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So like a first-person mashup of Magicka and Noita, huh? Sounds hilarious. I'm just not a big fan of the art style.

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Back then I wrecked my parents XP PC with all the good early 2000s malware.

Now I'm a IT specialist and SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!11!

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Ah...
Love this beautiful and simulated universe 😊

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indie team Siege Wizard Interactive

Not my kind of game but I like the dev's cool choice for their name.

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The clay dudes abides!

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Quoting: suchPiranha failed to adapt - they just kept going as if the market wasn't ever going to change, and as if fans of their games pleaded undying loyalty to the studio itself regardless of whether the games that studio developed were any good. Sad to see them go, but after Gothic 2 there was a sharp decline in quality. At best, their output was uneven, and that's putting it very kindly. Riding out that Gothic 1-2 "fame" could've only taken them so far. I'm amazed they lasted that long, frankly.

I mostly agree. Elex 1 was awesome, I really loved it, but then Elex 2 came out and it was kinda just average. It was like they didn't learn from any of the elex 1 mistakes, and had a lot of the same clunkiness that absolutely should have been ironed out. It was like they just coasted from one game to another.

There was still the Piranha magic there, you could feel it, but by that time, I agree with you: that wasn't enough anymore. Still (and I agree again lol) sad to see them go.

I hope that new game you linked to with the demo can take the feedback and make some positive changes!

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Had Iron Lung on the radar for quite some time, but don't know any of the others. Will check out this bundle!

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I wonder how well this works in online multi. The desynchronized input must add a fair bit to the difficulty. Looks fun, though!

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The Type O Negative bundle 🤘🏻

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Quoting: Caldathras

Quoting: Jarmer^ agree. Absolutely loved them as a studio. Was a sad day when the closure announcement came along 😫

😲

This is the first I've heard of the closure. Apparently it happened quietly in June 2024. However, according to Wikipedia, two indie developers have spun out of the closure, founded by former employees of Piranha Bytes.

One of those has a demo out. Predictably, it's a rough experience:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4293720/Cralon_Demo/

Piranha failed to adapt - they just kept going as if the market wasn't ever going to change, and as if fans of their games pleaded undying loyalty to the studio itself regardless of whether the games that studio developed were any good. Sad to see them go, but after Gothic 2 there was a sharp decline in quality. At best, their output was uneven, and that's putting it very kindly. Riding out that Gothic 1-2 "fame" could've only taken them so far. I'm amazed they lasted that long, frankly.

On the controls: I tried the modern/modded gamepad controls and cannot fathom why someone would play the games that way. It's extremely, needlessly confusing. The original keyboard controls are idiosyncratic, but they do follow an internal logic. Once you get used to those controls it's all incredibly simple. You can control Gothic with one hand, no mouse required (which is a bizarre condition to design your ARPG control scheme around if compared to modern standards, but there you go). Not to be that guy, but... it's really not bad if you just invest a few minutes into it. Interact button plus direction, attacks have more then one direction available. That's it, that's all the alleged complexity. So, looting a corpse or picking something up is ctrl+forward. Opening a chest is standing in front of it and pressing ctrl+forward... twice to account for the chest opening motion. Which feels very cool as chests aren't that common in the game. It makes it into a thing, and these days it's increasingly common for games to utilise player input in exactly this way. Talking to people is also standing in front of them and pressing ctrl+forward while not in combat mode (weapon holstered). Attacking people is drawing your weapon... and then also pressing ctrl+forward while in range to hit them (also left & right that you can chain). Inventory button, draw/holster weapon button, jump button. Inventory management isn't terribly convenient, but in terms of controls if your inventory is on the left and you're selling or moving stuff to a vendor/container to the right... you press ctrl+right on the item you want to sell/move, ctrl+left on the item you want to buy/move. Use item in inventory? Ctrl+forward. Cook meat? Ctrl+forward. Drop item from inventory? This is where things get really tough: it's ctrl+back.

There's some additional nuance to switching weapons when drawn or moving more items faster.

I highly recommend just rolling with it. If nothing else you'll earn bragging rights for "mastering" those "ridiculous" Gothic controls. Aka ctrl+direction ;)

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Based. I'm so happy that Steam Deck is even mentioned. There's been a lot of gacha games moving to Steam now - as a Cygames slave I'm happy to see that they've never restricted Linux. But outright Steam Deck mention is another step! Thank god for Valve having Steam Deck as the Linux trojan horse.

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The first game was awesome, really loved it! So I'll for sure check this out ... the shift to idle-ish is interesting.

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Quoting: Cyba.Cowboy

Quoting: Lofty

Quoting: Cyba.CowboyThe logical choice is ARM-based processors

And then after that the Ultra logical choice is RISC-V opensource license free architecture.

