Gamer's Diary 2009-02-13

Tuesday I started going through my Steam games in alphabetical order. I successfully got Half-Life, Half-Life: Blue Shift, and Half-Life 2: Lost Coast installed and running. To cap the evening off, I gave Fallout 2 a brief try (which I'd forgotten on Friday), and it ran beautifully.

Wednesday I installed and ran Darwinia (for which I found a native Linux executable), and Half-Life: Opposing Force.

Then on Thursday I tried to get Team Fortress 2 to install and run, but Steam refused to unpack the game files, instead giving me the all too familiar error message, "This game is currently unavailable. Please try again later." I had no luck getting past it, but I haven't run out of things to try yet.

Gamer's Diary 2009-02-10

Over the weekend I started a new gaming project: Get most of my PC games working in Linux, so I would only rarely have to reboot to Windows. Along the way I play-tested each game to see if it worked, so I played a lot of games.

Friday night I got the Good Old Games versions of Fallout and Fallout 2 installed in Crossover Linux Professional. I play-tested Fallout, and it ran great.

I also installed Frederik Pohl's Gateway and Gateway II: Homeworld, a couple of old DOS games that were made freeware by the publisher before it went under. These I installed in DosBox, a program for many platforms (including Linux and Windows) that emulates a PC running MS-DOS, and used DBGL to make them easily launchable. They ran very well in Linux.

I did not, however, play enough of any of the four games to form an impression of them. I'll write about them when I've played more of them.

Saturday I reinstalled Crossover Games, then installed Steam in it and started trying again to get my Steam games running in Linux. I had success in installing X-COM: UFO Defense and Half-Life and getting both to run properly, but Half-Life 2 was another story - and not a happy one.

It kept hanging after the initial loading screen. I tried many different combinations of command-line and in-game video options, to no avail. Finally I gave up and called it a night.

Sunday I tried varying my video driver - again without success - until I remembered that the way to deal with proprietary ATI video drivers in Linux is to use Envy. So I did, and noticed during the installation process that Envy relinked the driver to the Linux kernel. Aha! This was why I'd been experiencing issues with video for a while; I'd updated my kernel a couple of times since I last installed the video driver, and now they were out of sync.

After I updated the video driver, Half-Life 2 started working. Steam didn't work that well though; I started getting "server too busy" when trying to download a game, and "application unavailable" when trying to launch one. I managed to find workarounds for both problems, and command-line options that worked reasonably well for running the game, but eventually encountered settings that hung the game and prevented me from getting back to Linux. So I did a hard reset of my PC, and after that Crossover Games didn't work right. So I uninstalled it, reinstalled it, and started the painful downloading process once again.

Monday I tried Half-Life 2 again, without much luck, and decided instead to focus on getting two kinds of games to work: single player games I don't have on other platforms, and multiplayer games. So I gave up on Half-Life 2 and instead tried to run Half-Life 2 Deathmatch.

Unfortunately, I couldn't get it to work either. It simply refused to go past the menu screen and start a match. So I gave up on it too. When I'm at a lan party, I'll just have to boot Windows.

Gamer's Diary - Various games, comfort gaming

There were too many games to put in the title, so here's a list:

• Descent 3
• Fallout
• Fallout2
• Half-Life: Decay
• Halo: Combat Evolved
• Halo 2
• Halo 3
• Marvel Ultimate Alliance
• Okami
• Portal: Still Alive

Descent 3 and Descent 3 Mercenary: I pulled out my joystick to play these as they don't work well with the mouse. I enjoyed the Descent 3 campaign, but Mercenary's BlueDevil level doesn't seem to have any way to complete it.

Okami: I played this for several days and it enchanted me again. I don't know how long I will play before tiring of it, but it will take some time.

I find the total package of Japanese mythology brought to life in a game that looks like a painting charming, to say the least.

When it gets old - assuming I'm not comfort-gaming again - I'll turn to the next game that came up in the shuffle, Burnout Paradise. That may not happen for a while.

Marvel Ultimate Alliance: A while ago I took a break from Okami to play online with an old friend who lives halfway across the country and only owns a PS2 and a low performance Windows laptop. I picked the game this time, and because I wanted to play with my friend instead of against him, I chose Marvel Ultimate Alliance.

We didn't get as much enjoyment out of it as I thought we would. First, the action seemed kind of samey after a while - beat up bad guys, find puzzle piece, rinse, repeat. Second, while the game supposedly revolves around getting and using superpowers, we had no difficulty progressing through the level using nothing but the two basic attacks. Third, once I loaded a co-op game from a save, it became impossible to change the difficulty level. So we couldn't see if perhaps the superpowers would become more necessary at those higher levels.

Halo, Halo 2, Halo3, Half-Life: Decay: I've spent the rest of the time up to now comfort-gaming. I played through all three Halo games on easy, and they entertained as always. Then I set my sights on the comfortable Half-Life series. But instead of playing one of the games, expansions or episodes I'd already completed, I chose the only one I hadn't: Half-Life: Decay.

Decay comes with the PS2 version of Half-Life. It offers a co-op (or single player) experience, set during the Black Mesa disaster, but from a different point of view (like Opposing Force or Blue Shift). It departs from the Half-Life 'formula' in several ways:

• Instead of a mostly seamless, load-on-demand world, it breaks the story up into discrete levels, called 'missions'.
• Decay does not offer quick-save and save-anywhere. Instead one can only save at the end of a mission. Die during a mission and you must start that one over.
• The game presents two protagonists, whether playing single-player or co-op. In single-player one can switch between them. Some puzzles require the two characters to work together.

I've enjoyed what I've played of it, though I found some of the co-operative puzzles a bit tricky when having to switch between characters in time for the second to take advantage of an opportunity created by the first. The 'aimig assist' feature also added frustration. You have to get the aiming reticle quite close to your target, then hit the 'lock-on' button to have a decent chance of hitting the enemy. The extra time spent locking on means that the small, fast headcrabs will jump and take a bite out of your face before you can zero them. I solved that problem by using a USB mouse and keyboard, which the game supports and which made targeting enemies (especially the headcrabs) much easier.

Perhaps I made a mistake choosing Decay for comfort gaming. Too late; it has hooked me.

Portal: Still Alive: I found it a bit pricey since I already had Portal (twice, actually - both PC and Xbox 360), but I just had to have the challenge levels. I didn't play them, though; I started playing through the main game again, partly to refamiliarize myself with the gameplay, and partly because it feels so darn good.

Fallout, Fallout 2: A new website called Good Old Games (gog.com) has arranged with the license holders of some good old PC games to offer the games as DRM-free downloads that run on Windows XP and Vista at very reasonable prices ($5.99 for most titles). I'd never played Fallout before, and at these prices I couldn't resist.

I didn't play either game much, just enough to begin to get a feel for the gameplay. I'll be returning to them when they show up in my random game selection. Meantime, I've returned to playing Half-Life: Decay, and that scratches my comfort-gaming itch.