Steam Summer Sale dates leak! Feral teases a new Linux port, PAYDAY 2 kills DLC, and Mesa gets fast. Then World to the West faces the CHAIRQUISITION! All this, plus your hate mail.
Subscribe:
Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro
Steam News:
The Steam Store
http://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1301948399257707760
- This article is a very long winded way of saying you can now see why steam has recommended a specific game to you
- As it turns out, using black boxes to measure user behaviour and shrugging when people complain is kind of a bad thing. Plus now it will open the possibility of user feedback.
- Moar Hello Kitty Island Adventure, less Curse of the ravens cry
- This is a step in the right direction.
- I guess VALVe finally got tired of people complaining about seeing tons of shovelware in the front page and decided to do the minimum effort thing to let people have a glimpse of why.
Sale
https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/6aec94/steam_summer_sale_2017_date/
- A lot of people will find out about the new gifting rules come Jun 22.
- I can only think of a couple games I’d want to grab if they go super cheap
- Tyranny and Planescape
Neo Rockets
https://www.rocketleague.com/news/what-s-coming-in-v1-34/
- Neo Tokyo better have a massive flesh-monstrosity in the background or I’ll be super pissed
- The old neo tokyo map is under Tokyo Underpass
- But without the side-slopes.
- New crate contents, so get your parents credit cards ready kids!
PAYDLCDAY
http://www.overkillsoftware.com/games/payday2-ultimate-edition/
- Too little, too late?
- Also, Payday 3 confirmed.
- Still requires a 4GB download every two days
- I don’t understand why people would want to play as the H3H3 folks, but it’s an entirely separate option now
- From Ska Studios, the folks behind Salt and Sanctuary.
- These are actually older games, made for the XBox 360 Live Arcade.
- Which, of course mean XNA, which also means Flibit can put a nice ol’ Linux spin on it with FNA.
- You can tell the art was drawn by the exact same person across all games.
- Michelle Silva is her name.
- Charlie Murder don’t know how to quit me.
- Seriously, I have to manually kill it.
Asset flips
http://store.steampowered.com/app/440730/Survival_Zombies_The_Inverted_Evolution/
- Only bringing this up because of their Special Edition.
- That’s a lot of shovelware.
- The titlecard art has nothing to do with the game itself. What year is it? 1997?
News:
- This fixes the segfaults I was getting with Mad Max and Talos running in Vulkan.
- Turns out, the issue wasn’t entirely on my end.
- Also and so Mir can shut the hell up about it, there was an update to the 375 long lived branch.
- Version 375.66 brings mostly the same stuff to the long lived branch, as well as 1080Ti and Titan Xp support.
- Lots of fixes for PRIME support, so mobile users rejoice!
- It works ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
17.1
https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/mesa-dev/2017-May/155069.html
- Ivy Bridge now has better OpenGL capabilities on Linux than it ever will on Windows, joining Haswell.
- RADV becomes the shortest lived driver to pass Khronos CTS for Vulkan.
- Feral game performance improvements
- Are they using the d3d9 state tracker to alleviate the IndirectX overhead?
- I don’t think indirectx is transparent enough to do that
- Having access to the driver source is much better than what Nvidia gameworks ends up doing. I’m interested to see how big of a performance boost feral games will get
- Are they using the d3d9 state tracker to alleviate the IndirectX overhead?
- Shader compilation performance improved by caching some shared bits on disk.
- And if you have 25 commits or more in the Mesa state tracker, you get all them Feral ported games fo’ free.
- It’s a good time to be an open sauce driver guy.
16
http://wccftech.com/amd-ryzen-16-12-core-x399-whitehaven-cpus-leaked/
- AMD needs find a way to plug these leaks.
- Sorta want one of these for my server box. I need to run all the virtual machines
- I’m betting these will probably be a 125w part, although with the core density, I wouldn’t be surprised if this were another round of mobo-melters
- At minimum since it’s probably two 65W parts in one package.
- Also what will be the gold price? I wonder if Martin Wimpress is willing to pay the iron price.
- The clue is a samurai penguin.
- I want it to be Wang 2 but it will probably end up being some total ZzzZZ War MOD.
