If you’ve never had a gaming computer before and you’re on a budget, look up how to set up Heroic Games Launcher and make accounts with Epic and GOG. They give away free games all the time, and almost all of them will work on Steam Deck.

1998 comes up a lot in response to this question, for good reason. Pokemon Red/Blue, Baldur’s Gate, Metal Gear Solid, Thief, Half-Life, Fallout 2, StarCraft, and on and on. Games were made much more quickly back then, and the technological advancements allowed for a lot of these games to do new things that no one had done before, that were quite predictably going to be well-received.

If I’m putting together a pantheon of great years in gaming, it looks like 1998, 2004, 2007, 2011, 2013, 2015, 2017, and 2023. If I’ve got to pick one, it might be 2004. Half-Life 2, Metroid Prime 2: Echoes (an odd choice for many, but it’s maybe my favorite in the series), Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater and Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes, Halo 2, Burnout 3: Takedown, Star Wars: Battlefront, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Unreal Tournament 2004, The Sims 2, Doom 3, The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, Viewtiful Joe 2, Ninja Gaiden, Counter-Strike: Source, etc., etc. This was a magical time in online multiplayer, where it was pretty new for most, and you could do things like proximity chat in a shooter and expect people to actually use it for the video game at hand instead of spewing slurs into the mic. Local multiplayer was abundant. Obtuse game design made to sell strategy guides was just about obsolete, and DLC had yet to be invented (outside of beefier expansions). Midnight launches were exciting, and I have fond memories of, for reasons I can’t explain, playing Halo 2 on launch day in a 12-player LAN using bean bags, projectors, and 3 Xboxes set up in a local college’s racket ball court.

The Egypt one was definitely one where they changed it a lot. So much so that I no longer enjoyed playing them.

It’s a random statistical sample. They know that approximately 3 people for every 100 are on Linux, but it doesn’t matter which 3.

It’s a good game, but at least in RtwP, it could be a real endurance test. Most of my combats that went wrong did so because I had decision fatigue from having to march through so many enemy mobs.

It can be a slow transition, but I did the same. I had equal space for Windows and Linux in 2017, predating the Proton years. When I built a machine in 2021, I saw how much I was using each OS, and it ended up being 1.5TB Linux and 500GB Windows. Whenever I build my next PC, I’m quite confident I won’t have any reason to use Windows at all, seeing as I haven’t even booted that partition in about a year. If there is some odd use case, like a firmware update utility for a peripheral that requires Windows or something, I’ll just install Windows briefly on a cheap mini PC I’ve got and then set it back to Bazzite when I’m done.

Outside of delisted games, I always encourage people not to, but yes.

It’s possible, but it’s also possible that they already had that offline segregation built into the code to support the Switch version, and that it was trivial to enable.

THPS offline mode is the same version as elsewhere, but it magically allows itself to operate offline when it thinks it’s running on a Steam Deck, which you can do with a launch parameter. Baldur’s Gate 3 actually has a native Linux version that is only officially supported for Steam Deck, and that might be closer to what you’re referring to.

You’re on Lemmy, a site people use when they don’t like reddit. You don’t see any reason why there might also be a ton of people here who use Linux, an operating system you use when you don’t like Windows?

Who else has an incentive to do so other than Valve? Even when you buy a pre-built with Windows today, those things are subsidized by bloatware that’s already installed on the machine.

They kept the original title from the video, which is typically ediquette. The long and short of it is: from the perspective of someone who wants access to all of these games on modern platforms in an official capacity, especially for online play, it’s not a good package. There’s a lot of input delay, and the online experience is missing a lot of crucial features, not to mention some audio issues as a result of the emulation methods.

At the very least, this is the case on PlayStation. This same company put out the Street Fighter 30th Anniversary collection, and it had a lot of the same problems on consoles. The input lag in particular was less of a problem on PC. To my eyes/ears/hands, the input lag isn’t a problem in SF 30th on PC, but I haven’t measured it scientifically, nor am I so familiar with those old games that I’d notice something is off; on PC though, it passes the sniff test. It’s possible the same is the case for this collection on PC, which would still suck for console players, but it would at least mean that one of these versions is still good. Also, in the years after SF 30th, Digital Eclipse has focused on the documentary aspect of their work, and Max Dood doesn’t really mention this or care much about it at all, but it is a major factor in the appeal of DE’s collections.

I certainly thought I wanted to play Enter the Matrix but as Neo, but I felt Path of Neo jumped the shark with things like MC Escher, fire ants, and giant Smith.

Your list here and the one above it are all full of great examples, and we didn’t even mention Batman: Arkham Asylum.

Better than nothing. Thanks! Steam’s DRM has reared its head more often thanks to, ironically, the Steam Deck and playing on the go in places without internet access.

EDIT: Although, the results thus far are a little disappointing. I went to the store pages for a few known offenders and didn’t see what I’d hope to see. Dragon Ball FighterZ, for instance, has no DRM mentioned by the extension, but that one was one of the most finicky for launching in offline mode. I brought it to a fighting game major on a mini PC, and if you didn’t authenticate it online on the same boot, the game would refuse to launch. I’m guessing it’s just the bog standard Steam DRM, and this extension seemingly only lists third party DRM.

Is there a tool you can use to check that against your own library? I never got the sense it was anywhere close to a majority of my library, but years ago, I was just cross checking my then-small library against a hand-maintained list.

Heroic has gone pretty well for me. I’ve found a few exceptions that are solved by the same trick though. If you’re running a game like The Thaumaturge, and it doesn’t boot on the GOG version, take a look at SteamDB. SteamDB’s entry for the game has a “depot” for VC 2019, VC 2022, and DirectX 2010. If you run winetricks on The Thaumaturge via Heroic and install those three dependencies, it works.

As it relates to gaming, no. This is a large company who thought they could muscle their way into a very competitive market and then found that they very much could not.

They’re charging for it because the Japanese audience will pay for it, and I guess they don’t want to handle it differently abroad. Fighting games, at least up to this point, have been sustainable in a way that the rest of e-sports have not. The rest of e-sports was predicated on future growth, and fighting games have only grown as fast as the money coming in, in general. (2XKO is putting out $50k in pot bonuses for a game that doesn’t look to be earning that much, and the Saudis now own SNK and treat Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting like they’re Call of Duty.)

Mostly they bought or founded studios that didn’t produce a product. They bought the Killer Instinct devs, Double Helix, who mostly have now left and formed Quarter Up Games, working on the new Invincible Vs game. They put out a hero shooter called Crucible that launched and was quickly shut down. Their biggest success has been New World, which is a moderately successful MMO. They also forked CryEngine into Lumberyard, which found some favor in the market. Other than that, they’ve got some co-publishing deals, including for an upcoming Tomb Raider game, which may now be in jeopardy.