Road Trip aka Road Trip Adventure aka Choro Q HG 2 - Emulated



What is this game?
A unique hybrid of racing game and RPG, based on a franchise of Japanese toy cars. Imagine an open world RPG where you race instead of fighting, and the characters are chibi talking cars. This came out in 2002 for the PS2, two years before NFSU2 and a year after GTA III, while featuring an open world rivaling the size of both... even if the world is mostly empty.

This is the kind of niche game that's only made more niche by having three different names in three world regions - I'll refer to it as just Road Trip.

I found this game through YouTube recommendations:


Is it worth playing?
Well, I immediately decided it was worth playing when I saw the video, although it is hard to "review" the game objectively since a lot of its appeal comes from nostalgia, the so-bad-that-it's-good factor, and just my personal obsession with racing games.

For starters, yes, the game is for kids, but it features a surprisingly wide variety of cars (even if it's in un-branded and chibi-fied form). The list ranges from fire trucks and garbage trucks to muscle cars to more iconic vehicles such as the Castrol TOM's Supra, the Mazda 787B, five generations of Skylines, and many others.

The plot is silly - the President of the World decides that he's tired of being the president, so he organizes a World Gran Prix and declares that its winner will become the next president.
The physics are silly - not at all good for a racing game but seeing your car randomly start flying after hitting a curb is at least funny.
The customization is silly - the "body" of the car doesn't matter at all, just choose whichever car model you prefer, the only thing that matters is upgrades - upgrades which range from better engines and tires to jet engines and submarine propellers.
The music is silly - one radio station is intentionally badly compressed audio of obscure rock bands that really wouldn't sound out of place on radio at the time.

Oh yeah, did I mention the open world? With underwater areas and floating islands? Oddly enough, this might be one of the very few racing games which actually made me invested in its open world, thanks to the abundance of minigames and quests. There's a VW Golf that tells you to play car golf, a Fairlady Z challenging to you to a race on the highway referencing Wangan Midnight, a car soccer minigame where you play against Italian cars...

Long story short, "silly" is the best word to describe Road Trip, even if the physics are not fun to actually race with, most of the world is barren (although, the long trips from one city to the next across empty hilly terrain is very reminiscent of the Windows XP desktop background...), many of the quests are tedious fetch quests (even if the dialogue is fun), the upgrade prices require a lot of grinding, and more than half of its music was stolen from a non-commercially licensed playlist.

Very flawed game, but definitely stands out in my eyes. 7/10. To me this score seems fair, Road Trip seems to get a very wide range of review scores, with many 10/10s and just as many 3/10s. I desperately want a spiritual successor to this, there is just no other game quite like it.

Playing it on Linux, or low-spec hardware?
This game works perfectly on an emulator, and doesn't exactly push the PS2 to its limits, so it requires less processing power compared to the likes of Gran Turismo 4. If your computer somehow struggles to run PS2 titles, consider trying this one anyway.

Hylics - Windows/Wine


What is this game?
The official tagline is:

Hylics is a recreational program with light JRPG elements.

I think that sums it up pretty well.

Did I enjoy playing it?
This game is firmly in the category of "art games", so it's hard to answer that question.

Hylics is most famous for its unique graphics, done using claymation, and compressed to a limited color palette.


Screenshots don't do it justice, so here's an animated clip from the game's itch.io page.

The artwork is really well-made, and clearly a lot of care and love went into them, but at the same time Hylics does not treat itself too seriously, which I can respect. It's an absurdist game without a coherent plot, and in fact some of its dialogue is randomly-generated text. The turn-based gameplay is pretty standard for RPG Maker (just with more abstract actions) but at least it's relatively balanced.

Hylics is very memorable, and the absurdity of its story works well for its "vibe". On the other hand, the lack of story progression, combined with unremarkable gameplay, means that the game is just not all that fun to actually play. The good news is that it's short, but even if it's 2-3 hours long, it still took me two sittings to finish. It does have interesting moments though.

In terms of fun, I'd rate Hylics a 7/10. But it's one of those "weird 7/10" games that will stick with me for a long time, like The Silver Case or OMORI. So, even if it can feel slightly tedious, I'd still highly recommend at least trying it. At some point I might try out Hylics 2.

