Changes in 2018 (Part II) Games in PS4 vs Steam

Some of the greatest changes that I have undergone in 2018 involve the use of the Playstation 4 as opposed to playing on Steam.

Steam, in my opinion, has done a great job to bring games to Linux.  However, sometimes game updates render some titles unplayable for a while (as in the case with Bendy and the Ink Machine.)  Even so, I like playing Steam games better than playing on the console.  Maybe it's just that I prefer the computer because some of the Steam games are also available on the PS4, but I find them more enjoyable on Steam.

Whatever the case, I had to use the PS4 more because I was writing an article for a research project on games like Among the Sleep, Fran Bow, Violett, and Beyond Two Souls.  Eimi, my daughter, seeing the games on the PS Store, found Minecraft, and asked me to buy it.  I really saw no point because I had already installed it to her phone and did not like the MS game, so I refused.  However, my wife bought it for my daughter as a reward for all her effort in school this year.

When my daughter started playing, I understood why this game became so successful.  Pretty soon, both my daughter and I were playing together building structures, mining ore and feeding cubic animals.  The mash-up packs were Eimi's delight, in particular the Chinese Mythology one.  We explored the land, forged tools and, when outnumbered by monsters in the city, fled and fortified ourselves against them inside of a gigantic Buddha statue.  We created a hideout inside the sculpture's belly and connected it with a secret observatory inside the Buddha's head.  I must admit that finding Romeo's secrets (my daughter's fantastic quest in the game) kept me busy and entertained for quite a while. Oh, and the music is pretty relaxing, by the way.

Our stronghold against monsters

Yes, I am a Linux user and I still avoid MS products.  However, I guess I have to thank MS for this game that has made me spend such a good time with my daughter.  That's only fair.

Summary of Seven Days

This is a quick post to list the latest events.

1.  Mageia 6.1 was released six days ago (Oct 6).  I was sick and busy and, because of that, I missed the announcement.  I do not need to install it on my computers, but I will download it to install it on my daughter's machine and fix the problem with the MCC.

2.  Google+ is being killed (Oct 9).  That marks the end of my 3-year experiment with this social network.  Wow, excluding Blogger, that was the only social network in which I have been active for more than a year... I tried Tagged, Hi5, Facebook (before it became so popular here), and YouTube. Right now, I have been looking for a replacement and tried MeWe and Pluspora... MeWe is too Facebooky for my taste.  Pluspora feels like a merge between Facebook and Twitter with limitations and a really geeky flavor.  I guess I will continue my test drive in Pluspora for a while.

3.  Microsoft and the patents (Oct 10).  Megatotoro shared this article with me.   I was confused.  Either Microsoft is changing its position or it is a masked move that, in reality, does not help Linux at all.  Which one will be, I wonder?

4.  My Fedora acted weird (Oct 11).  As I was attempting to update Fedora, some WINE-related packages were not found because the repos were absent.  I updated without them and the screen locker got broken.  I had encountered that before in OpenMandriva, so I switced to a virtual terminal with Ctrl+Alt+F2, logged in with my user and password, and then executed loginctl unlock-session 5.  Then I switched back to the running session with  Ctrl+Alt+F1.

5.  The Forest on Steam via WINE ate up my home space (Oct 12).
I was playing this Windows game on Fedora using the Windows Steam client via WINE.  It works fine, but then the system told me that I was running low on space.  I checked with Dolphin and I had only 340Mb free!  After a while, this number went down to 467Kb.  When I finished the game, I rebooted and my free space came back.

The Nostalgia of Old Games

I have never been much of a gamer.  However, I admit that, back as a Windows user, I got hooked on several titles, such as "Doom," "Heretic," and "Tomb Rider-- The Last Revelation".

My favorite games, though, were SNES ROMs that my brother, Megatotoro, taught me how to play with ZSNES.  Among them, I  recall "Super Puyo Puyo," "The Violinist of Hameln," "The 7th Saga," and "Bahamut Lagoon".

Today I found the old ROMs and, using WINE, I played them for a short while.

Wow, so many memories rushed to me!

The epic battles of Captain Kokoro (Byuu) and his faithful dragon Me (Salmando)!

A game that made me laugh and think a lot

This game had some of that sadness found in "This War of Mine"

I do not have the time to play them all again, but it was a nice visit to the past.

