It the map has locations named and there’s a compass, I’ll manage. The quest pointer in later bethesda games is “a bit” too much handholding, imo. But that said I’ve seen some mw memes about some cube and how hard it is to find… No idea what that’s about but probably going to find out :P

so, I take there’s no in-game map then? oof, but I can deal with map on second monitor.

attacks not connecting might bug me a bit, but I suspect there’s some mod for that if it ends up breaking my brain.

Thanks, these were good to know stuff!

ah, in that case I’m gonna venture forth without it. Expansions are cool, but I kinda want to get my feet wet with the base game first. QoL mods which make the experience have “less friction” I’m entirely fine with

oh for sure (near vanilla) experience for first time. Gameplay changing mods etc are for playthroughs after the first one.

I take the Tamrield Rebuilt mods are mostly quality-of-life -stuff?

I’ve been meaning to check out Morrowind, most people have been frothing about it since forever and… tbh, only Elder Scrolls game I have really played has been Skyrim, only dabbled with Oblivion and Morrowind.

And… oh, OpenMW is in my linux distro’s repository too, that’s one barrier removed already! I take MW is quite a bit more approachable than Daggerfall, but probably quite a bit less than eg. Skyrim?

I’ve been waiting for this demo, right off the bat I have 2 technical points to raise:

• please offer a toggle for the filmgrain/noise. streamers and youtubers will thank you, as that stuff absolutely murders capture quality.
• my framerate tanked to 35 and stayed there after the intro interrogation, which ran fine at stable 120 fps (uncapped, vsync). Using linux + proton-ge, rtx3090, r5800x3d, 64gb

so… FBC: Firebreak 2: MTX Boogaloo: Revenge

honestly, can’t remember the plot at all, it’s been about 3 eternities since I’ve played it. I do recall liking the gameplay tho. :P

heh, yea, my approach is also full on murderhobo in Styx, but I do it so nobody notices anything if at all possible. Levels can take several hours with this method so … uh, it’s not really optimal way to play but damnit that’s how I roll. Admittedly the near constant presence of the void/cliffs/etc bottomless pits makes it fairly easy to get rid of bodies.

Never really felt the need to chase the time bonuses, just collectables etc are enough for me. Admittedly I have not finished either of the games, but played pretty darn far in both.

Oh, also: Rochard - if you can get it anywhere, it is pretty dope. It’s a bit of a mix of action & puzzle platformer but with Abuse-like controls. It was pulled from steam years ago, dunno if it’s available on consoles still.

Way back I played a bit of A.R.E.S: Extinction Agenda (https://store.steampowered.com/app/92300/ARES_Extinction_Agenda/) - it’s a bit of a score attack game, but controls pretty similarly to Abuse.

If purely multiplayer game is your thing, Teeworlds (https://store.steampowered.com/app/380840/Teeworlds/ , https://teeworlds.com/) controls just like Abuse. It’s about cure orb-shaped creatures duking it out. It’s free, btw.

(video games, slang) Video games from Europe (especially Eastern Europe) with ambitious concepts but lacking in execution and sometimes exhibiting unintended glitches.

as per Wiktionary (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Eurojank)

I was under the assumption the Styx -devs were german, but apparently the studio is French. Either way. I also don’t recall any specific glitches, but the first game has a bit stiff climbing mechanics where you can (and will) do some unintended jumps to void etc.

Basically “AA game” instead if “AAA big budget game”

I honestly can’t remember where the episode ended, as it has been several years since I played it. Sorry :/

It does have the bratty schoolgirls being bratty, but it isn’t the entire episode.

Telltales Batman is on my TODO list, gotta get on that. IMO the first TT Borderlands was fairly fun, haven’t touched the second season.

It’s been several years since I played LiS, so the details of the game are a bit hazy. I recall it feeling bit lame on the beginning, but it did ramp up quite a bit towards the end. The beginning was (mostly) some school drama, like some girls acting like absolute brats and dealing with that.

The first episode is free on steam, btw. If you’re on the fence, try it out before purchase.

I’ve only played through the first LiS “season”, it’s all right. Gameplay is pretty similar to Telltale’s Walking Dead/Wolf Among Us/etc -if you enjoyed those, you probably will enjoy LiS.

If you aren’t familiar with Telltale’s games, theyre “adventure games”. Quotes because they don’t really have a “verb menu” or inventory puzzles etc like the traditional point&click adventure games. They’re more of a interactive stories with few branching paths/choices, kinda walking-sim adjacent ish.

