A Shelter Full of Cats I’m a sucker for any game from Devcats.

So, most of my recommendations are going to be FPS or first person. For Valve related stuff:

• Half-Life 2 is pretty much a must have along with Episodes 1 and 2.
• Black Mesa is a remake of the original.
• Entropy : Zero 2 is a fantastic fan made mod that’s a good follow up after finishing Half-Life 2 and the episodes.
• The original Entropy : Zero is pretty good, but the default difficulty is hard as hell.
• Portal 1 and 2 are also a must have
• Portal: Revolution is an independent mod that’s a good follow up after 2.

As for non-Valve games and related:

• Crab Champions - fast paced, third-person, rogue-like shooter.
• Talos Principle 1 and 2 - first-person puzzles with a serious philosophical scifi story. It actually gets a bit heavy when it discusses mortality and death. 1 is being remade into a “definitive edition”.
• Untitled Goose Game - Honk!
• Gnorp Apologue - fun little game
• Pineapple on pizza - it’s free. I would describe it as games-as-art.
• Any of the Serious Sam games. They were made for PC.
• Fallen Aces is still in early access, but a good story driven retro FPS with sprites and multiple ways of navigating each level.
• Trepang2 - a bit of an odd FPS with bullet time.
• Roboquest - rogue like FPS
• Exit 8 - horror walking simulator. Kinda short once you figure it out.
• APE OUT - Ape smash! Top down “shooter”.
• Hotline Miami 1 and 2 - top down shooters with fast deaths and excellent soundtracks
• The Binding of Isaac - has always been popular if a little dated
• Gunpoint - stealth puzzle third person. Came out a decade ago, but a good game.
• Party Hard - little indie murder-everyone-and-don’t-get-caught.
• The Stanley Parable - walking simulator with some interesting dialog and interactions. 9-to-5 office people can relate.
• Dusk - awesome boomer shooter
• Antichamber - came out a decade ago, but it’s mind bending first-person puzzles.
• Hades and Hades 2 which is in early access. Third person isometric rogue-like.
• The Invincible - Story driven walking simulator based off the book of the same name. Good story.
• Firewatch - story driven walking simulator
• Deep Rock Galactic - wasn’t my pint of beer, but a lot of people like it.

Half-Life 2 is pretty much a must have. Black Mesa is a good remake of the original.

I’d be surprised if they had net positive income on Tribes 3. A lot of veteran gamers of the series saw who was really running development and decided to stay away. Once bitten, twice shy. The writing was on the wall that it was a dead game back in June.

Embracer treats studios like they are disposable. They killed Volition (Saint’s Row), Free Radical (TimeSpltters) plus a bunch of other studios. All of that was because their $2 billion deal with the Saudi Government fell through. Some studios managed to escape when one of the Saber Interactive original owners bought back a bunch of studios. They recently killed Pieces Interactive (Alone in the Dark).

If a studio is owned by Embracer, they are lucky if they will be around in 5 years.

Yeeeaaah, that makes more sense. 😅 That would be a giant gaping vulnerability if everything was in kernel space.

Bluetooth has one of the largest network stacks. It’s bigger than Wifi. This means some parts of the stack probably aren’t tested and may have bugs or vulnerabilities. It has duplicate functionality in it. This opens up the possibility that flaws in how different parts interact could lead to vulnerabilities or exploits.

A number of years ago some security researchers did an analysis of the Windows and Linux stacks. They found multiple exploitable vulnerabilities in both stacks. They called their attack blue borne, but it was really a series of attacks that could be used depending on which OS you wanted to target. Some what ironically, Linux was more vulnerable because the Linux kernel implemented more of the protocol than Windows.

Wasn’t Gearbox hired to finish Duke Nukem Forever? I remember it being someone else’s turd they had to polish.

So basically, Saber and all studios under Saber won’t have to worry about suffering the same fate as Volition did under Embracer. Maybe?

This is an FYI for any Tribes: Ascend fans. Tribes 3 is basically being developed and published by Hi-Rez 2.0. Prophecy Games is a spin off of Hi-Rez Studio and is run by the owner.

For those not familiar with the history of T:A, Hi-Rez released the game as free-to-play, had some of the grindiest of grinds (took forever to unlock the spinfusor for just one class), and a monetization plan that was targeting whales. There were balancing issues that needed to be addressed, promised features left undeveloped like competitive, and they basically abandoned the game within a year. They moved their developers over to Smite while things degraded leaving the player base salty AF. You’ll have to visit that other site for the history, but this is probably a good starting point. And I can’t forget that the CEO never took responsibility for their horrible monetization plan.

Now I would hope that Hi-Rez Prophecy would have learned from their mistakes because Tribes is one of those games I hold a special place for. However, they released a pair of day 1 DLCs that each costs more than the game itself.

They released two games. The first was just a game jam thing they threw together that established the core mechanics. The second was much more fleshed out and polished.

In a statement posted to Steam, developer Shiny Shoe said […]

What a sloppy and lazy article. They don’t even bother linking to the statement from the devs. Seriously, that would have taken less then 1 minute to add.

So, his replacement is going to walk back this cluster-you-know-what, right? Right?

crickets

Yep it’s a bug. When I did an “Add to Cart” it added both games even though it only shows the one game on my wishlist.

I edited the post to reflect that.

That looks like it. I checked one of the bundles.

Then tried adding to cart from my wishlist. It added both games, but on my wishlist it only shows the one game. That’s just really buggy, and fortunately only unintentionally deceptive instead of intentionally.

Could be, IDK. I’ve seen that with a regular discount and the price gets raised when a sale starts, but never with a double discount.

Perhaps someone that has published on steam could shed more light.

Oh, he was a former CEO of EA. That explains a few things.

Not EEE. This looks like a form of enshittification. It sounds like Mojang is trying to capture all value for themselves by claiming absolute control over everything.

You can use ruffle to play flash games. ActionScript 2 support is pretty good. ActionScript 3 is kinda hit or miss.

GTFO with some caveats.

1. You need a good group that can work together, coordinate, plan and work through challenging rooms.
2. You like stealth mixed with action. You’re gonna spend most of the time sneaking up on the sleepers with bursts of action if they wake up or when you have to unlock an alarmed door.
3. You’re gonna get your butt kicked. This is a difficult game that can end a run in under minute if you get too sloppy or cocky. But that’s half the fun.
4. You can set aside a good chunk of time for each game. An easy map will take an hour. There aren’t that many easy maps. We’ve gone 3 hours and failed a run multiple times. We also use the time to catch up with each other. We’ve spent 5 to 10 minutes in front of a door chit-chatting before clearing a room.

It’s bloody good fun, but you need a good group for it.