Bendy and the Ink Machine, [Fixed] (Thanks to the Ninja Pizza Girl)

The game Bendy and the Ink Machine (BATIM) has been a headache for players who use Linux and Steam.

Following the release of chapter 3, an update broke the game.  However, there was a fix on the Steam forum.  One had to add this line to the properties of the game for it to run again:

-screen-fullscreen 0

But then, for Halloween 2017, the developers released a patch for a fun crossover with Hello Neighbor and, when they released the rollback to normal, the game was broken again and, this time, the trick to fix it was useless.

So, BATIM remained unplayable unless you installed the Windows Steam client and ran it with Wine.  Then, the game was playable, but the performance was not the same and there were some other problems, too.

I visited today the BATIM forum on Steam and discovered that the community is anxious because the release of chapter 4 was delayed to April 30.

Of course, I was not really excited, but I read a forum post with a new fix:  one has to copy four files from another game made with the Unity engine.

 libCSteamworks.so and "libsteam_api.so"--->/BATIM_Data/plugins/X86 and
libCSteamworks.so and "libsteam_api.so"--->/BATIM_Data/plugins/X86_64

I remembered that I had a game called Ninja Pizza Girl, so I looked for the files and copied them to the corresponding folders.  Sure enough, that fixed BATIM at last!

After playing for a while, I played the Ninja Pizza Girl... I didn't know that the game was about bullying among teenagers, inspired on the life of the daughter of the developers, who has Asperger's syndrome.  Wow!

In this game, Gemma, a 16 year old girl, must deliver pizza orders in a dystopian city.  As she jumps, climbs, runs, ducks, and slides to get to the client's house on time, she has to face the most nightmarish adversaries that a teenage girl can have: other teenagers!

I personally loved the fatherly advice given after each delivery.

Nostalgia

Nostalgia becomes common during December and, in particular, in the last days of the year.

Today I went for a run and decided to take my old ZTE Open FirefoxOS phone with me.  That was the very first cellphone I bought (back in May 2014) and, after Mozilla terminated FirefoxOS in 2016, I replaced it by an Android smartphone.

The ZTE Open is still operational, though.  True, one cannot use it as a smartphone, but it can make calls, send and receive messages, browse the Web, and play music and measure one's time while one jogs.  That's more than enough for me.

However, I cannot avoid feeling sad about the demise of FirefoxOS.  While most of the apps have Android versions by now, some of the games never made it to Android. For example, my three favorite games, or what I called "The Cat Trilogy", were doomed to extinction and cannot be found in the Android app ecosystem.

The first one is Martha & Maw-maw's Fishing Days, a simple game that I found quite amusing.

Unfortunately, that game disappeared with FirefoxOS.

The second one was called Spooky Cats.  This game can be installed to an Android phone if one has the APK and enables the unknown sources.

You play as a cute kitty that has to go underground to find a child and battles zombie cats along the way.

Colored Cats, by DS Effects, was a great time killer and it's too bad one cannot find it in Google Play.  One can still try to play it here, but it is not the same...

There were other games, like Disney Fix-it Felix, that I cannot find for Android.

Time carries on and changes things and we are left only with bittersweet memories.

At least I can still play those games while the phone works.

Bendy and the Ink Machine Chapter 3: A Roller Coaster on Linux

Although I am not a gamer, I like to play games occasionally.  To do so, I I run Steam on my Linux computers.
 
One day, I stumbled upon a title that happened to be interesting: Bendy and the Ink Machine.  It is a horror game that relies more on the ambience than it does on jumpscares to create its effect.

The first chapter is free, so I installed it and played it.  I liked the experience, so I bought the second chapter. It was good.

I joined the crowd that was waiting for the third chapter and, when it came available on September, I bought it.

The problem was they released an update that broke the game on some Windows machines and, for what I could see, prevented Linux users from running the game.

After a while, somebody came up with a solution and posted it on a forum.  One had to add this line to the properties of the game: -screen-fullscreen 0

With that, I could play the game again on Linux.

The company wanted to surprise the user base.  So, they released an update that combined Bendy and the Ink Machine with another game, Hello Neighbor.  It was a Halloween gift.

However, the new update broke the game on Linux again.  This time, not even the magical line helped.

