LinuxGameCast Weekly 242 – Your Unicorn Looks Diseased

Proper PS3 emulation comes to Linux! Besiege enters the Multiverse, ioquake3 needs your help, and Feral teases some Wang. Then Thimbleweed Park faces the CHAIRQUISITION! All this, plus your hate mail.

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Steam News:

Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro

+0.02
http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

That’s roughly an increase of 2709 Linux users #VennMaths
Good, now let’s get that back to 1%.
- With extreme prejudice

Serious Sam TSE HD Vulkan
http://store.steampowered.com/app/564310/

50/50 on it launching and running without throwing a black screen.
Ran pretty consistently for me
Only real issue was sometimes textures didn’t render properly and I’d get big black boxes in the middle of the screen.
For me it freezes the moment I try to start the single player campaign with Vulkan.
- Works fine in OpenGL.
- Open GL to start and switch to Vulkan in-game.
  - That’s not a good sign…

I shovel well
http://store.steampowered.com/app/589510/

So they’ve finally spun off one of their DLC missions into a full game
Still, its Yacht Club, so it’ll be competently done platforming
I liked the first on well enough and this looks like more of the same.

Glest
http://store.steampowered.com/app/578870/

This will not end well.
Sell some Steamy DLC for funding, yes.
Sell a game that can be gotten for free, no.
I can see paying for the commodity of having Megaglest on Steam along with the rest of your games.
But I can also see how this won’t sit well with many people.
They’ve made a post on their Steam forum discussing how the funds they get through Steam sales won’t end up “in their pocket” but will instead be used to pay for infrastructure and such.
With any excess funds being used to further other Free Software projects.
So, their Steam sales are more along the lines of “donations” than profit.
- That seems fair.

Icarus Alliance
http://store.steampowered.com/app/608800/

Co-op PVE eh? Maybe we can play this for the aftershow now
Buying this gets you the original GOI, but if you already own it, you’ll need to purchase this one to get all the features. It’ll import your old stuff though.
- http://i.imgur.com/ewDcdDv.png
- Linux machine configuration not supported wat

Multisiege
http://steamcommunity.com/games/346010/announcements/detail/500304494279965378

Murderlegos with friends?
I can’t wait for the multiplayer physics to cock up… hilariously.
If they want to be smart about this, get multiplayer baked and release the damn thing.

Can you hear it?
http://store.steampowered.com/app/503350/

Scooby Doo 2, Electric Boogaloo
I think the whole team based survival horror thing is kinda doomed to fail. So much tension is just lost when you and your buddies can crack a few jokes over skype/discord/whatever

Break out the onesies (From Foxy)
http://store.steampowered.com/app/542660/

Cyberpunk Isaac?

Danger Drive
http://store.steampowered.com/news/?appids=394430

BEHOLD! The dangers of Early Access.

News:

Beta 381
https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/1002788

So it’s official, it is called the Titan Xp… okay!
- Seriously, though… What the hell is NVidia’s marketing/naming team on? I want me some of that!
- Also, yes! NVidia just proved the Titan X (pascal) and the GTX 1080ti are very much deliberately gimped.
  - xP is the face that the NVIDIA marketing team are making at their customers
So much for those OpenGL Threaded Optimizations being enabled by default.

Q3 Halp
https://ioquake3.org/2017/04/02/help-wanted-2/

I don’t want to come across more negative than usual but interest in this project is kinda waning.
They want build and release people, people to work on a minimal quake level and character set so that they can try to put it on steam and QA
Bit of a shame id doesn’t work with these guys and help them ship something, because it would basically be free money for them

Xonotic 0.8.2
http://xonotic.org/posts/2017/xonotic-0-8-2-release/

New maps!
Quick menu when you mash f8
You can now see who’s spectating on you
New mutators: Rocket Minsta, Vampire Hook, and Breakable Hook!
New weapon models
Improved netcode

Under the mountain
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rocketjumptechnology/king-under-the-mountain
http://www.indiedb.com/games/king-under-the-mountain/downloads

So…just dwarf fortress?