Playing it on Linux, or low-spec hardware?
It's a Windows game, but it mostly runs on Linux without a problem. However, for some weird reason, certain areas of the game lead to a lot of slowdown, also the fullscreen mode did not work properly so the game only showed up in one corner of my screen at 1x scale. But, it seems like these issues are also reported by Windows users, so I don't know if it's Linux's fault, or just RPG Maker being silly.

Damn I'd say you're too hard on it but I had a completely different perspective. I played on mobile and I think it works way better as a mobile game. I'll admit it's got all the same flaws like no reason to budget or trial and error taking so fucking long, but it never took me that long to figure a solution and I thought it was pretty satisfying. I think im on level 28 and I've never paid for a mobile game but I got this one for $2 after my Google play plus free trial whatever ran out and I think its plenty worth it.

5/10 was a bit harsh, yeah, I later bumped it up to 6/10 on my profile, but forgot to update the forum post. It's not a bad game and I did willingly complete it, but was frustrated with how long some later levels took me to fine-tune. Towards the end the game relies very heavily on jumps, and what happens for me is e.g. the 5th car in a column jumped too far because the previous four made the ramp wobble too much, then I reinforce the ramp slightly and now suddenly no cars can jump the ramp at all, it's things like that. Could've been a skill issue on my part.

Also "3 hours" might've been an exaggeration, looking back, well, it took me 14 hours to complete 50+ levels, so it couldn't have taken that long. But, I finished the game about a month before writing about it, and my hazy memory exaggerated those frustrated moments to "3 hours".

Bridge Constructor Portal - Linux


What is this game?

Enter the Aperture Science Enrichment Center and experience Bridge Constructor Portal – the unique merging of the classic Portal and Bridge Constructor games.

Portal is fun, bridge-building games can be fun, this game was on sale on GOG, it had mixed reviews but was called the best within this particular franchise of bridge-building games, so I bought it.

Did I enjoy playing it?
Not really, and I ended up refunding its DLC.

The solutions for some levels can be pretty spectacular, with cars jumping around, doing loop-the-loops, teleporting, knocking out turrets, and so on. But, arriving at these solutions is a rather boring process, looking something like this:

Step 1. Stare at a level for 2 minutes and think "okay what the hell do they want me to do this time"
Step 2. Realize the one and only intended solution, build it
Step 3. Spend the next 3 hours fine-tuning the solution, so the cars jump at exactly the right height and distance, etc

The game is shallow, since there are only two available materials, no concept of a "budget", no scoring system to speak of (let alone an online leaderboard), so if a bridge isn't stable it's possible to just add extra crap to it and hope that works. I have some dignity, so I tried to build reasonable bridges and tested with a full column of vehicles, but this was not testing my brain as much as just testing my patience for trial-and-error and finicky physics.

The developers took Portal's setting along with its humor, but they just weren't nearly as good at writing jokes as Valve was, so the charm is ruined. Although I did think it was cute when my coworkers congratulated me on completing sets of levels.

6/10, I wouldn't recommend it. The DLC adds extra mechanics which may improve things, but I haven't tried it.

Playing it on Linux, or low-spec hardware?
The game has a native Linux port, and i had no issues playing it.

https://howlongtobeat.com/user/siyiyar603

See chat

Also, their list of played games is very interesting.

Ballance - Windows


What is this game?

Ballance is a level-based puzzle game. The player has to move a ball through a hovering maze of paths and rails.

A classic game, originally released in Europe in 2004, and re-released on Steam and GOG just this year. As a kid I caught glimpses of it on my uncle's computer, and was mystified by it, but that memory was sealed and buried deeply until I saw the re-release. I had to buy this game and see what it was actually like.

Did I enjoy playing it?
Yes, Ballance is great, although it's a bit less of a puzzle game, and more of a relaxing walk through a mystical world... until you get impatient or lose balance one too many times and have to start over. The game relies heavily on physics, with the player-controlled ball transforming between three materials: wood is standard; stone is heavier and has more pushing power but is hard to steer due to momentum; paper is too lightweight to push anything but can float in the air. The puzzles are not difficult, but execution is important: you are tempted to use your momentum to go faster and perhaps cut some corners, but doing this without falling off the rails can take a bit of skill.

