Apologies for YouTuber link - as some of the sources cited are in Japanese, it’s harder to get to a direct English source. The video description includes links to the Yahoo.jp article.

Is there a alternative to roblox (preferably free) that is just better overall and dosent take advantage of everyone? I want to make games but also be a player... How might i do so and not use roblox? It feels like most clones are dead or close to it but what do you think? What do you suggest and why so?

What are your go-to native games for Arch Linux or any other Linux distro? edit:- It should be free.

So i used to play standard minecraft many years ago when i was a kid but then i got very burnt out and havent played it sense. Minecraft has a bigger community/mods than minetest, but minetest is a neat little lua project. How do i decide? what would you suggest?

I'm sure you'll know by now that some time ago I did a full interview-ish effort with the dev team behind RomM. RomM - three our of five of the team gave me answers on their history of the project, emulation as a whole, self-hosting, ROMs and building what they did.

That RomM Project is an open-source, self-hosted application that's designed to organize and give you a nice, clean and pretty way to view and play your retro video game collections. Its got a clean, responsive web interface that allows users to scan their ROM libraries, then grabs the metadata from sources like IGDB, MobyGames, and Screenscraper, and playing games directly in your browser via built-in EmulatorJS support.

It supports over 400 gaming platforms (seriously), accommodates various naming conventions, multi-disk games, and custom tags. It even integrates with tools like Playnite and muOS, and upcoming features include device syncing for games, saves, and emulator settings.

I reached out to the team again about their new release for RomM - RomM 4.0.0, which also included at the same time a full Android app made by a community member. They agreed to share their thoughts and experiences putting it together with me, and while 24 or so hours ago I shared a full 'article' I wrote on this, based on these answers they gave me, I'm sharing their full answers here on Lemmy with you.

I write these little interviews, Q&As and articles with devs from all kinds of gaming, Linux and Steam Deck projects and programs. Its fun for me, and I love to help people get a peek behind the curtain, and get to know who is behind these bits of software they might know and love.

I've previous shared interviews on Lemmy with:

• The RomM Project (like I mentioned!) in general
• The solo dev behind Minigalaxy
• A PC game repacker (piracy!)
• The dev who runs a Switch piracy FreeShop
• Independent Linux & Gaming journalist, Gardiner Bryant
• The creator and dev of Lutris
• The team who make Heroic Games Launcher
• With RetroDECK

Do be warned, this is a little rough, since I intended to cherry-pick the quotes for an article, there are some general statements from one dev, then some direct answers to direct questions from another.

Regardless, I do hope you enjoy this!

With danblu3:

About the Android App:

Our main goal is to have RomM reachable from any platform, we want to be the centre piece of your retro library and an android app has always been an idea in the devs head. That said, the Android app is not something we claim (fully) an amazing user by the discord name of "MattSays" actually made the application and just dropped it into our discord one day without warning, we did have a very basic and functional version from a user called "samnwella" which did do the job, but it was clunky and I know they won't mind me saying this. MattSays dropped it and the UI was there, the functions was there, everything. It was gorgeous even from a 1.0 release. Community reaction has been positive, bugs have been raised and already squashed, and in relation to the RomM team both Zurdi and Arcane have reached out to MattSays for further discussion, it's currently being branded as the official Android connector app for RomM and as for team status for MattSays, that is up in the air. The future? It's definitely bright for the Android app, the dev is very keen and even wants to get save syncing up and running. Imagine this flow: Going into ES-DE and with the recent Android app launch update you open the RomM android app, using your controller you scroll to a game you fancy playing, press A and that's it, downloaded, you exit the app, back to es-de, scrape the game and play. No removed SD cards, no plugging into your PC, no dealing with SMB users or NFS perms, just, done. Dusted. The future is very bright for this app.

About the new 4.0.0 release:

Right. So. 4.0 4.0 from many different point of views is huge, from preservation enthusiasts, from retro nerds, from the people who just want a retro fix and the completionists, 4.0 is HUGE. Before I go on to say what 4.0 is let me explain about hash matching, I'll make this very simple and it's possible I might get something a little bit wrong here or there but the theory is correct. A hash is like a signature, and each ROM (file) has a unique signature, some people way back when began groups to dump these games in the name of preservation and put all this together into a library called .dats, these .dats files store a unique signature and this unique signature will match to a game name, it's development date, if it was ever released to retail etc etc. Two of the biggest names of these groups is NoIntro and Redump, they both specialise in different media formats but with them combined they built a "digital bible" of what game is what signature, with 4.0 we finally introduce hash matching with the help of two incredibly skilled developers. Why is hash matching better, why am I so excited?

