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Game Reviews and Ubisoft's Ban of GNU/Linux Users
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Boiling Steam ☛ TGS 2026: Persona 4 Revival
It’s 2026, you are one of the biggest Japanese publishers, and you just realized that in a few months down the road there’s the TGS 2026, and you don’t have no plans for it. I mean, you have a couple of news, but nothing worth filling a huge booth that we usually go for. Never mind that! Sega didn’t have a lot this year. It was fairly obvious and their only real new title was Stranger than Heaven which is some kind of spinoff from the Yakuza (Like a Dragon) franchise. It was too early for Persona 6, and the only thing they could do is to throw a P6 teaser with nothing in it back in June 2026 ahead of the show. There’s Crazy Taxi World Tour but it was so low key that they had to put it on the side. Don’t get me wrong, this multiplayer Crazy Taxi has a good chance of being a fun game, but nobody came to TGS to see that.
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Boiling Steam ☛ The Prince is (a) Blue(print): Review
How long is too long before something “gets good”? The first few episodes of a TV series? 50 pages of a novel? What about 5-10 hours of a ~30-hour game? At what point do you give up on something, not sure if it is you or it? That was my dilemma in playing the highly lauded Blue Prince, a 2025 indie puzzle “roguelite” game from developers Dogubomb. I had heard good things, and even if I don’t play much in the puzzle genre, it had some familiar mechanics (roguelite, strategy, deck drafting sort of). So I was excited to have a review copy. But it just never landed for me, never making it to something I wanted to see through. And really, I dreaded a run ending to start a new one, the opposite of what any run-based game needs. I was waiting to get over an early hump to see the game open up, but I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, make it over. Drafting a room, with red ones generally a negative, but at least the Chapel gives you a path forward. You can’t rotate the placement. (Screenshots are all from the Steam Deck.) In browsing the community a little, I found I wasn’t alone, if a clear minority. And that doesn’t make it a “bad” game by any means. More like one that didn’t hit for me, because of me (and the genre?) and its own missteps, I would say. There’s a lot that is well done, new, and intriguing in Blue Prince, that I might one day try again. Right now, though, I don’t want to walk through the random corridors of Mt. Holly, not to unravel a mystery, not to unlock more of the game, and not to see if it really gets that good. It has had my time, and I’m not getting that back.
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XDA ☛ After banning all Linux and Steam Deck players, Ubisoft's For Honor is free to keep until September 28th
A little while ago, Ubisoft announced that it was introducing new competitive modes to its online multiplayer game, For Honor. In the same breath, it then announced that it was flat-out banning everyone playing on a Linux OS from playing, because it couldn't properly code a kernel-level anti-cheat when the kernel is open-source.
The Linux gaming community was pretty upset, especially those who had paid for the game, played past Steam's refund window, then got locked out of it (although one person got a refund after four tries). Now, to make matters worse, Ubisoft has made For Honor free to keep forever if you grab it before September 28th.