Itch.io is a game store, specifically popular with indie devs.
There’s no fee to publish a game on itch, and devs can choose what % goes to itch if they choose to charge for the game. They can also sell games where they let the customers pick what price to pay. Overall it’s very dev freedom focused and is very popular for smaller/experimental games and game jams.
Hopefully I’m just being cynical, but they’re probably saying that just to appease user’s fears, while fully intending to enshittify to make it profitable.
Oh that’s tempting, they’ve been teasing the CoQ mobile version forever now (7+ years?), and I’ve always wanted to play it on the go. I’ve got it on my Deck always, but I need good game on my phone much more than on my deck.
To be honest it was a weird hole in my gaming history. I’ve played later Castlevania’s, and I’ve always been a huge Metroid fan.
I think I’m largely judging it by comparing it to Super Metroid. Both games were ones I returned to after playing newer titles in their series (mainly on GBA and DS).
Playing SotN for the first time, I find it good, but it feels like it hasn’t held up as well as super metroid. When I went back and played super Metroid for the first time, I found it to be a great metroid game with slightly outdated controls. Going back to SotN after playing newer Castlevania games has felt rougher. SM is famous for how it guides players with an invisible hand, but SotN progression often seems more obscure, I’ve been trying to play without guides, and while I’m doing great at finding health/heart upgrades, I’ve been struggling to find the actual abilities for progression. The game also likes destroyable ceilings/floors for a game that doesn’t give great options for attacking up or down.
Anyways it’s good, I’m enjoying it, but playing it with no nostalgia and no prior knowledge on patching/puzzles has involved a lot of meandering around the map.
Pragmata was great, I really enjoyed it. Some of the simulation trials were brutal though, I never felt like beating them. I also always felt like there should be a better control setup for playing it on the deck.
Expedition 33 is really good, I played it shortly after launch and the default performance was a bit rough. I installed a performance mod (that disabled lumens among other things) and it let the game run and look decent. The game itself is fantastic, gives a lot of options to play it from mastering enemy parry/dodge patterns or mixing and matching the skills and bonuses to make broken combos. It really rewards experimenting, you constantly feel like you’re discovering new broken strategies, but then the game always introduces new much stronger enemies that force you to come up with something even more broken.
I’m still mostly playing Dragonsword Awakening. Really fun game, and a great value for it’s asking price. Plus the devs have been quick to patch bugs (including steam deck specific bugs) and add in quality of life changes. There’s also a lot of free content updates planned.
Also have been playing through Castlevania Symphony of the Night. Pretty good game, although I had to look up advice on some of the puzzles/breakable walls I missed.
I’m holding off on getting into any other games that are too large at the moment, want to make sure I’m not tied up when Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter releases later this month.
Yeah, should be a fantastic addition.
Unfortunately a lot of free out-of-warranty repairs just come down to what support tech you ended up talking to.
Size and speed issues aside, this probably won’t work at all. My understanding is that many m.2 slots are multi-purpose, with nvme, data, and USB data pathways. Most adapters like this just connect the micro SD to the USB pathways in the m.2 slot.
As far as I know, the deck has a NVNE only slot, so something like this that requires the USB part of the m.2 slot won’t work.
UWP may get support eventually, but not anytime soon. They’ll have to get other stuff working first
It has an public codebase, so you can review the code yourself if inclined.
Yes, Doom 2016+ are great games for it.
I recommending doing a mode shift with the right bumper (that opens the weapon selection wheel) to revert the Thumbstick to a regular stick when held, which makes swapping weapons easier.
For competitive or fast paced shooters, I really like to combine gyro with flickstick, where the right Thumbstick exists only to instantly turn your character to face any direction, and then they gyro is used for any aiming beyond that. It’s especially nice for horde shooter type games where you have to constantly turn around and shoot at enemies behind you.
Some newer monitors can support stuff like HDMI-CEC, HDCP (aka DRM to prevent copying video feeds), and EDID handshakes. Your motherboard, especially if it’s older, is probably getting hung up trying to resolve these during boot.
You can go into the monitor’s settings and try disabling extra features like HDMI-CEC, upgrade your motherboard bios, switch to display port (or display port->HDMI cable), or try disabiling legacy boot. There’s probably some other stuff to try, but that should give you somewhere to start.
You can also gather more info, like if it happens with other HDMI monitors (specifically newer monitors only or all HDMI).
There’s two competitions here, windows vs Linux, and steam vs epic.
Of those two, I consider windows vs Linux the more important competition for consumers. And Linux is the underdog there, so I think Linux doing better will help more people than any other result of this.
So the question becomes, is this good or bad for Linux? More official support for Linux is good obviously, but also Valve funds a lot of open source projects and generally invests a lot of money in Linux (and I’m very doubtful that Epic will do anything similar). So arguably Valve doing better and having a larger monopoly might do more good in the long run, if it helps counteract the windows monopoly. Of course, that would only matter if Epic on Linux actually dents Steam’s market share in any meaningful way, which seems unlikely.
Heroic is a great option, and will likely remain most people’s preferred way to play Epic games on Linux/SteamOS. After all, a lot of windows users prefer heroic there as well due to the bloat/slowness of the official Epic launcher.
That said, official support is always good. It both represents that Linux is growing and a viable alternative to windows, guarantees better support from games on the platform in the future, and pressures other companies to also support Linux.
Basically this (and GoG adding support) are big deals, even if it’s not because we really needed their official support to have a good way to play their games.
Proton is really meant to work through steam, UMU is meant to replicate how reliably games run through steam+proton without steam. There’s a reason that heroic and all the other game launchers are switching to UMU as the default for running games.
My basic understanding is that, in addition to proton, steam provides a set of Linux runtimes, to make sure that the converted system calls from proton always match up with the correct standardized runtimes on the Linux system, regardless of distro. They also provide winetricks/protontricks as needed for games. There’s also some system variables passed to tell proton/etc that the game is running through steam and has this setup. Finally steam distributes shader caches, which both improve performance, and bypass proprietary video codecs by replacing them with open source friendly video files.
UMU is basically replicating all of this except the shader/media distribution, hopefully allowing games to run as reliably outside of steam as they do inside of it.
As always, Tim Sweeney only cares monopolies and alternative platforms when it’s financially beneficial.
It’s a new pre-configured hyprland/arch distro, that raised $15 million dollars somehow. The founder of Omarchy is DHH, the creator of Ruby-on-rails.
The distro is probably AI/vibe-coding, setup to give LLM agents easy access to the system. Some of the previously mentioned $15 million is actually in the form of donated AI credits to code the distro with.
The distro has some controversial decisions like bundling Spotify and Zoom into the install, when Linux (and especially arch) is known for low bloat and user choice.
Some of the money they’ve raised is going to Vaxry the dev of Hyprland. There are various opinions on this, a lot of people like hyprland but Vaxry is kinda insane polish dude obsessed with anime porn.
Overall I think most people care because it’s a lot of money raised for a distro, especially when people disagree with the developmental decisions and goals. People would rather see that money go to other places, and are questioning why so many companies were willing to sponsor Omarchy specifically.