• It's faster, much much faster. Right now when a ROM is scanned into RomM it breaks apart the file name, removes the (tags) and then sends an API call to the metadata agent of your choice with the name, even though we began to get a high success rate it relied HEAVILY on your files being named correctly.

With hash matching, ROM reads the unique signature of the file and is told near instantly what the game is and what data is needed to be scraped, without wasting time doing a fuzzy match.

• It's more accurate

The fact we can now match on hash means that you could have a game named "TLOZ: AltP.zip" which is a snes game from way back when and you named it like for ease of use, you load it into RomM and are confused why it doesn't match, you know it's the legend of zelda! But RomM does not, because of the weird name you chose, like come on? It's one of the best games, give it the full name! Anyway, with hash matching it'll look inside and see the game file, extract and work out the signature and instantly match it against the matching signature online, pulling all metadata and information it needs, without you needing to rename your whole collection.

• It's prettier - Now we have confidence in what your matching, we've made SteamgridDB a metadata agent, it was before but we left it to user decision. Now that we are confident in the matching we can pull gorgeous artwork for the matched games directly from SteamgridDB, and we still give user the choice if they want to change it.

Now that is out the way, I want to give a huge shout out to Yukine for making Playmatch and FlibbleHexEyes for making Hasheous both these technologies have been implemented in RomM and honestly they are flawless. Yukine has been a regular around discord and I'm pretty sure he began working on hash matching pretty damn quickly just for his own benefit, he then released a small tool which caught the eye of the RomM team, a few conversations later and here we are with it as a service. It's essentially a 2 in 1 service where it does the hash matching through a lighting quick database and then proxies that over to IGDB to pull the relevant metadata from their servers, all in record time compared to our API to IGDB route. Then onto FlibbleHexEyes, people who are around the self hosting scene might recognise the names, and yes he is the lead dev and creator of Gaseous, I would say a competitor but not really only because of how well we get on with him, the self hosted space is large and there is enough room for all of us, no point sniffling creativity! It's another hash matching service (we go from 0 to 2!) and it's similar in the vein of playmatch, just on its own location and maintained directly by Flibble.

Without these two amazing devs 4.0 would not be as huge as it is now. We have more news as well! In 4.0 we introduced launchbox support, this is essentially an offline database that is downloaded every day and used for matching. It does not do hash matching but it does fair better with ROM hacks on testing, it's also very good for people who want to control exactly what is coming in and out of their server as it does not need an API key and the queries are ran locally (until we go to LB to collect the art) Something that might have been missed is that we also support retro achievements! This is purely display purposes but if you have a matching hash, 9.9/10 you have a matching retro achievement and it will update your status on how your doing when it resyncs, it's a nice little QoL feature and we even show the difference between hardcore and soft core achievements. Want to help contribute? Well now it's now easier then ever with an official devcontainers RomM container, which will be explained further in the release notes but the environment is contained in the container, just pull it and start developing, no setting up extra libraries and so forth. 4.0 is huge for RomM. It's deserving of the major number and this has lit a fire under the dev team, I'm sure there will be a small hiatus between updates to let them recover but as we always keep saying. We're just getting started.

With Yukine (community member and contributor:

What changes are you making?

The main changes for RomM 4.0 besides adding new Metadata sources (like LaunchBox) is the integration of Playmatch and Hasheous I've created the Pull Request to add Playmatch Support into RomM and arcane added Hasheous support a little bit later Playmatch (and Hasheous too) is a Microservice which does Hash based matching for Roms, it incoperates DAT files from Groups such as No-Intro and Redump and keeps a database of those Roms with a mapping to external Gaming Databases such as IGDB, right now only IGDB is support but i plan to add other Gaming Databases such as Screenscraper, MobyGames, Launchbox, SteamGridDB and more

How was your experience, making these changes with RomM?

The Pull Request to RomM wasn't really all that hard, even me who doesn't usually do or write python was able to integrate it quite easily into RomM that said there was work the RomM Team did before my change was merged to ensure that the logic runs in the correct order What i mean by that is that in RomM 3.10.x it used to be so that the resolution step of Metadata was running before the calcuation of hashes When you integrate services which require you to send the hashes of files for the metadata provider resolution you usually want these hashes calculated which before wasn't possible because Matching of Metadata Provider was running before the hash calculation step After arcaneasada changed that and did some other side work the Playmatch PR was quite fast ready to be merged, i think it took less than 2 weeks to get it merged into RomM

How long has this release been 'in the works' for?

