LinuxGameCast Weekly EP214 – Gore Galore

Warhammer® comes to Linux! SOMA breaks even, Threewave gets uncovered, and YouTube dun goofed. Then Slain: Back from Hell faces the CHAIRQUISITON!

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Steam News:

Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro

Threewave uncovered
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-09-22-valves-unreleased-half-life-mod-threewave-uncovered-fixed-and-released

Anyone want to Pepsi Challenge this?
Dropped the extracted files into the half life directory, restarted steam and it showed up
It runs, although it crashed when I tried to start a server
Joined an empty server and derped around for a bit. It looks like Deathmatch Classic.
Also doesn’t actually kill the process on Exit.

All the Feral games
http://www.feralinteractive.com/en/games/dawnofwar2/setting/

Chainsaw swords \:D/
- WHAR GREATER GOOD MOTHERFUCKERS?
- I needs my Tau army
This should hold me over until Mankind Divided
Yussssssssss. Called it.

Now available on Linux
http://steamcommunity.com/app/369070/discussions/0/353915309352505474/

Notice how the thread is from August 1st.
That was about the time I sent the devs the first email about the game.
To which they replied and said “Yeah, the Linux and Mac versions of Back From Hell are still in the works”
We’re now coming to the end of September and, obviously, I had completely forgot.
They didn’t and sent us the keys.
Thank you for that!
The only thing that really tickled me about this game was the soundtrack by a former Celtic Frost member
- Heads may have bobbed while playing.
We’ll see how well that holds up in the Chairquisition

RAID
http://store.steampowered.com/app/527450/?snr=1_7_7_230_150_1

Looks really fun or really shite, can’t decide.
Look up Bad Mojo and play that instead.
What is this? A game for ants?

Double
http://store.steampowered.com/app/506150/

Despite the implication of it’s namesake, this game has more to do with contra than Double dragon
Hipster pixel early access

4th Person
http://store.steampowered.com/app/417150/

Big thanks to the fine folks at Visiontrick Media for sending us the keys.
Very striking visuals, with more than a little nod to the MC Escher style.
You chase a guy around with a floating ball… I can get into this.
- So we finally get a video game adaptation of the prisoner?
This better be moddable #cattleprod

News:

Jumbo Bundle
https://www.humblebundle.com/jumbo-bundle-7

Picked it up for Prison Architect.
Not that I want to play it but I would never spend $30 on it.
Remember kids, your reviews don’t count.
Got it for Devil Daggers, still payed more than average in hopes the extra added games will be worth it.
- Devil Daggers Seemed interesting, but there isn’t really anythi ng else in the bundle that justifies picking it up for me
- I had a go until I noted it was instant-death.
Compare the pacman graph of this bundle with the current Mobile bundle

YouTube
http://betanews.com/2016/09/23/youtube-heroes-rewards/

Between this and the debates I’m going to run out of popcorn.
Did they get jelly of Steam’s slave labour and decide to get some student ath-o-letes of their own?
“Comments are disabled for this video.”
Empty and I were talking about this the other day. The cesspool that is the youtube comments section cannot be trusted to moderate itself
Plus every internet special interest group is going to be trying to use this to troll their rival groups
They basically renamed the Trusted Flaggers program and gamified it.
Let’s advertise our unpaid positions to the kind of people who use Youtube as Social Network. What could possibly go wrong?
Ultimately, I’m curious if this is actually just an elaborate rehash of the stanford prison experiment

Even SOMA
http://frictionalgames.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/soma-one-year-later.html

They sold a few Linux copies.
- That’s about 1.1% of sales. For a minority OS, not bad
Again, not a bad game, but it’s strong point was the world it presented and the questions it raised. Gameplay was kind of meh
If, paradoxically, instead of being too scared to get out of their comfort zone and not relying on the horror genre, SOMA would have been a proper sci-fi thriller.
But some of those monster encounters were painfully obviously shoehorned in.

Someone really didn’t want to send us Steam keys for this…
http://aveyond.com/games/aveyond-4-shadow-of-the-mist/

So instead they sent a DRM riddled “installer” which they haven’t realized is useless under Linux, because everyone knows exactly what is in that ~/.Aveyond folder.
Somethin something Steam reviews, maybe?
- Windows only for Steam.
RPG Maker jRPG-type-thing du jour.
All characters looking slightly to the left… the game. \
I guess they’re trying to go for the humourous “Villain dealing with heroes” schitck. It’s not that funny
Nor is having to enter two CD keys ಠ_ಠ
- And you have to do it from terminal… that rules out ARCH users.
Well, it runs.