Gnome Twitch
http://www.webupd8.org/2017/04/gnome-twitch-040-includes-improved-chat.html
https://github.com/vinszent/gnome-twitch/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md#v040

Woo! Custom emoji support! Our long national nightmare is over
It needs GTK 3.20 or higher, so by default it’ll only work in Ubuntu 16.10 and up.
Unless you’re running Ubuntu MATE 16.04 and you used that PPA Martin setup to provide the 1.16 version of MATE which does use GTK3.
But at that point you either build from sauce or you download the deb.
Unless you don’t mind changing the sources.list.d file for that PPA to pull from 16.10 instead.

Cry
https://www.viva64.com/en/b/0495/

PVS Studio fixing CryEngine bugs on the Linuxes.
What this actually is, is an advert for their software for identifying bugs in source code
There are all sorts of interesting bugs in cryengine though. Hopefully these guys have at least submitted patches for these issues

Dolphin Idol FAIL
https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2017/04/05/dolphin-progress-report-march-2017/

Now you can actually use the e-shop through dolphin if you have a wii. That’s pretty interesting.
- Incoming C&D in 3…2…1…
They removed software bounding box emulation, which means that if your GPU doesn’t support OpenGL 4.3 properly (R600 Mesa and MacOS) you’re going to have issues.
They’ve also introduced GPU Texture decoding to free up even more processor cycles.
It’s always great to see these post from the Dolphin Emulator devs, they’re doing stuff that is equal parts insane and awesome.

RSPC3
https://rpcs3.net/blog/2017/04/05/rpcs3-now-works-on-linux/
https://github.com/RPCS3/rpcs3
https://plus.google.com/106673918730634637921/posts/QhrGprz95vx

Oh shit motherfucker!
Goddamn this thing has dependencies. Pulling in it’s own ffmpeg, libvulkan, libpng and more.
It builds and runs!
Good thing roommate has a blu-ray player. Now we wait.
- Wait, this critter requires an actual spinny drive thingy?

Feral Wang?
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/640a9a/new_ping_on_the_feral_radar_made_to_wade_for/

Ah the feral speculato-tron. Because nerds on the internet love to decode cryptic clues
It’s Wang but looks hella far out.
Didn’t take long for that one to be decryptified.

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies

Game: Thimbleweed Park™
Webzone: http://store.steampowered.com/app/569860/
Devel: Terrible Toybox
Engine: Custom (SDL, C/C++, Squirrel)
Price: 19.99 / CDN 21.99

Wazzat: In Thimbleweed Park, a dead body is the least of your problems. Switch between five playable characters to uncover the surreal secrets of this strange town in a modern mystery adventure game from the creators of Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion. The deeper you go, the weirder it gets.

Disclosure: They made with the keys

Makes with the working

V-

No major issues.
Quick load times and smooth gameplay.
However, your gerbil lock “safe area” is a bit janky.

J-

P-

If I’m playing a game in fullscreen and you don’t lock my mouse cursor and I end up clicking on youtube videos I didn’t care to watch, you’re gonna get dinged a chair!
Also, I do see why you’d want to limit the FerPS to 60 but how about you do it without VSync’ing?
I don’t like tearing so I’ve taken many steps to ensure it doesn’t happen.
Except, if a game can’t sync to VBlank properly, as is the case, it takes a lot of doing to get rid of the tearing.
The only way I found to do it was to disable the game’s Fullscreen option, use KWin to force the game into a 1080p “fullscreen” window, and disable unredirection in compton.
So that gets you dinged another chair.

Total-

Shiny / Sounds

V-

Simulating screen tear is a nice touch.
It took me a hot second to figure out only parts of the screen were tearing.
Straight up big-head hipster-pixel done right.
Voice acting is done well enough.
Well, minus Ms. Dana Scully on a budget.
I want to believe whoever did that character was being intentionally bad.
Welp, the clown segment sounded like an edited LGC Weekly.
Does Google know you used their ring rang?
It tried to nail 90’s adventure and it did just that, unapologetically.