As i said above the PR itself was only ~2 weeks of work but Playmatch itself was quite a lot more work I've started Playmatch back in June 2024 (over a year ago already ) as a side Project of mine, at the time RomM was quite a bit more immature especially the Metadata Matching part, i personally have quite a big Rom collection and when only ~40% of all games got a match on IGDB i was quite annoyed because i didn't want to go through my whole collection and manually match all the unidentified games to get the nice looking metadata for them Out of annoyance i thought how i would fix that, thinking about other Projects who also use Metadata Providers i checked out how they solved it and then i also found Hasheous at the time which basically was @FlibblesHexEyes Solution to the issue. After checking it out i decided that while i know C# and i think he did a good Job i wasn't quite sure if i would've solved it this way and the database structure of it wasn't quite speaking to me (when i thought about performance and how many req/s it would likely get) so i decided that i could probably write a small microservice myself and i oriented myself at Hasheous but also at Skyhook which is a Metadata API Sonarr uses and how they solved a lot of issues with that

What can the users, both existing and new, expect from this 4.0.0 release?

Generally speaking 4.0 with Playmatch and Hasheous enabled should improve Automatic Metadata matchinig a lot. When users enable them they will be queried for each rom and if either has a metadata match in there database it will be used This makes RomM a lot less reliant on Rom Names and exact naming matches and basically kills the naming requirement completely assuming the Rom Hash is in either Playmatch and Hasheous (usually if your ROM matches the No-Intro or Redump DAT thats the case) and has a Provider match in either. Playmatch does by default automatically try to match ROMs it gets from the dat files to IGDB but sometimes that also fails when for example the ROM name is localized and on IGDB there is no Alias for that name. Playmatch also allows users to "suggest" manual mappings for No-Intro/Redump roms, if a rom was not automatically mapped due to naming issues i described before users can now use a Discord Bot to suggest a mapping to be added to Playmatch, after an Admin (currently thats me) reviews it and approves it it'll be added to playmatch and RomM can make use of it This Discord Bot is also added to the RomM Server so that users can do the suggestion there if they like to, this also helps out the whole community (so when the next person then checks playmatch for the same hash it already has a mapping!) which is generally the ideal state that the community can "maintain" a mapping database themself

Any significant difficulties? Anything you're particularly proud of with this release?

There were a lot of difficulties to be fair but thats normal Playmatch is written in Rust which is a Memory Safe Language and a very fast and performant language too. When i initially thought about how i would create Playmatch i had a few key aspects in Mind.

It needs to be fast and handle a lot of http req/s when a lot of RomM users run library scans

It should keep a low memory usage so i can run on a small VPSIt should have a good Database ORM because i dislike writing raw SQL queries in code generally My choices were between Rust, Golang and C# but i decided for Rust because the HTTP Server Actix im using has decently fast benchmarks, the language can run a http api on only a few MB ram and also the Database Driver im using (SeaORM) is great and very fast for database queries Playmatch does a lot of things automatically by now, it can automatically download & import dats and after import also automatically try to match unmatched games to IGDB for example the matching logic is also decently smart, the datting group No-Intro for example has a cloneof id relationship set in there dat file, basically if a game like Pokemon Emerald has multiple versions (different regions, Demos, Betas etc) they write it down in the dat file with an id and a clone of id field, Playmatch can make usage of that and use it for matching, if any game gets matched playmatch automatically matches the games parents and of the parent other child games as well so that if i manually match lets say No-Intros German Pokemon Platin ROM playmatch will check the database and see that other roms (Like the Italy Pokemon Platin Rom) is a clone of the same parent (The Europe or USA Pokemon Platin Rom usually) and then apply the same mapping to it as well For automatically matches this is a great benefit, like if one of the different region name is either the Direct Name or an Alias of the Game on IGDB then we can match all versions of a game This fixes the issue for localized rom naming a lot as well, if you use any Rom Manager or tool which renames your ROMs to match names from No-Intro/Redump dats this will now not make the Identify step of RomM fail because the name is localized and not like that on IGDB and also if one region gets matched now all region gets matched! this makes it less annoying to manually match as well when instead of 20 matches for all different versions (Regions, Beta, different Revisions) of Pokemon Platin you just match any of it and Playmatch does the other one fully automatically Another big issue generally is compression, RomM does not enforce any format when accepting ROM files for Platforms, users usually want to compress there roms if possible to save space zipping Roms is one way but usually the compression rate is not that good especially for newer consoles with for example encryption (which decreases compression rate by a ton) so most Homebrew Communities have developed own formats to compress ROMs a few examples are Wii / Gamecube raw format is .iso and the a common compression format is .rvz which is supported by Dolpin Emulator Wii U Raw format is .ISO but the common compression format is .wux A lot of Disc based system Emulators support .chd files which is a format the MAME team developed with a very good compression rate DAT groups such as No-Intro and Redump usually only create dat files for "RAW" or original formats so if you want to compress your roms it will not be matching to Playmatch anymore as Playmatch only holds rom data which is from a DAT group Luckly the Community already has made DAT files for a few of those formats but depending on the format and compression used these formats might have some randomness depending on what compression level and settings are used Playmatch currently has community dats for .rvz, .wux and decrypted PS3 Games