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies

Game: Slain: Back From Hell
Webzone: store.steampowered.com/app/369070/
Devel: Wolfbrew Games
Engine: Unity
Price: 12.99 / CDN 13.99

Wazzat: A heavy metal inspired arcade combat with puzzle elements and gore galore. Stunning visuals and true old school gameplay accompanied by the most metal soundtrack you’ve ever heard.

Mandatory Filth Disclosure: They sent us keys

Makes with the working

V-

Unity scream of nope even in Big Picture mode, impressive.

J-

P-

Unity Screen of Nope: -1 Chair.
If it weren’t for the lack of resolution options in game, it’d be useless too!

Total-

Shiny / Sounds

V-

Why has FSM cursed us with two weeks of hipster-pixel bullsh*t!

J-

Well, they got a former celtic frost guitarist to noodle for the soundtrack, so there’s your metal cred
And noodle he does!
Beyond that, you have a hipster pixel pseudo black metal visual aesthetic, which honestly looks like a gored up version of simon’s quest
Complete with annoying flying medusa heads!

P-

This is not the most metal soundtrack I’ve ever heard.
In fact this, to quote what I previously said about SEUM, it’s Elevator Music of the Metal Kind or EMMK.
The game which had the most Metal soundtrack ever, and even had freakin Ozzy playing the devil, was Brütal Legend.
So no, you don’t get to claim that!
I wouldn’t go so far as describing the visuals as Stunning either!
They look Castlevania on the Mega Drive/Genesis good, but stunning the visuals are not.
Speaking of Mega Drive, this game really does give me the Altered Beast vibe in more than just aesthetics but more on that later!

Total-

Control

V-

You really should not have anything remotely resembling precision platforming unless your controls are hella tight.
It’s like the system can only handle one input at a time.
However, you can rebind the controls in-game.
Then again rebinding movement to the D-pad turned it into a suggestion stick.

J-

There’s this super annoying half second delay between pressing a button and doing the thing
Makes it really hard to react to shit
Speaking of which, enemy hitboxes are weird

P-

Decided to start the game on the Steambox; Unity screen of nope!
I had to go into the Overlay, edit the controller mapping to make the left Areola on the Mistress to work as the mouse and clicking it would send the left click.
Like the captain of the Titanic said when he realised he couldn’t steer the boat in time: “The controls are floaty as fuck!”
They seem to have made the attack moves purposefully limited.
- After every 3rd swing you have a little pause.
And that’s fine, if your controls are tight. In that case it would a limitation which the player would need to master to ensure survival.
Plenty of games have done this. Hyper light drifter, comes to mind.
Even though in Hyper Light Drifter you had a visible 33ms delay from you hit a button to when your character did the thing, it felt tight and given enough practice you would learn to work with that delay.
In Slain though, the delay comes not from a 30FerPS lock, but from that stupidly over designed animation.
When you hit a button, you expect that press to trigger the action not the animation.
I can’t give it 1 chair for controls, since you could still in theory play and finish the game…

Total-

FUN

V-

Did you set out to make a rage platformer?
Because those only work when you FK you, not when a busted input system causes you to get fkd.

J-

Pretty much everything I can say about this game boils down to: I want to like it, but the controls are garbage
When you’re making a platformer/action game, this is the one aspect you absolutely have to nail
And you didn’t brad. No amount of heavy metal noodling is going to save it
And I really did want to like the game.

P-

Slain, like many Nostalgia driven games before, wears its inspirations on its sleeve.
It’s a 16bit-style, 2D platformer which is more than a little reminiscent of Altered Beast and Castlevania on the Mega Drive/Genesis.
Unlike Castlevania though, you have one path when on a level proper.
Though, it has a hub town which reminds me of Taimumari and -1 chair for reminding me of that game.
The floaty controls make combat and precision platforming a crapshoot.
You want to play a game which does both of those properly and is still a 2D platformer, play Salt and Sanctuary instead.
- Salt and Sanctuary also has the advantage of not being a hipster pixel game.
But, as much as I wish we were throwing chairs at it, we’re talking about Slain.
Slain fills me with disdain.
It’s everything I hate and grown tired of over the past few years.
It’s the perfect representation of a Kickstarter project.
It pulls the nostalgia-ridden retrogrades in with it’s promise of 2D pixel platformer and hopes the Metal theme will disguise the shitty, overdone mechanics and terrible controls.
Well it doesn’t.
Like AM2R, it’s a game which does dick and all to advance videogames as medium. And serves only to perpetuate the Nostalgia culture.
At least AM2R had tight controls.