- This one is probably Shogun 2: Total War
- The other one, “Made to Wade” is probably Shadow Warrior 2.
- As much as the possibility of Nier Automata peaks my curiosity, we have yet to see Squeenix Japan actually allow a Linux port.
- Good ol’ Fanwankery. I just hope I don’t have to review another total Snore game.
Tiny bundle
https://www.humblebundle.com/tinybuild-bundle
- Worth it for SpeedRunners.
- Pretty much the only thing really. Unless you got super into theorycrafting and wanted to obsess over Hello Neighbour
- What do you get at the $40 level? A fucking Pre-Order! I’m not even joking.
Still alive?
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-05-08-dead-island-2-is-still-alive-deep-silver-insists
- Will it even be worth it though?
- Deep Silver has dun and drunk the EON kool-aid, so even if it does come out, we might be giving it a pass.
- After the slapfight between Techland and Deep Silver, over who would get to support the Dead Island “Improved Edition”, I wonder who’s going to be developing this?
Square Hit
http://gematsu.com/2017/05/square-enix-withdraws-io-interactive-negotiating-potential-investors
- According to Steamspy, Hitmango sold ~630k (a little under Deus Hex)
- Hope this is the death nail for episodic bulls*it.
- I do wonder, is the developer footing the server costs or is that entirely Squeenix?
- Cuz if it’s the latter, I don’t think this will affect the admittedly limited Online functionality of the game.
- It’s a 59mil Canadollar loss for these guys, despite the fact that they made money last fiscal year
- Perhaps someone else will pick up the reigns (Garottes)
Who wants to paint
http://www.antigraviator.com/design-competition/
- Wanted to design a skin for a wipeout clone? Now’s your chance
- You’re limited to three colours though
GordanPats
https://www.patreon.com/icculus
- 100 bucks lets you actively stalk gmoney. I smell a new LGC patreon goal
- If he can get to 500 a month he’ll finally update his documentation!
CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope
– Not sure if want
– Check it out
– Shutupandtakemymonies
Game: World to the West
Webzone: http://store.steampowered.com/app/530020/World_to_the_West/
Devel: Rain Games
Engine: Unity
Price: 19.99 / CDN 21.99
Wazzat: World to the West is a pulpy, cartoony top down action adventure inspired by European adventure comics. Take control of four unique characters —Lumina the Teslamancer, Knaus the orphan, Miss Teri the mind bender and the gloriously mustachioed strongman, Lord Clonington—, each with their their own motivations, skills and interweaving storylines, as they seek to escape the dark shadow of an ancient prophecy.
Mandatory Disclosure: They Sent us keys
Makes with the working
V-
- Bugs, bugs everywhere.
- Not going to call them game breaking but they are 100% attention breaking.
J-
- Has some issues with non xbox controllers, but we’ll get into that later
P-
- You can tell it’s a Unity game because it starts on the wrong screen and the first thing you see is that dark blue screen of nothingness.
- Thankfully, it seems to remember which monitor is the right one after you move it and, even though the options menu says 3840×1080, it remembers the resolution is 1920×1080.
Total-
Shiny / Sounds
V-
J-
- The art style is alright
- I like the look of the grues
- Honestly, I can’t think of anything that particularly stands out about the visual aesthetics other than they’re consistent and well done
- There are some background noises, but the music here isn’t really doing all that much for me
P-
- I don’t hate the cartoony look!
- The background music is a bit of a mixed bag, some areas have a really awesome upbeat tune but others have “generic adventurous music” which sounds like budget Jeremy Soule.
- I can’t help but feel like voice acting would have made the playable characters feel less like chess pieces and more like actual characters. Assuming it’d be done properly, of course.
Total-
Control
V-
- Welp, you got some suggestion buttons.
- Unfortunately the suggestions fall on deaf ears when you are forced to defend yourself.
- Creating a 3D adventure game without any sort of camera rotation sounds like some sadistic shite I would come up with for Brick Simulator II: Shadow of Mortar.
