Don’t Think, Just Jam
I started a screenshot album for my virtual adventures. Check it out if you’d like.
Since you mentioned platformers, Rayman Origins might be worth a look. It’s a 2D platformer from 2011 so it doesn’t require a lot of power, levels take a few minutes to complete which makes it perfect for short sessions and it has local co-op (up to 4 players).
I tried it recently on my desktop (Pop!_OS, ubuntu based) and Steam Deck, played without issues on both of them.
I once again spent most of the week jumping between games with no specific plan in mind. My main idea was to play Serious Sam: The First Encounter but this, after a long and complicated process, ended up in complete failure.
I actually tried to play three different versions of the game: classic, HD and through Serious Sam Fusion. Each of them came with their own problems which made them unplayable, specifically:
I tried various in-game settings, WINE versions and their parameters - nothing helped. After a few hours without a success I decided to give up and keep looking instead.
After all of the mess described above I finally landed on Reverse Collapse. I actually played it on launch, back in 2024, but my brain was in no shape for this amount of thinking so I set it aside “for a bit”. I’m glad to finally be back.
RC is a 2D XCOM-like tactical RPG, with less focus on randomisation (different approach to hit chance, hand made maps), varied (often tricky) missions and lots of gadgets to help you survive each encounter. It’s also heavily focused on the story with a set cast of characters which may be a good or a bad thing depending on the player.
Game has some nice quality of life features, like:
I only came back to the game last night so I’ll need a few more sessions until I brush off the rust and have something more to write about. I can however say that if anyone’s interested in this kind of tactical titles, Reverse Collapse is definitely worth a look.
Completely understandable. Getting annoyed or defensive is a pretty natural reaction when people just downvote and move on, without articulating their reasons. I get why people did it but I also understand the frustration.
Current state of social media can be a pretty draining experience.
As the other posted said, it’s easy to see something like this and get the knee-jerk reaction of “stupid ads!”, especially in a place like fediverse where many people are overly sensitive towards such possibility (I know I am). I’m always curious about new stuff to listen to so I’ll make sure to check it out when I can.
They also do Bandcamp Fridays! These are the dates where all of the revenue goes directly to artists, without the usual 15% share for Bandcamp. Here is the list for this year if anyone’s curious.
It’s a side-scroller about (kinda sorta) American chicken fighting against Russian/North Korean/Nazi penguins and cloned chickens.
First impressions? It does not handle ultrawide resolution well. Even switching to 1920x1080 left me with a slightly cut off image because it just zoomed everything in to fill the screen. I had to play in windowed mode if I wanted to see the UI elements (inconsistent button selection when using mouse didn’t change even then unfortunately). Not a great start.
While cutscenes and music are pretty good, the in-game presentation is… unique? I was initially rather mixed on it because the game combines 2 slightly different art style (simple for characters and items, more detailed for backgrounds) but I got used to it eventually.
Gameplay is also alright. It has jumpy-shooty sections, with bullet spongy enemies who like to surprise you on screen change and can juggle you with shots to death. The worst example of this is the final boss who has huge health bar, surprise attacks on screen change, directional shield and lesser mobs showing up throughout the fight. It also has no music for some reason.
Besides that there are also neat flying sections with not so neat camera. They serve as a nice palette cleanser between longer on-foot sections while being short enough to not get annoying.
Going back to music for a moment, it has an unfortunate problem - combat tracks reset every time you start an encounter, regardless of how brief pause was since the last one. You can move between screens, combat music still fading out, and the moment enemies show up the track will start from scratch instead of picking up again. Heck, during one of the last flying segments it can even reset between waves of enemies!
It’s a decent game and I warmed up to it as I played but the minor annoyances did prevent it from ever feeling great. It’s also pretty short, with story taking about 3 hours to complete so it’s hard for it to outstay its welcome anyway.
I’m back at the state where I’m not really in a mood to play anything. I thought about starting Neverwinter Nights but I’m not sure about playing such a long game at the moment so I’ve been faffing around with couple different titles.
