LinuxGameCast Weekly 223 – CG Mark Hamill

Rocket League GOTY edition is out! Warsow dissolves, Steam lays down some rules, and we discuss the latest NVIDIA driver fiasco. Then Total War: WARHAMMER faces the CHAIRQUISITION! All this, plus your hate mail.

Subscribe:

Subscribe with iTunes LinuxGameCast Weekly Video SD LinuxGameCast Weekly LinuxGameCast Weekly Video HD


Steam News:

Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro

Movies back on the menu
http://steamcommunity.com/groups/SteamClientBeta/announcements

  • Somehow they fixed my VLC player?
  • The real story here is that someone actually tried to watch a movie in Steam.
    • ^
  • Implemented support for Steam Controller settings while streaming
    • Took you long enough!

Update your udev rules kids
http://steamcommunity.com/app/353370/discussions/0/490123197956024380/

  • “We’ll also sometimes be releasing infrequent bootloader updates; these updates are different and can only work when wired.”
    • Anyone want to start a “Bricked Steam Controller” pool?
  • Good on them for putting the full udev rules where everyone can see them. Before it took some looking

Steam Awards
http://www.pcgamesn.com/half-life-3/half-life-3-steam-awards

  • Some of the categories are ripe for abuse.
  • I decided to just fuck with it.
  • The ‘Best Use Of A Farm Animal’ Award
    • I started getting legal threats when I submitted my nomination

Rocket Cars GOTY
http://store.steampowered.com/sub/140146

  • Haaaa...dissonance
  • Fantastic deal! I’ll take twelve
  • I mean, normal pricing is pretty good. You get the full package for the standard price of the game. Just maybe pick it up piecemeal if the stuff is on sale
  • I had no idea that Rocket Cars had DLC.
    • It does and the real kicker is that the GOTY doesn’t buy you ALL the DLC.
      • What, you think they’d actually harm their bottom line?
    • It only includes the $4 packs.
    • So you’ll still have to buy the individual cars separately if you really want them.

Time Tenshi 2
http://store.steampowered.com/app/559850/#

  • Plenty of ecchi fanservice moments throughout!
    • Hey man, it’s what the people pay for
  • Exciting, well-written and thought-provoking plot
    • That’s a bold claim. Let’s see how that pans out.
  • I’m genuinely concerned about their poor backs.
  • If you’re looking for anime boobs, there are other places on the Internet you can find them.
    • Don’t insult anime boobs by comparing them to this nightmare-fuel.

Late Worms
https://steamcommunity.com/app/327030/discussions/0/208684375428593973/

  • Fantastic. Shame it only works on debian derivatives
  • Will they fix this buggy glitchy mess of game next?
    • Bet you’ll still need to another 3 or 4 lines to the sh launcher if you want to play it properly.

Robot Chicken
http://store.steampowered.com/app/339710/#

  • I can already sense that it will handle like arse.
  • Sort of reminds me of rocket birds
    • Yeah, that was my first thought.
    • Though this one is grittier version of that.
  • WHAR CHICKEN BITTLE

News:

37Slow
https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/977518/linux/problems-with-multiple-opengl-applications-running-simultaneously-with-375-20-on-a-gtx970/

  • I knew something was up when Rocket Cars was having trouble maintaining 60.
  • Admittedly I had to push the 1080 a bit more for it to present itself but it is there, too.
  • Seems to primarily affect 900 series cards.
  • Doesn’t play nice with the Warhammers either, but we’ll get to that in the review
  • Also doesn’t seem to like my laptop’s 960M, but that requires a wee more investigating

Linux?
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/11/star-citizen-production-schedule-release/

  • Still a better love story than Carmageddon.
  • It’s not that I don’t see this game coming to Linux it’s that I don’t ever see it getting finished.
    • That’s the loophole, they’ll say it’ll come to Linux after release.
  • I will owe people a terrifying amount of money if this game doesn’t hit the chandrasekhar limit and collapse under it’s own weight
    • ASTROPHYSICS JOKES!