I’d recommend the Walking Dead or Wolf Among Us over Life is strange, but it isn’t bad either.

While I do like the first 2 Styx games (the 3rd one is out soon-ish? if not now?), they are quite the “quicksave/quickload trial and error patience games” and quite deep in the eurojank spectrum. The climbing in the first one is pretty jank, and in both games the character breaks 4th wall deadpool-style pretty often, enemies are dumb as bricks but will absolutely murder you once alerted enough.

But on the upside, it’s one of those rare stealth games where murder is not penalized at all.

That said, the games are great!

That’s looks like the part of the game where you chase the mob guy with the squeaky voice. I recall having to redo the part several times, if the random goons didn’t kill me, the “boss” sure did.

But then again most scenes in the game were like that, the difficulty felt hella swingy all the time.

Guessing or do you have some edge case to present? Last I tried portal 2 ran fine on 64bit system. In fact I’m not entirely use I have ever actually ran it on 32bit one.

While true… I’m not aware of a single 16-bit game sold by steam. Are there actually any? (EDIT: I mean in context of Steam, ofc. systems running older 16bit games probably are not getting them from Steam).

Admittedly sample size of 1, but the only 16bit windows game I care about (Castle of the winds) runs fine on wine.

it’s kinda wild, they duplicated the data several times to supposedly help loading times on mechanical hdd’s. I guess to keep data sequential and minimize seeks?

And yet, I guess it was technically true:

Our testing shows that for the small percentage of players still using mechanical hard disk drives, mission loading times have only increased by a few seconds in the worst cases.

I don’t know how long the loading times in the game are, as I don’t play this. But surely +/- few seconds is negligible vs 130 GB duplicated data.

is Steam a flatpak or such on Bazzite? AFAIK that makes quite a difference. DE shouldn’t, but… who knows.

Either way, if the change was a positive one, it’s great.

Curious to know what happened with Bazzite to make you switch. I haven’t used it myself but I’ve only heard good things about it.

Been thinking of trying out cachy, but I already have perfectly good and configured Arch, so haven’t bothered.

Edit: 498 days? Holy… It feels like 365d was just a moment ago

that does sound quite cool. I’ll have to check this out, feels like something I would have really enjoyed as a kid.

Thanks!

only played the shareware, until I found out that the full game was eventually released as freeware.

Then years after I went to game store and bought One Must Fall: Battlegrounds on release day… mistakes were made.

somehow missed zzt entirely, never played it, seen some random screenshots back in the day and thought it was some kind of weird nethack -clone with occasional ascii graphics. But also the only few screenshots I recall looked like nethack, with ascii smiley -character instead lf @ as user avatar.

So… it’s some kind of game engine which you can script to make any kind of game, kinda?

ut99 > 2k4! But it is a close call, admittedly.

But also, epic released some absolute bangers in the 90’s, though admittedly as a publisher. eg. Castle of the Winds, One Must Fall 2097.

started Red Dead Redemption 1 last night, seems like just hitting esc during cutscene pauses it.

Admittedly I was wanting to go to settings and drop some settings, but that’s only allowed during gameplay, not cutscenes x)

the bane of my eyes. I don’t have glasses, but holy hell this effect starts to strain my eyes when games have it.

in general: settings which have multiple levels, display it as a slider so I can visually see which ones are actually maxed out and which arent. It’s insanity when most settings have off/low/med/high/higher and randomly some of them have additional levels like epic/ultra/psycho/gigaultrapseudobullshit. You have to go each and everyone through to figure out which have higher settings. Now, this is not a flex, my system can’t run new games on gigaultrapseudobullshitultra++, but older ones? sure.

for fps & tps games: FOV.

otherwise, in no particular order, option to toggle off entirely:

• motion blur
• chromatic aberration

otherwise, must haves:

• subtitles on/off
• master volume/music/sfx/dialogue as separate sliders.
• don’t default volume to max, this is instant ear explosion if you happen to use different audio devices

They do have a website up - https://www.horses.wtf/

by their own description:

CONTENT WARNING: This game contains scenes of physical violence, psychological abuse, gory imagery (mutilation, blood), depictions of slavery, physical and psychological torture, domestic abuse, sexual assault, suicide, and misogyny.

The game looks like it’s about keeping people on a ranch, with horse masks on.