After spending hours in Colin McRae Rally 04, getting used to driving in this game is a little tricky. I’m sure I’ll be able to do it if my mind goblins let me stick with the game for a while but the transition is a little rough. Good thing there’s a bunch of gameplay settings to make it smoother.
I don’t have much to write about yet since I just started playing. I hope it goes well and keeps me occupied for a bit.
No, you can post as a non citizen or “other” (someone from US working on the Inkscape Project used that).
Just checked with G1 and 2, the issue is still present for both. The reason it works like this, I think, is because both games can be played entirely with keyboard which makes sudden turns a bit of a pain compared to the mouse. It’s pretty much an assist feature if you will.
But yeah, regardless of the reason for its existence it’s still there.
First clear of 2026! Gothic is a game I played many times in the past but never really finished - until now. It still plays and feels really good and I’m pretty happy with it for the most part, I did however completely forgot how unfinished it is. Very limited side content which doesn’t really expand past chapter 2, a bunch of partially implemented or just empty areas, characters that seem like they should have something going on with them. There’s a lot but it didn’t really affect my enjoyment.
I played the game using OpenGothic, project technically focused on Gothic 2 Night of the Raven but it does support the first game as a bonus. Having the ability to play natively on Linux is pretty cool and the whole thing was rather promising early on but the longer I played the more issues cropped up. Some of the problems I’ve encountered include:
I’m not sure how many of these have to do with OpenGothic in general and what’s the fault of me playing G1 rather than 2 (as I said, support for the first games is just a bonus). I’m sure some of them were also present in the original but I don’t remember enough from G1 to pick them out. Thankfully, none of these problems were game breaking but I think I’ll play Gothic 2 the normal way (whenever that happens).
All in all, it was a fun ride but it also reminded me why I spent waaaay more time with the second game in the past.
After writing my end of the year recap I thought it could be fun to try and come up with the first completion date for as many games in my library as I can. I have a spreadsheet with all of them already so all that was left is to try and figure out the dates. It was easy with some and harder with others but I managed to come up with results for 151 games, with the oldest completion date going as far back as 2003.
Why bother? It’ll make another recap easier to write, simple as that. I also like organising things so the process was fun in its own way and gave me a chance to look back at my gaming habits throughout the years.
Didn’t know about SourceHut though it would have to wait until I find a job. GitLab on the other hand could work. I’ll keep those in mind at least, thanks!
The question however is: where should one move then? I’m genuinely asking since moving away from Github is something I’ve been meaning to do for a while now but didn’t have the time to search for alternatives.
The only one I know about is Codeberg, which could work for most but not all of my projects (for now at least). Anyone here knows other tried and tested platforms worth looking into? Preferably free as I’m not in a position to pay for this stuff at the moment.
Just to be clear, I don’t know if it added more reading on top of combat or as a potential alternative since I didn’t play it yet. I just heard there’s more of it (though I wouldn’t say no to improving the ratio between peaceful and combat scenarios).
All’s well that ends well then. Congrats on the move!
My problem wasn’t that serious (I enjoyed the combat and only dislike the large battles) but I can see how it can be a run killer. I’m not sure if that’s of any help but I saw mentions that Hong Kong has more reading than the two previous titles, I’m definitely looking forward to that.
I think posting can wait when set against real life (still, nice to have the thread), hope things went well.
I finished the game. As a whole it’s a better experience than the previous title, with slightly more interesting writing (both are great), better balance and an expanded format of acting as a shadowrunner. There’s only one issue that really affected my enjoyment throughout and that’s the amount of large combat scenarios (waves or rooms with 10+ enemies attacking at the same time). They weren’t a majority thankfully, but they were common enough to get a little tiring, to say the least.
I like Shadowrun in its small scale and more personal form, anything big (important jobs with tons of enemies, epic stakes) and I lose interest pretty quickly. I don’t know why games feel the need to end with saving the world or equally important scenarios but it’s the most boring direction a story can go for me at this point. Dragonfall did manage to put a reasonably interesting spin on that at least and I think it did it slightly better than Returns so kudos for that at least.
