Sophocles @ Sophocles @infosec.pub

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Joined

2 yr. ago

PS2/Xbox/Gamecube is my favorite era of gaming; there were so many good titles released. Here are some hidden gems some might like:

007 Nightfire: best Bond game imo aside from Goldeneye, spy themed fps, great splitscreen multiplayer

Marvel Ultimate Alliance: beat em up featuring a sizeable amount of marvel heroes (deadpool!)

Midnight Club 3: way ahead of its time; open world racing develeoped by rockstar. Basically GTA but just the car part

Sonic Unleashed: very slept-on sonic title, has the usual fast paced running but you can also become a werewolf sonic and it becomes more hack n slash / 3d platformer

SoulCalibur 2&3: SoulCalibur is my favorite fighting franchise, and SC2 is the best in that series. I like SC2 better on Gamecube because of Link, but SC3 was only released on Playstation 2

Star Trek Conquest: an RTS but for console? A decent Star Trek game? It's actually a lot of fun and challenging with certain civilizations. Winning as the Federation is HARD

Test Drive Off Road Wide Open: a racing game I used to play all the time, had an open world setting that I would just drive around in for hours. Fun, fast paced, and features Metallica!

Star Wars the Clone Wars: vehicular combat game with a surprisingly fun campaign. Flying around in a clone dropship is so much fun and the splitscreen multiplayer is a lot of fun too

Seconded on the Dolphinbar. If you switch it to mode 4 and you have an original wiimote it works natively with Dolphin emulator. Very straightforward setup and minimal tweaking. Best 30 bucks I've ever spent

Splitgate already turned me off in the first one when they nerfed all the weapons into oblivion. Not sure why almost every indie shooter I try eventually nerfs their guns into paintballs. I miss the days of the first call of duty where you could just mow everything down with the PPSh or actually one-shot with a sniper

Where's Gordy when you need him?

I tend to agree, open world is becoming just a box to tick off for AAA developers, which means it just gets put in as filler basically. Halo Infinite is the worst example I can think of. However I do think there are 2 ways open world can be justified: if the world is just packed so full of interesting stuff that the game just gets huge, or if the way of traversing that world is fun.

Category 1 would be games like Morrowind, Skyrim , Fallout 4, or even Mass Effect on a smaller scale. There's just so much to do that it becomes an open world on its own. Category 2 would be games like the Arkham series , Assassins Creed, or Forza Horizon, where getting from point A to point B is fun on its own.

Open world is great when it's done right, but since when has Ubisoft or EA made a good game in the past 10 years?

Steam Deck adhesive is unironically one of my favorite smells ngl. Guilty as charged

I did a deep dive into frontends because I love organizing stuff in general. I use different frontends for each device I have because they all have different pros, but overall my favorite is Playnite because of its metadata and sorting features. For Windows I use Playnite, on Linux I use Pegasus, on Steam Deck I use RetroDeck/EmulationStation, and on handhelds I use Knulli Firefly.

Playnite is imo the king, because it has really beautiful themes with custom cover art and can sort games in basically any way possible: by system, rating, genre, name, release date, you name it. The only con is that it's Windows exclusive (for the near future) and is janky in Wine/Lutris.

Pegasus is spectacular for its fine grained control, and can be configured to do basically anything. Its like the Arch Linux of the frontend world; start with the basics and build from the ground up. With tinkering, it works great on almost any platform.

RetroDeck is great because it's plug n play. I love to tinker, but I also wanted a platform to just play my games without hastle or messing around. I find myself actually playing my games on the deck instead of tinkering with the frontend.

Knulli Firefly is great for smaller screen handhelds for a similar reason. It's very customizable, but also works straight away with little to no hastle. It's also better than most stock OSes that ship with emulation devices

And the Linux community is Gordon Ramsay

Where's the green bell pepper :(

In my opinion linux runs old windows games better than windows itself. When I was on XP I used to play games like Starcraft and Lemmings Revolution which absolutely refused to work on Windows 10 after I switched, even in compatability mode. Later when I switched to linux, they worked great with Lutris with very few issues. Linux is great for older games. For newer games, Steam has most bases covered and worked ootb.

If you enjoy Titanfall 2 you might like Call of Duty Black Ops 3. I still havent found a game that handles so well and feels so smooth. It got a lot of flak at the time (2014) because everyone was tired of future shoooters, but imo it has the best fps mechanics not only in cod, but in any fps game. The story is also really good; I wont spoil but it does get kinda philosophical and has plenty of twists and turns.

As others have said, the Half Life series is probably the best fps objectively. I started with 2 and then played 1, so while they do go in order, it isn't required. HL1 is a bit clunky but still great.

Also James Bond 007 games are criminally underrated. Everyone knows about Goldeneye for the N64, but some of my favorites are Nightfire, From Russia with Love, Everything or Nothing, and Goldeneye Reloaded. A lot of the Steam pages were taken down for them though, and are only really playable on console, but definitely worth it if you are able to play

I see a couple of other comments reccomending exfat; I've had problems with exfat with both the Steam flatpak and the Steam system package. Exfat does not support linux symlinks which are needed for some if not most Steam games to work properly. You will have to re-install your games onto an ext4 or linux-friendly filesystem, for Steam at least.

Emulation and GOG is a different story though. I have both on an exfat drive and I can access and play them with both windows and linux.

In terms of security, you will be at a slight risk using an unsupported os in the future. But hey, some people I know are still on Windows 7, so it isn't a huge risk. As long as you practice basic computer hygene and have an antivirus running (windows defender (easy), malwarebytes (secure), or clamAV (open source) are decent picks) you'll be fine.

Yes, you can find it in the themes directory. It also has really good documentation on github in case you want to make custom collections or swap out game system cover art. I went down the qml rabbit hole because of pegasus, it was super fun

No problem! I think it depends on the theme. I use the Retro Mega Next theme which is optimized for handhelds, but it works great with mouse and keyboard.

I use Pegasus at the moment as it's extremely customizable, although it does have a bit of a learning curve since you do most things through media.txt files. You can configure launch commands, box art/media/videos through an external scraper (I use Skyscraper), and you can point to bash files which opens up use of the terminal for basically anything you want to do OS side. It also has many different themes, basic metadata, and sorts games by system.

Emulation station is also another popular choice and is more out-of the-box minded bit still requires a bit of know how.

I also really like Playnite because it's video game sorting heaven, but sadly it's windows only and is really janky in wine/lutris. I eagerly await the day a working linux port arrives.

I second this, I greatly prefer news from real people with their own style, especially when there's so much ai stuff and corporate boringness elsewhere. I'd love to see a part 5, good job!

Edit: Part 5!

One area of The Talos Principle is set in Greco-Roman ruins. It captues a very specific tone. The puzzles are fun too

I also enjoy dualsense and there is definitely quality there, but I could not get it to work with a handfull of emulators on linux for some reason. I'm sure there could be some tinkering to do to get it working but I've just been using xbox series for plug n play

Not generic, but I've been using Xbox Series controllers with LMDE. They were plug n play and work flawlessly out of the box. I've used them with both bluetooth and wired and have had no problems with emulation and steam. You'd probably save more buying a used xbox controller for about $30-$50 than trial and error with cheaper off-brand gamepads

Texas brisket was honestly a close second for me. It's so good when it's done right.

I totally agree on the West coast pick. San Diego and Tijuana have some of the best mexican food anywhere, and it greatly outshines the other food in the area