Psy-Q @psyq@mastodon.social

Did some patient gaming on the weekend and I must confess that Red Dead Redemption's writing is pretty excellent for a video game.

Sad that Rockstar Games is so anti-consumer with their crazy Rockstar Social Club and adding a second layer of (broken) DRM. I'd buy more of their games if the writing is equally good.

Fun fact: Even though you can back up Steam games, you can't actually install them again while offline.

The backup function's only purpose is to save on bandwidth so you don't have to download things again. To really have local copies of games, you'd have to buy from GOG or other DRM-free places instead.

We've frowned on Facebook logins for third-party sites for what, ten years now? And the public is catching on as well https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/04/delete_facebook_login/

Rudy Rucker is doing a new book in the Hollow Earth series: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rudyrucker/return-to-the-hollow-earth #scifi #sci-fi

After such a long and comparatively cold winter, I'm starting to understand the mystical qualities all those poets assigned to springtime over the millennia.

I was at a lake bathing not in its water but in the golden evening sun, its light drenching the white-blossoming trees along the shore in warm syrupy orange. Someone was playing with a dog on the lawn. Frisbees flying, beer bottles clinging. All things were good.

Spring! Powerful stuff, everyone.

The progress of #DXVK and the #WINE team has been nothing but astounding in the last few months. I wish I had statistics to prove it, but I'd wager a guess that more Windows games are now playable on non-Windows than ever before. That includes super-blockbusters like Witcher 3, KC:D and Dark Souls III.

WINE has a donate page at https://www.winehq.org/donate, DXVK doesn't yet, I believe. If every WINE user donated the price of a Windows license...

Feel free to invest money in freedom, nudge, wink.

Brrr, rereading Philip K. Dick's 50s - 70s era short stories with an actual cold war brewing really puts you in the mindset of the time. Like no amount of intellectual brain flexing could do before.

Read this stuff while you still can (i.e. you're still alive and not turned into a mole person).

Try to watch the Zuckerberg hearing while playing a threatening dystopian retrofuturistic musical score, it improves the experience so much.

I recommend the Brigador soundtrack by Mask and Vanity Set https://makeupandvanityset.bandcamp.com/album/brigador-vol-ii #dystopia #privacy

The Swiss government wants to install Internet filters to prevent Switzerland's citizens from visiting online casinos. But once installed this sets a precedent for wide-ranging censorship, as we have seen in other countries (e.g. the UK or Turkey).

If you're Swiss, oppose this badly thought ought law and want to support a campaign against it, head here: http://www.geldspielgesetz-nein.ch/

The organizers are for treating the actual problem instead: gambling addiction. #switzerland #politics #censorship

After an hour of Owlboy, I don't know yet what the fuss is about.

The pixel art and animations are glorious, but why does it have to stop the gameplay flow every 35 seconds to either do a cutscene or force you to watch some painfully slow animation?

With the right music, Beat Hazard Ultra is not as bad as its Metacritic rating leads you to think. The "insane" difficulty level is where it actually starts to fight back, and you can have some pretty memorably moments. I know this is an ancient game :P

A nice weekend experiment would be "how many of the things in my home still work when I unplug my Internet router".

Steam games? Should switch to offline mode. But does the smart TV still boot? And can it still play things from the local NAS when it can't phone home? What if it can't phone home for 30 days? A year?

Theoretically all should be well, but I've never actually tested it and other people have had nasty surprises with some devices.

I have a pet peeve. People have been using "digital" wrongly for so long now that it has started meaning something else entirely, and when they speak they make only little sense.

Examples: Gamers talk about "digital vs. physical", and by "physical" they mean a game on a portable medium, by "digital" they mean a game downloaded to local mass storage.

Or people who get their movies "digital instead of on DVD", ignoring that DVD is also digital. They actually mean streaming.

Infuriating.

The sheer tightness of Nex Machina in all of its design (well, mostly controls and level design) will be hard to match. On some levels the intensity dips, but I'm sure that's on purpose, and the boss approaches where the viewpoint shifts feel misplaced.

Other than that it plays like someone dunked all your nerve endings in acid and put you on a caffeine IV. People complain that "it's only one hour!" but in that hour you will age a decade. Now bring it to Linux, perkele. #gaming

Nex Machina is one of the twin-stick shooters that feels tight and solid on a controller. Some others like JYDGE or Neon Chrome seem to feel way better with keyboard/mouse, but the KB/M controls are highly odd in Nex Machina -- no aiming reticule!

I'm tempted to buy a PS4 now, but come on, just for one game? The devs won't or can't port it to Switch, where it would thrive beautifully. If anyone knows a similar twin-stick shooter for Linux or Switch that is not made by 10tons, I'm all ears :)

Which GNU/Linux distributions are the freest? I ramble something about the freedoms of different operating systems, including proprietary ones and different #linux distributions https://blog.psy-q.ch/blog/2018/02/23/which-gnu-linux-distributions-are-the-freest/

Played The Last of Us (PS3) for the first time on the weekend. Atmosphere and characters, 10/10, but that bug-ridden combat? A 5, maximum.

I flushed down the bad aftertaste with some JYDGE right after 😋 #gaming

My JYDGE review is up. I promise it isn't as badly written as my previous toot. https://blog.psy-q.ch/blog/2018/01/31/game-recommendation-jydge/ #gaming #linuxgaming