LinuxGameCast Weekly 243 – Codebeavers

Yooka-Laylee is out! GOG gets flat, UNIGINE releases Superposition, and CS:GO heads to Source 2. Then Manipulated faces the CHAIRQUISITION! All this, plus your hate mail.

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Steam News:

Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro

Source GO
https://pvplive.net/c/csgos-next-operation-and-source-2-engine-release-date

Nobody will claim that this “ruined the entire game”.
- Nobody whatsoever.
- Especially from such a welcoming and understanding community like that of an online First Person Shooter.
I on the other hand, don’t play CS:GO competitively so if I can get rid of the frame hitching when first loading a stage or when first getting shot at, I’d be happy.
I for one am curious if they’re going to go back and update all their old games croteam style.
It would be nice if we had some portal or brad with the vulkans

Brrr
http://www.moddb.com/mods/half-life-absolute-zero/news/half-life-absolute-zero-update-2-development-hell-edition

They had no news because they were using that time to actually build the thing they set out to build… I can respect that!
For those of you who have no idea what the project is, these guys are trying to integrate the leftover/cut content from the original half-life into the game. And interesting look at what may have been
The big updates are new enemy AI for some cut enemies, Gordon can bleed now (and if it bleeds, we can kill it) and a bunch of restored functionality

Yooka release
http://store.steampowered.com/app/360830/

All the critics have panned this critter but the Steam reviews seem positive.
Is this another one of those critics vs common folk video game scenarios, like Mad Max?
Common complaints seem to be the camera and controls, which can be fixed with patching.
- Shite camera was part of the N64 experience.
I liked playing banjo kazooie back in the day, so if this goes on sale or they send us a copy I’ll probably give it a look

Bogus Detour
http://store.steampowered.com/app/272620

So hyper sam drifter?
Wanna bet it will have a Vulkan render because why the hell not?
I always wanted to like Hammerwatch.
It’s one of those games that eschews fancy aesthetics in favor of having very tightly integrated and simple mechanics.
It should be right up my alley but I could never really get into it much.

Fusion 2017 Update
http://steamcommunity.com/app/564310/discussions/0/135513901707529147/

Fixed the SS TSE loading issue.
REALLY smoothed out the Vulkan render.
There are still some odd networking and animation issues
No random black monoliths though, so that’s a plus

TALOS Vulkan up
http://steamcommunity.com/games/257510/announcements/detail/646672845016569368

It’s faster than the last one… somehow.
They’ve got a lot of vulkan feedback from Fusion. Good to see they’re integrating what they learned in Talos
Also, WHAR SERIOUS TALOS?

Mechanized BETA
https://steamcommunity.com/games/dhmc/announcements/detail/486794522055126469

Simultaneous release. Giggity
The game went from Mixed reviews to mostly positive the moment they pushed out the beta for Linux and Mac.
I know correlation doesn’t automatically equal causation, but in this case I’m willing to say it did.

News:

Feral Freebie
https://twitter.com/feralgames/status/852555607978672128

“… any Linux game you want.”
It’d be a pretty dick move to ask for one they didn’t port!
- I wonder if they’ll actually fork out the dough for a copy of Curse of the Raven’s Cry
  - Batman, I want the goddamn Batman!
  - Needs some vulkan love.
50% off means it’s a good time to nab Hitman, Hodor or Max.

CSMT Proper
https://www.winehq.org/announce/2.6

According to the Codeweavers person who created the original set of CSMT patches, this isn’t a complete implementation yet.
There are still a few patches which you need for the best possible performance but those will be landing soon^TM

Superposition
http://unigine.com/en/products/benchmarks/superposition

QSslSocket: cannot resolve SSLv2_server_method
Vulkan “eventually”: https://twitter.com/Unigine/status/852441631106248704
- Engine.
Unlike Heaven and Valley, this one isn’t single-threaded up the wazoo.
In fact, it manages to implement OpenGL in a way that uses 100% of the 1080 while only using about 70% of all my FX 8370E threads.

Godot Tree… fiddy?
https://godotengine.org/article/godot-30-progress-report-6

They have a working export to webassembly, meaning that some less intense godot games can run in the browser. Their little demo works reasonably well
They’ve also redone their particle system so that it’s handled entirely on GPU. It also has the benefit of giving a performance boost to legacy systems. Supposedly
This also means that they hit all their feature goals, so now we’re just waiting on Godot Alpha 3.0
- Eat your heart out Samuel Beckett! Why don’t you go drive Andre the giant somewhere!

Morrow Multiwind
https://github.com/TES3MP/openmw-tes3mp

Oh what in the actual fuck is this?
Looks like people got sick of TSO fucking them over, so they’re making their own MMO
- With blackjack
  - And hookers
There used to be a Morrowind proper Multiplayer mod a long time ago, but it wasn’t anywhere near as advanced as this one seems to be.
While this one seems to have appearance movement and all the other visual stuff already implemented, the old one was so incomplete everyone ended up looking like Fargoth.

Achtung, die Kurve!
https://github.com/simenheg/zatackax

Well, it builds and runs
As far as I can tell, this is just lightcycles from tron. In crayon?

