The Steam Awards are over! Heavy Gear Assault enters Early Access, Postal goes open source, and a Silent Hill engine remake is headed to Linux. Then Mekazoo faces the CHAIRQUISITION! All this, plus your hate mail.
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Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro
Steam News:
Winning|
http://store.steampowered.com/SteamAwards/
- Six of the winnars have Linux ports.
- They need some more categories.
- Actually managed to get past Greenlit.
- Most years in Early Access.
- Still available for purchase even though the game has been abandoned for years and it’s very much broken.
- Most refunded.
Content In Exchange for Steam Award Votes
http://steamcommunity.com/games/346110/announcements/detail/536324417612602461
- “We want to make it clear that regardless of whether ARK wins a Steam Award or not, * Ovis will be making its debut in the next major ARK version update!”
- Neo.gif
- … as DLC.
- Ah, yes! Because selling an expansion pack to an Early Access game wasn’t bad enough, now they’re herding their fanbase towards gaming a bullshit award system.
- They want best use of a farm animal. I think this game is a little too mundane for that award.
- Did you really think for one hot damn second you would beat the Goat?
Werks 4.2
http://steamcommunity.com/games/251810/announcements/detail/586989913400890563
- I’ll give him this, at least he is still trying to improve it.
- At what point does that sentiment go from approval to enablement? Because I think at this point it’s really not healthy for him to be doing that, anymore.
- Right now the best thing is to just let it go and by let it go I mean the source code.
- Open Sauce the whole thing, pull an AMD/Epic and let the community do it.
- Of course, this could be a problem because there’s not really a Leadwerks Community.
- It, launches.
- If you’re sufficiently masochistic, they have a competition running until the 15th of January
- And hey, linux bug fixes in the changelog
Paranormal Teens
http://store.steampowered.com/app/549770/
- I’m curious how badly the carousel video triggered Venn considering how crappily it was recorded
- This could fall into the so bad it’s good category.
- A visual novel about sexy teens. In a van. And then a meteor hit.
Sparkour Racers
http://store.steampowered.com/app/386470/
- First person Speedrunners.
- Pretty big tron vibe coming from the trailer
Update with friends
http://steamcommunity.com/games/431240/announcements/detail/543080539830981295
- Mostly fixes some game breaking issues and performance stuff
- BUT CAN IT FIX ME SUCKING AT THE GAME?
Merry Mechmas
http://store.steampowered.com/app/416020/
- Check out the big price on Brad.
- Looks like a standard FPS with the characters replaced by mechs.
- Missing the entire point of having a mech game.
- Missing the entire point of having a mech game.
- Unreal engine.
- Good thing too. Loki ain’t around to port this one
News:
- From the fine psychopaths who brought you linux on the PS4 comes: How we dood it
- As it turns out, the x86 architecture is probably the only thing these suckers have in common with regular PCs,
- There’s so much hackery involved that they lost me digging into kernel code
Open MW
https://openmw.org/2016/openmw-0-41-0-released/
- Argonian NPCs no longer swim like Khajiits
- As god intended
- Didn’t know Mr. Cage played OpenMW.
- HE DOES NOW!
- Didn’t know Mr. Cage played OpenMW.
- As god intended
- Captain Distant Land and Lieutenant Shadows are still AWOL, apparently.
Rad DOOM (sent in by Freyr)
http://airlied.livejournal.com/82215.html
- That’s some pretty good progress considering radv hasn’t been around for all that long
- Some heretic with amdgpu-pro check in to tell us how good Vulkan doom runs on that
Postal
http://runningwithscissors.com/?p=2318?age-verified=b5f8c522d5
- GPL2? Would have lost that bet.
- I give the Dreamcast port a week, tops.
- Rohitn has one that builds.
- I can think of a couple other companies who I’d love if they’d follow suit and release the sauce for some of their older engines
For those who’d rather play the game instead of messing with Makefiles
https://lutris.net/games/postal/
https://lutris.net/files/games/postal/
https://github.com/lutris/buildbot/blob/master/games/postal/build.sh
- Two options available: With SteamWorks (requires the Steam client to be running but gives you the achievements and everything Steamy) and without (entirely DRM free)
- If someone has the CD, they could probably use it to make an installer with the No Steamworks binary
Shhh
https://github.com/Palm-Studios/sh3redux/issues/1
- You see kids, by using OpenGL, this guy doesn’t have to completely redo his graphic stack. Thus adding additional platforms is less painful!
- Dev is currently asking for OpenGL and C++ Linux people with development chops to help him get the project on the penguin.
- Why not Silent Hill 2, though?
- Well, it’s basically the same engine, with a bit of jiggering you could probably play that with this one too.
City Bound
http://cityboundsim.com/
https://github.com/citybound/citybound
- The prototype “works” but FK and or ALL if I know… what’s going on.
- I figured out the camera controls, but it crashed as soon as I spawned a car
- Keep in mind folks, this is very early road placement and traffic simulation.
