pride and games

Spangwiches — Sat Oct 22, 2011 5:47 am

Author: Spangwiches

Posted: Sat Oct 22, 2011 5:47 am

This will be babble, forgive me.

I like playing games. I also like taking screenshots and showing them to my friends. In Windows I used a proprietary and paid-for piece of software to take screenshots of games because the normal Windows screenshot mechanism doesn't work with graphical overlays.

In Linux I was just using the gnome-screenshot thing. But it only seems able to save as pngs. 4mb is a bit much for a game screenshot. So! I wrote a little one-line bash script which uses Imagemagick's import thing and saves a jpeg to my dropbox. Then mapped it to a key combo. Take that proprietary software, replicated in one line. This is the source of my pride. I know it's no big deal, yet at the same time.. I made that

So... do people here play games on Linux (emulated (I know fromt he podcast that Mike likes Frontier and NES games of course), Wine, native, whatever)? What's good?

I'm currently replaying a few loved games via Wine. Right now: King's Bounty: Armored Princess: Crossworlds. Which is a ridiculous name even by FOSS standards.

I'd recommend the King's Bounty games to anyone who likes the convergence of thinking and fun. They're like a cross between the old Heroes of Might and Magic games (or indeed the original King's Bounty game) and FUN. They have this absurd, self-aware sense of humour which beats anything else I've seen in games. And they're magnificently camp with it.

I just got a my pet dragon in KB:AP:C and named it in honour of he to whom we owe so much. I'm sure he'd approve of my playing Windows games in Wine.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/132841/2011-10-22_050626_033610742.jpg

Aside from that I've played (in Wine) a bit of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (which actually works better than in Windows 7, where compatibility with trainer apps was broken). And Oblivion and Morrowind. And Civilization IV.

I also have all the Humble Bundle games installed. Of those I very strongly recommend VVVVVV, which is a masterpiece of an insane platformer (I don't like platformers usually, but this is something special. It takes an 8-bit, C64-like aesthetic and deconstructs it to all fuck and back). Machinarium is also superb, a beautiful, subtle, clever point and click adventure game. World of Goo is... alright. If you like games and have never played it then it's worth a pop. Overrated like crazy though. Oh and there's always Minecraft. Minecrack indeed.

As for Free games, I love Nethack of course. Though I'm loathe to start it up, knowing how many hours it'll consume. Battle of Wesnoth is a pretty good turn-based kinda light strategy game.

So what else is good, especially GPLed stuff and also classics-I-may-have-missed?

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pride and games