That’s that procedurally generated detective game, right?

I really need to try it because it seems right up my alley. From what I understand, it can get pretty intricate when it comes to the detective work which seems really interesting.

Got some stuff in my cart, but need to play some demos first before I hit the “buy” button. Surprisingly quite a few games I’m interested in have one available, which is nice.

In the meantime, I’ve started Case of the Golden Idol because I loved Return of the Obra Dinn and I know it’s highly recommended for fans of that.

Don’t know if I’m really feeling this as much, though. I’ll carry on, of course, because I still enjoy the detective puzzle aspect. But it isn’t drawing me in the way Obra Dinn did for some reason.

I remember first trying the original when I was like 11 or something.

At the time, I didn’t really understand much beyond “shooty shooty” when it came to games with guns (it would be shortly after this that I’d find stealth games and have that passion ignited), so I was given guns, used them how I usually did at the time and proceeded to get obliterated in the first level and gave up.

A few years later, after I’d gotten into stealth games, my love affair with immersive sims began.

Along with playing the Thief series, I went back to give Deus Ex a try and it all just clicked. I think it and Thief II were instrumental in cementing my love for the genre.

After playing and enjoying the first one, I played them all over the next few years and Mankind Divided is probably my second favourite after the original. Loved every moment.

Then fucking Square Enix does their bullshit, and then fucking Embracer ruined it for good.

All in all, I love Deus Ex and I’m super glad I found myself getting into stealth games and immersive sims, otherwise I would have missed out on it so many other of my favourite gaming experiences, Deus Ex being one of them.

What’s weird is that it’s like the only Looking Glass/Ion Storm/Eidos Montréal immersive sim franchise that doesn’t have a clear spiritual successor. For System Shock we got not only BioShock, but Prey (2017) as well. For Thief, we got Dishonored. For Ultima, we got Arx Fatalis/Libertatis (and early Elder Scrolls to a very lesser extent).

But for Deus Ex, we’ve got… I don’t know, Cyberpunk 2077, maybe? But the whole open world thing doesn’t really fit in with the usual gameplay loop of Deus Ex. There are a fair amount of great cyberpunk games, but none seem to really scratch that immersive sim itch. I guess Prey is pretty close as well (in addition to its System Shock influences), if you consider some of the body/power upgrades, but it’s not all that similar thematically.

I’d love for someone to come around and pull a Thanos by just going, “fine, I’ll do it myself”. If the franchise is dead, maybe now there’s more motivation for that, since, before a few months ago, we were still clinging to what little hope remained for the third Adam Jensen game. Or maybe someone already has and I’ve missed it.

Think I might be in early stages of a hypomanic episode, but not sure.

Need to chill somehow. Running with assumptions, though. Might just be a bad few days; just haven’t had them this suddenly in a while.

Might end up making this comment and by the time next week’s thread is started in a day or two, I’ll be feeling fine(-ish) again. Wouldn’t be the first time.

Could really do with something interesting like the Olympics right now, but that’s still almost a month away.

I don’t even enjoy most sports, but it’s a nice distraction. If I’m being honest, all I’m really interested in is the women’s football portion, although there’s at least more Euro 2025 qualifiers and a handful of friendlies in a couple of weeks to hold me over until then.

Edit: Lol, never mind, already feel better.

Was getting all set up for another playthrough of New Vegas, mods and all (even made my own, though I ditched it last minute), and then I realised, “Wait, why am I doing this? I don’t actually feel like playing this at all right now, even with the new mods.”

So, now I’ve downloaded some stuff in my backlog, but don’t know if I’ll play any of it at the moment because I’m kind of burned out a little.

Yeah, then they fucked up and trained EddieAI 2.0 on some new art and we got the Dance of Death cover.

They had to roll back to 1.5 after that, unfortunately.

I feel kind of bad.

I really don’t like killing things, but ants have literally invaded my home, so I’ve had to do something.

Sprinkled some diatomaceous earth today. Watching a few stragglers just kind of meandering and basically not knowing what the fuck to do while they dehydrate and succumb to death has depressed me a little.

On a basic level, the way it works, it’s just cruel. Yeah, they’re not “sentient”, they’re mostly drones, etc., but still. Seeing this lonely ant kind of just… slowly dying and not knowing what to do is a bit heartbreaking.

Not exactly playing, but learning my way around the GECK to create a few personal radio stations for New Vegas. I’ve learned how to do most of it, I just now need to sort the audio files and add them. Too cold to sit at my desk and finish this, so I’ll do all that later.

(Before anyone says “why not just use the mod that lets you add your own music files”, it’s because I need separate radio stations with unique names that I can switch between, each with their own chronological order, rather than one giant one which basically works by saying “random bullshit go”.)

I personally blocked all politics and news communities, found much less bots and trolls since then.

Same. It’s a much more pleasant experience in general.

Kernels shouldn’t be a problem if you have the backports repo enabled (you can enable it during install, otherwise add it to your sources.list).

You do first have to specify that you want the kernel from backports (or set up APT pinning preferences), but after that, it’ll keep that specific package updated whenever you run sudo apt upgrade and there’s a newer version.

If you installed the generic Linux image on installation (usually the default, I believe), the quick way to upgrade is basically just:

sudo apt install -t bookworm-backports linux-image-amd64

It should be noted that backports is not Sid or Testing, it’s stuff built specifically for current Stable that people might need newer versions of for various reasons (e.g. hardware, limited feature updates that don’t affect the base system, some development libraries, etc.), so it’s quite small in the amount of unique packages it has. Like, you can get newer LibreOffice packages, but you’re not going to get Plasma 6 or whatever.

