• 1 Post
  • 41 Comments
Joined 10 months ago
cake
Cake day: September 13th, 2023

help-circle





  • For me I just found it annoying that whenever we wanted to go in different directions one player would end up getting dragged back by the camera border. So many failed jumps…

    But that’s fair, if someone thinks that being able to get in the way of each other and being forced to cooperate better due to it adds to their enjoyment of the game then playing the games without split screen could be preferable.

    I just never considered that possibility.


  • Lego games like Lego Starwars has already been mentioned and I will second those (especially the newer ones that have split screen).

    Divinity Original Sin is also great.

    Honestly most games I can think of have already been mentioned and those who have not seem like they might not be that great of an option since it seems your partner isn’t normally into gaming. (RTS in particular might be too hard)

    But I will suggest some anyway just in case

    Starcraft 2 has free online multiplayer which includes a COOP vs AI mode.

    There’s also a 2 player campaign adaption of Warcraft 3’s normally single player campaign. Although it might only be available for pre-Reforged.

    Also I didn’t know about it before now, I googled it just in case, but apparently SC2 also has COOP mods for its campaigns.

    You mentioned having a Switch so I will recommend Advance Wars Reboot and Wargroove 1 & 2, although there are no COOP campaigns but you can play multiplayer maps.

    Besides Advance Wars Reboot Camp on Switch (or the originals for Gameboy, which you could play with emulator), there’s also an online fan site called Advance Wars By Web where you can play advance wars in the web browser, although there’s no single player.

    Wargroove is also on Steam and besides the campaign and regular game itself there are puzzles.

    And speaking of Puzzles, card games tend to have Puzzles. I haven’t actually played Magic, Yu Gi Oh, etc. so I can’t say for sure whether they have any, but there’s puzzles in Faeria. (I would’ve recommended Might and Magic Duel of Champions, it had some great puzzles, but Ubisoft shut that game down many years ago)





  • Arch is made out to be a lot harder and unstable than it really is. And AUR is a great resource but realistically you won’t even use it that much. At least I haven’t. I used it for Brave Browser package before switching to Firefox, some WINE gst plugin, and some other small stuff I don’t remember.

    Also keep in mind even if it’s a AUR package, you can just install the package like normal if it’s a binary (it will be named with a -bin at the end, like brave-bin), so just because you’re using some packages from AUR it doesn’t mean you have to build lots of packages from source every time you update.

    People hear scary stuff about some random update breaking the system but it’s exaggerated.

    You definitely can break stuff with user error and sometimes if you’re not paying attention while updating you can get problems (combination of bad defaults + user error).

    Main problem is that you can do whatever you want, but you might not actually know what you really want to do or you might not be doing what you meant to do, and Arch Linux will let you do it even if something breaks due to it.

    And well that’s going to be same regardless of OS but it’s more accessible on Arch.

    However you shouldn’t be too worried about it, in the basically worst case scenario you might need a Live USB and another device with an internet connection to look up and what you need to do to fix what’s wrong, but you can always count on that there’s a fix.

    Most other OSes if you have a problem, depending on what it is you might just be stuck with it.

    Biggest noob mistake I recall doing was that I had my old windows hard drive as extra storage and slowly moving stuff over once in a while, so I hadn’t reformatted it and I also wasn’t aware of that the default Linux NTFS driver wasn’t very good and that I should’ve gotten NTFS-3G if I weren’t going to reformat.

    Well one day while not paying attention while updating my system through pacman (yay actually) I was also copying files from my old windows hard drive and I didn’t even look before just pressing accept on some AUR package rebuild.

    Well it turns out that package was formerly part of Extra repository and thus it used to be a binary package, but now since it was moved to the AUR and it didn’t have -bin it was changed to a package to be built from source, and if I were to continue using it I should’ve changed which package.

    But I just hit accept and it started chugging away, and it needed more RAM that I have and apparently there’s no safe guard for this (at least not by default) and by the time I noticed that my RAM usage was getting to high the system already got too sluggish and I was too late to end the process.

    I also didn’t know about SysRq at the time so the only option I knew was to force shut down by holding down the power button for 5 seconds.

    My actual system was still fine and all but my old windows hard drive that was transferring files got borked. It wasn’t completely bricked so I eventually salvaged it and it’s since been reformatted too, but I thought I had bricked it at the time.

    Well that might still seem a bit scary but that was me making several user errors in a row, and at the end of the day it still wasn’t even a big problem.


  • Disclaimer: my experience is only with Arch Linux (daily drive for 2 years) and a little bit of Linux Mint on a relative’s PC.