Today they released another update.  The game started, but crashed.  Understandably, many users are not very happy about it.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

**************************************
In a moment of desperation, I discovered that the game runs on Linux via WINE if one uses the Windows Steam client.

But that is not a solution... 

Playing Terrordrome on OpenMandriva Lx 3.0

Today, as my daughter was watching YouTube videos, she found one about a fighting game called Terrordrome. This is a fighting game with a retro look that features several characters of horror films, such as Chucky, Pinhead, Jason, and Pumpkinhead.

I found it sort of cute and looked for it.  Much to my surprise, it is free and it provides a Linux installer via Wine here.

After downloading it (it is rather large, 1Gb), I installed it and played it.  It works perfectly.

Of course, my daughter came to play with Chucky, her favorite character, and won pretty much every single match against me.
 

It was fun because the game incorporates special moves based on the movies and there are sounds that come from the films, too (careful with Chucky's swearing!).

Playing on OpenMandriva LX 2014.2

I reinstalled OpenMandriva LX 2014.2 today.  Last time I did, I had some problems updating: many packages were not found but, even so, I proceeded with the upgrading.

The OS was working perfectly except for the performance of games on Steam.

Today, I followed what I learned yesterday and, when I hit the first problem, I stopped the update and deleted all the repos. Then, I retrieved them again (they were marked as phosphorous 2014.0, which I believe was the previous version), but the update went on smoothly and I got the most recent packages, like Firefox 44.

With that, my problems with Steam disappeared: the games that I play are working perfectly now, yay!

But the best part is that I can now play Never Alone Kisima Ingitshuna, one of the most beautiful and enlightening games I have seen.  As the official site states about the game:


"Inspired by the rich art and imagery of Alaska Native cultures, Never Alone brings the atmospheric and compelling world of Iñupiaq stories alive."

As you play, you can learn about Alaska Native cultures, which is simply AMAZING.

Tomb Raider Chronicles: Those Unexpected Findings...

I have been experiencing problems to attach files larger than 200kb to emails.

I don't remember when this started happening but, since I normally do not work with files that large by email, the thing was nothing that a minor nuisance to me.

Today, when trying to find the root of the problem, I got side-tracked and ended up stumbling on a happy discovery.

You see, back in 2008 or so, I had to give up my favorite Windows game: Tomb Raider 4 "The Last Revelation."  This was not caused by my commitment to Linux (I did not start using Linux until 2009), but because a Windows XP update made the game crash.

Then I migrated to Linux and playing Tomb Raider again became a lost hope.

Until today.

I did not remember I owned a Tomb Raider Chronicles DVD.  Well, I installed it with WINE on my desktop with PCLinuxOS and, after changing some settings... I could play with Lara Croft again!

I never played Tomb Raider Chronicles on Windows.  Like I said, I did not even remember I had the DVD, so I was excited to hear familiar tunes and, like a child with a new gift, I did not worry about the playability of the game.

I will go back to the game on vacations.  Right now, and after all this time without playing Tomb Raider, I was satisfied with having Lara run around, walk, climb, jump, and shoot---on Linux!

Gotta work.  Er, wait.  Megatotoro is reporting that Pisi Linux is alive!  Wow, another unexpected finding!  :-)

Nostalgic Gaming

It seems that Eimi, my now 5 year-old daughter, developed a taste for Dragon Ball Z Kai.

For me, it was surprising.  She even asked me to buy two Goku and a Freezer figures to play.

Then, I remembered there was an old Dragon Ball Z SNES ROM.  I used to play lots of those ROMs in emulators when I used Windows.

I found a Windows ZSNES emulator and the ROM and tested them with WINE.

They worked.

WINE running the DBZ ROM, PCLinuxOS

We had a lot of fun playing together.

And so I Won...!

I woke up early today with all the intention of tackling my morning jog, but I lacked the energy.

What to do?

I could go back to sleep or... play LIMBO.

Somehow, I knew I was very close to finishing it.  I mean, with all those gravitational spins, how much crazier could that creepy game become?

As an additional motivation, I reminded myself that I had not won any game on Linux.

So I opened Steam and played.

It took me less than one hour to finish LIMBO.

LIMBO:  The end sequence

Just like T.S. Eliot's Magi would have said, the ending was... satisfactory! ;-)

Interestingly, I experienced certain emotion (joy, a sense of achievement/completion?) from winning this game, something that resembles what one feels after finishing a jog.

