Not sure how they’re planning to compete with the price of the lower end Steam Decks with those specs…

Nice to see ULWGL pick up steam so quickly, figuring out the right version of Proton to run outside Steam has always been kinda weird and fiddly. Name really sucks ass though.

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Same publisher (New Blood), but not the same devs. Dusk is by David Szymanski, Ultrakill is by Hakita.

Take a look at Haunted PS1, the games they published or that are in their compilations are usually close to that era of visuals.

For individual games you have stuff like, Anodyne 2, Cavern of Dreams, Zortch, Worlds, Lunistice, Hypnagogia, and many more. Like someone else said, there are plenty of indie games imitating or taking inspiration from the graphics of the late 90s and early 2000s.

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He didn’t. He did respond to it though: https://www.gnu.org/gnu/incorrect-quotation.en.html

Voyager works after logging out and back in, if you’re looking for a short term solution?

I suppose I’d prefer if short games weren’t overly expensive, but I never liked the hours per dollar thing. I don’t like replaying games. I’d rather buy six two-hour indie games for ten dollars each and have each one be at least somewhat unique and engaging, than spend 60 on a sprawling hundred hour AAA game filled mostly with repetition and busywork. Life’s too short for that, you know?

The article actually addresses this, but I feel "indie games bubble" is simply too broad a term. Is there a medium-high budget indie game bubble? Maybe. But can indie games in general even have a bubble? Fuckloads of indie games are passion projects, or made from crowdfunding money, or otherwise not based around the idea that they have to be the "product" of a sustainable business, making the whole idea of a "bubble" pointless. If the bubble pops, will itch indies stop making games? Will passionate solo devs languishing at double digit Steam review numbers stop releasing games? I don't think they will.

Steam Discovery/New Releases Queue! I’ve found a tonne of cool games, both old and new and popular and niche, just by flicking through the queues when I wanted something new to play.

I feel like I’ve heard this “it’s different this time guys, we swear” spiel about every Ubisoft game in the past five years. Hard to believe or care at this point.

I love when games use as few invisible walls as possible, and don’t stop you from exploring weird places or even out of bounds. There doesn’t even have to be a reward, just the feeling of getting somewhere where you’re not supposed to be is enough. Ultrakill and Anodyne 2 both do this really well.

I also love rich, responsive, low-restriction movement mechanics, which kinda ties in with the first point. I love when games let me chain all sorts of moves together for wild bullshit midair acrobatics, zipping and bouncing and flinging myself all over the place constantly. Good examples are Ultrakill, Pseudoregalia, Sally Can’t Sleep, and Cruelty Squad. On the flipside, Demon Turf is a game I hated and dropped quickly because of how artificially and pointlessly limited the movement felt.

Hot take, but I actually love well implemented radial menus on PC. When games bother to reset your cursor to the centre of the circle you can just quickly flick the mouse in a certain direction to make your selection, which is faster than most other mouse menus and a lot more comfortable than trying to reach for the 9 key.

Out of interest, what platformers are you referencing here? I can’t think of any that are that punishing.

This might sound weird, but are you actually engaged with what you’re playing? Maybe you need to find some higher intensity games to keep your attention.

I don’t really get the obsession with backlogs. Are you actually enjoying the games at that point? Are you playing this game because you want to play it, or because it’s on your backlog and you want to be able to check it off the list and move on to the next thing - presumably, since your backlog is so big it warrants a guide - as quickly as possible? Just pick out a game you want to play and play it. Why spoil your own fun?

The standards for mobile game quality are through the floor, but there some decent ones out there. At least the platform has some higher effort games now, like CoD Mobile and Fortnite, instead of just being infinite runners and coin dropper simulators.

Might be a bit too heavyweight for your tablet, but both GNOME and KDE have tablet/touch modes which activate automatically if they detect touch input but no mouse. If auto detect doesn’t work you can turn it on manually in Settings -> Workspace Behaviour -> General Behaviour -> Touch Mode in KDE. Not sure about GNOME.