I haven’t thought about this game since I was in junior high. Wow. I should look into it again since guitar hero and rock band have become so inaccessible. Used guitar controllers going for $150+. Fucking outrageous.
CrossCode is really good, but it isn’t free. I need to look through my Steam library to see which other games might be open source too. This is the only one I’m aware of, really. ProtonDB might have a list of games that are open source. It’s a great resource for checking compatibility if you’re playing on Linux.
I really wish someone would do an OpenRCT3. It was so much fun being able to ride your creations. I had a 3D projector back then too, which made the game even more awesome. Such an underrated sequel.
And yes I’m aware that Planet Coaster exists but has anyone actually tried playing that game? They made everything way too complicated and I just can’t get into it. I don’t want to engineer every single bend and design the perfect landscaping from scratch, I just want to slap some rides together, see the guests come pouring in, and occasionally ride one of my rides (in VR, ideally). No game since RCT 3 has satisfied that itch for me.
Too many amazing moments and memories to even count, always more to learn. I love how the open source nature of the game means there’s many different servers branching off from each other, running their own custom versions of the game. Smaller servers “downstream” pick and choose which features they want to keep when the upstream servers implement something new.
It’s not open source, but I do want to mention Barotrauma here – it’s not totally unheard of, but I don’t think many people realize that it’s a spiritual successor to SS13. Supports a lot less players, but still up to 12 or something on the bigger ships, and it manages to turn the absolute insanity of SS13 into a compelling survival game that still has plenty of goofiness.
I entered SS13 with the ssethtide and I stuck around past the worst of it but I haven’t logged in since probably 2021. Is it a good time to come back and see what’s up? I enjoyed high population servers and a lot of people were leaving with the tide around and before when I did. What’s an average server pop these days?
The overcomplexity of the game is part of why I love it so much but it’s also what drove me off of it, because I couldn’t figure out how to run an offline server to practice roles and I wasn’t trying to do my first day of engineering or doctoring on a public lobby if I could help it. I had a lot of fun in Mining and Cargo and occasionally just faffing about as an assistant helping Botany grow weed or bringing monkeys to the chef - but I’d like to learn “a real job” one of these days (he says, knowing exactly how pissed off everyone gets if mining or cargo either die or are understaffed). And most folks didn’t usually seem inclined to adopt assistants, unfortunately. Remember folks, adopt wandering assistants and then spay and neuter them because unattended assistants will cook their hands off trying to break into the armory.
I mostly play on tgstation’s european server Terry, which often gets up to 100 players in the busy hours.
I know exactly the kind of anxiety you mention when it comes to having to learn a new role. That was partly why I also had the idea of installing a server locally to tinker with the mechanics in, which fortunately tgstation actually makes very easy. My problem then is that I only have like 10 minutes alone on the station before the power runs out, and I have to go set up the solar panels to continue my experiments. Turns out being solo crew on a space station isn’t all that easy.
Is there anyway to play on Linux? I’ve always wanted to try a role playing game but never found one that I think I’d vibe but ss13 looks right up my alley.
You might not be aware but there’s also a fairly content-rich successor project called SpaceStation 14! Its obviously nowhere near as featureful as 13 is, due to lack of development time but has a very active development community around it.
One of the major (imo) improvements is a move to per pixel “real time” movement instead of the tile movement of ss13, it helps make them game feel much more alive and interactive.
Definitely worth a look for fans of ss13, and its also open source and Linux compatible.
Widelands is a great strategy / building game. The gameplay and UI style is a niche - but that’s one of the things I like about it. It’s doing something different to most games.
(The gameplay is similar to Settlers 2; before that franchise changed direction.)
[edit] But the open-source game I’ve spent the most time playing would be OpenXcom-extended, with xpiratez. That game is truly huge.
Endless Sky – open-source space game. I actually contributed to it back in the day; a date format option and a full-blown storyline about an author. Unfortunately the storyline is in development hell cause I lost motivation to work on it.
OpenTTD – really awesome, with NewGRFs and mods you can have a somewhat “realistic” rail experience (as in, using actual real-life trains. Obviously a pixel game isn’t the most “realistic” with graphics)
Happily, that’s no longer the case these days. TDM was originally a mod, but despite keeping the name, it’s now a standalone game using the open-sourced Doom 3 engine. The whole game is currently free without any purchases necessary!