What have you been playing recently and what do you think about it?

I've been playing a mix of games.

The one that left the strongest impression on me was a surreal, horror point-and-click called Detention. You play as a student stranded in high school after dark, sometime in 1960s Taiwan under martial law. Its unexpectedly personal and emotional story (which is probably based on real-life incidents) hits home and is the source of my melancholy this week. If you liked games like The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, Oxenfree or Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, I cannot recommend this enough.

Playing DiRT Rally is a weekly routine for me now to practice driving at extreme speeds over extreme terrains. Drifting through one dangerous corner after another without crashing is tremendously rewarding. Almost therapeutic when you get into the flow.

I also indulged in some FPS action with ET Legacy (modern build of the Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory) for a bit of nostalgia.

Then there's Renowned Explorers: International Society, an turn-based adventuring game which I find extremely entertaining to kill time with in between things.


Last edited by descender on 10 March 2017 at 8:24 pm UTC

Dying Light - it took me really long to get on board, because I was in love in the way the Zombie apocalypse was presented in The Last of Us. In The Last of Us when you made a noise it was super hard to survive. In Dying Light most of the zombies are slow, and the one that you can wake are easy to beat. In The Last of Us when you were loud for a moment it was guaranteed that you will die. And it made more sense (Plus The Last of Us was golden in general).

But 2 weeks ago I finally managed to spend more time with this game and I love it so far. I finished 61% of main plot and hope to finish main story next week. Of course if I have enough time.

Darkest Dungeon for me. It mixes Roguelike, RPG and turn based combat in a single package. The skill and character positioning system is very well implemented and lets you play around with many combinations.

On the technical side, the game is very-veryyyy stable and will run well on almost any potato PC (tested on my Intel N2840 Laptop).

Civ 6 has been taking up all my gaming time, I'm hugely addicted to it. I'll get back to Stellaris once the Banks and Utopia updates are released.

Warhammer 40k Retribution - almost done with all campaigns

Shadow Tactics : Blades of the Shogun

on the fence with Civ 6. Glad they ported it but not my cup of tea compared to Civ 5.

Also on the fence of whether I should play Pillars , Tyranny or Shadowrun.

Rocket League - Has replaced League of Legends for me since RL got released on Linux. This is my competitive game fix. I am hoping to get All Star before season is over, but I have been stuck in Challenger 3/Elite the past few weeks.
Civilization VI - The strategy just got even more interesting with the changes in tech/civic trees/boosts, districts, etc.
Lara Croft GO - Good puzzle game and also 3-year old loves playing it with me.
Torchlight II - Reminds me of what I liked in Diablo II. Good battle mechanics, rewarding drops and plays well online.
Shovel Knight - Just fun. Good mechanics, challenging levels and good music.
99Vidas - I had not played a side-scrolling beat 'em up for a while. This is pretty dang fun and worked well cross-platform online multiplayer with friends.
Portal 2 - I come back to this one from time to time.

EDIT: More explanatory


Last edited by TapocoL on 10 March 2017 at 10:06 pm UTC

I've been playing Dragon's Dogma using Wine 1.7.4.8 with the Gallium Nine Patches and the x360ce controller emulator for my Playstation 1 controller. It has been an awesome experience, definitely hooked on it, and i definitely think the game should come out with native Linux support.. its a good candidate really; its a DirectX 9 game so it shouldn't be an issue.

PS; I have Deus Ex mankind divided and an HD7850 2gb OC from sapphire + the mesa-git on and i have this annoying texture corruption where everything doesn't render out properly its annoying... that's why I'm not playing that one , if i was it would have been on this.

I loaded up Master of Orion this week, I actually can't think of a word to describe just how terrible the combat is. 'Totally accurate battle simulator' has better strategy & more control over your units during the battle...

Also played a bit of Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun, fun game.

I would like to play some more ARK, but they update it every day, which is annoying when you have 3rd world internet & have to wait an hour to update.

I tend not to be at the forefront . . . last few days I've been playing Pandora and Civilization: Beyond Earth (with the Rising Tides stuff). Pandora was IMO better than original Civ:BE, but probably not as good as Civ:BE with Rising Tides added in. Both are pretty good, but neither is quite the brought-to-modernity-and-improved Alpha Centauri that I'm longing for, just as I've yet to meet the "MOO II taken to another level" game I seek in the interstellar 4X genre.

