Recently discovered and played:

• Harmonies: cool spatial puzzle with drafting. Reminded me a bit of Tiny Towns
• Junk Drawer: small polyomino game where you are building into 4 separate areas at the same time, each with its own varying scoring condition

Discovered and looking forward to play:

• Flatiron: New game from the designers of Red Cathedral and White Castle
• Marabunta: 2-player area control by Reiner Knizia
• Mindbug: Very small card battling system by Richard Garfield and others

I am a longtime classic roguelike player (Nethack, DCSS) so the HJKL bindings are natural to me. In Pixel Dungeon terms that’s:

• North: K
• West: H
• South: J
• East: L
• NW: Y
• NE: U
• SW: B
• SE: N

You may have to change some other key bindings to accommodate this but from what I remember the keys were mostly unused in the default layout.

…but I must add that I didn’t end up playing much in keyboard mode. The main thing missing for me is shift+direction based fast movement. This would let you keep moving in a direction until you encounter something interesting (or dangerous). Without this you end up having to hold down direction keys to cover distance and this is awkward and sometimes dangerous in roguelikes. Some kind of keyboard triggerable auto-explore would be nice too and if I remember right the pop-ups and menus were not particularly keyboard friendly either.

I haven’t played at my FLGS yet but I occasionally buy stuff. Since the prices tend to be significantly higher I either wait for sales or buy smaller games where the price difference is easier to swallow. I don’t have it in me to pay MSRP or higher for expensive games. I think under $30 is my psychological threshold where I am willing to pay extra for the instant gratification.

I imagine I would be more willing to spend more if I was more involved with the community around the store.

Looks great! I used Twire in the past but this is a lot more polished and doesn’t require using an account.

Is 5-6 the typical player count or is it usually 4 or less? A lot of games max out at 4 or play too slow with more. There are plenty of great games for 5-6 or more but its an important consideration.

For 5-6 my picks would be Challengers, 6 nimmt!, various roll & writes (Welcome To, Super Mega Lucky Box etc), 7 Wonders, It’s a Wonderful World (might need expansion for 6), Sushi Go Party, Tiny Towns.

Games with fast turns or simultaneous play.

That’s just a go-go 80s Reaganaut issuing a challenge.

There is a series of tabletop games called MicroMacro that are sort of the same idea with a similar art style if you are into that. You have to solve various mysteries by tracing sequences of events. Good fun either solo or with friends.

Ugh, that’s a pretty insane default. Thanks for the heads-up.

I had similar worries about the AMD driver stability before I switched from NV about 5 years ago. But my experience has been great even back then and things have only improved since.

One data point to consider is that Valve is shipping the Steam Deck with an AMD AMU and stability and compatibility is paramount for that use case.

I’ve been waiting forever for this to get a real price cut but instead it just got 50% more expensive. I guess I will just have to be patient for another decade.

Any naming convention is fine as long as it’s meaningful to you. But it’s a good idea to keep your own repos separate from the random ones you clone from the internet.

What I see is an inexperienced developer who instead of systematically debugging the issue keeps trying random stuff hoping that it will somehow work.

Don’t forget spite. The guy was always an asshole but when people finally started calling him out he got triggered and became a raging asshole. Now he thinks that he found his people but doesn’t realize that they hate him too, they just find him useful for the moment.

If it looks interesting then make sure to check out the Forest of Shadows version too. It can be played either standalone or combined with the original. It adds a poison mechanic and some other relatively minor things. There is also a newer space themed game called One Deck Galaxy but I haven’t played that one yet.

Thanks. I tried to make sense of it and experimented a bit with making the same ioctl’s mentioned but couldn’t get it to work. I either didn’t get it right or it’s something else.

Maybe I will take another look later but for now my workaround is to just fire up Baba Is You which idles at a low cpu use and then run evfwd with the grab option so that Baba no longer gets the input.

Yes, that works too with one fairly big caveat: for some reason the Steam Deck’s controller is not producing evdev events until a game is actually running on the deck. So evfwd is not receiving events while the Steam UI is active. I haven’t been able to figure out yet why this is the case.

If you want to try it you can start a random game on the deck and then fire up evfwd on the controller device and using the -g (grab) flag to avoid passing events to the running game.

Edit: while we are talking about the Steam Deck: when ssh-ing to the deck it can be helpful to turn off wifi power management to avoid lag: iw wlan0 set power_save off

One Deck Dungeon is an inexpensive small box co-op game with a fantasy dungeon crawl theme and an approachable rule set. It only plays 1 or 2 but you could always have 2 people share a character and make the decisions together. Or just share both characters between all players. There is also an app version (mobile, steam) that is a good way to learn the game.

I’ve been using VLC for folder based play of audio files. The UI is not ideal but it works well and the other apps I’ve tried didn’t work out for various reasons. Unfortunately the Android Auto version of the UI doesn’t have access to the folder browsing feature.

No idea if VLC has lyrics support for audio-only files.

It’s been mostly Isaac as usual but I picked up Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate yesterday and I like it a lot. It’s a fast-playing roguelite with a neat idea that’s implemented well. The game mechanics remind me of Hoplite on mobile.

The game is currently on sale and has a free demo. It has good controller input and low resource use, a great fit for the Deck.

Trump and his handlers just before the debate:

Handler: Mr President… (he insists on being called that by his people) - before you go out there I want you to promise again that you won’t bring up the thing about people eating cats and dogs…
Trump: yeah, fine
Handler: Remember how we talked about this? And how you promised that you won’t bring it up no matter what happens?
Trump: Yeah, fine, whatever.