I guess the banhammer was swung because of sexual violence and mutilation of subjugated slaves?

it kinda feels like the more expensive a game is, the less value it seem to have.

heh, I have Superbook for the exact same purpose! (for the uninitated: it was a “laptop” which used your phone/tablet/etc as the tech, it was basically just a 1080p screen and keyboard for a phone).

Mine took 3-4 factory resets and firmware flashes to get working, and then the damn thing gave up the ghost the same night and hasn’t worked since… not that it has any real use anyway. Good buy /s

The factory transport network must grow!

• OpenTTD, easily. Would be nice if I could sneak in the og assets (music mainly) from Transport Tycoon Deluxe as well, but not critical
• Fallout: London - or does that count as 2 as it’s a tc mod + basegame of fallout4?

really drawing a blank on the other ~3 games. Probably some mix of old Lucas Arts adventure games (indy atlantis, day of the tentacle, the dig…), imsims (dishonored, deux ex).

depends. high refresh rate is great if you play fast moving games. The difference is pretty much “same” as 30->60 when going from 60 to 120, for example. After seeing something at eg. 120 fps, “60 feels like 30, kinda” - just a personal observation.

For turn based 4x games, isometric rpg’s etc, probably won’t make much of a difference.

FPS, racing, etc fast? yea, it’s great.

edit: if you’re a movie enthusiast, 144 Hz screen might make sense if you watch a lot of stuff which is 24 fps. As 144 (and 120, for that matter) divide evenly with 24, making the tiny judder go away compared to 60 Hz screen.

portal 3

well, if we’re sticking to scummvm, they offer some free games on their site: https://scummvm.org/games/#games

the freebies are in general fairly old (like early-to-mid 90’s dos stuff), but work fine on scummvm, hence they’re offering them there. AFAIK all of them are controlled by mouse only.

Not all of them are suitable for all ages though.

Flight of the Amazon Queen is a story set in 40’s, about a pilot for hire and his small plane crashing into the amazons while transporting a movie star. Overall theme is cartoony/goofy/comedy, with a bit of juvenile humour ( by modern standards). There are some things some could find unsuitable for children, I guess.

• rubber breasts, used in non-sexual way to build a costume to fool gangsters
• the “bad guys” are essentially ww2 germans (but not referred as such, iirc their faction isn’t even given a name, I think)
• some alcohol & tobacco references
• very mild innuendos.

Beneath a steel sky - postapocalyptic oppressive world, although a bit cartoony/comical and oddly british considering the story takes place in australia. Banger adventure game but does contain few violent deaths. I played this during my early teens, but I wouldn’t suggest letting very young kids have a go at this.

The rest of the games on there I either haven’t played or can’t recommend.

But, since you asked for games for kids to learn to use mouse, I suspect the kids in question are like 5-7? These 2 games aren’t probably for them yet.

If you want to just, remove steam from the equation, eg. for no-internet kids’ computer:

basically: buy them from steam, then just install them. Then, just copy the game files somewhere else, install scummvm & add the games to scummvm to play them.

Scummvm is just an app which runs these older adventure games on wide variety of systems, incl modern windows (the games are occasionally so old, windows doesn’t support them natively at all). Scummvm is fairly straightforward to set up, basically just click “add game” -> browse to where the game is -> ok -> it is now in scummvm, click “Play” to play it.

If you’re asking about “yar har har, me mateys, and a bottle of rhum” -methods, that’s an excercise left for the reader.

ye. ended up checking some of the games’ store pages. There’s a note about scummvm.

Dunno if they keep the scummvm updated though, not that it matters much unless there’s an issue with a specific game. IIRC Indy Atlantis is bundles with decade+ old scummvm, though it’s been a while since I checked.

depends on the age of your kids, buuuut: if they’re fairly young, maybe spyfox/putt-putt/pajama-sam/freddi-fish games? those can be found on eg. steam, and should run fairly painlessly from there. (and if you want to make them steam-free/offline, you can just copy the files from those games elsewhere and use eg. scummvm (https://scummvm.org/) to run them. But that’s entirely optional & up to you. afaik steam bundles them with scummvm anyway).

Basically they are point & click adventure games aimed for younger kids. I’m in my 40’s and kinda do enjoy spyfox as well x)

The games are fairly old (afaik mid-to-late 90’s, or so), so graphics are fairly low res by today’s standards, but they’re essentially just playable cartoons with mild puzzles, all dialogue is spoken (subtitles are an option) and no real fail states.