Civilization VI is confirmed for Linux! Rocket Cars reaches 25 million players, Humble gets positive, and Voxeliens goes open source. Then The Dwarves faces the CHAIRQUISITION! All this, plus your hate mail.
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Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro
Steam News:
Rocket Update
http://steamcommunity.com/games/252950/announcements/detail/498045089523832617
- TIL 1GB =’s “small”
- No mention of the spite crash issue.
- The people on linux_gaming were having a bit of a hissy fit in the past couple of weeks due to Psyonix’s policy of only supporting SteamOS.
- Psyonix’s reasoning is sound, but this is a broadly experienced issue.
Speaking of
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/01/11/rocket-league-has-25-million-players/
- Some of them will never leave the game either. They’ll persist, in a zombie-like state, driving into balls and one another until the day they die.
- So you’re saying supporting multiple platforms nets you a metric fuckton of players?
- This is also good news in the way I get to shove it in the face of a certain friend whenever he tries to get me to play League of Legends with him, giving the excuse that if it’s the most popular game with the most players there’s probably a reason for it.
- Like Foxy said in the comments in the show notes, I’d love to see a breakdown of this number.
Make it pretty
http://store.steampowered.com/news/?appids=346010
- It’s still averaging 800 players per day.
- I’m still waiting on this one to come out of Early Access to play it, because it seems like a really good game for which I don’t want to cloud my own opinion until it’s been finalized.
- Our long national nightmare is over. They’ve finally added logs
- The update includes a bunch of prettier textures, but they have the old ones as a workshop mod if you hate change
Ellipsis Shop
http://steamcommunity.com/games/514620/announcements/detail/567850422402724061
- Dear god! They’re actually storing their save files in $XDG_HOME now
- They also added steam workshop integration.
- They also read our contact page once upon a time, so they get a snickers bar for that.
返校
http://store.steampowered.com/app/555220/
- Side note, not exactly related to this game in specific: I get it, this is January.
- It’s when all the games their respective devs know aren’t particularly good or engaging come out, so that people will forget all about them by the end of the year.
- But goddamn, the list of new releases for Linux is a poor showing right now.
- Meanwhile, in the land of being on topic
- Like foxy said, it’s neat to see a game based on taiwanese mythology. Not something that gets explored a lot
- It looks like it might be one of those side scrolly adventure game types, complete with creepy asian people
News:
- Vertex Attrib 64bit and the remaining shaders have been enabled and thus bringing OpenGL up to 4.1 on Haswell.
- Now it’s just a matter of testing and fixing whatever bugs may appear in the higher OpenGL versions.
- Of course, this is only in mesa-git so far. If you’re relying on your distro’s repos and are waiting for these updates, unless you’re on ARCH!!1! or Solus, it will be a while.
Spoon
https://blog.aspyr.com/2017/01/09/sid-meiers-civilization-vi-coming-soon-linux/
- This was all a ploy to get free baked goods!
- No mention of that key of coke we sent them… dicks.
- I was a bit wary after the whole bad juju incident, but when you’re right you’re right.
Bold claim
https://twitter.com/natosha_bard/status/818434093847351296
- I really don’t think you should comment on input systems.
- And by wall she means they’d need to go back and fix some hacky code they put in earlier, which SDL2 handles much better and they’ll be damned if they admit defeat.
- WTH Pedro, the Unity input system is perfectly fine.
- Like Natosha said, SDL2 is broken. That’s the long and short of it.
None more negative
https://www.humblebundle.com/overwhelmingly-positive-bundle
- PIcked it up for the pony game.
- I’m a bit ticked that Shantae doesn’t have a linux version. At least it’s because they don’t in house support it and not because they’re too lazy to press a button.
…Soon
http://www.rockman-corner.com/2017/01/might-no-9-physical-backer-rewards.html
- At this point, I’m not even sure people want them
- Imagine, going to someone’s house and seeing a boxed copy, or some collectors art and thinking “Oh man, this person is the embodiment of the sunk cost fallacy”
OpenVoxeliens
http://www.volumesoffun.com/voxeliens-is-now-open-source/
- Literally Hitler Minecraft Space Invaders
CHAIRQUISITION:
Game: The Dwarves
Webzone: http://store.steampowered.com/app/403970/
Devel: KING Art
Engine: Unity
Price: 39.99 / CDN 49.99
Wazzat: Based on the eponymous bestselling novel by Markus Heitz, The Dwarves is a fantasy role-playing game with a strong story and tactically challenging real-time battles.
Mandatory Disclosure: They sent us keys
Makes with the working
V-
- Atl+Tab while in-game is unpossible.
- Hovers between 50/90.
J-
- Add another to the list of unity games you can’t play at UHD.
P-
- I will never cease to be surprised to see a Unity game running constantly in the high 80 FerPS.
- Especially one which looks as good as this one, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Total-
Shiny / Sounds
V-
- If you look at the Kickstarter pre-alpha trailer it looks… well, it looks exactly the same as the finished game.
- I’m not saying that’s a bad thing but makes one wonder where that $310,091 went.
- The graphics look spot on for a title released in 2006.
- Again, nothing bad but don’t expect to be blown away.
- The animation rigging and cutscenes are a bit of alright and the voice work is surprisingly passable.
- Just as an aside, the Dutch narrator is hella better.
- However, it’s all for naught since so much of the game is spent navigating the stupid monkey overworld map.
J-
- Hansi, I will always love you and will forever want to have your man babies, but that credits song is garbage!
- Did you literally have a list of bullet points of stuff about the dwarves and just ad libbed some lyrics?