I sort of understand gamers better now.

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 for Some Serious Fun during Vacations

2014 is almost gone.  After a rather complicated year, I am getting ready for some relaxation.

I don't plan to travel.  I want to stay home to read and play, if not with my daughter, then on the computer.

No, I don't like consoles.  I only play games on my computer.

I remember I used to enjoy games and dedicated a lot of time to them, but I stopped playing when I fully migrated to Linux in 2010, partly because some of my favorite titles would not run and I needed to learn how to use the OS for productivity.

However, for a non-technical user of Linux, I adapted successfully.  Well, truth to be told, it helped that my workload increased exponentially, so I had no time for even missing playing games.

But all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy...

I learned about WINE, DOSBox, and Desura. And there were some Linux games that I could play occasionally.   All that kept me going.

Comes Steam.  The reputation of Linux as a gameless platform starts changing... and I start buying games although I lacked the time to actually play them. 

Now I just noticed a curious change: my preferences moved away from games based purely on action, racing, and shooting to the ones where I could learn something about life.


Gradually, I had switched from liking titles that promised an adrenaline-rush to choosing those that offered me a space for self-reflection, regardless of technical considerations like awesome 3D graphics.

This transformation was triggered by my exposition to Jason Rohrer's Passage and Gravitation.

Maybe that's why I never missed Tomb Raider so much.

I am hooked now on the narrator's existential remarks in Nihilumbra, the approach to time and mistakes in Braid, and the human emotions triggered by To the Moon. I am also considering to buy This War of Mine...

"Are you going to kill us?"  The question of all the innocents trapped in the middle of a war

Of course, for less serious playing, I enjoy the irreverence of The Bard's Tale. :P

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...

Summary of 2013 and New Year's list

From my wishes for 2013, I am happy because I got most of I wanted.  

A.  Distros
Whereas I got many great distros to work with regularly, I am still missing Elive and Pisi Linux to have all the distros I want in my laptop.  I hope I can get them before Mageia turns 4.

B.  Tablets
I never got the Vivaldi tablet... but I received a great ZaTab instead.  My three-year old daughter is enjoying it: she has learned how to operate it and she finds no problem switching from a desktop with Mageia/MiniNo to a laptop with PCLOS/Mageia and then to the ZaTab with Android.

C.  Games
Desura and Steam have truly compensated for my lacking gaming experience on Linux.  When I migrated, I abandoned gaming because some of the games I liked were nearly impossible to play.  However, I have discovered some new games that I really like:

1. The Bard's Tale
2. Braid
3. Worms Reloaded
4. Machinarium
5. Violett

D. Consoles
I am not such a heavy gamer as to need or want a console.  However, I am considering getting a Steam Machine...

E.  Projects for 2014
Besides writing several articles, poems, ans short stories (using Linux, of course), I'd like to learn some Python and, why not, trying to learn how to develop Android apps.  I mean, I am no programmer, but it sounds like fun.

I am also considering to save some money to buy a new Linux laptop.

Another interesting fact is that now I can buy laptops with Linux preinstalled here.  Well, they only do Ubuntu, but it's refreshing... The world is changing.

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.

Games! Steam in Mageia 3

Although I'm not a gamer, I decided to check Steam on Mageia 3.  I installed the Steam client and open an account when the distro was released, but the software would crash whenever I attempted to see the description of a game.  As it was a beta client, I never thought about using it until today.

After an update of the software, I discovered today that Steam did not crash any longer, so I decided to carry out a gaming experiment: I wanted to purchase one of the Linux games to see the playability factor on my desktop computer.

I found a cheap game that seemed fun: "Snuggle Truck," a little side scroller in which you drive a truck as fast as you can to a zoo, trying not to drop any animals as you go.  The game was $5, so I chose it.

The game in the Steam library (on Mageia 3 x64)

The buying process was simple and fast.  The installation of the game was automatic.  What was left was playing it.

The game started fine, cartoonish music playing an all.  I liked the graphic quality and the responsiveness of the game.  Driving the truck was fun, too.  I am not a good player, but that is not the point. 

These are some screen shots of my poor performance in the game's tutorial:

I must say that the experiment was successful; I'm happy with the service (and the game, of course!).  My daughter will love playing "SnuggleTruck".

Steam, count me on your list of Linux customers.