Unreal grants
https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/unreal-humble-bundle-dev-grant-recipients-announced

  • Nice to see that some of the money is going towards game development in addition to all the education stuff.
  • In fact, all of the latest recipients are working on UE4 games. Hopefully at least some of them will make with the linux love. All of the ones with greenlight pages don’t list any linux system requirements

Oink
https://www.warsow.net/forum/thread/17216

  • Haven’t really played warsow in years, but it’s sad to see projects crumble like this
  • Perhaps the community will pick up the slack, but I’m unsure how devoted they actually are
  • One of the unintended consequences of Steam making Linux gaming a “thing” is older FLOSS projects turning into ghost towns.

Oreos
https://xoreos.org/blog/2016/11/24/not-thanksgiving-2016/

  • Once they get Neverwinter Nights in a playable state I’ll gladly redo that big ass tutorial with Xoreos.
  • If they keep this up, we might actually have a witcher game on linux

6000 years
http://revolutionarygamesstudio.com/

  • Huh, the ogre scream of nope. That’s a new one
  • This is a community project that tries to be what spore originally tried to be before EA got their mitts on Maxis
  • It works. Averages about 100FPS at UHD

CHAIRQUISITION:
CHAIR  – Nooope

CHAIRCHAIR  – Not sure if want

CHAIRCHAIRCHAIR   – Check it out

CHAIRCHAIRCHAIRCHAIR – Shutupandtakemymonies


Game: Total War: WARHAMMER
Webzone:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/364360/
Devel: Creative Assembly / Feral Interactive
Engine: Warscape (The same Warscape used in basically all the Total War games)
Price: 59.99 / CDN 71.99

Wazzat: A fantasy strategy game of legendary proportions, Total War: WARHAMMER combines an addictive turn-based campaign of epic empire-building with explosive, colossal, real-time battles, all set in the vivid and incredible world of Warhammer Fantasy Battles.

Total Disclosure: They sent us keys


Makes with the working

V-CHAIRCHAIRCHAIR

  • What’s with the load times?
  • I’m watching the htop and nothing is happening.
  • Seriously, I’m dinging you a Chair for that since waiting over a minute is bollocks.
  • If I try to launch the Eye For An Eye campaign (without the DLC) it will attempt to load it… straight to the Desktop.
  • Averages 45 @ 1080 on Ultra.

J-CHAIRCHAIRCHAIR

  • Don’t try it with teh 375.20 drivers or you’re gonna have a bad time
    • They released a patch on friday that might have fixed things. Too lazy to reinstall the drivers

P-CHAIRCHAIRCHAIRCHAIR

  • I did try it with the 375.20 drivers and it worked.
  • Loading times seem a bit excessive, but I guess they do have to render all those units if you’re one of those people who plays RTSs with the camera zoomed all the way in.
  • It averages 132 on High and 56 on Ultra at 1080p with the FX 8370E and the GTX 1080.

Total-CHAIRCHAIRCHAIR


Shiny / Sounds

V-CHAIRCHAIR

  • What game did they use for the screenshots on the store page?
  • This is a total WAR skin job and little more.
  • Granted the overworld TBS game looks alright but i’m trying to avoid that at all cost.

J-CHAIRCHAIR

  • The juxtaposition between the cinematics and the gameplay are hella jarring
  • The soundtrack and voice acting is there, but aside from Mister announcer guy, it’s fairly generic
  • The overworld map background is alright, but I feel all the UI clutter takes a lot away from it

P-CHAIRCHAIR

  • It looks like your standard fantasy RTS type deal without any of the charm.
  • The sounds are there but there’s really not much of a purpose other than try to create some atmosphere and, maybe it’s just me and my unquestioned hate for RTSs, it doesn’t really do it.
  • I guess it’s good to have sound if you play the game long enough, so you can identify troops by selecting them and having them shout out their thing.
  • I’m not blown away by the aesthetics here.
  • Regular Warhammer is definitely not as compelling as 40K.
  • Oh and, I hope you like screen tearing! If you don’t, you have play the game at locked 60FPS with Vsync on and pray the performance doesn’t tank, because if it does you’ll be playing at 30.

