LinuxGameCast Weekly 257 – Make Me Tacos

River City Ransom disappears from Steam! Wonder Boy comes to Linux, Albion Online is ready for public consumption, and NVIDIA don’t text Xwayland. Then Jotun faces the CHAIRQUISITION! All this, plus your hate mail.

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Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro

Steam News:

Another reason not to game on Windows
https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/20/16003722/valve-one-up-security-exploit-hackers-ragdoll-source-sdk-vunerability

  • Ah, the classic arbitrary code injection-a-maroo
  • This is why when you make something extensible, or have any sort of untrusted input, you sanitize the fuck out said inputs
  • Considering how much the source engine makes SELinux go apeshit because of memory ‘execheap’s, I’m not entirely sure if it wouldn’t have been a matter of time until someone figured out how to make a Linux exploit out of this.

River City pulled from steam
https://www.videogamer.com/news/river-city-ransom-underground-pulled-from-steam-dev-clarifies-situation

  • How jacked is U.S. copyright law? BEHOLD!
  • Seeing as they don’t have the funds to take her to court, this was the best course of action in their opinion.
  • Because in the US, you’re guilty until proven innocent as far as the DMCA is concerned.
  • I hope Imagos Softworks and Leonard French can set a precedent in their suit against Alex Mauer, and maybe get a gag order to prevent her from ever filing more spurious copyright claims.

Serious rebalance
http://store.steampowered.com/news/?appids=564310

  • No vulkany or linuxy bits in this update.
  • Just getting rid of ammo drops and increasing the enemy count on serious difficulty for BFE
  • Also a bunch of miscellaneous fixes
  • PLUS!
    • Sam shouldn’t get cramps in his arm when showing the Sirian Bracelet anymore, so he will likely put his arm down all the time from now on.

Wonder Boy
http://store.steampowered.com/app/543260/Wonder_Boy_The_Dragons_Trap/
https://www.patreon.com/posts/wonder-boy-trap-13093161

  • This thing is somehow partially using the original ROM.
    • Probably some insanity involving remapping sprite locations
  • It’s a dotEmu published game, that’s their usual MO.

Norsca DLC will be available for Linux
http://store.steampowered.com/app/455040/Total_War_WARHAMMER__Norsca/

  • Available “later this summer”
  • Get yer warhammer vikings. They ride mammoths. Delicious mammoths

Park with your friends
http://store.steampowered.com/app/611830/Park_Bound/

  • Ultimate Chicken Fuck You with your friends?
  • Imma be real here. I’m kinda getting tired of the “Crap” aesthetic. I mean, it was funny the first few times. Now it just looks lazy.

News:

I see the why, it’s the how that’s killing me
https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/925605/linux/nvidia-364-12-release-vulkan-glvnd-drm-kms-and-eglstreams/post/5188874/#5188874
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/6oit93/nvidias_team_for_linux_drivers_currently_have_no/dki1dyx/

  • Aaron says there is no support for Xwayland planned.
  • In a perfect world, that’d mean game developers and porting houses would need to start looking at this Wayland thing.
  • But since we live far from that perfect world, those games are going to stay X based and people with NVidia GPUs on Linux, read the majority, will have to keep using X for their gaming.
  • Still, I get the not wanting to support the Xwayland crutch. Because that’s what it is!
  • AMD reeeeeeeeeeeeeee drivers reeeeeeeeeeeee open source reeeeeeeeee!
    • Mayhaps this is the kick in the pants the mesa community needed to actually get their driver competitive
    • Prolly not tho.
  • This originally came out of a discussion on getting a gnome3 wayland session to run standalone on the nvidia drivers. Clearly there are still some issues there, but they are being worked on
  • Looks like we still have a long Xorg.conf filled road ahead of us

A Telling bundle
https://www.humblebundle.com/telltale-bundle-2017

  • We know they have populated at least one depot with the Linux.
  • As an aside: Remember how the “average” price would plummet after the first 23/4 hours?
  • Yeah, that number stays hella static these days, just sayin.
  • This still falls under heretic purchase purview IMO
  • Not a single Linux game.
  • And no, I don’t think TellTale will ever go back and release anything for Linux.

Albion Online official launch
https://albiononline.com/en/news/albion-online-official-release

  • I guess it’s supposed to be a sort of medieval EVE online
  • It’s SDL based, so that’s a plus
  • Looks like a one time payment. But the more you pay, the more stuff you get. I see how it is
  • I’m curious, but considering I’m also broke right now, I’m not $30 curious.

Hipster Spite and Malice
https://github.com/fdev/sciibo

  • The moral of the story here is don’t read a wikipedia article on the rules of card games
  • It’s a neat little challenge, making a card game that’s fully animated and plays in a terminal
  • It’s not replacing my rogue though
  • Yeah, no. I can still play Doom The Roguelike in my terminal.
  • Oh, btw, fuck you Bethesda!

Endless sky unstable
https://github.com/endless-sky/endless-sky/releases/tag/v0.9.7

  • If you’re not on ubuntu, you’ll need you some libmad, glew,scons and some openal
  • It’s…asteroids with trading and RPG stuff.
  • They have a use for capslock now. It makes you go fasta

BLAM! 3.5
https://github.com/Javanaise/mrboom-libretro

  • With Libretro and SDL2 flavours
  • This is port of a bomberman clone for dos
  • They decompiled the fucker and fixed it up. Gotta give them some credit for that
  • I don’t know about the libretro version but the regular SDL2 version works fine.

