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It’s time for annother edition of our biannual Game Giveaway topics! Share games with the community and get rid of those extra bundle keys you have lying around.

Before you participate, please make sure you read the rules below.

Rules

-Gifters

Post your available games, the platform and method of delivery, rules for your giveaways (e.g. first-come first-serve, random draw, etc.), and any additional info or requirements. Feel free to get creative!

-Giftees

Request giveaways. Please make sure you follow the gifter's posted guidelines.

-Guidelines

Anyone can choose to be a gifter, giftee, or both! Giveaway rules are set by individual gifters, but there are handful of guidelines everyone should follow:

1. No grey market keys! Only give away games from reputable sources. If you're not sure what this means, please ask.
2. Requests for games should be done in this topic, but if the gift is a key, those should be delivered by PMs only. Please don't post keys publicly in this topic, even obfuscated ones.

If you're new to these, check out previous giveaway threads to see how these usually go.

Inspired by the recurring topic every Steam sale over at /r/GameDealsMeta:

• What are some lesser-known or overlooked Steam games that you recommend?

• Are there any genres you’d like hidden gem recommendations for?

If you're interested in previous Hidden Gem topics, you can find them here.

For popular recommendations and general purpose sale discussion, please use the main Steam sale topic.

Optional: Feel free to categorize your recommendations by number of reviews (as a proxy for popularity)

Note to future kfwyre: please see this comment about changes to the Hidden Gems topic when you come back to this one in six months.

The survey has been closed and the results are in!

Thank you to all the 165 people that responded! Check out the dashboard for the full results!

• ZIP download of the data

Thank you all again for participating! As mentioned in the original post, this will be the last survey for a little while! On August 2nd however I'll be back with the vote for the next surveys we'll do. :D

I recently have been reconnecting with something from my childhood: the Krosmoz universe! Anyone who was a kid in France between 2004 and 2012 or so either grew up on it or is at least a little bit familiar with it. Most people outside of the country, if they know of it, generally only know of Dofus, the first of their three (actually five (actually eight if you count the dead ones)) tactical MMORPGs, or the derived TV animated series Wakfu, which was picked up on Netflix at one point. But it's massive here. Even today, they're still quite popular and perpetually developed.

As a medium, video games are not generally so closely tied to countries; more than half of their history has been during the era of globalization and the Internet. Even in the past, when you could only buy games in person in a store, people's minds everywhere were nonetheless on games from overseas. Today, games made in Sweden or Morocco have lived on the same storefronts as games made in Venezuela and Australia for a good while, and I'd bet most people don't even think about where the people who make the games they play come from.

I personally think this is a great thing! But the fact that there's something like Krosmoz, that's so unusually localized to one place, makes me curious to know if there's more; and if there is, I want to know what's unique about it, and what it says about its players and makers, too.

I've asked this before on reddit, and I remember being told about Metin2, an originally Korean MMO that was so popular in Eastern Europe that even a decade after the original Korean and US servers were shut down, players from those countries are still updating the game and keeping it alive. This is a different situation from Krosmoz but another fascinating one. It's the kind of thing I wanna know about.

This is an invitation to yap, if you'll oblige me. Do you have anything like that where you're from? A game or game franchise that only people of your culture know, and that you want everyone else to know about? I wanna hear about it!

I posted this once and immediately deleted it to make it shorter. I did not really succeed. Please don't sue me!

Custom games/game modes/rulesets give gamers the ability to enjoy some games nearly infinitely. Gary's Mod, Rust, Minecraft, Robolox, Fortnite, and many others keep people coming back as people create new ways to play.
When I was younger I played a ton of Warcraft 3 custom games. I remember there being a solid ~2 years when that was almost entirely what I would play whenever I was able to use the computer and then another 3-4 years after where I would play at least a couple of times a week.