Anyway, some people have said it's boring, but I liked it.

The graphics are very "of their time", that mid 2000s era of computer software, where the tech optimism of the 90s is replaced by the more nuanced idea of computers providing "experiences". Ballance is peak Windows XP. Ominous ambient music, realistic textures plastered on oddly simple geometric shapes, glowing particle effects everywhere...

Maybe I'm just nostalgic. In any case, I think the aesthetic fits Ballance perfectly, since the game is slow and rewards patience.

I must say though, this "re-release" had seemingly no work put into it compared to the original game, so there is no widescreen support, and the language must be set with an external config tool. However, due to its cult following, there are mods available for widescreen support. There was also a glitch where rotating the camera would get registered as a move command, and I could not figure out how to fix it.

7/10, would've been an 8/10 if not for the input glitch. I will admit that I only had the patience to do two or three levels at a time, but I'd still recommend playing this and sticking through to the end.

Playing it on Linux, or low-spec hardware?
This is the really frustrating part, in the end I probably spent as much time trying to get the game to work on Linux as I did actually playing it. But, my attempts were unsuccessful (I won't dwell on them here, see my WineHQ App Database report if you're curious), so I ended up just booting into Windows instead.

Steam users report better luck, but I was using the DRM-free version with regular Wine, instead of relying on Steam.

Of course, the game runs very smoothly on modern hardware: they could have updated the graphics with this re-release, but IMO that would lose a big part of the game's charm.

Nice screencaps that you took of that Ducati game.

That game had a replay mode, with a few camera modes to choose from. I took some time to screenshot the #0 glitch bike because I've never seen that glitch as a kid, and I couldn't find it anywhere online, so these screenshots could be the only showcase of this obscure bug from an obscure game. In a way, that's kinda exciting.

Site Update:

HowLongToBeat: The Game (Beta)
- Support for custom games by adding to the URL.
- Share button now includes URL link to replay the exact same set of games so you can challenge your friends.
- Game now supports up to 10 rounds.
- Design Tweaks
- Game Scoring and history has been refactored to support different round lengths.
- Slightly reduced difficulty of game selection (about 300 less games).
- Added New Game and Replay Options

https://howlongtobeat.com/play

Share Example (Witcher Trilogy):

I scored 28 / 30 playing HowLongToBeat: The Game!

1. The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings - 10 / 10
2. The Witcher - 10 / 10
3. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - 8 / 10

Play @ https://howlongtobeat.com/play/10268-10267-10270

It's a very clever game, but I have a complaint.

The "user rating" should give a hint to the player that you're supposed to enter a percentage, rather than a rating in a 5 or 10 point scale.

My preference for game ratings on this site is to use a 10 point scale, so I'm used to thinking of it like that. I typed in "7" thinking it would mean "7/10", but the result was "7%" and I got no points. (also, I'm dumb, so it took me a couple of guesses before I realized what I did wrong).

Simple solution is to say "??h" and "??%" instead of just "??".

(Also, in general, a brief explanation of the game would be nice, even if the game is intuitive as-is.)

EDIT: wait, I didn't notice that it says "%" in the input field placeholder. That was embarrassing. Still, for the sake of people like me, I'd recommend changing the "??" label as well.

Out of curiosity, any reason why you are using GitLab instead of GitHub?

I have a GitHub for bigger projects, for university projects, and forks. My GitLab is for more personal stuff. This is a remnant from the times when GitHub required payment for private repositories. These days it's a bit arbitrary, some repos I push to multiple hosts, others are scattered. I even tried out Codeberg and SourceHut for some tiny projects, like Minecraft modpacks.

Here's a fun question. Most of us include completion times with our HLTB entries. How do you keep track of the time you've spent playing a game? Do you use a clock? The in-game completion time? Something else?

Me, I have a AutoHotkey script set up on my computer. Every 5 minutes, it writes a list of all my open windows to a file (I originally created it to keep track of how much time a week I spend wasting time). This way, after I complete a game, I can simply take a look at my logs and know exactly for how long I had the game running.

