Yeah, thankfully those tend not to be the titles I have any interest in playing. Just more high budget over marketed repetitive DLC and DRM ridden shiny piles of garbage. </rant>

My guess would be to play games smoothly that are so horribly un-optimized they run poorly on all hardware.

Games got a lot more complicated and many use so many 3rd party add-ins that just sorting through what you have rights to release can be a pretty big task and not worth it if what you can release ends up unusable with all of them removed.

I’m also confused, in the mod browser I see Mineclonia and Mineclone2 but no Mineclonia2. Which is better?

It does have full controller support and lots of on-screen directions for what buttons do what. How fun it is with controller I can’t attest to, I’m sticking with M+KB.

I guess if you want to be paranoid you could get a new hard drive and install just what you want for the LAN and keep personal info off it. Then just swap back when you get home.

It’s sounds snarky but the reality is not much will change from software and hardware developers until it reaches that level. Right now the direct support we get is from developers that just happen to like Linux. After around 10% most other developers can no longer afford to ignore that market even if they aren’t adept or comfortable with it.

I’ve played and enjoyed:
OpenTTD
OpenRCT2
OpenClonk
Hedgewars
Foobillard++

I’ve also been looking at Tabletop Club but haven’t played with it much yet.

Some games I thought were pretty good that got somewhat looked over:

Dandara: Trials of Fear – Somewhat Metroid like but with a unique limited movement system.

The Dwarves – An ARPG with a bland title (based on a book I guess) that I think made a lot of people overlook this but the gameplay was well done.

Echoes of Aetheria – Typical JRPG which isn’t for everyone but I enjoyed it.

The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians – Similar to Grimrock (though maybe not quite as good) but still fun.

Figment – Adventure puzzle game with some surreal and cutesy art, pretty well done.

Full Void – Inspired by games like Out of this World, it was short but very cool.

Grandpa’s Table – It’s not a crazy hard brain teaser, just a relaxing sliding puzzle game with great music.

Rise of the Third Power – Another JRPG that had some fun writing and combat.

Seedlings – A Godot engine puzzle platformer with Samarost vibes. The detail put into the story at the ending really surprised me.

Yeah I do hope they update the demo to the latest build and put it back on steam. I found the random factors in Xcom to be really annoying but Capes is all strictly predictable damage and some of the later missions end up being a real challenge to figure out.

Same, our battle just to get a foothold on Ashlands was pretty epic but now we’ve taken down a fortress and things are getting a lot easier.

misleading? I guess if you aren’t familiar with the game and expecting anime game art I could see the confusion but the content pretty accurately describes the feeling of entering the Ashlands.

Hohndel agreed but added that the industry needs to support these smaller projects – and not only with money. “Companies need to engage with these projects. Have your company adopt a couple of such projects and just participate. Read the code, review the patches, and provide moral support to the maintainers. It’s as simple as that.”

Really glad he said this, I keep seeing posts about how all these big companies could solve the problem by just throwing money at small projects and while that is better than nothing it would help way more to have their own developers helping to review and fix issues.

Haha, the early VR stuff was pretty terrible, but it was cool that D1 supported it.

Yeah I like FPS games sometimes but I find them really hard to watch especially if the streamer is twitchy on the mouse and/or the bitrate isn’t really high.

That seems to be the case with the majority of the streams I’ve seen, just folks havin fun with a few friends showing up now and then. I do like to check out the odd streamer I’ve never seen especially if it’s a game I know really well. What games have you been streaming lately?

I ended up writing a perl script to generate a .m3u from a root music directory that shuffles all the subdirs so I can listen to full albums in random order instead of just tracks.

Which is why it’s so awesome that most of Steam Deck is actually fairly open, or at least as open as running steam on desktop Linux anyway.

Not FOSS but free2play and native with vulkan:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/884660/CRSED_FOAD/

Palia is fun for awhile but not a lot of lasting content there yet.
An oldschool style Linux native MMO I still recommend is Project Gorgon. It’s a very social game, while you can do a lot solo eventually you’ll run into the game’s only real punishment which is dying from a boss fight. You’ll get a permanent curse that can only be lifted by defeating that boss and the best way to do that is to find other players in game to help you do it.