I loved the side character story arcs - small, personal, some more tragic, other ending happily. Advancing them after every run was one of my favourite parts of the game. I wish such mundane and unimportant story beats played a bigger part in RPGs in general.
After finishing two games I think I’m ready to say I really like this series, WAY MORE than I ever expected to. I had some reservations initially, both due to the setting (not because the idea is bad, I just wasn’t feeling it) and jumping in after a long break from isometric RPGs but these games managed to win me over.
I just wish they had more unofficial content. All I have left is Hong-Kong (with its DLC campaign) and 2 user campaigns for Dragonfall (one of them being a remake of the SNES Shadowrun) - once that’s done I’m out of modules. Cant’s say I’m looking forward to that moment.
It’s an indie tactical(ish) FPS made in EDuke32 engine. It has decently feeling and sounding weapons with really nice sprite work, nine levels (of varying quality) and unique hand drawn cutscenes.
Game aims for a more grounded approach, with relatively low health, reloading, aim-down-sights mechanic and 4 weapon limit. Oh, there’s also localised damage system for enemies (well… head shots), simple squad mechanic (with voice acting for combat barks!) and a stealth system.
Enemies are rather brain dead and have trouble aiming when approached from slightly elevated position - they can still tear through your health if you’re not careful though. Levels are a mixed bag, some parts look pretty good, some are a bit undercooked (simple design, broken lighting on certain models, occasional lack of skybox etc). Heck, one of them might cause some Max Payne’s nightmare level related PTSD flare ups due to its design and pixel perfect platforming. On a more positive note, various map elements have pretty cool damage effects, you can really see the your handiwork after more chaotic encounters.
Outside cutscenes some story segments are displayed as dialogue boxes at the bottom of the screen. Unfortunately, these disappear pretty quickly which paired with their tendency to show up in the middle of the action make them easy to miss. It might not be the best story ever but it would be nice to have a chance to enjoy it.
It’s a neat if amateurish project but it’s fun enough way to spend 3-4 hours with. If anyone’s curious about the game it’s free on Steam.
It’s the final thread of the year so I thought I’d write a short recap. I managed to finish 16 games (that I properly remember) last year, 9 of which were bought this year - I was thinking this kinda puts a dent in the idea of backlog clearing but regardless of their tenure on my “to play” list, the end result is still better than the last few years combined. Backlog is shrinking, if only a little.
Anyway, here are the games I finished in 2025:
There were also other things like visual novels (if you’re interested in those feel free to join us in the [email protected] community) and some smaller indie titles whose names escape me at the moment. All in all a pretty decent number, I’d say.
Can I beat it next year? Probably not but I’ll give it a shot. There are still a lot of titles waiting for their turn so even this pace means a few years of work just to get through everything. I’ll be happy as long as I can finish the year with a slightly shorter backlog than I started it with.
Regardless of their differences it was still tied to the first game, not making use of this connection doesn’t make much sense. At least it wasn’t the case of (new) Prey where they forced the name of a completely separate game to bump up the sales.
Wait, it wasn’t? It’s a genuine question as I got into the series way past its prime.
Yeah, PE2 can be like that. I vastly prefer the first one as well but I also think that the sequel isn’t bad, it’s just not necessarily what I’d like from a follow up. That’s why I think it’s worth suggesting anyway - some people might find it to be more enjoyable than I did.
Heck yeah, Parasite Eve recognition! It’s a fantastic RPG and one of the more unique ones thanks to its setting and gameplay - I wish later games kept the latter at least. If you didn’t play PE2 it might also be worth a shot. It’s a bit different, both in terms of story and gameplay, but it’s still a solid and enjoyable title.
Older games are purely singleplayer, multi is something they leaned on later on. For PC Rayman Legends also supports local co-op, I believe. This one however is only available on Steam and requires Uplay account or linking your Steam to it. Origins is available on both Steam and GOG - I can confirm the latter version does not require any additional accounts or services.
Finally, there’s Rayman Raving Rabbids but that’s more of a mini-game compilation/party game rather than a platformer. It also has multiplayer.