A Shelter Full of Cats I’m a sucker for any game from Devcats.

So, most of my recommendations are going to be FPS or first person. For Valve related stuff:

• Half-Life 2 is pretty much a must have along with Episodes 1 and 2.
• Black Mesa is a remake of the original.
• Entropy : Zero 2 is a fantastic fan made mod that’s a good follow up after finishing Half-Life 2 and the episodes.
• The original Entropy : Zero is pretty good, but the default difficulty is hard as hell.
• Portal 1 and 2 are also a must have
• Portal: Revolution is an independent mod that’s a good follow up after 2.

As for non-Valve games and related:

• Crab Champions - fast paced, third-person, rogue-like shooter.
• Talos Principle 1 and 2 - first-person puzzles with a serious philosophical scifi story. It actually gets a bit heavy when it discusses mortality and death. 1 is being remade into a “definitive edition”.
• Untitled Goose Game - Honk!
• Gnorp Apologue - fun little game
• Pineapple on pizza - it’s free. I would describe it as games-as-art.
• Any of the Serious Sam games. They were made for PC.
• Fallen Aces is still in early access, but a good story driven retro FPS with sprites and multiple ways of navigating each level.
• Trepang2 - a bit of an odd FPS with bullet time.
• Roboquest - rogue like FPS
• Exit 8 - horror walking simulator. Kinda short once you figure it out.
• APE OUT - Ape smash! Top down “shooter”.
• Hotline Miami 1 and 2 - top down shooters with fast deaths and excellent soundtracks
• The Binding of Isaac - has always been popular if a little dated
• Gunpoint - stealth puzzle third person. Came out a decade ago, but a good game.
• Party Hard - little indie murder-everyone-and-don’t-get-caught.
• The Stanley Parable - walking simulator with some interesting dialog and interactions. 9-to-5 office people can relate.
• Dusk - awesome boomer shooter
• Antichamber - came out a decade ago, but it’s mind bending first-person puzzles.
• Hades and Hades 2 which is in early access. Third person isometric rogue-like.
• The Invincible - Story driven walking simulator based off the book of the same name. Good story.
• Firewatch - story driven walking simulator
• Deep Rock Galactic - wasn’t my pint of beer, but a lot of people like it.

Half-Life 2 is pretty much a must have. Black Mesa is a good remake of the original.

I’d be surprised if they had net positive income on Tribes 3. A lot of veteran gamers of the series saw who was really running development and decided to stay away. Once bitten, twice shy. The writing was on the wall that it was a dead game back in June.

Embracer treats studios like they are disposable. They killed Volition (Saint’s Row), Free Radical (TimeSpltters) plus a bunch of other studios. All of that was because their $2 billion deal with the Saudi Government fell through. Some studios managed to escape when one of the Saber Interactive original owners bought back a bunch of studios. They recently killed Pieces Interactive (Alone in the Dark).

If a studio is owned by Embracer, they are lucky if they will be around in 5 years.

That depends. Are you looking at preserving the music without loss of information? Then you need to use a lossless format like flac. Formats like aac, mp3, opus can throw away information you’re less likely to hear to achieve better compression ratios. Flac can’t, so it needs more storage space to preserve the exact waveform.

You can use a lossy format if you want. On most consumer level equipment, you probably won’t notice a difference. However, if you start to notice artifacting in songs, you’ll need to go back to the originals to re-rip and encode.

Yeeeaaah, that makes more sense. 😅 That would be a giant gaping vulnerability if everything was in kernel space.

Bluetooth has one of the largest network stacks. It’s bigger than Wifi. This means some parts of the stack probably aren’t tested and may have bugs or vulnerabilities. It has duplicate functionality in it. This opens up the possibility that flaws in how different parts interact could lead to vulnerabilities or exploits.

A number of years ago some security researchers did an analysis of the Windows and Linux stacks. They found multiple exploitable vulnerabilities in both stacks. They called their attack blue borne, but it was really a series of attacks that could be used depending on which OS you wanted to target. Some what ironically, Linux was more vulnerable because the Linux kernel implemented more of the protocol than Windows.

There’s talk on the Linux kernel mailing list. The same person made recent contributions there.

Andrew (and anyone else), please do not take this code right now.

Until the backdooring of upstream xz[1] is fully understood, we should not accept any code from Jia Tan, Lasse Collin, or any other folks associated with tukaani.org. It appears the domain, or at least credentials associated with Jia Tan, have been used to create an obfuscated ssh server backdoor via the xz upstream releases since at least 5.6.0. Without extensive analysis, we should not take any associated code. It may be worth doing some retrospective analysis of past contributions as well…