I also use a script, in my case a plain Linux shell script.

It's more or less just a stopwatch, because I didn't like having to use my phone for that, but also didn't want to install extra software for such a simple thing.

Sometimes I forget to pause the timer if I pause the game to go get dinner or something... Other times I'm too eager to pause the timer, even for basic bathroom breaks or responding to someone on Discord etc, things that most people would probably consider as expected gameplay time... But I guess that the overestimates and underestimates cancel each other out, and in the end the time is hopefully accurate enough.

(I should mention, I use it for PC games, mainly because I like DRM-free stuff from GOG or itch.io, but this means I don't get a timer like what Steam provides)

I hope I'll have to time to participate in the club again.

Nominating Signalis for April.

Nominating Sonic Robo Blast 2 for Fool's. It's a fan game, I don't know anything about it, other than that it has really high ratings.

I tested the latest release of Wine, running games on Wayland without using DXVK. Seems to work nicely.

My backlog keeps growing. I watched some LGR videos and got the urge to buy some city-building games. So, now I have SimCity 3000 and Tropico 3 from GOG. (I've already played SimCity 4 a long time ago and really enjoyed it, until I tried to rename my save file and it somehow stopped working... I've never played Tropico though)

But before I get to city builders, I wanna complete Stardew Valley, or at least reach the credits at the end of Year 2. I am in the latter half of Year 2 right now, and at a point where I'm making quite good money from my greenhouse full of Starfruit, and have automated crops and animal produce, so I'm focusing on building and decorating to have a nice-looking farm at the "end" of the game (even though there's a ton of content that's still far beyond my reach, and I probably won't be going for 100% Perfection). Anyway, excited for the recent 1.6 update. Yay for big chests.

Hackably Linux Games
Collection of fan-made ports, engine remakes, and various "hacks" to allow games to run natively on Linux. Standouts include Cave Story, Morrowind, OpenRCT2, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., X-COM, and others. The Steam Deck has proven that Windows games can run on Linux using compatibility tools, but these full-on remakes are more interesting to me.

It is based on a much bigger list available at https://luxtorpeda-dev.github.io/, one day I might add the entirety of it to HLTB. (Luxtorpeda is a tool that integrates with Steam to launch these versions of games instead of Windows versions)

Neat itch.io Android downloadables
Small itch.io indie games that you can buy, download and install as APK files. I made this in part as an "advertisement" for Mitch, an app I made some time ago for installing and updating such games without relying on Google Play.

----

Side note, I really wish descriptions of collections weren't so limited in length. I can barely fit two sentences in there.

After glancing at the volume of some info-dumps in my blog, I added this to the OP:

Originally Posted by: gardenappl

* spends too much time tinkering with games rather than actually playing them

Which is saying something, considering that I do spend a lot of time playing games, too.

Originally Posted by: gardenappl

Wayland support is also currently experimental, you need to follow these instructions to enable it, and also it only currently works with Vulkan, so DXVK is required.

As soon as I write this, I find out that the latest Wine update now also supports OpenGL in Wayland, so you shouldn't need to install any extra stuff like DXVK. I'll have to test this.

Continuing my previous post, but with a new addition!

High scores!
I saw that this game had an option for "merging" records from someone else's save file, for comparing the best lap times. I thought it would be a fun idea to share my save files on the internet, so others could compare lap times, maybe this could make the game a bit more fun for some. Note that there are not the fastest times, because I challenged myself to not use aerodynamics controls.

(and, yes, nobody cares about Ducati World Championship specifically, but I'd like to do this for other games in the future, too)

Save_1.sav
Save_2.sav
Put these inside the "Save" folder in the game's installation directory.

