I’ve been playing a couple new-to-me games lately, Plague Inc and Guntouchables.

I can see why Plague Inc is so popular. It has a bit of that “one more turn” feel to it for me, and it is interesting how you can employ different strategies to try to win. I find it to be a decent game for relaxing after a tough day of work (though it could also be frustrating when you lose).

Guntouchables I got for free when it first launched and just played it yesterday with some friends (who also got it for free). It is a fairly simple co-op rogue-lite top down shooter, but I think it is well executed, and I enjoyed the couple runs we had. I’ll probably buy the supporter pack DLC for this at some point, because I do feel it deserves that.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but as shown in your link, $HOME does not conflict with the XDG Base Directory Specification. It partially relies on $HOME being defined.

I agree and I’m sure many feel the same.

At the same time, this is the reality we live in. Some need to have jobs at companies that don’t evaluate applications/materials as fairly as they’d like, and they will have to deal with this problem regardless.

It is fair to have a preference for exceptions. It sounds like there may be a misunderstanding on how Option works.

Have you used languages that didn’t have null and had Option instead? If we look at Rust, you can’t forget not to check it: it is impossible to get the Some of an Option without dealing with the None. You can’t forget this. You can mess up in a lot of other ways, but you explicitly have to decide how to handle that potential None case.

If you want it to fail fast and obvious, there are ways to do this. For example you, you can use the unwrap() method to get the contained Some value or panic if it is None, expect() to do the same but with a custom panic message, the ? operator to get the contained Some value or return the function with None, etc. Tangentially, these also work for Result, which can be Ok or Err.

It is pretty common to use these methods in places where you always want to fail somewhere that you don’t expect should have a None or where you don’t want your code to deal with the consequences of something unexpected. You have decided this and live with the consequences, instead of it implicitly happening/you forgetting to deal with it.

For this example, I feel that it is actually fairly ergonomic in languages that have an Option type (like Rust), which can either be Some value or no value (None), and don’t normally have null as a concept. It normalizes explicitly dealing with the None instead of having null or hidden empty strings and such.

The Steam Deck compatibility notes for the game specifically say that it isn’t good at handling multiple controllers:

This game does not default to external Bluetooth/USB controllers on Deck, and may require manually switching the active controller via the Quick Access Menu

I think it is likely that this problem comes from the game, not a problem with streaming sending the inputs. You can try testing this in another game with more flexible controller support to narrow it down.

Does the Mass Effect 3 multiplayer count, then? There are RPG elements, there are a bunch of playable women, and it is all about stomping hordes.

If this sounds appealing and you aren’t already aware: this is not available in the remaster. Andromeda has a version of this, too.

Arma is an interesting example. I’d say that it is only an open world game in some scenarios, and often times is a linear game that happens to have a big map and sandbox.

In any case, I’d agree that it having a large world with many possibilities is important for the gameplay and ability to mod/create content across the maps.

I personally use Matrix for text and Mumble for voice, but most probably won’t go anywhere. Discord is convenient, and most users won’t care enough about some extra ads to put in the effort to migrate.

In case it is helpful: Big Picture Mode does show non-Steam games. Go to the library and there is a tab for them. They’ll also show in the recent games list on the home page.

Recent conversations with friends had me playing Star Fox 64 earlier last week, which has been very nostalgic.

Over the weekend, I was surprised to have a couple friends who I thought would never want to play an Arma title show interest in playing Arma Reforger with a group of friends I play with. I got to play a bunch with one of those newly-interested friends yesterday, and was super pleased that she enjoyed it.

Sometimes I chill after work by driving around the Nurburgring in a touring car in Automobilista 2.

Alternately, for more driving games:

1. Art of Rally has a free roam mode, which is pretty chill.
2. I’ve been playing Sledders, a snowmobile game. It is super early in early access, but it can be fun to just roam around (and learn how to drive a snowmobile).

Seems like it is just some cosmetics? Seems like many items you get by interacting with NPCs and others are somehow paid, but I haven’t looked at how that works.

I see a bunch of mentions of Journey. Recently, I’ve been playing Sky: Children of the Light for the first time, which is made by the same devs. It is beautiful, and feels like a spiritual successor to Journey, to me. It is also free to play, so it is easy to recommend trying it out.

I feel like it is best, in racing games, if either:

1. Everyone agrees that racing dirty is okay, like in more combat racing type games.
2. The game has systems to discourage contact or intentionally ruining others’ races. Some more serious games have safety rating and such.

Otherwise you get some who want to have a fair race and others who think that all racing must be dirty, and it isn’t fun when these collide (literally).

I personally buy games almost exclusively on Steam after realizing how much Valve pumps money into open source/Linux gaming, and this is yet another thing on the list. Cool stuff!

I am not a fan of horror games all that much, and Half-Life Alyx is not one, but the horror elements are stronger than previous titles and I still haven’t finished the game because of that. The game is incredible, but I just can’t get past the scary parts.

This has improved further in recent years, so you probably weren’t seeing how it is now.

It may be different in other regions, but I see significantly less toxicity in Dota 2 compared to Counter-Strike, the only other big competitive game I have enough time in to compare it to. Though my CS experience was longer ago, and they could have improved things there, too.

Well, we can also look at their other games for this. For example, in Dota 2, everyone has a behavior score, based on reports and such. This is used for matchmaking on top of skill, and lower behavior scores result in certain restrictions (like can’t speak, can’t ping as much, can’t play ranked, can’t pause).

The way they are handling Deadlock has many parallels to Dota 2. For example: popular invite-only playtest, probably a free-to-play model with cosmetics for sale, Dota 2/Icefrog style gameplay depth and balancing.

This game has consistently had more players than most games on Steam without even being released yet. I think it is far from going the way of Artifact, and is much more likely to take a place alongside Dota 2 and CS2 as a giant multiplayer game with indefinite longevity.