Right now, the kernel is on 6.7 in backports, while Stable is on 6.1 and Sid is on 6.8. So you’ll get them a tiny bit later, but that’s in terms of days/weeks, rather than, you know, the usual two-ish years (not counting security updates).

Side note: if you want all this enabled by default, Spiral Linux is just straight up Debian Stable with a bunch of firmware packages preinstalled for easier installation on a variety of hardware and the kernel is updated via backports by default, so you could give that a shot as well.

It’s not like “a distro based on Debian”, it is Debian, but set up with conveniences for modern desktop users and also sets up btrfs + apt snapshotting by default, similar to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed’s process.

I did mention it as a smaller, compact alternative, but I maybe wasn’t specific enough with regard to the scope of gameplay.

Probably should have specified that I meant Outer Worlds as an alternative to Starfield mainly for people interested in a game set in space with the familiar approach to worldbuilding that Bethesda and Obsidian seem to share a bit, and also because it’s not uncommon to hear either of them referred to (maybe a bit unfairly) as “Fallout, but in space”.

Then again, most people interested in that would probably already have played it by now (although lots of new Fallout fans this year, so maybe not).

I’m really surprised that neither of the 2019 “Outer” games with similar names showed up in any of your posts: The Outer Worlds and Outer Wilds.

Worlds because if we’re talking about Starfield, it’s something to consider as a smaller, more compact alternative (although I recently finished a playthrough and there’s actually very few comparisons to be made between the two), and Wilds because… well, it’s just straight up space archaeology that makes heavy use of travel and planet exploration. Also because it’s probably one of the most critically well-received space games.

Something else I wanna throw out there: Heaven’s Vault. Nice little narrative game which takes place in space and has quite a calming (even if completely unrealistic) method of space travel.

Ended up starting a new playthrough of The Outer Worlds.

Mostly enjoying it and having Parvati with me again feels great.

Lol, it was buggy as fuck for me as well, so I “downloaded” another build and it worked perfectly.

The Game Pass version is especially bad in this regard.

Also on Netflix:

Play Wonderputt Forever if you like physics-based and/or golf games. I found it pretty fun and fairly challenging in the later levels.

Desta is also a really interesting narrative turn-based tactics game with some poignant emotional moments (it can actually be a bit heavy at times, especially if you’ve dealt with LGBTQ+ prejudice personally).

And I’m also really glad Netflix resurrected Cut The Rope from its grave. New puzzle daily and several months worth (i.e. hundreds) of puzzles to play if you’d like to catch up.

Quantum Break was really fun. I’d love some more time travel games like that.

While Remedy don’t own the rights and it can’t officially be “canon” to Alan Wake and Control, there are some things that the community has kind of put together which establishes how it’s a part of the wider universe/multiverse.

Loaded up The Outer Worlds yesterday because I wanted some first person Obsidian RPG goodness after finishing New Vegas a couple of weeks ago.

Forgot how absolutely fucking saturated and vibrant the colours are. My old monitor must not have had the saturation turned up or something because, as someone super sensitive to bright or intense anything, I don’t remember it immediately hurting my brain like it did last night.

Anyway, used ReShade and toned down a ton of shit. Then I realised I’m not actually feeling it all that much, so I’m going to start a new playthrough of New Vegas instead. I think this time I’m not gonna fuck Benny and kill him in his sleep. Well, maybe I’ll still rock his world because it’s hilarious, we’ll see.

Edit: Oh, also I’ve been playing a bit of XDefiant. It’s not terrible, honestly. Like, I’m not paying for their battle pass and I’ll definitely lose interest fairly quickly, but it’s not a bad distraction.

Too many fucking ants.

Getting some diatomaceous earth and we’ll see what happens.

My only worry is the spiders.

I like little house spiders. Never really bother them and they don’t really bother me, and I really don’t want to kill any, so I hope whichever ones happen to be hanging around (if there are any) won’t get too close to the floor.

Something is very wrong with me… I’ve been playing Overwatch and… enjoying it? Still a shell of its former self, but it’s not always too terrible.

I need to get away from the computer desk and mouse/keyboard for a while, though, so I’m thinking of either giving Fallout 76 a shot or starting up a new playthrough of New Vegas and going for a different ending.

Got a few new mods to try, particularly new radio stations and other goodies, but I’m wondering if I should use that “make your own radio” mod to add some old time radio shows like The Shadow(*) and sci-fi podcasts that fit the theme.

Sure there are a bunch of mods with great shows like Dimension X already, but after hearing the same episodes over and over again, it might be nice to listen to other popular shows (e.g. The Shadow) or more obscure ones (e.g. Candy Matson).

Might actually just use one of the other radio mods as a base and make my own mod entirely. Did that with Skyrim to much success (power metal when dragons appear, bardcore in the taverns, all kinds of fun).

(*) (I mean, that’s pretty much what The Silver Shroud in FO4 was, which I should maybe also try and get into my NV radio because I enjoyed that as well.)

Hah, I was actually considering Tunic! But I’m also a little mentally burned out, so I think I need to be in a bit of a different headspace, otherwise I’m going to ignore some of the more interesting parts like the little secrets and slowly revealing the instruction manual and all that curiosity-rewarding stuff.

It’s definitely on my “to play relatively soon” list, though, and thanks for the suggestion!