Records.zip
Merging records in Ducati World Championship:
1. Inside the game's installation directory there should be a folder called "ExRecords".
2. Extract the "Records" folder inside it, so you should see "..\ExRecords\Records\other stuff..."
3. Go into the game's settings and press "Merge records"

Playing it on Linux, or low-spec hardware?
I also used this as an opportunity to test some of Wine 9.0's brand new features, namely native Wayland support, and support for running 32-bit games without relying on 32-bit libraries. Those are a pain the ass, at least on Arch Linux, because the main repos don't ship a lot of the 32-bit libraries anymore, so you had to compile them from the AUR, and compiling libraries for video codecs took absolute ages. Being able to run games using only standard 64-bit libraries is gonna make life much easier in the long run. However, you need a version of Wine that supports the "new WoW64 mode", which is currently a work-in-progress and not shipped by default.

(Theoretically there is even support for running Windows games on ARM, but I can't test this yet)

Wayland support is also currently experimental, you need to follow these instructions to enable it, and also it only currently works with Vulkan, so DXVK is required.

But, long story short, the entire game works perfectly for me using Wayland, and without any 32-bit libraries. Great to see Wine improving even further.

Ducati World Championship - Windows/Wine


What is this game?
A mediocre bike racing game, released in 2006, and sold on Steam today for less than a dollar. The one notable thing about this game is that the entire soundtrack consists of Lacuna Coil's gothic metal. It's also a game which I really liked when I was a kid, for no apparent reason, and I am sorta nostalgic for it. I even organized a playlist for its soundtrack on YouTube.

Did I enjoy playing it?
Eh, the game is very flawed. If you can figure out its weird control scheme, it's trivially easy, because you have the ability to "lean forward" which gives you better aerodynamics, improving your top speed and acceleration, but the AI never does this, so you can just outrun them all on a straight line. Cornering can be tricky on some later stages, but I was able to beat the game as a kid, so you probably can, too. When replaying as an adult, I chose to challenge myself by never relying on the leaning boost, but the game is still easy.

I tried to challenge myself further, by going into the Settings menu and cranking the "Simulation" slider to 100%, and setting the difficulty to Champion. The Champion difficulty makes the AI rubberband pretty heavily, and the "simulation" slider means that the slightest touch from one of many crazy-fast opponents sends you flying off your bike. So I basically made the game frustrating for myself, but hey, better than boring, I guess?

The game is pretty repetitive, there are very few tracks and bikes to choose from. All the bikes are Ducatis, and all the tracks are unlicensed fictional tracks (though some of their layouts are blatant rip-offs of real tracks).

The game also crashed for me at some point in the middle of a championship, and my bike was glitched out for the rest of it.


Normally the Desmosedici racing bike is supposed to match your racing suit's color scheme, but instead it glitched out to some placeholder #0 graphic?


Excuse the motion blur, I don't know how to disable it.

Oh, and speaking of disabling, this game has the most obnoxious race team manager ever, constantly telling you to "accelerate as much as possible!" even when you're entering a slow corner, and literally berating you for pausing the game, reminding you every 10 seconds that "we have a race to win!", until you unpause. Luckily he only shows up in the later portions of the game, and you can disable him in the audio settings.

5/10, it was a good bit of nostalgic fun for me, and the soundtrack is a guilty pleasure of mine, but I wouldn't recommend playing it.

to be continued...

This seems fun. Always nice to have an excuse to look through the Stats screen of this site :D

2001 - Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - did not release outside Japan until 2005, but I just didn't have anything as good from 2001.
2002 - The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
2003 - SimCity 4
2004 - Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines
2005 - Need for Speed: Most Wanted
2006 - Mother 3
2007 - FlatOut: Ultimate Carnage
2008 - Grand Theft Auto IV
2009 - Persona 3 Portable
2010 - Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit
2011 - Minecraft - holy shit, I just came to the realization that I've been playing this game for most of my life by now.
2012 - Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair
2013 - Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance
2014 - Crypt of the NecroDancer
2015 - Undertale
2016 - Sid Meier's Civilization VI
2017 - Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony
2018 - Celeste
2019 - Disco Elysium
2020 - Factorio - this is the release date for 1.0, although I haven't actually played it since early access.
2021 - Deltarune: Chapter 2
2022 - Norco - pretty good game, not amazing, but I just didn't play any other games from that year.
2023 - no games from that year.

