Vulkan gets high! Humble revisits 2016, GabeN does an AMA, and Xonotic is still a thing? Then Super Rad Raygun faces the CHAIRQUISITION! All this, plus your hate mail.
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Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro
Steam News:
- I did a ctrl-f linux on that AMA and couldn’t find any answered questions
- Not going to speculate on whether that was intentional or not.+
- We’ve said it a million times already though. Valve does not care if the majority of the software on their service is garbage. As long as people keep buying shit from them, on behalf of other companies, they will keep on keeping on.
Training day
http://steamcommunity.com/games/360950/announcements/detail/536326320059100048
- THey’ve gotten rid of the training mode, but they’ve added easier bot AI. The normal bot AI will return in a future update apparently
- The bot AI was already hella stupid… well, when the bots were not frozen.
Torn Tales
http://store.steampowered.com/app/388960/
- The Adventures of Snow White, Robin Hood and Dr. Jekyll.
- I played a little bit of it, it plays similar to The Dwarves.
- The art style and the fact Snow White looks like she hit her goth phase in her 40s will take some getting used to.
- Kudos to Chilled Mouse, the devs, for sending the keys.
I Am The Hero
http://store.steampowered.com/app/498500/
- I did a google search about this developer, they’ve only made mobile games up to this point.
- I found an email address for them but I immediately got a “Return to sender” reply from the mailer daemon.
- I can’t decide if I like the dutch angle side scrolling aesthetic. Maybe it’s a thing you’ll get used to, but it’s just weird looking based on the trailer
- Pixels of Rage II?
Super ninja boy
http://store.steampowered.com/app/566670/
- Interesting system requirements.
- The windows requirements aren’t better either, considering you need to install Microsoft 7 to run it.
News:
378.06 Beta
http://www.geforce.com/drivers/results/114232
- Added support for the ARB_parallel_shader_compile extension to allow multi-threaded compilation of GLSL shaders.
- That doesn’t mean magic performance boost.
- It still requires the game or at least the engine to be built aware of that extension, for it to do anything.
- They also added a PRIME option to the nvidia-settings GUI for people like Jordan.
- Still requires you to set up modesetting and the secondary detached display in xorg.conf
- The driver now allows external EGL libraries to add functionality to client-side applications.
- A couple of new Vulkan extensions
- And the big one is the fact that the __GL_THREADED_OPTIMIZATIONS environment variable is now enabled by default.
- Which means most people may see a performance improvement and some improperly threaded games, but it may also cause performance degradation in certain situations.
- Can it run on PCIE powa?
- According to the product page it does
- And I wants one
- A dual slot half-height card, fascinating.
- With a full size bracket, cuz that makes sense.
- They usually ship’em with two brackets. You just use the one you want
- With a full size bracket, cuz that makes sense.
- Hopefully something to address the “Vulkan is hard, DX12 is easy despite being the same fucking thing” attitude some developers have
- Visual DX12 in 3.. 2..
- Dear god… could you imagine click and drag assembly?
- Visual DX12 in 3.. 2..
- Concerned about how portable this will actually be though. Nvidia does like their lock in, which can harm an open standard like vulkan.
- Obligatory:
- If Icculus or anyone else working with SDL don’t want to do with Vulkan what they did with OpenGL, this may be the only option.
- Though, it is defeating the purpose somewhat. The reason Vulkan has to be more involved is exactly of how much closer to the metal it is and the performance gains to be had from that.
- Seems like making it a higher level thing is just one step forward, two steps back.
- Then again, that’s exactly why most DX12 games haven’t been performing all that well.
- Turns out that Visual Studio abstraction for implementing it isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.
2016 strikes again
https://www.humblebundle.com/best-of-2016-bundle.
- 4 bucks for Shadowrun Hong Kong and Victor Vran is hella worth it if you don’t own those games already
- Vran is worth it alone.
- If you’re a Linux user, please keep it under $10, we don’t want to go around rewarding people who don’t provide Linux versions of their games.
- I hope Bethesda get a proper kick in the teeth with this trial.
OpenJazz (sent in by Pizza)
https://github.com/Chemrat/openjazz
- Jazz Jackrabbit 2 was possibly the last truly old school platformer I actually enjoyed and played all the way through.
- Unfortunately, you can’t play it with OpenJazz.
- It’s an open sauce reimplementation of the original Jazz Jackrabbit engine and, as usual, you will need the data assets for the games in order to play them.
- It’s using SDL 1.2, with all the fun that entails
- Why are the jump and shoot controls reversed on linux?
Number organs
http://xonotic.org/posts/2017/2016-by-the-numbers/
- Wow, Xonotic has a pretty big fanbase for an open source shooter. Would’ve lost that bet
- Unfortunately it’s the type of people who only play Xonotic all the times!
- People really like their mortars it seems
CHAIRQUISITION:
Game: Super Rad Raygun
Webzone: http://store.steampowered.com/app/297660/
Devel: TRU FUN Entertainment
Engine: FNA
Price: 9.99 / CDN 10.99
Wazzat: It is the year 198X. Big hair is hot, and the war with the Soviets is colder than a refreshing glass of New Coke. RAD RAYGUN must travel the world fighting communist robots, and save the 1980′s by shooting his way through the decade in a totally fresh, expanded version of the original XBLIG game.