One thing I've noticed: To this day, I don't think I've ever seen a Civ-ish game where espionage is really all that worth it. And the more elaborate it has become, the worse it has gotten; really, I could get more out of a Diplomat or Spy with less faffing around in Civ II than I can with modern incarnations with their endless missions and crap. This is probably true to life; WW II is one of the few times espionage has IMO really delivered enough positive to make it worth all the negatives. Most of the modern intelligence services of countries around the world, whether the American octopus or my country's little-but-obnoxious CSIS or Britain's maximum snoopers, are IMO way more trouble and expense than they're worth.
The Civ:BE espionage takes up my time for little reward, but at least doesn't cost much in terms of resources. In Pandora, on the other hand, there's less time sink and it's more old fashioned, but there are a number of technologies devoted solely to the spies, and I found it effective to simply bypass researching them whenever possible and buy tanks instead.

Faeria since I saw the article here, and I have to say thank you, because I really enjoy it. It seems a bit more blanced compared to hearthstone.


It can be improved a lot and I think it needs a a bit more cards, but it's still nice and young.

Quoting: GuestStardew Valley. It’s a bit grindy but new things happen regularly and you slowly improve your farm and equipment and there are many different things to discover and do, which keeps the game fun for many hours. Also the UI is a bit unpolished but you get used to it and workaround the issues.

I'm going to have to finally break down and play this. Harvest Moon was one of my favorites growing up, and I think I've been scared that this would be too much like it but not as good : )

lol that sounds weird, but it's seriously why I haven't played yet.

Quoting: mrdeathjrAlso test ffmpeg 3.24 with nvenc 7.1 (waiting for sdk 8.0) and works good

I seriously had a partition with Ubuntu installed b/c my main rig broke my ffmpeg setup (GTX-1070). The steps you have to jump through to get a FULL ffmpeg install on Ubuntu is not trivial, to say the least. Anyways, I ran one last strace today and solved my nvidia-uvm module issues that had plagued me since I believe 4.9 (4.10.1 now). So no more dual booting Arch with Ubuntu..

The performance is better than before, with cuda 8.0 and they added vp9_cuvid, (decode only), making it easy to do full hw transpiling (*_cuvid) -> (hevc). I think GPU to GPU transfers are something like 8X faster than RAM to GPU, and who knows about disk to GPU. I tested today with transpiling a 8k video down to 4k and it was somewhere around 80 or so fps. CPU was around 8-12% b/c I was also on Steam/YouTube lol (@Liam -- that's what 64GB of RAM is for :))

Thanks for your YouTube content as well! I've watched several when trying to determine if something runs on Wine or not ;)

Oh, and to answer the forum question -- Civ6 and DiRT Rally. Also, I highly recommend Typoman to anyone who hasn't played it/looking for a recommendation outside the other 90% mentioned.Cheers --

Recently brushed up my copy of the first game I ever bought for linux: Professor Fizzwizzle. Still holds up as a nicely crafted puzzle game from before there was such a thing as widescreen support ^_^

Sadly, it is no longer available for linux, since the company, grubbygames, was taken over by bigfish. One of the co-founders, Ryan Clark, went on to work on Crypt of the Necrodancer. I always keep hoping he buys back the rights to the fizzwizzles...


Last edited by emphy on 11 March 2017 at 11:29 am UTC

Deus Ex: Human Revolution Director's Cut

(With Wine, lol.)

Great story, can't wait to play Mankind Divided but I've got to upgrade my hardware *sigh*

Quoting: saildataI seriously had a partition with Ubuntu installed b/c my main rig broke my ffmpeg setup (GTX-1070).

The steps you have to jump through to get a FULL ffmpeg install on Ubuntu is not trivial, to say the least.

Anyways, I ran one last strace today and solved my nvidia-uvm module issues that had plagued me since I believe 4.9 (4.10.1 now).

So no more dual booting Arch with Ubuntu..

The performance is better than before, with cuda 8.0 and they added vp9_cuvid, (decode only), making it easy to do full hw transpiling (*_cuvid) -> (hevc).

I think GPU to GPU transfers are something like 8X faster than RAM to GPU, and who knows about disk to GPU.

I tested today with transpiling a 8k video down to 4k and it was somewhere around 80 or so fps. CPU was around 8-12% b/c I was also on Steam/YouTube lol (@Liam -- that's what 64GB of RAM is for :))

Thanks for your YouTube content as well! I've watched several when trying to determine if something runs on Wine or not ;)

Oh, and to answer the forum question -- Civ6 and DiRT Rally.