And with this post, the blog has just about caught up with the games I'd completed up until today! I said I'd make shorter posts, but I really just can't stop myself from rambling about certain games, it turns out. Anyway...

Celeste 64: Fragments of the Mountain - Linux


What is this game?

Relive the magic of Celeste Mountain alongside Madeline in this small, heartfelt 3D platformer. Created in a week(ish) by the Celeste team to celebrate the game’s sixth anniversary.

The game is free and open source, which I guess is fitting for the Linux theme of this blog! Although I don't think there's too much being done with the game's source code right now.

Did I enjoy playing it?
It's a short and sweet game, lasting around 1-2 hours depending on your skill level. My skill level can only be described as an "issue", so it took me a whole 3 hours to complete this very tiny game, but I still enjoyed it. 7/10, good bit of fun for free, could potentially be frustrating if you go for 100% completion.

(Remember when I said that I tend to ramble in some blog posts? This won't be one of those posts, I don't have much to say about Celeste 64, other than that I think it's kinda neat.)

Playing it on Linux, or low-spec hardware?
No issues. Yay!

Sega GT - Windows/Wine


What is this game?
Racing games are a bit of a special interest for me, I'm always hungry for more classic car racing titles. Sega GT was, as the title suggests, Sega's attempt at competing with Gran Turismo, back in the year 2000. Originally released for the Dreamcast, and ported to Windows PCs a year later. Was it any good? (probably not, because basically nobody's heard of the game since then, but you never know...)

Did I enjoy playing it?
Speaking, again, as a fan of such games, I thought Sega GT was really charming. But it was seriously lacking in content, only a few dozen cars compared to GT2's monstruous 600+ roster, and a lot smaller than even the more modest GT3's line-up. It also suffers from the issue that a lot of similar racing games have, where most of the cars will be roughly in the same class (Civics, Skylines, Evos, what have you), but then they'll include one car that just completely overpowers the rest (in this case, the Dodge Viper which you see in the cover art). Although of course, part of the fun of racing games is the ability to choose your own difficulty by choosing your own cars, and I was focused more on driving a variety of cars rather than just beating the game as quick as possible.

The unique selling point of this particular game is the so-called Carrozerria, which lets you assemble your own car model, by specifying things like engine displacement, drivetrain layout, and then picking one of a few exteriors. Looking at the choice of exteriors, you may realize that this may have been just Sega's way of sneaking in some car models that they could not properly license for the game - the fictional car bodies closely resemble those of e.g. the Corvette C3, the Caterham Seven, and other fun models. The problem is that, more often than not, the custom cars end up being horribly tuned and really un-fun to drive. But, with enough money, you can make their engines extremely powerful (though even then you may have trouble competing with a plain ol' Viper).

The music was also really good, being a Sega game.

The game has its strengths, but the lack of content and mediocre driving physics make it overall a bit difficult for me to recommend even as a fun of that era of racers. 7/10

Playing it on Linux, or low-spec hardware?
The game is old, and likely due to licensing issues which are typical for racing games, has not been updated or sold since 2000, so it is a pain in the butt to run on modern systems. You'd probably be better off emulating the Dreamcast version. But, I made a whole write-up for getting the Windows version of the game to run in Linux, if anybody's interested. In case the WineHQ website dies some day, I'll just copy-paste it here:

What does not work:
Game uses a CD check, won't run if you just execute the .exe.

Game displays black screen for me unless I enable "virtual desktop" in winecfg.

With default installation, car sounds don't play (though all other sounds and music play properly).

Intro cutscenes don't play.

Workarounds:
To get around CD check: if you install the game from disk images (via CDemu or fuseiso or whatever), make sure to go to winecfg -> Drives -> add D:/ drive, pointing to the "Play" CD image mount point. Make sure to select Additional Settings and mark the D:/ drive as "type: CD-ROM".

While you're in winecfg, make sure to enable virtual desktop, to avoid a black screen issue.

To fix car sounds, install "winetricks dmime".

You can press spacebar to skip the broken intro videos, but my preferred workaround is to just get rid of the cutscene files. Remove "Activision.avi" and "SegaGT.avi" from the game installation directory.

