personality would be too much and just end up distracting from that.
Viva New Vegas should be a stable base to work from in terms of mods, as already mentioned. Vanilla New Vegas is almost unplayable but with the latest slew of community patches and engine fixes and even engine rewrites plus 4GB patch and all that it should be quite stable.
I recommend trying again, I had a playthrough just two years ago I think with pretty much no stability issues. And New Vegas is an amazing game.
I did a ton of side content (basically all of it) so I probably was overpowered then in terms of levels/weapons/Pictos for the main story?
The balance of the game is all over the place, that much I agree on. Especially the final act, which is a mess quite frankly. If you do any side content at all the final boss is a complete joke you probably kill in one shot and miss a bunch of cool attacks and mid-fight cinematics.
I’m far from a parry god myself, so I simply built around it. Stacked HP and Defense on Maelle along with the First Strike Pictos and started every fight with her using Egide, which let her absorb damage for the team. Ran Lune with constant healing through Tsunami. Reasonable investment in HP and Defense on all my characters. The only times I ran into an issue of getting one-shot through the main game was when I deliberately went into a higher level zone - and at that point I felt like I had it coming. The optional superboss is a different story of course, but that’s a whole different issue and also kind of par for the course.
Also this was on Normal mode and not Expert so YMMV.
Do it like Remedy does for Alan Wake: Pattinson acts and reads out the lines in (presumably butchered) French, but then have a separate native French actor do the voice and dub over him.
I’m still hoping for a “Definitive Edition” type update eventually. There are some parts that could definitely do with a retouching or restructure, the final act in particular.
I never really got the feeling of reverence for the originals personally, down to the references made feeling like lip service created by someone browsing a wiki who has never played them in the first place.
Choosing to set the game a 100 years later (so that they wouldn’t have to incorporate much of the original cast or story) but still shoehorning in two fan favourite characters never sat right with me either.