Quoting: NanobangI have held off playing System Shock 2 just so I could play this version first, and the question remains: When? When when when? Wheeeeeeeeeeeeen?

You should just play SS2 now. The story in both games are basically self-contained and playing the 2 in order is entirely unnecessary. SS2 is kinda janky, frustrating and ugly so you kinda need to be in a certain nostalgic mindset to enjoy it nowadays.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: WorMzy

Quoting: BotonoskiI never really expected Dwarf Fortress to ever officially use anything besides ASCII art.

It's supported tilesets for years. There's hundreds of different sets available if you don't like ascii.

See http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Tilesets

Well I new it supported tilesets, I just never thought the vanilla game was ever going to use anything besides ASCII and tilesets were just gonna remain as part of the game's modding scene.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I never really expected Dwarf Fortress to ever officially use anything besides ASCII art. I suppose I ought to use this as an excuse to finally properly try the game out.
Didn't know the dev was having health issues. I'll definitely try to throw some funds their way when I can.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: axredneck

Quoting: Botonoski... something almost indescribable ...

It's nostalgia about Doom 2, Duke Nukem 3D, Quake 1 or PSOne/PSX.

I don't think I actually have many nostalgic memories attached to any of those things really.
I was pretty narrow-minded and poor in my youth and, if I wanted to video play a game at all, just played SimCity 2000 in my free time, otherwise I'd just read a book or something. It's only been the past decade that I've been broadening my scope and have been trying things I'd ignored prior.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I'm really loving this recent-ish influx of retro style FPS games. There is something almost indescribable about pixelated low-poly 3D graphics that I find oddly captivating.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I wonder if they'll use something like Bullet to replace the Havok physics engine. It'd be fascinating to see how that sort of change would impact the games, if at all.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Neat, I've been using a workaround to accomplish basically the same thing, it's good to see it properly implemented.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: dvd

Quoting: BotonoskiLinux is sort of on the bleeding edge, always changing and a bunch of experimentation going on. Perhaps when Linux has a larger market share and one particular distro rises to the occasion the platform will be more stable and easier for developers to support. Though if that were to occur I think Linux would ultimately be worse off as it probably be slower to progress in performance and design to maintain legacy support and whatnot.

I don't really agree with this sentiment, you can pretty much support 99% of bigger distro users by testing on debian and fedora/opensuse.
Of these Debian, for example, is not "bleeding edge" at all. If you target stable, you get lots of years of support, and at least 3 years between the next distro. I don't think that's more bleeding edge than windows versions. I think this view that it is "bleeding edge" - at least when it comes to gaming - is because much of the work on modern ogl drivers were done much later than on windows.

Also, indies and big studios also like the bleeding edge: i remember back when i used to play on windows, the new games would always tell you to not forget to upgrade the graphics driver.

What gives me the impression that even Debian is on the bleeding edge is, well, currently playing a decade old native linux game on my current system is rather difficult, certainly possible, but dealing with a web of older dependencies and getting those installed without breaking my system has proven before to be quite the headache, even moreso than compiling a game from source code.
Now compare that to Windows where I'm able to whip out a game from 1999 and get it running on Windows 7 with zero hassle most of the time.
From this I get the impression that Linux is a bit quicker in pruning out old code compared to Windows, this can be rather inconvenient but it's probably more secure and efficient.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Hmm, I haven't felt particularly starved of FPS games while on Linux, it's a majority of my native library. Admittedly I'm very fond of the classic FPS titles, almost none of my FPS games are newer than 12 year of age and they're nearly all running on source ports.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Linux is sort of on the bleeding edge, always changing and a bunch of experimentation going on. Perhaps when Linux has a larger market share and one particular distro rises to the occasion the platform will be more stable and easier for developers to support. Though if that were to occur I think Linux would ultimately be worse off as it probably be slower to progress in performance and design to maintain legacy support and whatnot.

View this comment - View article - View full comments