Also, I highly recommend Typoman to anyone who hasn't played it/looking for a recommendation outside the other 90% mentioned

.Cheers --

Have ffmpeg with nvenc in ubuntu is complicated as your said, various guides are needed case

https://www.quantstart.com/articles/Installing-Nvidia-CUDA-on-Ubuntu-14-04-for-Linux-GPU-Computing

At least can use libnpp with ffmpeg (i have reinstall cuda-8.0 but disable symlink to usr/local/cuda) and put /usr/local/cuda-8.0/lib64 in ld.so.conf after this ldconfig as sudo

Respect nvenc consume minor resources compare GT 630 GK208 (old card), in various titles is possible capture with cpu at 90% or more use without loss frames (this occurs in some titles with GT 630, in this cases is needed capture at 30fps)

Without forget install video driver manually and have all emus i have without no appears conflict dependencies is very dificult, various packages from ubuntu 14.04 are needed case various gtk libraries case pcsx2

One purpouse of channel is give a idea about which games runs in wine (native games and emulators too)

But most important objective is have large duration tests (at least 1st chapter of each game if possible)

Actually many games run in wine but most import is for how much run and which problems can appear in large sessions case:

-stability

-compatibility

-graphics behavior (glitchs if appears and others)

-audio behaviour (pulse, alsa in some games cases like zestiria, god eater 2 rage burst and others)

-input behavior (in which games xinput must be selected as built-in or native) mouse stay all time or leave after some time, actually various games begins need have xinput as built-in in wine cfg) and other issues

^_^


Last edited by mrdeathjr on 11 March 2017 at 5:51 pm UTC

I liked Shadow Tactics a lot recently. And then I started playing EU4. Now I'm broke, have lost all my free time and kind of love/hate my friend for fixing me up to the game.

Last month Dirt Rally(not much of a petrol-head but the Dirt series always provided a good mix of challenge and fun for some reason and this one is definitely worth playing) and many a night duelling a friend in Chaos Reborn(online play is basically dead, but if you convince one or two friends to play it's an awesome game) took the lead.


Last edited by Schattenspiegel on 11 March 2017 at 10:44 pm UTC

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: saildataI'm going to have to finally break down and play this. Harvest Moon was one of my favorites growing up, and I think I've been scared that this would be too much like it but not as good : )

I’ve never played Harvest Moon so I can’t compare…

What?? That's immediately what I thought of when I saw SV... "Someone's made a modern Harvest Moon".

Your mission is to search the dark webs until you find it, install it (snes version was the best.. or N64) and come back saying, "holy crap they made a modern Harvest Moon!" :)

Quoting: mrdeathjrHave ffmpeg with nvenc in ubuntu is complicated as your said, various guides are needed case

https://www.quantstart.com/articles/Installing-Nvidia-CUDA-on-Ubuntu-14-04-for-Linux-GPU-Computing

...

*Mic drop* : -|

Where were you when I was hand linking and compiling each.. individual.. codec.. asking myself do I really need this one too.. I can follow a recipe card lol. Live and learn.

I completely agree with the "your mileage may vary" depending on the game. I'm a total nerd and basically install it for either strategy or simulators. You'd think that someone would put two and two together and figure out that sims would sell like crazy on Linux.. but alas I can only blame myself for giving into the temptations.. why should they port it when people like me jump through hoops so they don't have to..

I can, however, say that I still have my original 512GB Nvme with Windows 10 on it just in case Asus ever decides they will update their UEFI and I have to have my windows install to initiate it. Even with that I haven't booted Windows (for more than the initial warranty registration) in about 3 years.. I had to dual boot in grad school. If a Linux drive fails totally I'm wiping the factory one though.. just sayin :)

Have you seen anything/anywhere about the latest Rollercoaster Tycoon? People had originally said they would port it to Linux (it IS built on Unity..). I want to verify before actually paying more than $10-$15 for a Windows game. E.g. Simple Planes... Love that game.

Honestly, as someone else said, the new X-PLANE 11 is amazing on Linux. Best (proprietary) Flight Sim I've used.

EDIT: I can't seem to properly quote a post ( smells like PHP >:-| )


Last edited by saildata on 12 March 2017 at 6:53 am UTC

So I just finished all of the Hard West scenarios, though I am going to replay the last one again so that I can take a look at one of the different endings. Then there's the DLC.