Phoenix Point is fairly bad. The various permutations of XCom 2 with different add-ons (I think several of them are actually incompatible with each other and provide different rulesets and I forget which ones I’ve played) are all kind of like junk food imo — lots of artificial (overtuned) tension spikes, opportunities to become overpowered and then suddenly not, and so on. I think it borderline killed the genre after new XCom brought it back, to be honest; it’s hardly a bad game, but it’s kind of crowd-pleasing in a bad way.
4 Likes
WotC without the Alien Hunter DLCs is a really nice challenge, though yes it’s entire premise is about arbitrarily increasing the tension once in a while. Unlike the Alien Hunter DLCs - which basically everyone agrees are horrible - the challenge is just enough to be intimidating but not daunting imo. But the rules that expansion adds facilitate more strategy and offer some really great reward. Plus it’s an expansion with several actors from The Next Generation voicing major characters! It’s so good!!!
Ideal XCOM 2 is WotC without any other DLC.
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Valkyrie Elysium’s pretty fun
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I might be the only one here that champions Gears Tactics but maybe consider giving it a shot?
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realised that you can install the EA App on a Steam Deck* and use your Game Pass PC or Ultimate privileges to play their “EA Play” games for “free” there, so I started playing GRID Legends (which it still pains me to consider an EA game) and it’s alright so far, also picking up Titanfall 2, which has quite a reputation, but so far aside from the wallrunning and mecha piloting feels a little generic at this stage
*there’s a decent tutorial about it on GitHub, which lets you install multiple games to the same EA App install folder under Proton, which means you only have one copy of it
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god I did this wine-mono stuff in 2013 lol, never again, godspeed steam deck
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I regularly confuse this one with King of the Dragons and am stunned to learn that this has Bonafide Parries
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yeah drinking Merlot while infected with the Epstein-Barr virus is not recommended
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“sideways 2, except the whole script can simultaneously be read as linux documentation” is the kind of creative project I would only take on if I had a fatal illness
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been consistently getting the stage 3 midboss extend in ketsui and gotten to stage 4 (without just carpet bombing the stage 3 boss to death lol) amazingly cool fucking sexy sleek game
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it’s altogether not that bad, only have to do it once for the EA launcher, and Proton is pretty reliable, but ymmv of course
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yeah, I remember it being straightforward in theory, except that over time it amounted to having a bunch of Docker containers in various states of nonmaintenance, and every so often a game would expect to launch like a .NET-based configuration tool that would just die on the vine, and you’d have to establish whether you symlinked your saves out of the prefix when you inevitably wanted to redeploy it because it had gotten into a non-reproducible state
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suffice to say it is not like that
the difficulty is parked at “maybe plug in a keyboard for a non-steam game” and well below linux CLI work. you may have to do goofy things like adding origin to steam to avoid the linux CLI but you can
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yeah, I’m just approaching this from the perspective of “I love the Linux CLI, but I hate having to go back and forth from shims and hacks to launch stuff under a Linux GUI that wasn’t meant to run under Linux,” and the form factor gives me the willies there
and the guide @ticky linked to running origin stuff looked a lot like that
I’m dreading having to dust off my younger self’s patience to get the generic FPGA cores running on my Analogue Pocket when it ships next week
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for the happy path it requires none of that, but of course if you’re pushing the envelope you need a little extra savvy and commitment, it’s fine
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I’ve played about 12 hours of the Zachtronics Solitaire Collection over the past week, despite already owning most of the solitaire games featured through previous Zachtronics games.
The game unique to the collection – Fortune’s Foundation – is particularly good. The cards and the overall aesthetic is striking, and it has a really chill track to go with it!
It’s played with a slightly modified Tarot deck, and you have to stack up the major arcana (from either end) in addition the four minor arcana. It’s sort of like free cell if there were 22 extra cards gumming up everything. You can only move one card at a time but you can stack cards in either ascending or descending order. You also get one free cell, but using it blocks you from putting any cards on the 4 minor arcana foundations (a devious twist)!
It’s really tightly balanced and rather difficult. My first couple games of it were very overwhelming and frustrating, but I started to get in a groove after a getting a couple wins under my belt (although I’m still VERY slow at playing it!) The game often feels like it would be trivial if you had just one more space available, so it teeters right on the edge of doable and impossible.
I also rather enjoy the Windows-Klondike-like Sawayama Solitaire. It gives the player a lot more information than regular Klondike but still retains some hidden cards in the form of the draw deck, which gives it a little gambling flavor and makes it feel pretty similar to original Klondike.
I’ve also gotten a lot of mileage out of Shenzhen Solitaire, which features 3 suits that you must alternate and blocker cards that can’t be stacked unless all 4 are uncovered.
Definitely recommend the collection for fans of solitaire or meditative randomized-puzzles!
23 Likes
calm down Felix
there’s still plenty of dumb shit for you to do on a Deck that’s CLI only
like if you’re playing horny VNs and you need your Wine to be set to Japanese locale and mount an iso and have Wine see it
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oh yeah I am shocked that there isn’t a good little GUI toolkit for mounting ISOs on Linux, how am I longing for Daemon Tools in TYOL 2022
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there definitely was one at one point but it was probably like a Gtk2 thing and judged unmaintainable by Canonical c. 2012
and honestly I can’t blame them, Linux GUI tools are extremely all-or-nothing due to very short bursts of funding and inspo (usually from whatever Fedora is doing at the time) and a lack of UX experience for most of the designers. Like this was my favorite Twitter client on any platform and it lasted maybe 4 years? GitHub - baedert/corebird: Native Gtk+ Twitter Client
this is why the SteamOS ecosystem is worrying to me, I would be less inclined to want to leave Valve’s walled garden than I would be determined to leave Apple’s on another platform
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yeah that’s the thing, there are tools which are like, kernel module level CD emulation (not so useful on the deck’s immutable root filesystem), but I have no real need for that, just mount it like it’s a normal drive - mount already knows what to do, I just want to be able to do it without bringing up the dinky little steam keyboard to tell it what I want
2 Likes