    For me I found it more tedious to get games working through WINE on Linux Mint compared to on Arch Linux, some packages I wanted seemingly don’t exist in the apt repositories (wine mono and wine gecko) and had to be manually installed.

    I also had some trouble because the package names were different compared to on pacman, especially the lib32 ones, but to be fair I would probably have had the same issue on Arch if I first used Linux Mint then Arch so not having the same package names isn’t inherently a fault of Linux Mint.

    But it wasn’t that it wasn’t doable, it was just more tedious, and to be fair daily driving Arch for 2 years compared to using Linux Mint every once in a while means I’m way less familiar with Linux Mint.




  • I legitimately didn’t know it removed features and until reading the other reply and watching the linked videos I wasn’t aware of a lot of the changes or even the existence of features like rejoining matches. If I ever got disconnected from a match I just played something else even back in the day. I don’t remember ever having an option to rejoin a match, unless that’s specifically a ladder games thing. I don’t recall getting disconnected from many games though, but I know it did happen. Definitely not enough for me to have been upset about it.

    Warcraft 3 itself never had rejoin as in you could not close WC3 start it up again login and rejoin, but if you were having connection issues it would pause the game and wait a minute or so to give you a chance to reconnect before dropping you.

    Some private WC3 servers did a have better reconnection features added, like ENTConnect, but obviously those were obviously just for games hosted by their own bots (although you could still join these games from official battle.net lobby search until Blizzard nuked host botting a year or so before Reforged came out)

    But if you get Desynced there’s no waiting for reconnection, you’re just dropped.

    Because being Desynced means the game state on your client doesn’t match with the rest of the players, so to fix that the game would have to be rewinded until before the desync happened and no such feature existed in WC3.

    And the patches leading up to reforged and Reforged itself added a ton of desync issues.

    I’m assuming that’s what you’re referring to by missing network features because it still has multiplayer and I’m pretty sure it still has the chat lobbies although I never really used those back then and I don’t use them now either.

    LAN doesn’t exist. Ranked Ladder & profiles didn’t exist until 2022, and it still sucks and everyone uses W3Champions instead anyway, and the auto hosted in game tournaments don’t exist.

    As far as me saying the custom games were improved I’d say you’re the dishonest one if you’re saying that’s not the case. They definitely improved custom games and while I don’t know all the changes, an easy one to point out would be the saved ranking system that exists for line tower wars now. That definitely didn’t exist back in the day.

    Regarding custom games, the custom games are not made by Blizzard, they’re made by players. However in the patches leading up to Reforged Blizzard did add a lot of new functions that modders/map makers could use which were great additions, thus allowing for new cool stuff in custom games.

    One super obvious and huge change was that in version 1.30 24 player support was added, instead of the usual 12.

    But that doesn’t change that Blizzard then also made changes in Reforged that broke basically every existing custom map and they had to be updated to fix.

    There were some desync issues and saving games in single player was broken but for custom games version 1.31.1 (the last patch before Reforged) was the best patch, you had all the new functionality added to the map editor but a lot less bugs and problems from Reforged.

    Also there still haven’t even added the ability to play custom campaigns to Reforged lol. The few single player campaigns you can play in Reforged are thanks to people independent of Blizzard coming up with a work around and they’re technically just a series of custom games you play (although that is what campaigns are so).


  • Warcraft 3, Age Series (AoE, AoE2, AoM, AoE3), Need For Speed Most Wanted (2005)

    I played the first age of empires when I was 6 or 7 y/o and I’ve played all of the games besides AoE4 (including Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds).

    As a kid we had few crappy dell computers connected to just a hub (LAN without internet) and would play a lot of Age of Empires 2 and C&C Red Alert 1 & 2 multiplayer.

    Age of Empires and Red Alert were also games I would frequently play at small LAN parties (although everyone was really bad)

    I played a bit of online AoE2 when AoE2 HD came out on steam but it was pretty bad so I stopped playing it. When DE came out I started watching AoE2 content but I’ll never play it because I’ve come to greatly dislike Microsoft over the years.

    I’ve replayed Need for Speed Most Wanted (and also Carbon) tens of times over the years, and I still play it every now and then (with mods now)

    But the game I’ve played the most is probably Warcraft 3. I’ve played a ton of custom games on Battle.net (RIP) and it’s what got me a bit into programming since I liked making custom maps and making triggers eventually led me to learn JASS (Just Another Scripting Language)

    If Blizzard didn’t completely ruin Warcraft 3 with WC3 Reforged Refunded I’d probably still be playing it and making custom maps every so often.

    I have played a bit on private servers but it’s just not the same anymore.

    There’s a pretty cool Warcraft 3 open source project called Warsmash though so maybe one day I’ll start playing again.