But do they have the maximum power / minimal power usage benefits of ARM? Anything partially or completely "open" is always a benefit; but it'd be a step backwards if they couldn't offer the power of ARM, whilst using minimal power like ARM...

it was more of a joke , but also with some optimism & idealism thrown in.

who knows, in the future it might become an alternative even if it's not class leading.

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“It's VOY, man!”

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Quoting: Lofty

Quoting: Cyba.CowboyThe logical choice is ARM-based processors

And then after that the Ultra logical choice is RISC-V opensource license free architecture.

But do they have the maximum power / minimal power usage benefits of ARM? Anything partially or completely "open" is always a benefit; but it'd be a step backwards if they couldn't offer the power of ARM, whilst using minimal power like ARM...

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I just tried the installer out of curiosity and it was the easiest and fastest I've ever remembered installing that game. Just ran it on my 2021 laptops onboard graphics and it worked great, not that I should be surprised considering the games age. Not ideal trying to play with a touchpad though.

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Quoting: Lofty

Quoting: suchDRM in fn Dino Crisis? Just install Duckstation, problem solved.

And using the right combo of setting it probably looks better. There are also texture packs for the PS1 game that will run via duckstation..

However.. Look into the drama surrounding duckstation and the main Dev. He is literally blacklisting certain Linux Distro's in the source code ( Which by the way is not fully FOSS & has a strict license )
Not to mention not supporting AUR or Flatpak. At some point i would not be surprised if he entirely stopped supporting Linux altogether. Fortunately before it was locked behind a restrictive license the code was essentially all complete. So a Fork will be possible at some point, even if it takes some time to get upto Duckstation's quality.

I think is not that simple as you put it. The Flatpak it have some issues that the App Image do no have so that why he remove it. For the not supporting AUR or packaging on general the problem that people start posting issues that where directly related from the packaging in the duckstation repo instead of the packagers that made it, so it all snow ball from there. In one hand there is a guy that is working for free in a project that he have joy on doing it and in the other hand is a lot of work to maintain some thing that has grown a lot.

That say, I believe that he could handle it really more gracious and not burn all the bridges in the process. But is easy to talk from the distantance

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Quoting: Cyba.CowboyThe logical choice is ARM-based processors

And then after that the Ultra logical choice is RISC-V opensource license free architecture.

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Quoting: Eike

Quoting: Hamish1999 (my fifth birthday)

None of my business of course, but as I see this...

All those games and systems are not your own good olde times? What made you investigate them so deeply?

Well, Hamish answered it.

I started using Linux in 2004, which means more than a year after I got my first computer at home. Loki and many other games for Linux aren't part of my childhood, too. Hamish is really making something amazing by publishing these articles, and I can learn more about the history of games for Linux.

The commercial games helped many of us keep using this system, and I wish it were a much bigger community. You can see huge communities of retro users constantly talking about games for Windows, Mac, Amiga, and Atari. etc. So many incredible companies sacrifice their time and risk their money to help Linux users play commercial games.

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Thank you for your response.

Quoting: HamishOur federal institutions are obligated to provide services in French, and commercial packaging bears both French and English labels (what I like to call "cereal box French"), but beyond that you would be hard pressed to ever need to learn or use French in Alberta where I live.

That's interesting. I always thought that people learn foreign languages because they want to read books, watch movies, or browse websites in those languages.

I have to admit that I don't know the regional language called Kashubian from Poland, but it's even smaller in population than the Francophone minority in Canada:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashubian_language

Quoting: HamishThe MS DOS version of Inner Worlds was made explicitly freeware, and the Linux version has been found and distributed on the Internet Archive, but I do intend to try and get in touch with Sleepless Software at some point to clarify the legal status of this before I would cover the game for an article.

The DOS version is still on Steam, which is weird. I know that some parts of this game aren't freeware, like the editor, even for DOS users. It's great to hear that you plan to do it, and I hope you receive a positive response from Sleepless Software.

Quoting: HamishLoading up the binary distributed from old SunSITE archives displays the following message:
"LinCycles v2.1unreg by Oliver Richman.
(C) Copyright 1996 Five Wheel Horse Software.

This program is Shareware! The trial period is 30 days.
If you like LinCycles, then please register it. For only $5,
we will send you the registered version of LinCycles, plus our
nifty FWH software catalogue! Source code for all programs are
available. (see the read.me file for more information).
PLEASE REGISTER LINCYCLES! ALSO ASK ABOUT OUR REALLY COOL PDSOFTWARE CATALOG!"

We have probably lost the commercial game for Linux, and I didn't find any information about this game on his old website:

https://web.archive.org/web/20010104235100/http://www.pathcom.com/~simex/opr/index.html

I also noticed that YiJing was a commercial application rather than a game created by Oliver Richman:

YiJing ::
Thousands of years ago in Ancient China, wise men discovered the oracle
bones. These bones were used to tell the future and gain advice into
the nature of humanity itself. The wisdom and poetry of China, and more!
Featuring chinese (ZW/HZ) support, and many useful command line options.