With FlibblesHexEyes - community member and contributor:

Hey! So, just to clarify I'm not part of the Romm team, though I do work closely with them.

I work on Hasheous (https://hasheous.org/), which provides hash based ROM matching to metadata providers as well as metadata proxying.

Hasheous came about from my other project called Gaseous Server (which is similar to Romm - started about the same time) where I noticed a major point of friction for users was matching their ROM files to metadata providers such as IGDB.

This led me to begin the Hasheous project where a user adding a ROM to their ROM Manager of choice (Hasheous was always designed to be client agnostic and not favour one client over another).

The idea here is that when adding a ROM, instead of the user having to manually say that file is "Choplifter", the client (Romm or Gaseous), would reach out to Hasheous and say "do you know what this file with this SHA1 hash is?" and Hasheous would respond with information about the ROM and where the client could find metadata such as summaries, and cover art.

Which led to solving a further point of friction for users which is that many metadata providers require an API key - and an often convoluted method to generate them - which led to Hasheous having the ability to proxy some metadata providers.

This allows users of Romm (and others) to have a completely friction free experience when adding ROMs to their libraries. It's this part that I'm particularly proud of.

It's taken me about a year to get Hasheous to where it is today. By far the biggest issue is that of data integrity. Hasheous relies on DAT providers (such as TOSEC and NoIntro) who all name games slightly differently. The same is also true of the metadata providers. Examples include that a DAT might name a game with a dash, which the metadata provider might use a colon. Individually these are reasonably easy to match, but at scale it gets a lot harder. So building out a community contribution method (to fix bad matches) that is abuse resistant was also a challenge.

With MattSays - community member and developer responsible for the Android app:

Yeah sure! You may want to know why I decided to make this app. I recently got into retrogaming handhelds and in particular Android retro handhelds, and I also discovered the existence of RomM. However, to my surprise there wasn't an app that could easily handle all of my rom collection without having to go to my browser and manually do all the steps required to just play my desired games. So I developed a client that could improve the usability of RomM on Android without too much hassle and shared all of this with the charming community that instantly tested it and gave me precious feedback.

And that's that!

Well, like I said, perhaps a little rougher than my regular efforts at these, but the contents in the answers really did deserve to be read through, but anyone interested. I love how passionate about gaming, self-hosting and emulation the team (and contributors) are in RomM. It makes me smile to see!

You can find more on The RomM Project with these links:

• Their official website
• Their GitHub
• Their Discord

And don't forget, if you like this kind of gaming nonsense I share, you can find me on Mastodon, where I tend to post every day:

Today's game is some more of The Last of Us. I made it all the way through the chapters with Sam and Henry, and damn, did their death's hit hard. They were only with me for a short while but i kinda got attached to them. Maybe it's because the game makes you feel so alone sometimes.

My favorite part so far has been the river. It's just so pretty that i kind of wish we got more time with it. Exploring the story of Ish was awesome too. It was cool seeing that narrative laid out for me to follow in the form of notes.

Earlier in the game I had noticed Ellie stopping to pick up the Toy Sam dropped, and it's a neat attention to detail that not a lot of games do. I know she carries it with her after Sam's death, but it would have been so easy for them to just say "oh, yeah, she picked it up off camera". But nope, they committed all the resources too it. It's just such a good detail.

