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Latest Comments by Purple Library Guy
The 2015 GamingOnLinux GOTY award is now over, here's the results!
13 January 2016 at 5:22 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: Stupendous Man
Quoting: BeamboomI must say I'm surprised about Cities: Skylines receiving that many votes. Apart from that it all looks fine although only one of my favourites won. :)
Me too, I recently bought the game, made a large city, and grew really bored; the game has close to no difficulty as is really just a sandbox. Oh well, to each their own.

It's a city builder. Surely it's supposed to be a sandbox. If people like city builders at all in the first place, surely most of them won't be put off by it being a sandbox.

Ori and the Blind Forest won't come to Linux for now, thanks to Microsoft
31 December 2015 at 8:53 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: NyapI personally think that this news is good ~ I came to linux for privacy. By attracting attention, and making more people use linux, we are making it more vulnerable from government wishes to implement backdoors.
Uh . . . what?
. . . I was going to do a takedown of the idea of secret back doors in open source code and stuff, but--are you really someone who dislikes the idea of games being on Linux, coming to explicate your point of view on a site called "Gaming on Linux"?! Or are you just a common or garden variety troll?

The most popular Linux gaming articles from 2015 and thoughts on the year
30 December 2015 at 8:12 pm UTC Likes: 2

People clearly think differently from me. I'm kind of surprised--very few of the, what you might call "strategic" articles, made the list. You know, like stuff about the Steam Machines and controller coming out and how they were selling and stuff, or about Vulkan (I think I saw one Vulkan article on the list), and so on. To me that kind of thing is more important than news about any particular game, because, like, one game is one game, but movements of Linux as a gaming platform as a whole could mean the difference between thousands of games in the future and very few, between good performance and crappy performance, etc.

Hatred, the controversial shooter now has a Linux beta
20 December 2015 at 10:34 am UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: kibblesAnd ignore all the people above playing this game that need to state just how above playing this game they are. God you sanctimonious puritans invade literally everything...
So you're . . . posting just to state how above, being above playing the game, you are? God you sanctimonious "Everyone must be pseudo-edgy" types invade figuratively everything . . .

Hatred, the controversial shooter now has a Linux beta
18 December 2015 at 5:30 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: KelsWhy shouldn't we call it controversial? Being controversial is the whole point of the game and all its marketing. If it wasn't controversial, nobody would have bought it to start with.

Very true. Which is why my basic reaction to articles about this game has been, "Yawn. Don't care."

SMACH Z, the portable AMD Steam Machine is on Kickstarter
12 December 2015 at 7:19 pm UTC Likes: 1

To me the questions revolve around the controls. OK, the AMD thing is a little worrisome, but let's imagine someone has gotten drivers much more better by the time it comes out. But the Steam Controller took Valve ages to get right, it almost seems like it was the major bottleneck for the whole project. These people are going to be doing their best to emulate the Steam Controller on this little device, but how well will they succeed?

I'm not really part of the audience for this thing, but it's interesting.

A KDE developer has thoughts on changing how Linux games work
11 December 2015 at 6:09 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: SethoxMy point here is that as long as you just deny an idea because you do not like it, you stagnate the community.

Of course! Everyone should support ideas because they don't like them! How could I have been so blind?

Techland show how hilarious it is when a Linux port has no quality control with Dying Light (updated)
9 December 2015 at 10:20 pm UTC

Quoting: melkemindIt reminds me of the original Torchlight port that came out of Humble Bundle years ago. Whenever you attached anything like a hat to the head of your character, the head would disappear.

My question to all you zombiephiles is: Does being headless make a zombie more or less scary?

Heh. Tough one. On one hand, zombies tend to transmit the disease-or-whatever by bite and are generally enthusiastic biters when it comes to their offense. A zombie that grapples you and then does nothing = less scary.
On the other, are we talking about the kind of zombie you can usually only kill by bashing in their head? Because I see a potential problem there.

User Submitted Editorial: Current Linux gaming situation
9 December 2015 at 10:12 pm UTC

I think what makes this article easy to misunderstand is that on one hand, the author says at first that this is not just a list of the AAA games, but a personal list; in comments he reinforces that, saying that he only listed the games he was interested in. But late in the article he draws conclusions more generally about the state of SteamOS gaming from the shortness of the list. For the rest of us, though, it's pretty damned hard to compare the author's personal list with the broader state of gaming. We don't know how much came through that he just wasn't interested in, we don't know how much was released not on SteamOS that he was interested in. That makes the article inconsistent; basically a personal list can't really support a general conclusion, especially if we don't have access to the inside of the person's skull.

When was Civilization: Beyond Earth released? I'd pretty surely rate that AAA.

The Zotac Steam Machine ZBOX NEN SN970 impressed OC3D in their review
28 November 2015 at 10:55 pm UTC Likes: 2

Of course the numbers mean something. People are impressed by big numbers. You tell someone a console has well over 1000 games at launch, there is going to be a certain "Wow! Really?" factor there.
But it's still true that people want the big popular games, and the Steam Machine is woefully short of the biggest, top-selling titles. I don't personally care--I basically don't even play the genres those games are always in--but it's a brutal fact when it comes to selling boxes.
Mind you, the few indications I've had about how many Steam Machines are actually selling give me the impression that sales have been fairly, perhaps surprisingly, brisk. Another brutal fact is that Steam is a really, really huge sales channel. There are a lot of people on it buying things, and Valve don't have to spend big money to dangle those machines on the screen half the time when you log on.