J-
- Aiming in this game can eat a bag of dicks
- Also, it’d be nice if the context sensitive menus had a bit more margin for error. I didn’t realize I could ride frog things until I accidentally triggered the prompt
- There’s a definite delay between pressing a button and the corresponding action happening
- Also, you need to play this with an xbox controller. By default you can’t do any actions with the Dual shock 4, and remapping things don’t seem to work too good either
P-
- Oh my fucking fuck!
- What the hell happened?!
- Default mouse and keyboard has you moving the characters Diablo style.
- Change to keyboard+controller and the Steam Controller doesn’t respond.
- Turns out, it wasn’t bound by default and I had to bind it my way.
- Until Friday, Knaus’ Ice Skating ability would shoot you off in some random direction rather than where your cursor was, if you were playing with the mouse. They fixed it, though.
- What they didn’t fix was the unresponsiveness that got me killed or, at least, had me taking stupid damage because the characters would outright ignore button presses.
- I get what they were going for with the limited movement and obstacle traversing abilities each character has, but the lack of a jump in an exploration, metroidvania-type, isometric game doesn’t feel right.
Total-
FUN
V-
- This game really needs to at least attempt to explain what and or why i’m doing something.
- E.g. right now I’m running around in a cave opening what best can be described as “light plants” with zero direction.
- No idea what they do or how many of them I need to open.
- You made a 3D platformer without the ability to jump, fascinating.
- Four hours in and i’m not even done with the tutorial.
- I had nothing (not really, but close) to do Friday but put time into this game.
- I ended up favouring the nothing.
- I’ve still not reached the Avengers Assemble moment and @ 4+ hours in I never will.
- You should have tightened this shite up, son.
- Hell, just cut it down to an hour and add some story vs. endless “wandering” followed by solving the occasional puzzle, followed by more wandering, followed by… well, you get the idea.
- Did I just accidentally summarize the entirety of World to the West?
- Yes I did, Brad, yes I did.
J-
- There’s a good game in here. I liked the “The Cave” style puzzles where you need to make your dudes co-operate to progress
- What I don’t like is the mindless backtracking
- As you unlock more characters, you figure out, “Oh, you need dude X to clear this obstacle”
- Which quickly turns into “Oh fuck, I’m going to need to play this segment 8 more times to clear this obstacle
- Dear lord, I haven’t cleared the tutorial yet?
- So far, the difficulty I’ve seen is grappling with the innacurate and clunky controls to bypass relatively easy puzzles, or exploring every corner for that one area you missed that lets you do a thing
- Once I sorted the controller issues, I started actually enjoying the game a bit, but the thing drags it’s feet.
P-
- I don’t mind the fact the game doesn’t really tell you much in the way of what to do.
- Instead, it has a 6 hour long tutorial until the “mysterious old lady” then basically tells you: “Now that you’ve learned the necessary skills in order to progress (the hard way), here’s the big open world and here’s where you need to go to make story happen. Do what you want!”
- Now, this is the point where you will have to traverse the world and, while I agree with Venn, that this is a 3D platformer without a jumping ability, I also get what they were going for.
- As the indirect “sequel” to Teslagrad and seeing as it was made by the exact same people, it retains the same metroidvania, unlocking skills to be able to progress, style of gameplay but handed to you in a different “style”.
- It’s not a 2D platformer, it’s an isometric 3D platformer.
- And even though there’s no jumping, they doubled-down on that decision and crafted the levels to be navigated with just the chess-piece style abilities of each of the characters in mind.
- To be fair, though, during that 6 hour tutorial, of all the areas I couldn’t access with the 1 or 2 characters I had available at the time none of those bits had anything that made me want to go back once I had the full lineup.
- So, that’s a negative. You created entire sections of maps I just can’t be bothered with.
- The thing that saves this game, in my not so humble opinion, is the “Show, don’t tell” approach to letting figure out how to make progress and the well crafted puzzles.
- Because, make no mistake, the platforming puzzles in World to the West get a whole new level of “How the fuck do I get up there?” when you can’t jump.
- But these puzzles are not obtuse; the game gives you everything you need to figure it out and just lets you fail miserably.
- I could have given it 4 chairs here, weren’t it for the fact that in those precision platforming bits it simply didn’t register a few needed key presses.
Total-
Final –
Hate Mail:
Tyres
http://linuxgamecast.com/bradley/?W2hnKoH