Mandatory Disclosure: They sent us keys
Makes with the working
V-
- I have to enable fullscreen each time I start the game?
- Alright, if you go fullscreen then back to windowed you cannot go back to fullscreen.
- No Big Picture 4 U!
J-
P-
- No resolution options, you only get a “fullscreen” option after you’re already in-game.
- And if you do enable fullscreen, it just upscales the game from 720p to whatever your monitor does.
- What’s that? You’d like the game to remember your settings? Fuck that noise!
- First time going through the first level the character clipped through the floor and I could do nothing else.
- Redid it once more after I finished it to get the second battery and the game crashed while checking my time against the online times.
- This isn’t going to be pretty.
Total-
Shiny / Sounds
V-
- I have two pallette options, NOPE and CAN’T MAKE SHITE OUT ON THE SCREEN.
- Much like the original GB, minus the screen blur.
- 4 “colours” onscreen at any time.
- Disabling the hipster-grid effect helped out a bit.
- Not that it remembers the option.
- It looks like something from a High-def NES or an emulator.
- The chiptunes are not bad at all but they are WAY overdone for GB music.
J-
- I mean, I played my share of platformers on my original brick gameboy
- It did not look as good as this
- The screen whiting out as you get low on battery is a cute touch, but it’s more annoying
- The soundtrack is alright. I could’ve sworn I heard some stolen riffs from pokemon though
P-
- You start with only the gameboy palette which, even with an 80’000’000:1 contrast ratio, is still fucking hard to see when you’re moving around.
- I get that they were going for the gameboy experience and artificially inflating the difficulty by limiting how the player can see the game.
- You know what that tells me? They let their pretentiousness get the best of them and stuck to their vision in detriment of the game.
- That’s not good.
- I had to mute the background music, too.
Total-
Control
V-
- When you first start out Super Brad controls a bit meh.
- Not bad, but you are really thinking “they should have tightened up the controls”
- But if you stick with it and build up the agility it becomes quite enjoyable.
- Loses a Chair because like ALL OTHER FK MOTHERING SETTING the controls must be remapped on each start.
J-
- The walk cycle feels annoyingly slow
- Everything works though. Despite it being FNA, I get xbox prompts. boo
P-
- It’s FNA, if the controls were broken it would have made it plainly clear they had put out an absolutely horrible game on purpose.
- It still only gets three chairs because it doesn’t remember the remapped controls.
Total-
FUN
V-
- I have a distinct feeling this game was created by a team that were not alive in 1989.
- They got a few things right.
- Limited lives
- Health bar
- You dead? Start from the beginning.
- No difficulty option.
- Hell, I kinda wish they went full out and noped the checkpoints.
- So what is it?
- It’s like Mega Man + Mario 3 + Zelda II + a bag of mushrooms shagged and had a babby.
- Unfortunately that babby came out functioning like Sloth from the Goonies… at first.
- Because if you haven’t made it to Berlin you have not seen how challenging this game can be.
- The sad thing is most people will not make it there since it takes well over an hour.
- BUT when / if you do you will be rewarded will a wicked hard properly done platformer.
J-
- It’s kind of just this middle of the road platformer.
- I get the feeling they’re banking on the visual aesthetic and some misguided sense of nostalgia to steer people towards this game
- The battery juggling is an interesting mechanic, but it really does break the flow of the game and becomes tedious. Also, I don’t remember the GB having any L or R buttons
- Most of the difficulty stems from the really loose controls and the screens that can require some tight maneuvering.
- Battery collection seems a bit tedious as well
- Ultimately, it’s just meh.
P-
- Remember everything I said about ASMR2? No!? Well you should because most of them apply here, too.
- Here’s a few bullet points:
- Serves no other purpose than to reinforce my belief that nostalgia grabs have worn-out their welcome.
- Does absolutely nothing to innovate the genre.
- Hipster pixel visuals, made even worse by the pointlessly limited color scheme.
- “But that’s the point!” – If that’s the point, they have bigger problems than me shitting on their game.
- Annoying “chiptunes” the likes of which can only be rivaled by a PulseAudio buffer underrun
- And last but not least, to make everything even worse, they expect you will do some bullshit leaps of faith.
- That’s not level design, that’s asinine and it turns the game into an exercise of trial & error and frustration.
Total-
Final –
Hate Mail:
Annoyed P2
http://linuxgamecast.com/bradley/?donlHtd
Fee 2 Play
http://linuxgamecast.com/bradley/?aCzYUCS
- The term, as coined by Jim Sterling, is Fee 2 Pay not “Fee 2 Play.”
- If you’re going to talk about games you have no experience with and a personal vendetta against, at least get your terms right.
- I’ve had this discussion with Michael before, his argument descended to him posting the URL to some graphs where someone attributed arbitrary values to the turning radius and the hitboxes of all cars and then compared them.
- He thought he had it in the bag by only sharing the imgur link with the graphs, but I found the original post on Reddit and the author himself admitted at the end that none of the cars had any significant advantage.
- The Rocket Cars devels confirmed different cars have different hitboxes and turning radiuses.
- Yes, but the only car which has a significantly different hitbox, from the paid ones, is the Batmobile. How many people do you see with the batmobile?
- Maybe that’s why he was so quick to add the “differences are small” shpiel when attempting to persuade Venn on Youtube.