During the stealth section with the spotlights i committed myself to the stealth too. I took out the guy patrolling the front, and then planted a few bombs. Then i knocked out the generator and bang. Everyone basically died without a shot fired. It took a good few tries but damn was it satisfying. It probably would have been easier if i had arrows, but oh well. I made due. I appreciate that these games arent just Shooters. Being able to use stealth adds a lot of charm i appreciate.

The ambient story telling is on point too. I was checking out this room and picked up the note, not noticing the blanket with the corpses under it. The note points out they their are kid's corpses probably in the room. When i put the note down and turned to look i noticed the blanket and had a "oh..." moment. It was really heartbreaking. But also really well done.

I ended off making my way through the suburbs and starting the Fall chapter close to Jackson. Now that i seem to have solved the issue it's addicting again. I'm excited to get back into it.

Hello, everyone!

I was lucky enough to get in touch with Wouter, the solo developer behind the Linux game launcher Minigalaxy. He was generous with his time and happy to answer a bunch of random questions I sent his way over the course of a few days. What started as a quick chat turned into this fun little Q&A.

A few hours ago, I posted an article here on Lemmy that used some of his replies as the backbone for a short piece about Minigalaxy. But the more I looked over his answers, the more I felt they deserved to be shared on their own, unedited and in full. So here they are...straight from the source.

I like to do these little Q&A's, interviews and pieces on these projects and programs, because it's a fun chance to get to see what's behind the curtain - hear from the devs which you rarely get to.

Minigalaxy itself is a lightweight, open-source game launcher for Linux, designed specifically for running GOG games with ease. It keeps things simple and streamlined: no bloat, just the basics like installing, updating, and launching your games.

I hope you might enjoy these, it was a fun time, and Minigalaxy itself is a great little Linux program :)

All questions by me, and all answers are by wouter!

Minigalaxy:

Q. I'd like to start with what inspired you to create Minigalaxy? Was it the 'typical' reason? - I know that everyone (do you know Lignuin from Heroic? I'd say you do, he and I both think that GOG's own Galaxy 2.0 is essentially abandoned now) is dissatisfied with the software GOG themselves present.

A. So I wrote Minigalaxy at at time where Lutris was the only other option, but it wasn't as easy to use as I'd like. I also wanted to do a project using python, since that language was still quite new to me. So I decided to write my own client. The idea was to have my own easy to use GOG specific launcher. The initial version was a bit rough and still saw some crashes, but it got better over time. In the beginning I was only planning to make it able to install Linux games, but then it ended up taking off and people started contributing. A contributor who's account name on GitHub is Kzimir wrote the initial wine support.

Q. Minigalaxy seems to be known for its minimalism. Was that a deliberate design choice from the start? I'm a big fan of that, by the way!

A. It was deliberate, I wanted a good overview of the GOG games I can play and an easy way to install them 😄

Q. Why focus solely on GOG support, instead of building a more universal launcher?

A. In the last 6 years I've contributed to a lot of open source projects, but the only launchers I've been using have been Steam and Minigalaxy, so I've not really ran into an opportunity to contribute to other launchers. Besides Minigalaxy I spend a lot of time contributing to PSPDEV, which is a homebrew SDK for the Playstation Portable, and to open source games and game preservation projects.

I think other launchers do a great job integrating multiple platforms. I really like that Minigalaxy is so focused specifically on GOG. I think that gives it its own niche and allows us to offer a level of uniformity while still providing a lot of specific info from GOG. For example filtering on genre would be hard if you're dealing with multiple platforms

Wouter's unprompted statement:

I do have to say that I was not expecting as much community engagement as there has been when I originally started. It was initially just something I wanted to have, but also made available to others. Then when I implemented translation support the contributions really started rolling in and even some programmers joined and added features I wouldn't have thought about. Lately GB609 on Github came in an he fixed most of the outstanding bugs. It has been really cool to work with the over 50 contributors over the years

I recently made translation easier by adding support for Weblate and we now have a 100% complete Ukrainian translation which we didn't have before. It's things like that which just blow me away

To give another example, being able to ship a full Taiwanese Mandarin translation with the third release I did was unexpected, but insanely cool

Q. How has the Linux/GOG gaming community responded to Minigalaxy?

A. The community has been really nice 😄They've really helped to keep me going. Minigalaxy has had so many contributions from the community. Translation, small fixes on the website and even new features and bug fixes

Q. What keeps you motivated to maintain the project?

A. I think that has been my main drive. Minigalaxy has had the features I want from it for a while now, but the community keeps bringing in new ideas and even implementing them

Q. Is there any way people can support you — contributing code, donations, spreading the word?

A. I don't want donations, but contributions are always welcome. It is now super easy to contributed translations, I think it would be really nice if some more people could help out with that 😄

And that's that!

