Yess, was playing that recently too. Love that game.

Even just resolution has an impact as well. I started playing Alpha Centauri now. I can tell that this game’s visuals are something I would have loved back when my eyes still worked properly and I’d be playing it on a 1024x768 crt monitor. But now on a 1080p laptop display and my poor sight even with glasses, I’m finding it strains my eyes a lot to play.

By contrast the low rez blocky NES-style visuals of civ 1 are much easier on my eyes, making one more reason this game is easier to get into.

I think I downloaded both of these much, but didn’t really get around to playing them. Will have to give them another try.

I noticed there is a Final Fantasy mod. I will have to try that.

This is where I played. Be sure to use an adblocker.

https://playclassic.games/games/4x-dos-games-online/play-sid-meiers-civilization-online/

Spurred by your comment here, I did a search and Alpha Centauri is presently $2.49 on Steam. Looks like I’ll need to try that now too. 🥳

Most games being called roguelikes now days should really be called Roguelites, as they tend to lack the depth, complexity, and replayability of more mature traditional roguelikes. Mileage varies. I’ve noticed that newer titles that have forms of permanent upgrades have more addictive gameplay loops - love Dead Cells and Hades - but they don’t offer the same degree of excitement that true permadeath rls do. When a game has tens of floors of dungeon, and after many attempts that fail at floor 5-8, you’re finally flying through levels 10, 11, 12, 13, and you know it can all end just like that - a very intense feeling emerges. Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is one of my favorites for this.

For soulslikes, I’ve yet to play a game in this genre that has been as satisfying as FromSoft’s games themselves. Been meaning to get back into Elden Ring.

For you, not for me.

Supreme Court recently declined to take a major copyright case involving AI, which meant the previous court’s ruling still stands - ai generated content can’t be copyrighted. Tho I haven’t looked at the details, so I’m not sure if that applies to code or not.

It will not surprize me if everyone currently depending on these systems is going to be in for a very rude awakening.

I have tried installing and running a huge variety of games, using Lutris, over the years. Multiple distros too.

None of them have ever worked. Not a single one.

I love when there are basic bike lanes directly adjacent to the road, and cars are just using them as extra parking space, making them completely useless and forcing the cyclist to use the road.

Fuck cars.

When I looked at a gameplay trailer of the new one, it really didn’t feel authentic at all. It was more like looking at Destiny - Extraction Edition, with Marathon branding.

As someone who grew up playing the originals, it would be kind of nice to try this game and see what it’s like. But it’s not worth using something other than Linux to make that happen. Oh well.

For those unaware, the original Marathon games were in the same vein of 2.5D fps as the original Doom. It had a more foreboding sci fi atmosphere, and has been credited as one of the first fps games to actually weave narrative elements into the gameplay itself.

It’s also freely available and open-source these days.

While some foods are associated with a higher risk of type 2 diabetes, no single ingredients in and of themselves cause diabetes - obesity does. That’s why every fad diet can make a semi-credible claim to have “cured” people’s diabetes. If you lose enough weight, it might go into remission.

And to be clear, none of what I just said is meant to imply a moral, individual failure on the part of anyone who is living/struggling with obesity and diabetes. It’s a complex thing, and like all complex things we can go ahead and blame corporations for it. 👍

Can’t we just watch that one Zeitgeist indie documentary to find out the Venus Project is a thing, and then make open-source Star Trek real?

I’ve played with and without the analog inputs, and using a real DualShock 2. By default it’s not L3, it’s circle for cqc, and square for pressure sensitive controls for the gun.

The controls were even worse on ps2 because even though they are technically analog buttons, they have a very short travel distance which makes it too easy to accidentally do the wrong thing. I found the modern controls slightly more intuitive.

There was also a time I tried to play the ps2 version on pcsx2, but could only use a DualShock 4 then. Since that controller doesn’t have analog face buttons, I remapped cqc to L2 and gunfire to R2 and found that control scheme worked surprizingly well.

But the basic controls are the least of those game’s problems.

As far as getting them in the wild, you just have to be sure to forage where the air and soil is free from pollutants (as far as that is feasible anyway), then clean and dehydrate them.

As far as safety goes, the conventional wisdom is that you want to decarboxylate them. If I recall, there are two main active ingredients in amanitas: muscimol, and ibotenic acid. It’s believed that one of these is safe, and the other not so much. But the whole thing really isn’t very clear, and we certainly don’t have any reliable long term data on habitual use. Anyway, the process just involves simmering them in a solution of water and citric acid, which converts the unsafe substance into the safe one.

And of course dose is a large part of safety.

Amanitas are not “magic mushrooms” in that they do not contain psilocybin, and are fully legal, just heavily stigmatized. I’ve tried them and found them to be the single greatest substance I’ve taken for anxiety, but I’ve stopped taking them because I have doubts about their safety. Chubby Emu on youtube has an episode about a guy who died after taking them, for example.

So if you are inclined to try them, do your research first. Extensively. And keep in mind that even the science on these fungi is still far from complete.

Despite my best efforts, I never got to a point where I felt like I wasn’t fighting against the controls and mechanics. As somebody who has played a fair share of other stealth games, they just are really bad.

I’ll talk about the boss fight that was the final straw for me.

The whole thing was an exercise in annoyance and frustration. After getting past it, it made me realize how hard I had been trying to ignore the way these things had been annoying me throughout the entire game. I couldn’t ignore it anymore. Just hate it, the games are not for me.

These days when I play Bethesda games I always end up using console commands to expand inventory space. I’m so done with hyper-limited inventory systems and having to waste stat points to increase them.