Game On!

Although I am not much of a gamer, I enjoy good games when I get some free time to play them.

I wanted to try World of Goo and This War of Mine.  Luckily, The Humble Bundle offered The World of Goo and other interesting titles (ZenBound, Limbo, and Braid again), so I bought the bundle and decided to play them on Steam.

Steam, for its part, had This War of Mine at discount price.

I could not resist and bought it, too.

So, I resumed my playing of To the Moon, Nihilumbra, Braid, and started This War of Mine (to add to the assortment of painful games).

A screenshot from To the Moon

As an emotional relief, I also played Limbo... CREEPY!

Limbo... a platform game with an oppressive atmosphere

Of course, keeping all this joy for myself is just not right.  I had to share the happiness and thus sent the games to Megatotoro.

I have to admit that the gaming experience on Linux has become a lot more enjoyable thanks to Steam.  I might even get a Steam machine later.

I will try to play on Desura one of these days, too.

On my new laptop: ZaReason's Strata 7440

When Mageia 4 was released, I migrated the two desktop computers in my house.  I also wanted to install Mageia 4 to my HP Pavilion laptop, but it had a hardware malfunction that prevented me from using it at all  (it would not start at all... apparently a chipset/display problem).

I took it to a repair shop I trust and they had to send it somewhere else to find out if the machine can be saved.  This means I had to wait for a month.

But I cannot wait for a month.

So, I decided to buy a new laptop with Linux pre-installed.  As my brother Megatotoro had a very positive experience with ZaReason (and I envied his Alto laptop, to be honest), I went for this beauty: the Strata 7440. 

The Strata arrived this week and its performance is truly great: all the KDE desktop effects could be activated and used without any major impact on the laptop's responsiveness.

However, I wiped the Mageia install to install the OS myself... mainly because ZaReason configured the user account for my brother and I dislike the partitioning they used.

I wanted also to make room for other possible installs.

Getting Mageia 4 on the laptop was no big deal.  In fact, I used the 64 bit version of the OS and everything worked, even the Japanese IME with iBus.  

Then I tried to get PCLinuxOS and, unfortunately, had problems with the display.  I need to see if I can get to correct the problem later.

The other OS that I installed to the Strata was OpenMandriva 2013.  The only problem was the lack of Wifi connectivity... It was solved easily adding the appropriate packages.

But then I discovered that the webcam on the machine is not detected.  Neither Mageia nor OpenMandriva Lx can see the webcam.  I tried a live Linux Mint 16 DVD and it was the same.  I hope this is caused by a lack of drivers rather than by a hardware issue.

I am not extremely bothered by the webcam issue because I don't use it much and, interestingly, this machine can run practically all the games I have purchased in Steam and Desura.  The list includes:

A.  Steam Games

1. The Bard's Tale (real funny)
2. Revenge of the Titans
3. Worms Reloaded
4. Snuggle Truck
5. Hero Academy
6. Cogs
7. Osmos
8. Violett 

B.  Desura Games

1. Braid (I love the concept of this game!)
2. Nihilumbra

It seems that the only game that I lost in Desura is Machinarium... because it is a 32 bit game and would not load.

So, the balance tilts more into the positive side than into the negative.  I only need to figure out how to solve the webcam thing...

On Gaming, Upgrading, and PCLinuxOS

I am nothing close to what people call a gamer.  In fact, very seldom is it that I play games. I used to play some in Windows before I migrated.  However, back then, I did not invest a lot of money on games, either.  Once I bought a nice game that Windows stubbornly refused to launch even though my machine fulfilled all the requirements.  I also bought "Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation" and enjoyed it for a while, until a Windows XP service pack prevented me from being able to use it again.

When I migrated to Linux, I had already given up on games.  I mean, I could still play some of my favorite titles thanks to DOSBox or SNES emulators but, essentially, I simply assumed that Linux was pretty much a gameless land.

One day I read a tutorial that Texstar wrote to install Desura (I did not know what "desura" was) on PCLinuxOS and I gave it a try.  I learned then that it is possible to play games on Linux.

Gradually, my PCLinuxOS laptop became my door to a gaming experience on Linux; I would play the first Humble Indie Bundle games I bought for the penguin OS.  What I liked the best was that I could play most of the titles in the bundle, like Braid, Cogs, Machinarium, and Cayon Physics Deluxe (the latter two with WINE).

Nevertheless, bothered by minor KDE bug that was probably the result of my own failure to install updates for a long period of time, I upgraded the OS to PCLinuxOS 2013.10.  I actually did not have to do it, but I went ahead anyway and did it.  Although the upgrade surely fixed the KDE bug, something went wrong: I lost the Kwin OpenGL effects and the games played with WINE became unusable. 


I solved the problem rather easily: I put PCLinuxOS 2013.2 back and updated the machine.  It took almost three hours, but the games worked again and the KDE bug was gone.  Sometimes you just have to revert...

Now, armed with both Desura and Steam, this laptop with PCLinuxOS has turned itself into a nice source of entertainment.

Oh, and I have bought some new games, too. I guess I will write an entry on the differences I found between Desura and Steam one of these days.