It was short, but their time is valuable, and this was more a chat than a full-blown interview. I am very glad wouter agreed to chat at all: projects like Minigalaxy, which are done free for the community who love gaming are amazing, and I think he deserved a little time to share his views!

• If you're more interested in Minigalaxy, you can find the GitHub page here!

• And of course, the Discord server link is here too, if you want to join in on the chats!

I do hope you'll forgive me posting the entirety in full here, so soon after my other link. And I hope you enjoyed this little post also!

I saw that no one had shared Junk Store's newly released version '2.0' announcement, so I figured I'd format it for Lemmy and post it here.

Is anyone picking it up? Or trying it out?

Anyway, everything below here is their words that I'm pasting in:

The wait is over! Junk Store 2.0 is now live, and we’re excited for you to try it! You’ve heard the fuss, now you can judge it for yourself. If it’s not for you, no hard feelings; all we ask is that you make up your own mind.

Check it out in action here

Get it here

What is Junk Store 2.0?

Junk Store 2.0 is a fully extensible game launcher designed to help you easily install and manage games from platforms like Epic, GOG, Amazon, and more — all without the hassle of complex workarounds. It’s faster, more stable, and includes a ton of new features to enhance your experience on the Steam Deck.

Try Junk Store 2.0 Now!

We know you’ve been waiting for a faster, more stable, and expanded experience, and Junk Store 2.0 delivers just that. While we continue to scale up some of our supporting systems, we’re offering a 25% discount on your first year if you sign up before the end of the month. Use the code EarlyBird at checkout to take advantage of the savings Learn more here

What Users Are Saying

• “Junk Store 2.0 gives me access to dozens of games I already own on platforms I rarely use — without all the convoluted workarounds.” — Anonymous

• “JS allows me the freedom to choose stores with better deals, DRM-free options, or freebies — without sacrificing the joy and simplicity of the Steam Deck.” — BadServo

• “This is f*ing great and well worth the sub. It’s leagues better than before and blows the Decky Loader version out of the water.” — Zer04evr

• “It's the perfect Swiss Army knife for my Deck!” — Tiny Tech

How to Try It?

• 7-day Free Trial – Try before you buy! If you cancel within the first 7 days, you won’t be charged.

• 25% off your first year – Discount available until the end of the month.

Why Upgrade?

You’ll still have access to the old version of Junk Store, but we truly believe the new version offers too many improvements to ignore. Whether it's the download queue, the new extension generation tools, or the ability to view up to 1,000 games, this is the future of Junk Store. Check out "What’s New" here

Hear from the Developer:

• Hear from the developer himself in this interview with Gardiner Bryant: Watch here

• Listen to Gardiner Bryant: Watch it here

We’re Here to Help

Junk Store is a living project. We’re constantly working on improvements, and we need your feedback to make it even better. If you run into any issues, let us know — we’re a small team, but we strive for fast resolutions.

Thank you for your support — Game on!

Hello everybody!!!

Sorry it’s been so long since my last updates here on Lemmy. I do know its been too long between my Steam Deck / Gaming News posts (and I pinkie-swear that will change sometime soon!), but at least I have some things to share here which I hope you’ll find interesting.

I’ve been lucky in that a friend on Mastodon has asked me to help contribute to his weekly gaming ‘magazine’ - a site he’s launched a week or so ago with the idea of being:

...a site where we can write about games, technology, and nerdy culture in a relaxed, informal fashion. Where we can celebrate creators, game developers and anyone else who makes a positive contribution to the gaming community on the fediverse.

So, this time, I’ve written some things for this site as a contributor, and I’d love to get your thoughts on what I’ve written.

An article:

First is an article on RomM's new release version 0 4.0.0 (along with its Android app release!), which is a little different to how I’ve typically written and shared on Lemmy before. You might remember that I’ve interviewed the team behind RomM before, and shared it here on Lemmy. They’re all lovely people!

For this I wrote more of an 'article' - but also was in touch with all the devs responsible for the changes in this release, so you'll find them sprinkled throughout!

The link to my RomM article is here!

