I’ve been a busy game blogger lately, but before I get into Linux-specific gaming, I’d like to share my latest crush: Bowsette!
In the grim future of Bowsette there can be only war!
Bowsette is a fan creation I covered in my write-up of the top weirdest moments of the Mario / Donkey Kong franchise. As a Gen Xer, I’m in a unique position to sum up the scope of the historic Donkey Kong and Super Mario franchise. I was there twoscore years ago, a greasy triangle of disgusting pier joint pizza in hand at the Balboa Fun Zone witnessing the dawn of the Donkey Kong original arcade machine. (You can still play that on Linux, if you bootleg the ROM and load up Mame.) I catalog the weirdness from that day through all the magic mushrooms down to modern-day 4chan and its Bowsette abomination.
See, I understand where it comes from. Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga (2014) for the Game Boy Advance and Wii U had this moment where they decided a female-possessed Bowser would make a fun boss fight, namely Bowletta. Fans instantly repressed the memory until it manifested itself years later on image boards. Every fetish has a childhood trauma behind it.
As wrong as Bowsette is, on the teeth-grinding irritation level of Brony culture, it still feels like it belongs in 2020 pop culture somehow. It was inevitable. Torment the proles enough and even their escapism becomes twisted.
This post on the wackiness of Mario’s universe was a follow-up from my previous post on underdog Super Nintendo games. But you know what really sticks to me from the Mario franchise?
This damn music from Super Mario World 2 : Yoshi’s Island, the castle and fortress music. It sounds like Beetlejuice waltzing with Princess Peach, and then Bowsette just seems to fit right in there.
Anyway, I promised Linux gaming, so…
Torchlight II is the Diablo II on Linux you should have been playing
I searched long and hard, far and wide, for a drop-in replacement for an action RPG. Blizzard Entertainment is notoriously Linux-unfriendly and kinda in the doghouse in the gaming world in general, so I just refuse to kick Diablo II onto Linux anymore, even is that means giving up my beloved Median XL mod. Enough, I say! It’s been onescore years since D2, there has GOT to be a successor!
Finding this was a lot harder than I ever imagined. First, it has to run on Linux. Then it has to be low-spec enough to survive on a Mint laptop. Then it has to be single-player-friendly, because a man my age has heard enough of the ribald barbs of 14-year-olds. Then it also has to be an actual action RPG. Have you noticed no matter what search terms you use on Steam, it’s going to shove its own preferred games at you anyway?
Cutting to the chase, I found Torchlight II and haven’t looked back. It runs flawlessly on Linux, like it was born there. I’ll do a full guide for it someday, but I must take the time to point out how damned good this game looks. They poured gangs of time into the detail of the environments when they didn’t have to. There’s particle and atmosphere effects all over. Vast, elaborate scenery everywhere you look.
While the story is none too complicated and the characters won’t have you standing up to applaud their performances, it’s still everything I ask in an ARPG. It’s just pure dungeon-grinding satisfaction without having to think too hard. It also brings a lot of innovation to the genre (or it did when it was new, at least), while remaining faithful to the D2 style. It turns out several ex-Blizzard employees came to work for the development house behind Torchlight. That explains that!
Dicey Dungeons is ruined, but still playable
My favorite online free casual re-thinking of the dungeon crawler genre went paid-only on Steam, and in the process got dipped in stupid. I held off for as long as I could until my jones overcame my revulsion. Then I said “It can’t be THAT bad!” Give it a shot. Well, I gave Dicey Dungeons a shot, and I’m mad at whoever drove the designer to do this to such a nice game.
I gave it a shot. And discovered it COULD be that bad! The redesign took the game in the opposite direction from common sense, glomming on a framing story that doesn’t work, stale humor that would make a rock groan, cutesy sugary graphics straight out of a kid’s cereal commercial, and even nerfed the four starting characters while adding two more to make the line-up confusing. Terry Cavanagh did to Dicey Dungeons what this cosplayer did to Darth Vader:
You see where we developed a collective cultural obsession with Bowsette now?
Nevertheless, the core idea – a dice-centric view of a dungeon-crawling RPG with everything else stripped out so it becomes a fast, but still deep, casual game – is still good enough to play, so I continue playing it. I still recommend it! It’s just an experience tinged with sorrow, as I pity the poor game choking under all that crap that got painted onto it.
Adventure Capitalist is still a dumb dopamine dispenser
God help me, are clicker / idle games ever my guilty pleasure! I originally reviewed Adventure Capitalist and its nauseating Communist sequel for the Android platform, but then found it on Steam too and what the hell, it’s free. So of course now that I have it installed on what, my fourth device now, I of course have to “beat” it again – or at least, finish Moon, Mars, and Earth to the point where there’s no more unlocks and you get the silly postcard ending.
The primary charm of this gear-stripped casual clicker is the cheesy 1950s motif and music, but the secondary charm comes from learning the names of the big numbers really well. Which, by the way, actually exist. There they are in Wikipedia. Septendecillion, novemvigintillion, and even octotrigintillion all right there. At the least, I feel like Adventure Capitalist deserves an entry in that article.
By the way, when you play Adventure Capitalist on desktop, there’s no ads.
SO: Three games that currently have my attention. There’s several more of course, but they have to wait their turn until I blog them next.
If you’re looking for something to read next, my IMGUR gallery of the graveyard of forgotten toys and games is right this way, dive in.