CHAIRQUISITION:
CHAIR– Nooope

CHAIRCHAIR– Not sure if want

CHAIRCHAIRCHAIR– Check it out

CHAIRCHAIRCHAIRCHAIR– Shutupandtakemymonies


Game: Jotun: Valhalla Edition
Webzone: Jotun_Valhalla_Edition
Devel: Thunder Lotus Games
Engine: Unity

Price: £10.99 / US$14.99 / CDN$16.99
Wazzat: Jotun is a hand-drawn action-exploration game set in Norse mythology.In Jotun, you play Thora, a Viking warrior who died an inglorious death and must prove herself to the Gods to enter Valhalla. Impress the Gods!


Makes with the working

V-CHAIRCHAIRCHAIRCHAIR

J-CHAIRCHAIRCHAIRCHAIR

PCHAIRCHAIRCHAIRCHAIR


Total-CHAIRCHAIRCHAIRCHAIR


Shiny / Sounds

V-CHAIRCHAIRCHAIR

  • It’s really hard to figure out where I can and cannot go because lack of depth.
  • It’s like running around on a flat surface.
  • Also, the character is missing a turning animation.
  • Background noise is fine and the narrator is legit.

J-CHAIRCHAIRCHAIR

  • The soundtrack in this game is pretty freaking great
  • Some of the wide shots are incredibly gorgeous too
  • The problem is, it’s really hard to track your character when the camera zooms way the hell out
  • Also, the closer you zoom in, the worse it kind of looks
  • When there are lots of enemies on the screen, especially dead ones, the hand drawn aesthetic seems to fall apart

P-CHAIRCHAIRCHAIR

  • Some bosses clearly had much more love put into them than others.
  • The dwarf mother rock Jotun, the way she moves doesn’t make it look like she’s made of rock, make’s it look like she’s being streamed over a connection with >2000ms ping.
  • The ice Jotun’s movement and the forest Jotun, the first you fight, is lumbering but smooth, so what happened?
  • Also, zooming all the way out to show the whole gigantic boss Jotun and its arena, makes your character so small it’s actually almost impossible to see her against the ground texture in certain arenas.
  • The music is awesome though, if I had to find something to complain about it, is that it just doesn’t let up. It’s always epic, always making you feel like you’re in this grueling quest and you get no pause.
  • But that’s me literally complaining that something is too awesome, that should tell you just how jaded I’ve become with Steam games lately.

Total-CHAIRCHAIRCHAIR


Control

V-CHAIRCHAIRCHAIRCHAIR

  • Everything worked with the Xclone.

J-CHAIRCHAIR

P-CHAIRCHAIRCHAIR

  • I’ve had a few bullshit deaths because the game either glitches or cheats with certain boss fights.
  • With the bosses which have legs, you can pass under them, sometimes.
  • Other times, the game goes “Nope! There’s now an invisible wall under the boss’ lower appendages and you’re going to take some bullshit damage.”
  • The windup on that heavy hit is stupidly long considering the negligible amount of damage it is
  • That said, Steam Controlla worked just fine out of the box.

Total-CHAIRCHAIRCHAIR


FUN

V-CHAIR

  • Turns out I don’t really care for exploration games.
  • 95 minutes in and I have noped a “boss” and a few dwarves.
  • Saying Joton lacks direction would be a MASSIVE understatement.
  • AND if your game is an explore-fest don’t hand me a mini-map constructed of moon glyphs and spite.
  • Combat is boring as FK and or all.
  • You get upgrades without andy explanation as to what they do.
  • And as I mentioned earlier half of your time is spent figuring out where exactly your character can walk.
  • Is it pretty? Yeah, you know what, I will give it that but only that.
  • At the end of the day the only redeeming thing about Joton was the price, free.

J-CHAIRCHAIR

  • http://i.imgur.com/aa31lee.png
  • So many dead dwarfs. What does this game have against dwarfs?
  • The bosses kind a prove an interesting challenge
  • I managed to kill the giant flower troll, but after her last HP went away, she insta-gibbed me, which made me lose the win
  • At that point, I said “fuck this game”
  • Still, it has some redeeming qualities. If you’re a fan of the nose mythos like I am, this game is pretty faithful to it
  • It’s also pretty cool to run around a giant frozen wasteland dodging Jormungandr, the world serpent
  • There are definitely some gameplay issues though.
  • I didn’t hate it, but may be tighten up the controls and ease up on the bullshit

P-CHAIRCHAIR

  • I don’t hate the game
  • The animation is spotty and outright missing in places.
  • The controls are fine when the game isn’t cheating like a motherfucker.
  • The sound effects are alright for the most part but they’re nothing to write home about.
  • And the non-boss fight areas scream “We thought the game was too short and had to pad it out a little bit”.
  • That I feel is what keeps me from actually enjoying this game.
  • Sure, game length is important.
  • But honestly I’d rather have a short yet intense boss run gaming experience, than longer game that feels unnecessarily padded and boring with random spurts of intense boss fighting action.
  • And unfortunately, that’s where Jotun ends up being.

Total-CHAIRCHAIR


Final –CHAIRCHAIR


Hate Mail:

NVIDIA
http://linuxgamecast.com/bradley/?pAHTb3B

Squirrel
http://linuxgamecast.com/bradley/?neJKwO9

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