Minigalaxy:

The developer behind the Linux GOG launcher for games, Minigalaxy was kind enough to chat to me over a few days so I could hear more about the work and what brought the launcher into being.

I'm super grateful that they wanted to chat, and Minigalaxy is such a fun program, if you haven't already then you should check it out!

The direct link to that article I wrote is here

An interview:

Lastly was to be an interview with the developer behind Falkor, an independent game launcher built almost entirely by one develop. Designed to be personal, customisable, and community-driven, Falkor was built to stay in line with the dev's plan: a 'user-first alternative to the other launchers available'.

In our conversation, he shared his journey as a dev, insights on the plugin architecture, thoughts on legal boundaries, and future plans for Falkor, including Proton support and deeper community involvement.

Sadly, a few hours before posting, he actually ceased work on Falkor with an announcement in his Discord, and has stepped back from it. So that one is no longer being posted!

What's Next:

But I have also got plenty more in the works to share. I’ve been in touch with:

• PortMaster (though this one might be taking a little longer than I first anticipated)

• The person behind the emulation compatibility report site called EmuReady

• The dev team who have made Ocean Keeper: Dome Survival on Steam - they've been super kind and are arranging the dev team to answer my questions, and provide me with promo material to use

• And another handful of teams and devs – projects and independent games, which I suppose I’ll share when the time is right!

What I'd love most from all of you here is to hear what you think. These posts have entirely been for all of you on Lemmy in the past. But sharing these on this site does mean RSS will be easier for you (for those who ask how to RSS my posts).

Would you like me to share my articles and interviews here in Lemmy as they were, or through this fediverse-centric site instead? Or both?

Please share what you think. My style writing these, the format, the fact they’re on a site, just give me your thoughts.

If you’d just like a link to the site itself, its here:

https://magazine.fediverse.games/

One other thing, if you'd like to contribute to that site, then Mr Dendry stated:

...if you have a product or project you'd like to be featured on this site please reach out! Additionally, if you're a writer and you want to contribute, please let me know as it would be great to have a few people writing here aside from me.

Hope you’re all well, and enjoying gaming lately. Again, all apologies for my absence from Lemmy lately :)

Some interesting analysis from Mat Piscatella about the state of the industry.

• Exclusives aren't driving console purchases anymore, as evidenced by Forza Horizon 5 most of all.
• Nintendo would likely benefit from this too, but they're unlikely to do so anytime soon.
• It's too early to predict any sort of success for Switch 2, as the numbers they're seeing right now may be little more than the supply being great enough to reach their biggest fans.
• Overall demand for gaming hasn't gone down and has stabilized. Those dollars won't be distributed evenly, but the enthusiasts are showing up.

Today's game is (finally) some more of The Last of Us. I discovered the crashing i was having seems to be a combination of the game thinking my PC was a Steam Deck and thus messing with some Specs, and the game being a little too powerful. I lowered it down to High and everything seems good now. We'll have to see though for sure.

I finally managed to make it out of that damn hotel. It was an awesome segment but holy fuck did the crashing draw it out way too long. I'm now out on the streets again and i appreciate the change in environment.

They have a segment where you're being chased by an armored truck, and i'm starting to suspect the Naughty Dog loves their Armored Truck chases. Uncharted 4 had one too. Granted that was far more of a scripted sequences while this one is more like run and duck to cover. It's not a bad thing though. It was a lot of fun doing this segment and i loved sneaking past it on the ledge.

While i was in the Basement segment and dealing with the Bloater, i struggled a bit with it. I ended up using a combo of the Shotgun and Molotovs. Even with that it was a bit of a challenge due to the narrow hallways. On the plus side though i got this sick (albeit dark) photo of the Bloater in a scuffle with Joel.

While playing i keep noticing a series of parallels between this and Uncharted 4. I'm not sure why but i feel like i've seen this exact scene before in Uncharted 4 as well only on Libertalia.Maybe i'm just over analyzing things, but damn is this fun to be reminded of.

Overall though, i'm glad to resolved the issue i was having and picking up the game again. I really didn't like living it unfinished so starting it up again is fun.

This is by pannenkoek2012, who you may know from his Super Mario 64 videos. You know, the one from 2016 about playing Watch for Rolling Rocks in "half" of an A press.

Poor timing considering the subnautica drama

The group responsible is "Collective Shout", the same org has targeted Steam before.

There are calls on social media now to contact Mastercard, Visa and co. and file complaints.

Source.