QuoteDon't miss out, try it free on itch.io.

It's pay what you want, not free. Although you'll obviously get away with paying $0. It's not overly long, but quite polished and it did exceed my expectations, so I think it's definitely worth something :-).

I'm just not sure if turning it into something bigger will allow it to retain its qualities and charm, but best of luck to the devs if they try!

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Quoting: kokoko3kI think Sensible soccer required just 7mhz and 512kb of ram when running from the floppy drive :)

Yep, it ran fine on an ordinary Amiga 500, and at least from memory it did feel snappier than what's shown of Ballsy. But I guess if you played SWOS back then, Ballsy might be the right speed for you now ;-).

Quoting: kokoko3kSo that today, to read a bunch of kilobytes of text out of the web before growing old, you need a bunch of gigaherts and a bunch of gigabytes of ram ^.^.
Sadly, not strange at all :/

I don't want to image what we could do with the computing power at hand if only we'd have lean code optimized for the hardware it runs on. Instead we developers (and I'm guilty of that as well) keep heaping layers upon layers of high level languages, libraries, abstractions and indirections on top of each other until we end up with an onion the size of a melon for a task that could be performed by a pea.

I mean, just look at something like this!

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Quoting: rustybroomhandle

Quoting: Comandante ÑoñardoValve acquired Campo Santo and cancelled "In the Valley of Gods"

This is not accurate. Valve have a "work on what you want" policy, and the Campo Santo team kind-of just drifted themselves over to Half Life: Alyx. They made the decision themselves, not Valve.

And now that Half Life: Alyx is done, maybe they can just kind-of drift back, thank you!

I was really bummed when they cancelled that one. Not only was Firewatch already pretty good, so there was a decent chance that In the Valley of Gods would not disappoint either, but I also really was looking forward to what they'd do with the Egyptian setting. Ancient real-world stuff fascinates me, and there's little enough of it in video games.

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As fascinating as the hardware looks, I'm done with Apple. If I'd want to run Linux on ARM I'd probably just get a Raspberry PI. But for now I don't.

As for Apple, I've grudgingly opted for a MacBook Pro around 2013 (the 13" one, the last with a DVD drive), and at least that one could still be upgraded, so it now has twice the original RAM and an SSD. In theory it's still usable and might even run Big Sur, heaven forbid! But in practice it sees little use. My wife switched to an LG Gram, which is 14" but half the weight, and even has slots for a second SSD and more RAM. Given that Apple has removed the ability to upgrade or replace the hardware in any way, I simply won't buy any of their computers any more. And software wise, things went basically downhill after OSX 10.6.

So yeah, guess there's an argument for getting Linux to run, after all :-).

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Quoting: pete910Make it so I could actually buy a damn card would be a good idea first!

Yeah, with the current situation my plans to upgrade my PC early this year have been postponed. But it's okay; the game that would have mandated an upgrade won't be finished anytime soon either.

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I'd be very surprised if Arcadian Atlas was released this year, but I won't complain if it does :-).
Totally looking forward to Encodya, and it's not long now.
Backbone is something that might be interesting, and so is Rosewater.
I've already played the Roadwarden demo, but it didn't impress. Maybe if the writing was more concise and to the point.

Looking through my own list of interesting upcoming games, Linux support is mostly absent. Sad.

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Without Wine/Proton, this year would have been pretty desolate for me, even in the indie space. But even then, the games I did enjoy this year would rank fairly low on my list of all-time favorites, with one notable exception: Paradise Killer. That one came pretty much out of the blue, but it was so wonderfully wacky and had a great world to explore, and an awesome soundtrack. Really quite an extraordinary experience.

Looking back, Signs of the Sojourner probably deserves another playthrough, or two. I love how it looks and due to the card-based dialogue mechanic it takes a bit of luck and planning to get the outcome you want. So there's plenty of stories I have not yet fully explored.

Crusader Kings III is likely the game I spent the most time with this year (maybe with the exception of the Ace Attorney trilogy). It's a good game, no doubt, but there isn't anything truly novel or exceptional about it.

Yes, Your Grace really looked and sounded gorgeous (I've since bought 2 CDs of the wonderful Merkfolk, who did the soundtrack), but with a mostly fixed story it's really only good for a single run. And even the best ending leaves a bit of a bitter taste.

I'm still playing Haven, but it's not quite as good as anticipated. Pretty chill overall, and funny on occasion, but not very gripping. A bit more mystery and greater sense of discovery would have gone a long way.

Luna The Shadow Dust was short and sweet. Unfortunately it was practically over by the time the puzzles got really interesting.

I enjoyed art of rally, but all in all there was just not that much variety to keep me hooked for long. I didn't even unlock all the cars. The same goes for Pendragon. Even before unlocking all playable characters, repetition set in and the novelty was gone.

I guess to sum this year up, there were some delicious bites and snacks to be had, but I really, really could have done with a three course dinner! Maybe 2021 ... :-).

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Guess this will be buried in Cyberpunk-related discussion, but this version of Proton actually runs Haven (with native media foundation DLLs in place). Since it came out a week ago, I have been trying various Wine flavors to get the game to launch, to no avail. It either crashed in the native mfplat DLL or threw gstreamer errors when used without.

So yay! :-). Who needs CP77 when they finally can play Haven!? ;-)

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I loved the writing and stories in Sunless Seas, but the game mechanics weren't really my thing. Here's hoping that this one will be a better match for me :-).

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Quoting: kaimanNow I'm a dwarf with a diploma in Kingdom management and am still hated by everyone, but for me that's going to be way more enjoyable.

I'm so glad I got back into the game, because this character absolutely rocks! I turned him from a passable steward into a diplomacy powerhouse (holding and attending feasts gives great bonuses with time, it seems, as does an adept wife) and he made it from King of Ireland to Emporer of Alba with hardly a war fought. And better yet, most of the money spent on usurping titles or bribing Petty Kings into vassalization was sponsored by the Pope! And the icing on the cake: his one and only daughter also excels at diplomacy.

Seeing a strategy actually work out as I hoped (much better, actually!), even though it required plenty of patience is immensely gratifying. And that the game allows to play a diplomacy-focused character in a way so different from my previous approaches only goes to show how nuanced and deep it really is.

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