Flat GOG
https://github.com/kujeger/flatpak-gog

Guy’s goal is to make a generic flatpak buildsystem for GOG games
Might be something Le Strider wants to yoink for the Lutris’s’s’s’s’s, should it come back from the dead
Snap is teh future!11!

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies

Game: Manipulated
Webzone: http://store.steampowered.com/app/530510
Devel: Wolfray Entertainment
Engine: Unity
Price: 4.99 / CDN 5.49

Wazzat: Warning! This game does require an ability to think. Manipulated is a logical platformer that will change your consciousness and involve you in the world of puzzles.

Disclosure: They sent us keys.

Makes with the working

Venn-

Jordan-

Pedro-

Oh, look! A game that does know how to sync to vblank properly.

Total-

Shiny / Sounds

Venn-

This looks like a Flash game from 5 years ago.
And by that I mean it’s vector graphics laid on top of a background.
Not so much as a turning animation.
Is it fugly? No.
How do I say this, it comes across as highly polished place art.
I took off my headphones before the lass made it down the elevator.

Jordan-

Let be real here. I’ve seen flash games on newgrounds that look better than this
- Naughty ones too
The voiceover guy’s accent was cute for a bit. Then it got super annoying

Pedro-

On their own, each of the visual elements of this game look good.
Put them all together and you make the “Anachronism Stew” in Shakespeare look grounded by comparison.
The voice-over person was trying to be funny, but I found myself enjoying the game more when I put down the headset and didn’t listen to anything he said.

Total-

Control

Venn-

Floaty as FK and or ALL.
This is beyond obvious when you almost complete a ledge jump and the engine pulls you the rest of the way up.
Zero hitback?
Alright, not zero, more like random as hell and wholly unpredictable hitback.
You can get killed to death by getting cornered by an enemy.
Stuck between two baddies?
That’s a killed to death as well.
I’ve died from the shite controls more than anything else in the game.

Jordan-

When I first started playing this game, it had some issue with controllers and menus. That seems to have resolved itself
this game doesn’t like turning much
The controls are floaty, and in your ghost form, it feels slippery

Pedro-

Such Unity
Much Floaty Controls
Very Platforming
Wow
Did you really, absolutely, necessarily, have to have these precision platforming bits?
Because the puzzles are brain scratchy enough as it is, you don’t need to had the random Unity physics into the mix.

Total-

FUN

Venn-

The biggest issue with any puzzle game is finding the right balance between FK you hard and Fun.
Manipulated took a different approach by providing neither.
None of these puzzles are “hard”, they’re just poorly telegraphed.
I’m not stuck at this 4 digit puzzle, nay, I have simply ran out of FKs to give.

Jordan-

Compare this game to another “hard ass puzzle game”: stevens sausage roll
Steven’s game lures you in with the apparent simplicity, the silly graphics, and then traps your brain with some challenging puzzles you know you can solve if you just spend some time figuring it out
This game? It’s a series of logic puzzles with some poorly done platforming bits tossed in the middle
It sort of reminds me of those BrainAge DS games, except this one has the pretext of being some kind of fun game
- And that just reminds me of some crazy TAS runs of Brainage that I’d rather watch than play this game.
I’m just not into it brad.

Pedro-

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again.
A good puzzle game hands players a loaded handgun and sits back and watches them shoot themselves in the foot over and over until they figure it out.
Allegory aside, the best puzzle games give you everything you need to solve a puzzle and the only thing expected of the player is to put those elements to use to create the solution.
Manipulated does this for the first few puzzles.
The moment you get to level 7, though, all of that goes out the window.
Not just in the proverbial sense, either.
In order to progress, at one point you actually do need to send your ghost offscreen and navigate that place with just the help of a little map thing.
That is the very opposite of what good puzzle design is.
It would be like if an actual physical puzzle has you tearing into the physical packaging in order to find a piece to solve it.
That’s not a puzzle game, that’s a hack job!
Much like Venn I stopped giving a damn when I had to figure out the code to open the way to “Black Beard” and the only thing I had to tell me the solution was a Blue, Green, Red and Yellow flag and a 4×4 matrix of dots with the same colors.
I tried anything from the obvious solutions to the completely far fetched.
I caught myself looking up the visible spectrum bandwidth of those colors.
I like puzzle games…
But Manipulated isn’t a good puzzle game.

Total-

Final –

Hate Mail:

Heretic
http://linuxgamecast.com/bradley/?XKRfpwL

We will have confirm with the Chairs but so long as there are Linux games in the bundle in question, which there are, I don’t think so.
Bundle must have a majority of linux games. Otherwise the chairs deem you heretic.
- LIES!11!
- Granted this is open to interpretation but if there is one Linux game in the bundle and that’s why you yoinked it everything is cricket.

Lutris
http://linuxgamecast.com/bradley/?IPC61B6

For the second question, yes. You can use Lutris to create a menu entry for one of the games you just installed.
Then, in Steam, add that as a non-Steam shortcut.
For your first question, how often do you feel like setting up a new prefix to install one of those Steam games which isn’t available for Linux?
If the answer to that is “It’s usually too much work and I don’t bother”, Lutris is your best friend.

Roids|
http://linuxgamecast.com/bradley/?y6UQ2LZ
http://www.beardedwhale.com/codroids/