YiJing 0.5beta binaries .............................. $29.99 CAN.

None of these games or applications is actively developed, which is terrible.

Quoting: Purple Library GuyWell, overall, it kind of is. But French speaking in Canada is really quite geographically concentrated--masses in Quebec which has a large population, a couple of other enclaves like the Acadians, pretty much none everywhere else. That said, in British Columbia where I live, school programs offering French immersion are quite popular . . . but North American language teaching just doesn't seem to be as effective as, say, European language teaching. I don't think most of those French immersion kids end up fluent in French once they've been out of school a few years.

Thank you for sharing it. It's always great to learn something new about a different country. In my view, students decide what they are going to do with the basics of any language taught in schools.

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You can't stay on x86 architecture forever... Whether it's now or in twenty years time, sooner or later they'll need to abandon it in favor of something else. The logical choice is ARM-based processors and if there is a performance hit - which there almost certainly would be - the next question should be "How do we reduce that performance hit". I've never used Apple Silicon, but supposedly they've managed to reduce the performance hit for software running through compatibility layers, so why can't Valve Software do the same?

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Quoting: Cyba.Cowboy

Quoting: Salvatos

Quoting: Liam Daweit's open again

Huh, I had no idea.

Nor did I... I was like, wait, what?

I wonder if all the old content is back, too? I have some old support questions that the GOL Community kindly answered in the past, and whenever I need them, I need to pull them out of the Wayback Machine.

Jan06/26 - Welcome back to the GamingOnLinux Forum

Answers all your questions...

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Quoting: Jarmer^ agree. Absolutely loved them as a studio. Was a sad day when the closure announcement came along 😫

😲

This is the first I've heard of the closure. Apparently it happened quietly in June 2024. However, according to Wikipedia, two indie developers have spun out of the closure, founded by former employees of Piranha Bytes.

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About a year ago I searched for a way to play unreal Tournament 2004 on linux. Thought i should be abel to buy it on GOG or Epic games store and then run it from Heroic. But no. So i gave up. Then I learned about the Old unreal project and I hade hope that I would be abel play unreal Tournament 2004 on my linux computer soon. Great that it's free. If it had been on GOG a year ago I had been happy to pay 5 euros (50 sek) for it.
Will try this out when I can 🙂

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Quoting: LampHope that this accellerates their decision to drop the x86 arcitecture for handheld compute and go all in on ARM for the future version of the SteamDeck, pushing down the cost, size and weight.

You DO NOT abandon the architecture that 100% of products and service in your store programmed for unless your company's name is Apple. Translating Windows games into Linux on top of x86 to Arm emulation will not make gaming viable on Deck, contrary it would make it miserable. Sigh...

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The final complication is that the Linux version of Terroid appears to have been freeware ("Download the full game for Linux"), so one could argue that game was not commercial when it comes to our platform. Similar to Maelstrom which started out as shareware for Mac OS in 1992 but was brought to Linux for free in 1995 by Sam Latinga when he was given the source code, and later became fully free and open source. Nevertheless, Terroid seems the best candidate for our list in 1997.

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Quoting: NasraIt seems to have problems with Ubuntu before 25.04 :
https://github.com/OldUnreal/FullGameInstallers/issues/27

SDL3...

Can confirm, to get it running in AWS I had to use a marketplace ami image of ubuntu 25.10 to make it work.

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It's been ages since I last played a Star Trek-game. I remember playing "Star Trek: 25th Anniversary" and the sequel "Judgement Rites", then I played "ST TNG: A Final Unity" and finally a really bad "ST DS9" game, then...nothing.

I'll check this one out, it's been too long since I tried something Trek-related.

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Quoting: poiuz

Quoting: F.UltraThere is not a single mentioning about 30% nor about any value of a cut in the DMA, the DMA is entirely about not abusing your position as a gatekeeper, something that Apple violated by forcing in-app payments to be done by the Apple payment solution _and_ something that they violated by not allowing 3d party app stores to be installed on the iPhone and iPad.

No, it's about Apple as a payment processor because they take 30% (or some other amount). If it wasn't about Apple's percentage then the whole story would be done now - they allow 3rd party payments. But it's not because they still claim a percentage (now 30% - 3% payment processing fee = 27%).

They could take 0% and still violate the DMA so no (IE was included for free in Windows, this still violated their monopoly situation in EU). This is about abusing your position as a gatekeeper and not about some specific cut. Funnily enough you have now changed your tune from 30% to (or some other amount) so it seems like you are in agreement that this is not about the 30%.

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