Gaming

Introduction Over the past few weeks I’ve played an finished Sea of Stars and I decided to write a review for it. I’ll be going over some things but keep it mostly spoiler-free until the end of the review. The spoiler section will be marked and the article will be concluded by a spoiler-free section at the very end. Sea of Stars is a fairly recent game in the style of a JRPG. It was inspired by Chronotrigger (which I’ve played but never got very far) and adopted a few mechanics from it, as far as I can tell. You play a party of people and control them from an isometric point of view. Combat is turn-based and the way you travel over the map seems very reminiscent of Chronotrigger. But can it compete with the original? We’ll see. ...

“Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy” celebrates its 20th anniversary this year! Reason enough to dust it off and play it yet again. This time I went to hunt for mods to make it more interesting this time around and I found JKHub. This has a list of recommended mods for the game here featuring cosmetic ones, new textures, new lightsabers, new character models but also conversion mods, new missions and more! But first things first: installation. I own the GOG version of the game so I used Lutris to install the game with this script. It makes use of OpenJK, an open-source reimplementation of the game engine which also has a Linux build so you can now play this game natively on Linux! What a time to be alive! ...

I recently decided to revisit the childhood memory of mine that is “Zelda - Majora’s Mask” on my Steam Deck. I’ve never owned a Nintendo console and was only ever able to play at a friend’s place or watch them play. I figured that after so many years it was finally my turn to play, especially because I now have a console (sort of) that is quite powerful at emulation. ...

Here’s another piece of gaming nostalgia: Freelancer. It’s celebrating its 20th birthday this year which seems like a good opportunity to me to get it up and running again. Prerequisites Although this can probably achieved in any number of ways here is what I used: Lutris (flatpak or native), the version used here was 0.5.14 from Flathub Freelancer install script for Lutris (the following is a customized version of this which contains various fixes including a no-CD fix). This script contains a custom return code after the initial installation. This is necessary because this step does not exit cleanly resulting in the Lutris installation crashing. Expand to see script ...

This game is an interesting one. It was infamous after its release and I haven’t been in the habit of paying attention to new game releases for a long time. For the most past that’s because for the longest time in my life I didn’t have a powerful enough gaming PC and my disposal (also no gaming console) so I couldn’t have run them anyway. Now that I own a Steam Deck I’m in a sort of narrow window where somewhat recent AAA games are available to me which is why I tend to look around the Steam Store a bit more nowadays. ...