CHAIRQUISITION:
Game: Mekazoo
Webzone: http://store.steampowered.com/app/390330/
Devel: The Good Mood Creators
Engine: Unity
Price: $19.99
Wazzat: Mekazoo is a 2D platformer set in a vibrant 3D world with fast-flowing gameplay and a cast of kinetically-diverse mechanized animals.
Mandatory Disclosure: they sent us keys
Makes with the working
V-
- No UHD support.
- Why do I have to quit the game three times?
- VSYNC is always on during the game.
J-
- Unity game with no scream of nope? Bonus soda
P-
Total-
Shiny / Sounds
V-
- This game is FKN gorgeous.
- The detail in the levels alone gets this all the Chairs.
- However, all that awesomeness can cause you to sometimes lose track of you character.
- All the characters (in the loading screen) look like the’ve slammed a N,N-Dimethyltryptamine smoothie
- Soundtrack really has a Sonic 2 vibe.
J-
- The soundtrack really stands out. I dig it
- The art style looks well done, although it does look like a unity game with those unity shaders
- Overall though, it fits the game
P-
- I can’t give it 4 chairs here because at one point, it did genuinely cause me to get a wee bit motion sick.
- The camera flails around a little too much to give those panoramic shots of the action but when you’re stuck in a ditch and actively trying to wall jump with the kangaroo “skin” and the camera keeps flailing left and right… That’s more than a little barf inducing.
- Other than that, it looks very good and the aforementioned panoramic shots do add to the experience.
- The soundtrack fits. I know that may sound like a cop out answer but between saying that and saying it’s nothing to write home about but at least didn’t get muted… potato potahto.
Total-
Control
V-
- Can’t rebind the controls.
J-
- GODDAMMIT A AND B NEED TO DO DIFFERENT THINGS!
- Movement is also super floaty.
- I can’t really figure out how exactly to time the Kangaroo’s jumps or the armadillo’s acceleration, and they don’t really tell you how to do it either
P-
- There’s a noticeable delay when you hit the “action” button but the game doesn’t really punish you too hard for it.
- All the levels are pretty short and there’s usually more than one way to get to places, so I’m not about to be too harsh on it… yet.
- Not letting me rebind controls and only giving me an option to “invert” some mappings on the controller is what a developer does when they feel they know better than the player, how said player enjoys playing games.
- But more on that later.
Total-
FUN
V-
- I don’t know if things change later on but the first two boss fights were exactly the same thing.
- If you’re going to do a Sonic like platformer it better damn well handle like one.
- I made it to the kangaroo.
- Other Venn quietly said now they’re just fuck*ing with us.
- Seriously, I barely understand how armadillo MC rolley Face works and you throw this shite at me?
J-
- Lucky me, I fucked up my button mashy finger this week, meaning I can’t play this game without irritating it
- Still, from what I did play, I enjoyed. It sort of reminds me of a rayman/sonic mashup.
- In fact, I’d probably nominate it for best sonic game of the year
- I like the multiple routes that you can take to finish the level
- You can also pick your favourite dude, and just play the other one only when you have to
- Sorta kinda. The dynamic changes when you get more dudes
- I can’t give the game 3 chairs though, because I feel that’s charity on account of my thumb. If I could get further, maybe I’ll find it gets repetitive
- So throw an x-mas asteroid up there.
- Well, now that I don’t bleed every time I play it, I can say this for certain: The controls really do ruin this game
- Platformers make or break on their controls, and this one needs some work
- Responsiveness and mapping are fixable though, so maybe these folks can come through in a patch. But until then, they get what they get
P-
- Sonic and Megaman had a baby and they left it in the care of Aunt Metroid.
- And if you’ve been watching the Chairquisition for awhile, you know exactly how I feel about platformers in this day and age.
- The only thing that saves Mekazoo from a completely thorough beating with the mediocrity stick is that it doesn’t feature a hipster pixel aesthetic.
- I will even excuse the fact that all the different skins (except the kangaroo) can’t jump.
- The second one you get is a frog, but it doesn’t really jump outside of that little hop it does when moving around. But I will let that slide too.
- Like many games before it, Mekazoo sacrifices functionality over aesthetics.
- And while it does look and sound above the average piece of Unity dross which currently clog up the Steam store, the controls, that one piece of essential videogame componentry, are floaty as fuck.
- I don’t think I need to explain why controls are one the most essential bits of a videogame and having bad controls, or unresponsive controls, is a sure fire way to get people like me to stop playing your game pretty damn fast.
- If the one mean of a fleshy human being interacting with the digital world you have created is fucked, most people won’t be able to enjoy that world the way you’d like them to.
- And imposing a certain control scheme upon those players is adding insult to injury.
- So no, I didn’t have fun with Mekazoo.
Total-
Final –
Hate Mail:
MOOD
http://linuxgamecast.com/bradley/?qoSvuhD
Plug
http://linuxgamecast.com/bradley/?xHNgt7k
http://playellipsis.com/
- “Its actually not that bad, but then again i love these kind of games, like flower for the PS3, Its beautiful, simplistic and kinda addicting, very nice work for such a small game –Foxy”