I remember loving custom games like:

• Defense of the Ancients (DotA)
• Island Troll Tribes (also Jungle Troll Tribes to a lesser extent)
• Risk (and it's many versions)
• Wintermaul and Wintermaul wars (along with all the other tower defense and tower defense wars)
• Vamperism
• Pest Control
• Many others as this list would drag on

I remember chatting with a lot of interesting people, though I didn't have any friendships I made move past Warcraft 3 in to other games.

I know there are many other games with custom games or customer game modes that the community developed, with DotA 2 coming full circle from being the sequel to a custom game to having custom games of its own.

To get the conversation going:

• What games had your favorite custom games?
• What custom games were your favorite?
• Did you make or contribute to any custom games?
• Any favorite memories?

Now that we know everyone's favorites, I'd love to hear about games that are further down the list -- the ones that don't necessarily rise to the high heights of definitive favoritedom.

So, share your eleventh favorite game this time. You know, the one that doesn't quite make it into your top 10.

Feel free to share your top 10 if you like as well, but lead with your 11th, as those are the ones I'm interested in seeing highlighted.

The survey has been closed and the results are in!

Thank you to all the 244 people that responded! Check out the dashboard for the full results!

• ZIP download of the data

Thank you all again for participating! Hope to see you in the next survey! :)

A few days ago, I posted this and quickly realized that the world of data backups is far richer than just sudo rsync -av --delete --exclude=Videos /home /home_bkup.

So now I'm window shopping the top Linux-supported backup solutions: borg, duplicacy, kopia, restic and--oh look--a core borg dev just dropped his own new-and-improved solution, vykar.

Restic was the first tool I started to research, and I thought I really liked it, got as far as installing, initializing a test repo, creating a couple of snapshots. But restic seems to be, hmm, fussy about the source and destination paths, absolute vs relative paths, etc.

The fact that merely renaming a parent directory (or grandparent, or great-grandparent, etc) causes restic to treat every unchanged byte below that as brand new ... that's a recipe for giant, bloated repos, and it's unacceptable to me ... and hey, lookit that, borg does not do that. So now, restic is out and borg is in.

But what other pros v cons are there, that I haven't even realized need to be considered? What advantages/disadvantages do other apps offer? Which ones can I easily automate with nightly/hourly cron jobs? Which ones have their own even-better automated solutions?

Do I even want encryption? All of my drives/volumes are LUKS encrypted, and anything I would store remotely would also get encrypted before it ever left my LAN ... plus, I'm just a bit nervous about having the backups encrypted, requiring working, functional software to restore/recover data from them....

That may not seem like such a big concern, perhaps, but I am currently working my way thru decrypting a bunch of 10-15 year old TrueCrypt-ed volumes, which requires using an old, outdated version of VeraCrypt and a somewhat "cross-my-fingers" effort to find KeePass repos old enough (also outdated, KeePass 1.0 repos) to still contain the various passwords I used to encrypt those ancient volumes ... but also still use new enough master passwords that I can still get the KeePass repos unlocked.

With rsync, I can literally just go into any backup, find the specific version of the specific file(s) I want to recover, and manually copy it back to my workspace. Is anything like that option available in any of these deduplicated/encrypted solutions, even if they're not encrypted? If (eg) a borg repo is created w/o encryption, the data is still all just borg-specific blobs, right? Or can I navigate into the repo and just manually grab files?

Oh yeah ... for reference, the past 10-ish years, my backup routine has been to create a new, dated, destination folder, starting with a full backup of my /home folder (excluding things like Videos, Music, VMs, other bulky stuff that gets backed up separately/differently), and then running nightly diff backups into the same folder, while also maintaining a "one-day-older" second backup of the whole thing on a 2nd HDD ... then, every 3-6 months, zipping up the current backup folder and starting a new one.

At any rate, there you go; that's the kind of stuff I'm thinking about now, as I overhaul my 20-year-old, 20TB (but could be 2TB) backup system.

Any and all feedback, recommendations, tips are welcome. Danke.