Additional comments:
To upscale the resolution:

Install "winetricks dxvk", this is necessary for dgVoodoo2 to run.

Install dgVoodoo2, move the DLLs from MS/x86/*.dll to the game's installation folder.

Run winecfg and add the moved dlls to the library overrides list.

Run "wine dgVoodooCpl.exe". There you can change the resolution, force fullscreen and change aspect ratio, enable anti-aliasing and texture filtering, etc. The menu textures might look a bit broken with this, but the gameplay will look much better.

To let the game run at 60 FPS, you can try following PCGamingWiki's guide on how to hex edit SegaGT.exe, but for me personally that didn't seem to work.

Grim Fandango Remastered - Linux


What is this game?

A four-year journey through over 100 exotic locales. An extraordinary experience within 3D Art Deco and Aztec-inspired environments. A web of intrigue 50 characters deep. A shocking portrait drawn wit 7,000 lines of revealing dialogue. hundreds of challenging puzzles for all adventures. a smooth, seamless interface puts you smack in Manny's world. A lush orginial score featuring Swing-era bebop and jazz.

The Remastered edition is mostly a straight port of the 1998 classic, but with some tasteful minor additions, such as a better lighting system for all those film noire shadow effects.

Did I enjoy playing it?
With the occasional peek at a walkthrough, yeah. The game is incredibly charming and the story is fun. I don't play "adventure games" a lot, but as far as I understand it, Grim Fandango was one of the last big releases before the genre had died off, and I can say the game has aged really well. It did feel like it was almost too long, but maybe that was just me being stuck on some slightly obscure puzzles. 9/10

Playing it on Linux, or low-spec hardware?
I ran into some weird issues with GOG's Linux version of the game. Some Steam Deck users have reported the same, too. Basically, you get the error message "Unable to initialize game. Make sure the latest graphics card drivers are installed" when you launch the game through the desktop shortcut. But if you go into the game installation folder and run ./GrimFandango directly, it should be fine. Seems to be an issue with GOG's launch script and some libraries that it pulls, but I did not investigate it much.

I'll talk about more retired games later, for now let's talk about a game I'd actually completed!

R4: Ridge Racer Type 4 - Emulated


What is this game?
A PlayStation 1 arcade racer, supposedly one of the best for the system. The main Grand Prix mode can be beaten in about an hour as it only consists of 8 short races, however the game is replayable due to its... visual novel element? You can pick one of 4 teams to drive for in the tournament, with each one having varying budgets as well as storylines. One tournament can be the story of a low-budget team desperately trying to stay afloat, while another is about a well-established racing team whose owner turns out to have a dark past. I don't think I've played a racing game with a narrative like this before.

Did I enjoy playing it?
Yes, Ridge Racer is short but sweet. I first "completed" it all the way back in October of last year, but I kept coming back to replay it with other teams and car brands. It's just so dang good - the physics are very arcade-y and take some getting used to, but are satisfying when mastered; the graphics are great for the PS1 era, the sound is just amazing. The game clearly had a lot of effort put into it, so every minute of it is designed for maximum fun, like how the music is hand-picked for each race. I swear there is nothing quite like getting to the semi-finals on the hardest track in the game, with Kohta Takahashi's "Move Me" playing.


Video not mine. Timestamp for the semi-final race I mentioned.

The final race is a bit anti-climactic in the sense that it takes place on a much simpler track layout, but the excitement is still there, since canonically it takes place on December 31st, 1999, and upon reaching the final lap, fireworks go off and "HAPPY NEW YEAR" is displayed across all the billboards. Then the announcer has a special message for you depending on which team you pick. Sounds silly, but to me the whole atmosphere of the game felt really special. 8/10, I'd recommend playing it at least once if you at all like racing games.

Playing it on Linux, or low-spec hardware?
My laptop is too weak to fully emulate PS2 games (it can juuust about emulate Gran Turismo 4, but only at ~90% speed...). However, PS1 games are not a problem even for me. I've been playing around with some enhancements, namely the widescreen patch, higher render resolution, as well as PGXP which fixes "wobbliness" of geometry and texture rendering on the PS1. Don't get me wrong, the original PlayStation graphics have their own charm, but the enhancements are nice too. Sadly there is no 60 FPS patch for this game, unlike for Gran Turismo 2 (whoops, spoilers, stay tuned for that!)