J-

It definitely looks like a game out of that vintage
The voice acting is decent, but sheriff Ned Flanders is making me want to choke a bitch

P-

They went full on retro with this one.
I’m not entirely sure the different levels of audio compression in the different characters was intentional, to give it that extra feel of “old game”, but that’s definitely something I noticed.
I also appreciated the 1×1 pixel specks of dust you collect. That too was a good call back to the olden times when you needed pixel perfect mouse skills to pick up certain items.

Total-

Control

V-

All of the commands are sprinkled around the WASD area, nice.
Outside of that it’s point-and-click.
No rebindable controls in 2017 gets you nixed a Chair.

J-

The lack of escape button functionality is a bit annoying,but not enough to ding it a chair

P-

Why do you hate the Esc key?
Why do I need to edit a freakin’ Unity-like prefs file to change the hotkeys?
I was also going to point out how much of a dick move it was to not let you scroll your inventory with the mouse-wheel, but the April 4th update did add that functionality.

Total-

FUN

V-

Hard mode can go FK right off.
I tried that for a hot second until I realized I was knee deep in a river of nope.
It’s a clicky adventure game.
You’ve played it before and you will play it again.
The only thing that sets these games apart is their story.
I’m happy to report Thimbleweed Park has a proper one.
Even at the two hour mark I can already see how storylines are starting to intermingle.
And for once, I’m interested to see how it plays out, in casual mode.
Really dig how flashbacks put you in charge of that particular character.
That said, switching between the agents can get a bit tedious.
Goes double for slogging through the dialogue.
On that topic, this game is genually funny.
Yeah, there’s some cringe humour but more often than not the jokes stick the landing.
The puzzles are challenging without being FK you hard in casual mode.
Overall it’s just well done and clear that a lot of love went into its creation.
I’m planning to put some more time into it.

J-

Normally I don’t really care for point and click adventure games
This one isn’t too bad though
The writing is sharp, the gameplay is tolerable, and that’s really all you can ask for when it comes to these
I’m getting to the point though where I’m just randomly clicking things on other things in the hope that something happens.

P-

Regardless of what I say, the moment I mention my score for this category a lot of people are going to hate me.
But I’m nothing if not a glorified exercise in futility in relatively human form.
When I play video games, I do so for the escapism.
I do so to lose myself in a world where I don’t get reminded of how much I suck as a human being.
I do so to vicariously experience a story through the playable characters.
I do so for far too many reasons for me to list, but I can list you a few specific reasons why I don’t play videogames for.
I don’t do it to be reminded I’m playing a videogame, constantly during the first 10 minutes of said game.
I don’t do it to have characters “ironically” referring to my past time as being inferior to doing other stuff.
I don’t do it to test just how far Poe’s Law extends.
I go into all videogames with about as much of an open mind as I can, even though my opinion is always inevitably colored by my own previous experiences.
I didn’t like Thimbleweed Park because it managed to hit all the buttons necessary for me to call it a pretentious nostalgia cash grab made by developers too stuck in the glory days of their past, desperate to prove they and their chosen genre are still relevant.

Total-

Final –

Hate Mail:

Ticket
http://linuxgamecast.com/bradley/?cIbUoTW

Overkill
http://linuxgamecast.com/bradley/?bRbiArz

If you’re going to brandish your insecurities as a javelin and throw them at us, you may want to make sure you’ve worded them as grammatically correct as possible.
And please, do tell me more about how I should enjoy video games.
Stop liking what I don’t like!
Again, no bots, maze like maps, and classes that are borderline identical.
“They did not need to make a linux version”
- Well you know what Brad, they did.
- Then they contacted us and asked if we would review it.
- Developers don’t get a free pass for farting out a Linux port in 2017.
And to quote Mr. Foxy
- “Yeah should have warned you, not to kick that hornets nest.”
Listen, I get it.
You are emotionally invested in this particular game, your argument reflects that.
That’s cool daddy-o, but that investment just might prevent you from looking at it objectively.
And at the end of the day it doesn’t matter what other people think, as long as you enjoy the game.