- The game has a weird tendency to switch between in engine cutscenes and rendered ones. It’s pretty jarring at times
- The cinematic stuff looks about as good as Total Warhammer, which is less of a complement of this game and more a dig at Total Warhammer.
- The voice acting is Okay.
P-
- There’s some flickering in the UI. I don’t think it was there at first, it just started happening at one point.
- It happens in both MATE and KDE regardless of compositor.
- It doesn’t really cause anything to break it’s just very unaesthetic.
- Speaking of aesthetics, this is a good looking game!
- They went for heavily stylized characters but compensated for that some by having very realistic looking textures, for both characters/clothing and the tiny bits of the world you see up close.
- It’s a shame most of the game happens in text form and you do most of the exploration from the world map, because this is all very good looking!
- And good sounding!
- As Jordan mentioned, the lyrics aren’t very good, thankfully they’re mostly absent through the game.
- The background music which accompanies most of the action scenes and the eerie, soft music when you’re exploring a creepy place are really well done.
- Bonus points for awesome voice acting as well.
Total-
Control
V-
- Bog standard RTS controls.
- They “work” but if you don’t have rebindable controls in 2017 automatic 2 Chairs.
- Oh, I guess you can use a controlla but seriously, who hates themselves that much?
J-
- At first I wasn’t sure if I liked the whole hybrid turn based/rts mode
- After 3 hours, I’m pretty sure I hate it
- The way battles go, you get moved around so much in such random directions that whatever directives you give are invalid the second you unpause
- It looks visually interesting, and really captures the cinematic dwarf fights of the hobbit, but it’s a pain in the butt to control
- The overworld is a conventional hex crawl. That I have less problem with. It’s done competently enough.
P-
- You may remember that other game about dwarves we covered a while back.
- This game is what would have come out of We Are The Dwarves, if the devs had taken what we said to heart and fixed the game instead of doing nothing at all.
- The combat in The Dwarves manages to be tactical and still feel very impactful, or meaty as some people often say.
- If one of the dwarves does a special attack you’ll see the enemies get squished and blood spray everywhere, or there’ll be a bunch of ragdolled orc bodies flying all over the place… it’s awesome!
- The controls themselves are mouse driven with shortcuts for the special attacks.
- I’d like an option to remap those hotkeys though, it’s the one thing keeping The Dwarves from getting four appropriately sized chairs for Controls.
Total-
FUN
V-
- The Dwarves opens with a nice sized battle that’s borderline enjoyable.
- Then it’s just you on a quest to bring a bag from point A to point B.
- Oh fkn look! The overworld map is going to be a THING! \:D/
- Seriously, that gives me D&D flashbacks and i’ve never played D&D
- …mainly because having my adventure read out puts me right the fk to sleep.
- Sorry, not sorry, I noped right there.
- I really wish this was a hack-n-slash and not a Real-time /w pause.
- Did I mention the Pause? Because this game sure as FK does.
- Kinda defeats the whole point of real time, doesn’t it?
- Choose your own adventure the game.
- Averages 8 hours of gameplay.
- $39.99
- What’s not to love, Brad?
J-
- I’ve decided to make my dwarf dude a self hating dwarf
- This is one of those games where it does a bunch of stuff right, but the core mechanic isn’t, and that hamstrings the game
- The combat just doesn’t work IMO, and that’s where most of the gameplay is
- Occasionally, you’ll have a section where you need to solve a puzzle, investigate something or just wander around the world, but the majority of your time and effort is going to be spent on fighting
- And with it’s really poorly explained and very likely poorly implemented system, you’re not going to be having too much fun
- The game can’t’ decide if it wants to be an RPG, moba or hack and slasher, and it’ll try to drag you in all 3 directions until you get tired.
- It would have worked better if they just picked one and stuck with it.
P-
- I liked it.
- If I had to find something to rag on it, and I kinda do since that seems to be the only reason some people stick around for my bit in the Fun segment, it’s the extreme adherence to the “Tell, don’t show” school of game design.
- I’ve talked about this before, I’m sure, but as a refresher, in broad strokes there are two kinds of video game narratives:
- Narratives which integrate into the gameplay and keep the word count down to a minimum and are still able to advance the story, or the “Show, don’t tell” approach. A good example of this kind of game would be Half-Life 2;
- And then you have the “Tell, Don’t Show” approach where the narrative is told to you and the gameplay is something which is completely unrelated to it.
- Don’t believe me? You could replace the entire story in The Dwarves with a “coming of age” narrative where a young dwarven stud who had a very sheltered upbringing, going out into the world and befriending two other dwarven hunky boys, joining them in their quest to broaden their sexual horizons.
- Given how much of the non-combat narrative action happens solely in text form, the gameplay, which in this game is mostly just combat, and the narrative are absolutely disjointed.
- That said, even though they’re completely independent, both the story and the combat are very good.
- And I like that! I will excuse this Ludonarrative “Discordance” for the simple fact that, in their own way they’re well done, even if the only thing keeping them together in The Dwarves is completely superficial.
Total-
Final –
Hate Mail:
Reverse Steve
http://linuxgamecast.com/bradley/?is3QaeD
- Yes, I do have the best MIC control but I talk into tin cans for a living. Also this is primarily an audio podcast.
- No I’m not, (our voices are perfectly level) you just like my glorious voice-organ the best.
- Touché
- Stock·holm syn·drome
- noun
- feelings of trust or affection felt in certain cases of kidnapping or hostage-taking by a victim toward a captor.
- noun
- I take exception to that! I’m not smart!