Total-CHAIRCHAIR


Control

V-CHAIRCHAIRCHAIRCHAIR

  • Total WASD, nothing to report here.
  • Alright, if I’m being picky the camera pan control is different in the overworld map.

J-CHAIRCHAIRCHAIR

  • Threw me for a loop when they ditched traditional RTS hotkeys for some more :”intuitive” ones
  • The camera control is pretty painful though. I can never seem to find an angle I like

P-CHAIRCHAIRCHAIRCHAIR

  • It defaulted the camera controls to WASD but thankfully they included the option to reassign controls, so that was changed promptly.
  • Can’t really seem to find anything to ding it a chair for, here.

Total-CHAIRCHAIRCHAIR


FUN

V-CHAIR

  • $59.99 and $63.04 of DLC o_0
  • Multiplayer is a ghost town.
  • I’ve played a few opening campaigns with different factions only to get lost in new and unique ways.
  • Granted, I’m not a fan of hand holding but throw me a bone every now and again.
  • But Vinnnn you can learn about advance troop movements by reading chapter 5 section 14 subsection c. in the manual.
    • And that right there is the problem, Brad.
  • Wow, you are really dealing with two different games here.
    • One is an painfully slow paced, needlessly complex RTS.
    • The other is a turn based spreadsheet simulator.
  • Total War fans dislike this game because of the dumbed down mechanics and Warhammer fans dislike it because it’s a Total War game.
  • The one thing they both agree on is the bird culture DLC.

J-CHAIR

  • As venn pointed out, you play the video game version of warhammer so you don’t have to read tome after tome of age of sigmar army nonsense
  • And believe me, the amount of tutorial text in here would make a warhammer faction book blush
  • Make no mistake, there is a lot to do in this game. They give you a multitude of options including diplomacy, terrorism and the like
  • Still, I feel DOWII captures the feel of a warhammer game better than this.
  • Yes, in the tabletop version you’re dealing with similar unit stacks, but that’s the key difference between a tabletop wargame and a computer wargame.
    • That level of abstraction is required because humans have to resolve the conflicts
    • In this, we have master computer for that
    • This will always be one of the pain points of adapting tabletop games to computer
  • Still, I found the combat to be rather boring. I usually end up using the auto resolve feature. My strategies aren’t Yang Wenli enough to warrant micromanaging the battalions
  • Gratuitous space battles did this type of strategy right. Just make everything look cool

P-CHAIR

  • I hate real time strategy games, have I mentioned that before?
  • If you’re going to make me play an RTS on Linux it better be called Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War 2. Which, when I saw the Warhammer bit in this game’s name I was actually excited.
  • But then I started playing and realised that this is a Total War game, first and foremost, and the Warhammer bit is just there for the sake of the character skins and to provide a bit of background lore as to why there’s some orcs fighting some dwarves.
  • If that description sounds like it could work with ANY and ALL fantasy settings that’s because it could, Brad!
  • Total War games are perhaps the single most unimaginative series of Strategy games out there and regular Warhammer is the same but for fantasy settings.
  • I’ll take the 40K space marines any day of the fucking week!
  • And even though I do like my turn based games, I’ve grown to hate the 4X genre too.
  • This is the perfect example of a videogame I’d be much happier not playing and the fans of the genre would also be much happier if I didn’t play it.

Total-CHAIR


Final –CHAIRCHAIR


Hate Mail:

Dying Light
http://linuxgamecast.com/bradley/?kezpq1w

  • Main issue is that they’ve outright ignored all my emails about sending us keys, which since we are sent many for many other games, kinda sorta kills it.
  • Then there’s the fact the game has been out for a LONG time and it’s still pretty damn expensive.
  • I guess if one was to get it, it is currently on a 50% off sale. Which is still €10 more than I care to spend on something which looks a lot like Dead Island.

Mah game
http://linuxgamecast.com/bradley/?TGsWFN3
http://store.steampowered.com/app/297660/

  • Motherfu*ker actually read the instructions and made /w the keys.
  • HAR free plug and we may give it a look.
0 Comments

Leave Your Reply