Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Confession

I should number these confessions.  I know I have a few other posts with that title.  So, I scraped my money together and bought a new and glorious computer.  I bought Windows for the first time in my life.  I installed steam for the first time ever.  I am now beffuddled with a wonderful glut of games.

I love Ubuntu for my everyday work.  It is very stable and easy to use.  Gimp and Inkscape work without a hitch even on my older computer with it's crappy video card.  But games.  Dear games.  I have gone for decades now without them (mostly getting my fix on consoles).

Sure, people say you can run most games through Wine.  But not in my experience.  Couldn't get even big popular titles like Fallout 3 to work or popular titles that have been around forever with plenty of time for fixes to get worked out like Morrowind.

The first game I downloaded was Rome: Total War.  It was less than $3.

So, on one hand I feel a little dirty for selling out on Free Software so cheaply.  On the other hand I never got to finish exploring Morrowind and now I can (I installed the updated graphics mod last night and it looks wonderful for a game so old).

I want to keep posting here (and really need to get my campaign started back up to try out all my wilderness travel innovations) because I'm coming up on some big milestones, but expect me to be distracted and scatterbrained.  

And if you want to recommend some games in the comments feel free--I just got Legend of Grimrock which looks great and FTL which has been pretty fun.

7 comments:

  1. I just this week bought parts to build my first new PC in years. I'm a Debian guy, but I will be leaving a partition open for Windows 8 (shudder) and Steam.

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  2. I don't think they're on Steam yet (though they're trying), but Naev is an awesome sandbox spaceship game that started out as a clone of Escape Velocity, but is adding and changing things as it develops (sounds like retroclones, no?). It's free, here: http://blog.naev.org/downloads/

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  3. I run windows for the games as well - it's sad but true. Well soon you should be able to get left 4 dead 2 and team fortress on steam's ubuntu client too.

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  4. I'm very much looking forward to steam on linux too; apparently a fair number of Arch and Ubuntu users on reddit have it up and running already. I may try to get it working over the holidays.

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  5. Thanks for the comments. I should have mentioned that I'm dual booting this baby with Ubuntu 12.10 and still using my old linux computer with all my files. So I haven't given up totally. Linux wins hands down on freedom and choice.

    I do wonder if Shuttleworth could have done more to fund Wine or get Steam on board instead of courting the Amazon search stuff and trying to turn the software center into itunes when there were just no native games.

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  6. Valve seems to be putting serious attention on Steam for Linux lately, so you have have come to the fold just before the fold comes to you.

    I'd recommend Fallout: New Vegas, especially if you can pick up the "Ultimate" edition and play with the developer patch (http://twofoldsilence.diogenes-lamp.info/2012/09/jsawyeresp-v5.html).

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  7. Thanks, Joshua. I got a chance to play some New Vegas before my ps3 was stolen. That patch looks interesting. What reaaally interests me is a saw a mod for Fallout 3 that let you rebuild a compound, finding engineers and medical personnel. I'd like to be able to rebuild something in a post-apocalyptic game.

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