More retired games:

Odd Realm - Linux

Take control of a group of settlers to build a settlement that survives the passing seasons, roaming bandits, underground horrors, and gods from legend.

A game I got in the big itch.io "BLM bundle" back in the day. Pixel art looked fun, and, hey, I sorta liked Dwarf Fortress, so I decided to try this. But I got bored pretty quickly, and now remember almost nothing about it.


The game is still in active development, so who knows, maybe it's gotten better since then.

Celeste - Chapter 9: Farewell - Linux


Some friends reminded me that Celeste had a bonus chapter, so I decided to try it out, jumping right into the hardest level in the game years after last playing it. Needless to say, I sucked at it.


...and this is before I even reached the Heart Gate, which unlocks two thirds of the level. My excuse is that I played left-handed because my arrow keys were broken at the time...

The gate was locked for me because I didn't gather enough hearts in the previous levels. This was an obvious sign that I needed more experience with Celeste before continuing, but I never ended up continuing. At some point I will conquer it, though.

Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon - Linux/Wine


An old FPS which was given away for free by Ubisoft at some point. Honestly I have zero interest in this type of game, I only tried it due to morbid curiousity, mainly to see if the Ubisoft Connect launcher could work on Linux. It worked, and I got the game to run, but I stopped playing immeiately after the tutorial.

Crysis - Windows


Same thing here, installed the game out of curiosity, but did not get far, stopped playing shortly after the aliens showed up. Anyway, if you're reading this blog and asking yourself "does it run Crysis?" like I did, the answer is: yes, though the game's only really playable on lower settings.

Big persona fan here. I DO NOT recommend starting with persona 3. It has a lotta bullshit that you can manage after you learn how to deal with it, and a bunch of outdated mechanics. if you're dead set playing it, play FES and also mod it. But thats too much hassle to get into jrpg's imo.

In the same series, 4 Golden or 5 Royal (though 5 is very, very long) are much better starting points.

In general, id recommend
-Final Fantasy 7, 9 for the 3d entries, or 4 and 6 for the 2d entries
-Dragon Quest XI S is a great jrpg for starting out as well.
-Chrono Trigger i believe has already been mentioned.

they're all really good rpg's and really easy to get into. I personally started off with ff7 and then played 9.

You're right, in a similar vein, I recommended MOTHER 1 (aka EarthBound Beginnings) earlier, but I also wouldn't recommend starting with it. Play EarthBound or MOTHER 3 first, then come back to MOTHER 1 if you want. It is a bit unique compared to the later games, and is ahead of its time, but still a game from 1989. Personally I can recommend the MOTHER 25th Anniversary ROM hack. You could argue that it changes too many things, but the goal of it was to make the game approachable by modern standards, and personally I'd say it succeeded.

Open Hexagon - Linux


A free and open-source "clone" of Super Hexagon. However, do not underestimate the quality of Open Hexagon based on its "clone" label. The game features genuinely great music for such a project (including FantomenK and Bossfight), as well as plenty of levels with some creative gimmicks, fancy graphical effects, a level editor (with a niche but fairly active community surrounding it), and other fun things.

Another game that I used to play as a kid (because it's free!) but I wasn't good at it. In 2021 the game got revived and released on Steam (although you can still compile it from source code for free if you like, and I even packaged it for the Arch User Repository). Anyway, I tried playing it again as an adult, but I am still not good at it. Probably the one flaw in this game is that the difficulty curve is nearly endless: Super Hexagon was challenging, but bite-sized in comparison. On the other hand, I have 15+ hours of Open Hexagon on Steam (and some hours playing my compiled version offline), and I am nowhere near being able to complete all the levels, even though by now I can complete Super Hexagon in less than 15 minutes. Anyway, this is a very well-made game, but incredibly difficult, thus I never beat it.

Actually the 15-minute time to clear Super Hexagon on Steam is a bit of a troll, since I had practice with the DRM-free itch.io version, prior to activating the Steam key...