My most played Steam game is Dishonored, at 127 hours. I have replayed it a lot. A rarity for me, but I really liked that game. Dishonored came out in 2012. It’s taken me 12 years to accumulate that many hours.

Balatro came out two months ago.

I have 93 hours in it.

Yup. Zorin’s another great Debian-based distro. I’ve been running it on my laptop for awhile now and I’m a fan.

Man… Anybody remember “Back Orifice”? The late nineties were weird.

If not vanilla Ubuntu, I’d still suggest trying an Ubuntu derivative like Linux Mint or POP! OS. Ubuntu has a huge community, so in the event you run into issues it’ll be easier to find fixes for it.

What you’ll find is that Linux distros are roughly grouped by a “family” (my term for it anyway). Anyone can (theoretically, anyway) start from a given kernel and roll their own distro, but most distros are modified versions of a handful of base distros.

The major families at the moment are

• Debian: A classic all-rounder that prioritizes stability over all else. Ubuntu is descended from Debian.

• Fedora: Another classic all-rounder. I haven’t used it in a decade, so I won’t say much about it here.

• Arch: If Linux nerds were car people, Arch is for the hot rodders. You can tune and control pretty much any aspect of your system. … Not a good 1st distro if you want to just get something going.

There are many others, but these are the major desktop-PC distro families at the moment.

The importance of these families is that techniques that work in one (say) Debian-based distro will tend to work in other Debian-based distros… But not necessarily in distros from other families.

In order to add their names to your dictionary. You don’t have to allow it. But given that there’s no internet access for the keyboard - it seems pretty safe

Self-replying to add a couple other classics that aren’t already in the thread:

• Penguin Land: A Mr-Driller-like puzzler where you are trying to carefully bring an egg safely to the end of the level - but it can only fall one block distance without breaking. Also, there are polar bears you can crush with boulders.

• Zillion: This game has no business being as good as it is. Side scrolling adventure game where you are tasked with rescuing your captured spy-buddies. You have to loot secret codes from the bodies of fallen enemies, use them to unlock laser doors and progress further into the enemy base. It uses exceptionally large and detailed sprites for the time and is a surprisingly “mature” game for the Era. (Not meaning nudity, just that it is more interesting to someone auth the patience to map out a base and write down secret codes)

Skip the sequel, however. Zillion 2 sucked. a lot.

True, true… yet still more reliable than LoZ’s “hold the reset button and hope” method of saving the game…

GOLVELLIUS

This game is a blatant… homage to OG Legend of Zelda. But IMHO it does almost everything better.

The game begins with Link Kelesis entering a cavern where an old woman tells him to take a sword - and some boots because our boy can’t even dress himself.

After that, you know the drill. Top-down action rpg mode, slaying monsters, leveling up, finding secrets and better equipment.

Where it improves on the original LoZ is that the Master System was more powerful than the original NES, so the graphics here are brighter and more detailed and the audio is crisper.

The structure of the world is more linear than LoZ - but that means it’s a lot harder to get lost. Also, as you unlock gear and powers you can backtrack to discover new secrets in old locations.

The game’s characters vary wildly in tone from angry old ladies berating you for lacking the funds to shop to meandering fairies commenting on snow cones.

I replay Golvellius every few years on whatever the handheld platform dujour is. …I think it’s about time to give out a spin on the steam deck again.

Anyway. If you like that classic Zelda vibe, give Golvellius a spin. It’s seriously one of the best games I played on the old Master System.

Though they are often synonyms, simple != easy.

Simple is uncomplicated.

Easy is unchallenging.

Super Mario Bros. is a simple game, but not necessarily an easy one.

Mechanically - both games are puzzle games in the same rough 3d-platform-puzzler vein as Portal. Instead of solving puzzles with teleportation however, you’ve got laser beams and force fields.

On a more metaphysical level, the first game is a philosophical investigation of what it means to be human - to be alive and an individual.

The sequel is a meditation on what makes societies succeed or die.

