I’m glad it’s good. Probably going to try to hold off until a sale because I’ve got my backlog full already but man, I’m tempted. Reviews sound great and a part of me wants to honour Itagaki by immediately getting in over my head in NG4 on Master Ninja.

For how great Fallout 2 is, it’s amazing how horrible the first hour or two is. It’s such a shame as it has filtered more than one first playthrough. Hell, I’ve given up on replaying the game one or two times myself midway through that opening bit.

Mine as well. The intersection of detective work and historical knowledge paying off hit me just in the right spot.

I think I might have relapsed. Send help. Everything was going so well, I was playing through the Final Draft of Alan Wake 2 and having the time of my life, and then I clicked on a video YouTube recommended in my feed that looked interesting and the familiar old craving kicked in. Suddenly a week had passed by and I was deep in the rabbit hole again.

So this week I’ve mostly been modding STALKER: Anomaly. There’s been so many new mods and modpacks and even engine optimization released since I played it last and I’m having a blast getting reacquainted, this time basing my modlist on the H.A.C.R. pack which seems to be a flexible and solid base. I’ve already added about 30 mods to it.

I also have to give special mention to the mod and video that kicked it all off - TALKER. It transcribes your voice talking into the mic, and uses AI to give responses from characters in game and it’s actually just so much fun to use, especially for someone like me who loves the role-play and emergent narratives and storytelling of Anomaly. Right now I haven’t even started a full playthrough yet as I’m still tweaking parameters for the AI to fine tune the prompts given to each faction as well as adding to the list of unique personalities.

If you’re an Anomaly player, I definitely recommend checking out TALKER, even though setting it up is a little annoying.

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 remember Game Makers Toolkit raving about some text-based interactions in the game The Shivah in an old video about detective games.

Hah! I also actually related to him a lot actually. As someone who has struggled with mental health, depression, addiction, failure and clinging to the past I ended up resonating a lot with the protagonist as well, and Disco Elysium overall was a very emotional and impactful experience for me.

But even so, I never really felt like I was playing me like I do in self insert RPGs. But that was fine - the main mystery of the game is discovering your protagonist’s backstory and history and everything he is and has been through anyway.

One thing I will say: Disco Elysium is not a self-insert or blank slate RPG. You are playing as a very defined and distinct person, and you discover more and more things about him as you go. You can choose to emphasise certain traits that he already possesses, but you can never completely reshape him. He will always be who he is. A lot of people who want to “pick dialogue options that they would say IRL” end up bouncing off the game. I recommend trying to accept that you’re playing as an insane, depressed failure and commit to it.

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.

Otherwise you should be good to try.

Ghost of Tsushima is touted by some as a “game of the decade” candidate when in reality it’s just a somewhat more polished Ubisoft open world game, that’s also highly monotonous and repetitive for its very long playthrough length.

It was probably poorly phrased but I feel like I remember there was a group of various instance admins at the time discussing ways to deal with it, so it was more of a reference to maybe they figured something out.

You’re right that they used tiny instances with no oversight and open registrations to ban evade for a long time even before this debacle when it was just normal Nicole spam.

A copycat spammer started sending gore pictures to people using the same Nicole copypasta text. A lot of people got upset and there was a flurry of discussion over like a 24h period. Some people seemed to think it was a serial killer and Nicole had been doxxed and killed. In reality if I recall right the picture was from a morgue somewhere in China.

Anyway the whole thing led to a general “okay maybe the joke has run its course and we shouldn’t encourage this” type of moment and the sub was shut down. Presumably the spammer stopped spamming once they no longer received attention, but maybe the admins found and IP banned them or something. I have no idea.

Act 1 one is very weak unfortunately, it’s a major flaw of the game. After one of the strongest prologues in recent gaming memory they whiplash the narrative into hours and hours of Gestral nonsense and completely ruin the vibe. And none of the main characters react believably to any of the insane bullshit - not to mention react to why they understand Gestral.

I’m glad I pushed through in the end and overall the game managed to stick the landing, but I was very close to abandoning it around the Gestral village.

Thanks for the tip, En Garde looks like a lot of fun and I’ll definitely wishlist it for a future sale!

The games are available for free on NOLF revival if you want to play. Nobody knows who owns the IP so there is nobody enforcing the copyright.

The setting, theme and writing is really fun but the gameplay really hasn’t aged well.

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.

Great pick, she’s up there for me too. I also only played the first one but thought it was an amazing experience.

I agree. That scene on the island with Celes hit me like a ton of bricks the first time.