Quoting: scaine(That's the third time I've posted this link! It's really, really worthwhile - I'm enjoying how tear-free all my games have become since doing it)

Oh, good. I hate it when my games get torn.

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Since I play mostly 4X games, not a lot of really scary moments, you know? Unless you count the first time in Master of Orion II when the screen suddenly shifts from the game to a shot of the Antarans coming down a wormhole at you and telling you they're going to exterminate you. But . . . nah.

Thriller? Depends what counts. The Professional was pretty awesome; I've been a Jean Reno fan ever since. Sexy Beast was very good if it's a thriller. And, this might strike some as odd, but The Crying Game. Aside from the . . . different . . . twist that got everyone's attention, it was actually a pretty tense and well-acted story about betrayal and revenge in the IRA. Had some good lines, too. Main character being hassled, has had enough, quietly asks the guy, "Ever try to pick up your teeth with broken fingers?"

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So, wait, this colossus of a game that everyone's been raving about is something where you can't save?!
Yeah, OK, I'll wait until February or whenever.

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All in all, if the changes from the previous version are a matter of small incremental, polish-level adjustments, that's a Good Thing which suggests they're pretty close to ready. If they were still making radical changes which they would then have to start testing from scratch, that would be a Bad Thing.

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Technically not the cheapest unless "free" isn't considered to count as "cheap". There are free games on Steam for Linux, and I'm quite fond of one of them:
Sunrider: Mask of Arcadius is available for free on Steam for Linux. It's not an open source game, it was developed with some sort of crowdfunding money and then released for free. And while it's partly an interactive novel thingie, it also has turn-based tactical spaceship combat, so it's a real game even if you don't consider novel thingies to be real games. And really, the combat is quite fun and challenging. You command a carrier and a little fleet of space mecha and eventually, optionally, some secondary ships. Plus, you get "prize money", as it were, from the space battles, and you can buy quite varied ship and mech upgrades and a few other goodies. There's a nice mix of weapons which behave quite differently from one another. Also, successful battles give you "command points" which allow you to go all space opera by giving various commands to do "above and beyond" sort of stuff, whether simply fighting more aggressively ("Full Forward!") or unleashing the wrath of the experimental Vanguard Cannon. Even though there's no real animation, there's something satisfying about watching a series of enemy ships go boom as the Vanguard Cannon's beam bisects them.
Warning: The art is seriously in the "voluptuous anime girl" style, while the plot mixes anime harem with classic space opera.

"Mask of Arcadius" is the second piece in a planned three installments. Third is expected this year and will also be free, although I'm sure they'd be happy of any support when they run the crowdfunding for it.

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All in all, what I'd really like would be Alpha Centauri with its rules pretty much intact, with some of CIV:BE's graphics and Pandora's user interface (Pandora IMO has a great UI) and a few bells and whistles from both newer games.

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After an admittedly cursory look at CIV:BE, there's an angle that personally bugs me but probably not too many other people. The whole "Affinity" thing and some of the other clever cultural dealies should be interesting in that they are science fictional and not tied to old-earth political concepts. But it doesn't work for me. There's no guts to the approach IMO. The reason is that they all give the impression of a society/culture that is all of a piece--"Your society" is like this. All of it.
But I'm an ideologue, and I'm interested in politics. And politics is precisely about the idea that there are in fact different groups in society whose interests are not all the same. In Alpha Centauri, it was clear that the factions were run by and for different segments of society; you could infer that there were perhaps other bits of society in those factions but nobody in charge cared what they thought. There were numerous technologies and achievements and political choices which dealt directly with various approaches to social control, from bread and circuses to repressive policing by AIs to empowering Eudaimonia.
I don't immediately see that in CIV:BE. Citizens aren't even unhappy any more--they're just less healthy (and for utterly illogical reasons--you build a second city, more people get sick--WTF?), which right there pretty much sanitizes the whole notion that anyone in your faction might think differently from beloved leader. Nope, they never get upset, they just get sick and/or stop having kids (which are both apparently the same thing). And it's unclear to me what the social directions you can take your faction mean to anyone living in the society. So yeah, it feels like the political choices have been emptied of political content. Maybe this is inadvertent, but it kind of feels to me like no guts leading to no glory.

Pandora incidentally is both less and more satisfying in this regard. Basically, they don't have much of what Alpha Centauri had for political/social issues. But the factions have the basis for it, the game just hasn't done the hard work of putting those dimensions in, either in the Alpha C way or the CIV:BE way. Who knows? Maybe they'll do something in the future.

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This post reminds me of an idea I've been mulling at.
I think so far it's quite plausible that Linux ports of games are on average not moneymakers, not directly at least. And yet it's happening, and seems to be happening faster and faster. I see two basic reasons. First is Valve, which gave a major impetus and made the whole notion seem sane and acceptable. But the reason it's kept on so far even though there's still no signs of a Steam Machine to create large scale Linux sales, the reason it seems if anything to be accelerating, is cultural.

Basically, desktop Linux here is clearly piggybacking on Everywhere Else Linux. The desktop at this point is about the only significant computing space where Linux is not prominent or even dominant. Linux rules supercomputers, dominates webservers, reigns over the cloud, takes names in embedded, enhances the enterprise, pervades hobbyist computing. So anyone involved much in programming probably is involved in Linux culture some way. It runs their clever raspberry pi device, or they cut their teeth on the LAMP stack, or whatever. Even if they're not directly involved, there's an awareness that Linux is deeply intertwined with programmer/nerd culture in a way that Mac OS is not even though it has a bigger desktop share. You can see in this post, that general enthusiasm for Linux as an idea and a hacker thing rather than as a vehicle for gaining sales. So give game developers, collectively, a respectable reason why it's not insane to port to Linux, and lots of them really want to do that. All they needed was an excuse and an atmosphere where they're not reflexively mocked for the very idea. Valve provided that, and now it's feeding on itself--every game released for Linux just reinforces that it's a normal thing to do.
How long it can last if actual market share doesn't shift (eg. Steam Machines are not released or tank on arrival) remains anybody's guess.

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If you have a game about exploring space that everyone at NASA plays, you have to be doing something right.

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As to the percentages having nowhere to go but (someday) up, while I certainly hope that's how it plays out it's not the only way it could go. If Linux were to stagnate on the desktop with no love, what could happen is that new computer users/owners would not start using it and so as older ones died out (or in the case of Steam surveys, just stopped gaming), the share would erode even if nobody actually stopped using Linux. This is a worry, especially since some of the early ideological enthusiasm that propelled Linux to many desktops despite a fair amount of inconvenience back in the day has waned.

Be really nice if the Steam Machines really get released and hit some success.

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