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.

man, the mention of printed-faq’s opened a core memory. I had One Must Fall 2097 and Mortal Kombat move-lists printed out

I absolutely love the no-nonsense approach of gamefaqs (and the likes). <3

if I’m stuck in a game (usually some 90’s point&click adventure), more often than not I just want an easily ctrl+f searchable walkthrough, and does the site ever provide.

It’s probably a windows-thing, and it’s been quite a while since I last played it (seems like it was when win7 was still a thing), but I don’t think there’s been updates to it. Could be the sound issue I had was specific to some audio hardware or settings.

https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Max_Payne#Issues_fixed has some audio fixes listed, but it’s been quite a while and I can’t remember the exact issue, but the audio was entirely “borked” without the fix.

Haven’t tested the game on linux yet.

the last time I played MP1 I had to tinker with some fanpatches to even get audio working. While it wasn’t a massive ordeal, would be nice if it worked on modern systems out-of-the-box.

No worries, my comment was a bit ambiguous.

up to personal taste, to me it’s mostly about implementation. All motion blur isn’t terrible, but when it’s terrible, it’s really bad. Some older games had really odd stepping in it, or everything had a trailing blur of same length regardless of how fast the objects were moving, or motion blur is calculated at different fps/shutter speed than the game runs so the blur is either too long/short/fucky.

Mostly I’m about the fov being the dealbreaker here. My eyes start to hurt with narrow fov’s, feels like I’m straining something somehow. I usually go with something between 90-100, 110 in some rare cases.

edit:

oh, maybe I misunderstood the question: I mean, I agree it’s a dealbreaker. Just “FFS”'ing because it’s not an option.

ye. they tend to be.

Kinda funny that the review header states they had 0.1 hours in the game at review time - so they knew exactly what they were getting, still bought it - and have played over 9 hours after it. Like… why?

Just to get early in with the rage reviews and farm steam reactions?

Seen few videos about this, the game seems like decent-ish action adventure with Vampires, less like a rpg.

Might pick this one up when it gets to -50% sales or so.

edit: from the user reviews:

Why does this game need Paradox Launcher?

but seems like it can be circumvented, at least peeps with gog version seem to be doing so.

Why is there no Motion Blur toggle?

Why is there no FOV slider?

… oh ffs.

Why are there no basic accessibility options in 2025?

they didn’t detail what this means.

EDIT: for clarity, it’s amazing that motionblur/fow are not available options. Wasn’t criticizing the review, these are valid points.

But I’d like to know what accessibility options were omitted as well.

I loved this game, up until the difficulty ramped up quite hard and I just couldn’t proceed. Could be a classic issue of gidgud, but the shift was quite sudden, iirc. It’s been quite a while since I last played (early 2021, around ~13 hours, according to steam).

The game looks absolutely lovely, that style is absolute peak.

had not even heard of this game. Looks pretty cool, but according to PCGamingWiki it’s UE5… If the stuttery-options can be turned off, it’s probably entirely non-issue.

While I do subscribe to the “quality hours over quantity hours” for game length, 30€ still sounds a bit steep.

Oh well, wishlisted for now.

a bit later Sierra adventure game “Leisure Suit Larry 7” has both: mouse point & click AND text-parser. Though it is only really required in few places where you either need to ask about something not offered in the dialogue options, or figure out a clever verb for doing something (some are easter eggs and funnies, can’t really remember what else needed custom verbs typed in, fairly sure there was some).

In any case, the game isn’t for everyone’s tastes, it is goofy/juvenile/immature/naughty/“adult”, but overall more on the side of comical/cartoony and not really a “sex game”, even if getting laid is the goal for Larry.

I’m fairly sure downloading/preloading shaders is a thing only for steamdeck, as the compilation result is different based on hardware & driver versions. Only “fixed” target valve has is steamdeck.

edit: actually, I might be combining two different things in my mind. Steam has downloading precompiled shaders for games for steamdeck, but has the preload/precompiling option for other systems?

Turbo was on by default

while true, BUT: everyone I knew at the time, who had turbo buttons on their systems, told me that it made the computer faster and could lead to the computer breaking if it was left on all the time. So they just had the turbo off :|

I’ve been told this kind of belief was VERY common.

Transport Tycoon Deluxe.

That jazzy midi is an absolute banger, gets me into the mood to build railways.

edit: ooh, almost forgot: Jazz the Jackrabbit (the first game). Absolutely phenomenal mainmenu music, that bassline slaps so hard.

Still no launch date but there’s a demo! I know what I’m doing tonight.

You are entirely responsible for me wasting this weekend grinding DRG:S.

This one is pretty darn slick, thank you / [some degatory slur of your choice here] for giving me the push to get it.

I have played Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous, and ran out of motivation with both. I don’t remember either that well, it’s been quite a while since I played them, but I feel like Rogue Trader does share similarities with them. Overall… I do like the game, but man if it doesn’t require me to force myself to play it occasionally. 40k vibes are great, dunno if I’d care about the game if it wasn’t 40k.

I got to admit the warping between systems and exploring planets does get a bit old. I’m sure not all of it nescessary, but if it’s there, I gotta explore it, damnit. Most planets are just there to be scanned and they might have a spot where you plant a moneymaker. Some planets have some small area to walk around and do some skillchecks and most likely have some skirmish for small-ish rewards.

Plot areas are pretty big and have (usually) several moral compass tests, which are basically: “nah, let’s not kill everyone, everyone has good in them”, “I’m gonna burn you alive because religious reasons”, “give me your possessions and you might live”.

One that really makes my head explode is when your group spots a floor trap. If you don’t carefully walk each member around it, literally everyone will step into it otherwise. And there’s A LOT of these traps, though admittedly vast majority of them can be directly defused.

ooh, that’s a good list! Thank you for pointing it out! Bookmarked with violent intent.

I take there’s permanent unlocks/stat improvements/etc? Is gear permanent or per run? Surely the dwarves don’t enter the levels unprepared? :D

To me Vampire Survivors started to get a bit obtuse with some unlock requirements (have skills x, y, z, survive this certain level this long, be at this exact place, possibly with a character C, have the hand towel on second hook… etc). I’d assume DRG:S is a bit more straightforward?

Have you perhaps played Soulstone Survivors - it’s the one I’ve played the most, unlocked everything apart from some hidden/masked achivements? If you have, how does DRG compare?

ooh, DRG:Survivor has been on my wishlist for quite a bit. How does it fare against other survivors games?

I keep hearing the early game unlocks a lot of stuff but at some point it grinds to a halt, dunno how true that is. Thoughts?