In what situations is this a blocker for gaming? Like, genuinely, who actually had any significant issues from it? Top 1% Counter Strike pros? I've been playing games on Wayland for ages and I never understood how anyone can think the experience is worse, let alone so bad it's unusable.

Neverlooted Dungeon: Comedy dungeon crawler inspired by games like Ultima Underworld and Arx Fatalis. The demo consists of a tutorial and a small open-ended area to explore, with a focus on avoiding traps and interacting with physics objects to navigate and find loot. The demo doesn't really show off Arx-levels of complexity, but it's fun to explore and genuinely funny at times.

Stop Dead: Fast paced first person shooter where you attack enemies by using telekinetic powers to hurl objects and bodies to deal damage. The weapons work kinda like Mirror's Edge, in that instead of getting your own loadout you pick dropped guns up off the floor and get rid of them once they're out of ammo. Also, if you stop moving for more than a moment, you die. Demo is quite varied, and ends with a challenging mid-game level to show off the mechanics a bit more.

Mr. Run and Jump: Challenging 2D platformer with a lot of different moves that can be chained together in slick ways. There's not much of a narrative and the neon visuals kinda look dated in a not-even-retro way, but the movement really carries the whole game.

Echo Point Nova: New shooter by the developers of Severed Steel. Has a lot of the same mechanics (slow motion, destructible terrain, etc), but makes the levels a lot more open and adds a grappling hook and hoverboard for a different style of mobility. There's a bit of jank, but it's very satisfying to play.

El Paso, Elsewhere: Indie Max Payne. I'm not exaggerating, it plays like Max Payne 2 and looks and feels like Max Payne 1. Swap out the main character and it could pass as a phenomenally faithful fangame.

Phoenix Springs: Stylised neo-noir narrative-driven point and click adventure. I usually don't have the patience for these sorts of games, but I found the writing and visuals very compelling.

Fortune's Run: Sprite based RPG FPS with level design that feels a bit like the classic Deus Ex, but with the fast paced combat of a boomer shooter. Has a Star Warsy rough and gritty sci-fi setting, if you're into that.

The Next Fests are my favourite Steam event by far, already looking forward to the next one!

It depends. In my experience, most demos stay up, and the few that are taken down sometimes explicitly say so on the store page or demo announcement.

Deus Ex: Invisible War. It might have been a symptom rather than a cause, but it was a clear example of how the PC was sidelined as a game platform throughout the 00s, and the simplification of genres traditionally found on PC for console hardware.

Also, on an individual level, the game sucked! The original didn't have the best voice acting, but it was hammy and endearing. Invisible War's was somehow just wooden and boring. The levels were cut up into tiny chunks separated by loading screens, but even as a whole were smaller and more claustrophobic than almost anything in the original. The weapons were less fun (universal ammunition??), the inventory system was gimped, menus were all big and slow to navigate, stealth mechanics were oversimplified, there were fewer notes and logs and books and news articles in the game world... You get the idea. It's honestly a miracle that the franchise ever recovered.

I haven't played Doom 3, but it sounds very similar to what Prey 2017 has - all the computers in the game have (in-universe) touch input, so you can use them just by pressing the interact key while looking at a display. You can even fire rubber-tipped foam darts at screens to trigger a click in the spot where the dart hit!

https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis/

As we understand it, this contract clearly states that the terms do not intend to contradict any rights to copy, modify, redistribute and/or reinstall the software as many times and as many places as the customer likes (see §1.4). Additionally, though, the contract indicates that if the customer engages in these activities, that Red Hat reserves the right to cancel that contract and make no further contracts with the customer for support and update services. In essence, Red Hat requires their customers to choose between (a) their software freedom and rights, and (b) remaining a Red Hat customer. In some versions of these contracts that we have reviewed, Red Hat even reserves the right to “Review” a customer (effectively a BSA-style audit) to examine how many copies of RHEL are actually installed (see §10) — presumably for the purpose of Red Hat getting the information they need to decide whether to “fire” the customer.

If you contractually limit user rights to redistribute the code, then how can you actually comply with the GPL? Redistribution isn't an optional clause.

Ooh, I love finding obscure indies. There are an awful lot of games on Steam and Itch and other platforms that are amazing experiences, but that almost no one has ever played or even heard of for one reason or another.

One of my recent favourite zero-budget indies is Sally Can't Sleep, a strange first person platformer with a lot of focus on fun, versatile, and exploitable movement mechanics. The dev sacrificed visual polish for quantity and style, so the game has a lot of interconnected levels with a big variety of different mechanics and visual styles - it's a really good example of how much a solo developer can accomplish.

Another one is Worlds, which is a 3D stealth-shooter-platformer-adventure? I like it for the same reason as Sally Can't Sleep, it's ambitious and creative, and you can really feel the developer pushing against their limitations to release something that punches far above its own weight.

Also, both these games are very cheap, even at full price!