Both games are fun, the puzzles are just hard enough to be interesting with a sprinkling of well-hidden secrets. But the real reason to play The Talos Principle is if you’ve got an interest in philosophy - the storylines are deeply interested in asking some very big questions. … and they don’t provide answers either - the game poses questions and allows you to answer as you see fit.

If you liked FO3 you’ll like 4.

It’s a lot stronger mechanically than 3 or NV - shooting is a lot less janky and the gun customization adds some great emergent quests.

The Boston of FO4 has its moments - a certain duck pond stands out to me in particular - but aside from Nick Valentine the questlines are largely forgettable.

Still, the core game loop is a lot of fun - go here, blow stuff up, scavenge bits to upgrade your stuff.

As a longtime Fallout fan (came for the isometric apocalypse, stayed for the 3D googie architecture) I still put 80 hours into FO4.

It’s a good fuckin’ game. It’s just competing with the legacy of a lot of other great games in the series.

This is why I loved thee Demon’s Souls approach - single player game with crowd sourced miniboss AI.

If you haven’t played it already - Inscryption - by the same author - is also really good.

… and I should lay off the emdash for the rest of the night.

And it’s currently $5.00 on steam. You know, if you’re price shopping.

Well - I played both and I quite enjoyed Heaven’s Vault as well.

I played HV through twice - once for the story and then a second time to see how far I could alter that story with different choices. My wife even played a third time to try for a really particular set of events.

The translation game in HV goes much harder than Chants’. After the first playthrough, you get longer and more challenging texts to decipher.

Also - there’s no backtracking really required. The game is pretty strict about telling you where you can and cannot go and reacting to what you found or didn’t find. You can cut whole plot lines in HV and it’s no problem.

Which makes it one of the better games for replayablity in my mind.

It is - for sure - slow paced. Almost meditative.

Oh man - I loved WRoEF, but the bathtub segment has ensured I can never play it again.

Ugh - this game!

I loved it. The mechanics of The Scene is still one of the most amazing bits of storytelling I’ve seen in a video game. I think about it frequently when I’m considering how video games can tell stories in ways that movies or books just can’t.

The game as a whole is good, but a little uneven IMO. But I’d put that scene up there with Braid for the sheer impact of storytelling-via-videogame-mechanics.

If you don’t already know… the “corrupt” text in the terminals is where a lot of the semi-secret story clues are - especially in the beginning. If you want to know how to read it, lemme know and I’ll tell you what you need. Otherwise, no spoilers.

That said, the puzzles in the game are pretty consistent throughout, so if solving 3d spatial arrangements of laser beams isn’t fun for you - it’s not gonna get any better.

Also… A big part of playing Death Loop was figuring out the proper order to kill everybody. … and sadly, there’s only one order that will work. So once you know the order, a big part of the challenge is eliminated.

It would have been really cool if the game selected a random ordering for your character at new game start and each target’s vulnerable timing changes accordingly. Something similar to how some of Dishonored’s missions could have multiple solutions.

… but I get why they didn’t. Dishonored had mission variants just switch up some text which is relatively cheap compared to having fully different behaviors and speech and so on that would need to be created just for the tiny set of players that not only finish but replay a game.

As someone who played through Dishonored 1,2 and all their respective DLCs multiple times, I was sad that Death Loop didn’t have the same level of repayablity baked into the overarching structure, but I still quite enjoyed the game itself. I just finished it once and moved on.

It’s not as good, but running small LLMs locally can work. I’ve been messing around with ollama, which makes it drop dead simple to try out different models locally.

You won’t be running any model as powerful as ChatGPT - but for quick “stack overflow replacement” style of questions I find it’s usually good enough.

And before you write off the idea of local models completely, some recent studies indicate that our current models could be made orders of magnitude smaller for the same level of capability. Think Moore’s law but for shrinking the required connections within a model. I do believe we’ll be able to run GPT3.5-level models on consumer grade hardware in the very near future. (Of course, by then GPT-7 may be running the world but we live in hope).