Below you will find pages that utilize the taxonomy term “Steam”
XCOM, Steam, and Linux
One of the great things about Steam and the internet is the cloud save. It means that you can go from computer to computer and, as long as it’s connected to the Internet, you can pick up your game where you left off. In my case, I have a Windows computer and a Linux computer both capable of running games from Steam. I wanted to see how well XCOM was ported to Linux so I launched it and didn’t have any of my saves! It turns out that the saves are in a folder called SaveData on Windows and savedata on Linux. (In the path: ~/.local/share/feral-interactive/XCOM/XEW - remove XEW if it’s not Enemy Within) Those aren’t the same thing in Linux. So you need to delete the folder savedata and then make a symlink to SaveData where the symlink is savedata. Once you do that it works perfectly. To give credit where it’s due, here’s the forum post where I fond the info.
GOG vs Valve: Why competition is good
I still love the innovation coming out of Valve (like their VR and controller work), but today I listened to the Beastcast Episode 2 and saw that Steam is implementing game refunds. This is something GOG has offered for quite some time now. It appears that GOG is starting to eat Valve’s lunch as it’s getting more Triple A games DRM-Free! I have no issues with Valve and I don’t consider them evil or anything hyperbolic, but here’s how healthy competition helps. Now Valve has to match GOG for refunds just as GOG has had to create GOG Galaxy to match the Steam client. I hope they continue to challenge each other in the market and create a good environment for us that is pro-consumer since digital has been anti-consumer for so long. (DRM, games/books/movies/etc being pulled without notice)
Year of the Linux Desktop? For Real this time!
I still really love using Linux, but I don’t follow the Linux press like I used to. I’ve settled into a comfortable zone where I only follow Fedora and KDE news since that’s what I use. But I followed it very closely for nearly 10 years. Every year there’d be multiple articles asking whether this was the year of the Linux desktop, meaning people would finally see the Microsoft hegemony for what it was and throw off the shackles of proprietary software. It never came. Thanks to Ubuntu and Vista, we almost got there. Then there were the Netbooks, but the manufacturers chose horrible versions of Linux and underpowered machines and Microsoft came out with Windows 7 starter edition. And people went to Macs instead of Linux in the biggest tech comeback of … ever.
December 2012 Games Report
[caption id=“attachment_5805” align=“aligncenter” width=“480”] Saint’s Row The Third: The Ho Boat[/caption]
Saint’s Row the Third (14 hrs): I got a lot of video games for my birthday and Christmas (mostly on Steam). So I wanted to finish up the last narrative game I had started before playing those games. I played a few missions in Saint’s Row The Third. As I had surmised before, the loose narrative based mostly on archetypes and stereotypes made it extremely easy to jump in. It wasn’t like in Mass Effect or Final Fantasy 10 where I couldn’t remember why I should be caring about these characters. The missions with the VTOL planes (STAG missions) were pretty hard.
The Easiest Server Setups: ownCloud, Team Fortress 2, and Piwigo
I first heard about virtual machines about six to seven years ago. I couldn’t see a point in wanting to run another computer inside your computer. A few years ago I used VMs to test and blog about Linux distros. In the past year I’ve used it to preview new features in Fedora while the next version was in beta. This week I used them in the most useful way yet: to test server software before implementing them on my public, paid server. These were some of easiest installs I’ve ever done - even easier than Wordpress’ famous Five Minute Install.
An Open Plea for Sanity to Amazon and Valve
Dear Amazon and Valve,
I write this to you because you are the largest and most powerful companies in your ecosystems. The digital world has become ridiculous and you need to be leaders in rectifying the situation. Let’s start with Amazon. The two biggest digital things you sell are books and music. Back in the analog world before commerce became a Wonderland distortion, if I bought a book or CD, any member in my household could access this item. It didn’t matter if I bought the book or my wife bought the book. We could both read it. The same went with a CD. Either of us could grab the CD off the shelf and put it into our portable CD player. But now go to the Kindle (or any other e-reader system) and Amazon CloudPlayer. Sure, either of us could pick up the e-reader to read a book. But what if we both want to read a different book at the same time. How can we access each other’s libraries? What about if we each want to listen to the same music library from Amazon CloudPlayer on our smart phones or other devices? For various reasons, like Amazon recommendations, it makes sense for us to have different accounts instead of a family account.
Greed Corp
This game that’s been capturing nearly all my free time in February was an impulse buy. At $10 I might have passed it up, but in a midweek sale it was $5 and I decided it looked interesting enough to pick up. This is a great example of what I spoke about here with respect to getting more people to buy a digital good by putting it on sale even if they don’t have shelf space to clear. Part of what drew me to the game was the decidedly retro-futuristic art style. It gives the game a very unique set of visuals. The 1920-40s music (I’m not 100% sure which decade) also helps add to the atmosphere.
The NeoEconomy
There’s a new system of exchange of goods and services that threatens to rock the economic system and it’s not some new form of derivatives. Digital goods and services are growing larger and larger, but economics has not yet caught up. This is scary because more and more of our economy is based upon digital goods. In order to understand why I’m raising a fuss about this, we have to do a quick review of economics 101.
The End of Braid Part 1 of ?
warning: The following contains many spoilers about Braid. I, personally, feel that your enjoyment of the game will be greatly reduced by reading this ahead of time. You have been warned!
I finished Braid last night. I did cheat a little. Of the 60 possible puzzle pieces, I used a walkthrough to get about 10 of them. Each of the ones that I used the walkthrough for (and I did not do this until I had spent a good chunk of time trying everything I had learned up to that point and even afterwards (since you could revisit worlds) were puzzles I would have NEVER solved. For example, the puzzle piece that is accessed by moving around the giant replica of the puzzle in the level would never, ever have occurred to me. Someone of a certain type of mind would surely have realized that the puzzles would not exist in the world if they did not have a purpose, but I could not figure this one out. And the fact that most of the puzzles are one-offs means that you never do this again.
First Look Review: Braid
That a game like Braid can exist is a statement on where video games are as an art form with a well-established history and canon. To make a parallel in the paint world: without a long canon of traditional paintings of tables with fruit and bread, people wouldn’t have really understood the “parody” or “remix” of a Cubist rendition of such a painting. In the same way, Braid is most enjoyable to those of us who have been playing video games for the past 20 years, growing up with Super Mario Bros. as our first video game experience. In fact, Braid does indeed make a few callbacks to this classic game which has almost become a scripture to us. Any game that allows users to design levels (eg Little Big Planet) cannot exist for more than a femptosecond before at least four people have recreated Super Mario Bros. World 1-1. Braid does nothing so brash and that’s where the game design genius begins to show. The game designer does not ape Mario, but hints at it here and there. One can almost see the developer giving you a knowing look and a nudge in the ribs. “Look here, I’ve made this or that subtle reference.” I don’t want to ruin it by speaking of it even though this game has been out for ~ a year already. It would ruin the delight of experiencing it.
Valve To Release Steam on Linux?
I heard this on The Linux Outlaws Episode 42 and I thought it was a pretty awesome idea. Up until now Valve has been pretty hostile towards people asking them to release onto Linux, even threatening to ban anyone who brought it up in the forums. Apparently someone has convinced them of the merits because here’s the story that led Linux Outlaws to report the headline.
My brother, who is really into video games, has informed me that pretty much every computer game developer plans to release via Steam in the near future. This means that most people, who are always mentioning their only reason for keeping Windows around is to play games, can finally get rid of Windows for good!