Steam Machines live! Full Metal Furies comes to Linux, Rocket League enables tournaments and Feral updates their cryptic arse-radar. Then Neverwinter Nights Enhanced Edition faces the CAHIRQASITION! All this, plus your hate mail.
Special tanks:
Jack Bryant (increased pledge)
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Steam News:
RIP Hardware
https://overclock3d.net/news/systems/valve_removes_their_steam_machine_section_from_steam/1
- Considering Links have been on fire sale this comes as no surprise.
- VALVe killed the Steam machines about three days after they announced them.
- However…
Tits, calm them
http://steamcommunity.com/app/221410/discussions/0/1696043806550421224/
- So, to paraphrase Pierre Loup-Garou
- “Everybody relax. First Vulkan, then the bitches”
- Street Fighter V is going to be epic!
- But here we have it. Steam machines are dead, steamOS is what valve is going to support and deliver stuff on.\
- People, start spooling up the booga booga drive. We have Worm Sign! Or at least mention of “initiatives in the pipe”.
- They were never removed from the store.
- A quick check would have noped all the hype and concern.
- At the end of the day VALVe is working on shite that we can’t even begin to fathom.
- Granted, it could be exceptionally useless / stupid shite.
- They’re not gone but they’re certainly not going anywhere either.
Mounted
https://steamcommunity.com/groups/SteamClientBeta/announcements/detail/1657763209739490075
By the numbers
https://galyonk.in/steam-in-2017-129c0e6be260
- PUBG skews the entire year’s worth of numbers.
- $20 games lead, if their name isn’t PUBG.
- 293 million players SteamSpy could track.
Heathen checker
http://lgc.lysioneer.nl/
- Some of the games it lists as not supporting Linux do.
- There’s a submit a correction button for just that instance.
- On initial inspection of the URI, I was half convinced this would rate your heatheness on a scale of 1-4 chairs
Rocket Tournaments
http://steamcommunity.com/games/252950/announcements/detail/1672399365484081031
- …so it begins.
- They’re actually mentioning SteamOS fixes!
- Granted, the two they mention also affected Mac, but that’s certainly welcome.
- Introduced High CPU usage and slowness in the menu for some people.
Rocket WWEague®
http://store.steampowered.com/news/?appids=252950
- I was hoping for some dedicated PVP shit
- Or at least a suplex city map
Führer Further Beseiged
http://store.steampowered.com/news/?appids=346010
- They added a ctf mode to single player
- LAN supposed.is super nice in the era of of online only mp
Welcome to Albion
https://steamcommunity.com/games/596970/announcements/detail/1653259610100101329
- I thought it was Albion the MMO, finally come to Steam…
Unworthy
http://store.steampowered.com/app/613190/Unworthy/
- Grimdark Metroidvania where you roll around instead of jump
- Don’t have word on a release date or price
- The look, I likes it but i’ve been Slain by pretty + shite gameplay more than once.
- It’s Limbo meets Salt & Sanctuary, from the description.
Biggest multiplayer challenge ever seen
http://store.steampowered.com/app/805850/Get_Wrecked/
- I for one approve of mounting artillery on VW Busses
- OMG this thing has a hard stutter every two seconds no matter what.
- No graphic options minus High and Low.
- Unity matchmaking system of random.
- Babbys first Unity game.
- Whatever did happen to Scraps since they shit on Linux from on High?
Build and… sell?
http://store.steampowered.com/app/387820/Build_a_Game_Universe/
- So….a store within a store?
- Pretty much!
Full Furry
https://plus.google.com/+flibitijibibo/posts/2Udv4oYkCgY
- Played a little bit of this recently with roommate.
- Hipster Pixel Castle Crashers
- Heeey! Another game from Cellar Door Games.
- Rogue Legacy was a long time ago!
News:
Linux Game Jam 2018
https://itch.io/jam/linux-game-jam-2018
- Brick Stimulator + Chuck Tingle audio book soundtrack.
- I used to look forward to game jams to see the awesome new stuff developers would come up with or how they’d work around the theme to deliver a short, but damn interesting experience.
- Nowadays you don’t see a whole lot of that.
- The slight bending of the theme is still present but it’s used mostly as an excuse for the dev to make whatever they wanted, with only a slight nod towards the theme.
FNA 18.04
https://github.com/FNA-XNA/FNA/releases/tag/18.04
- Actually giving people an idea why their FNA game won’t work with the Linux is a pretty handy tool not just for developers!
Dolphins need love 2
https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2018/04/02/dolphin-progress-report-february-and-march-2018/
- The android controller addition is actually a neat little idea
- Lots of neat stuff, but Ctrl-F linux finds nothing
- Which is a good thing IMO. Linux is now humdrum to these folks
- Per-game .ini settings on Android without having to either fire up another app to change it or plugging it in to your PC is a big plus!
- Proper OSD scaling if you have a stupidly high res phone/tablet.
RIP MAC gaming
https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/3/17191986/apple-intel-cpu-processor-design-competition
- If these new chips are going to be beefy arm processors, even with their decent x86 emulation, yeah, you’re basically asking devs to support an entirely new architecture.
- That’s a big ask. But people accepted metal, up until they figured out how to vulkanize it
- Maybe it’ll finally be the catalyst that makes ARM laptops a more accepted thing
- We’ve seen apple make some strange decisions in the past that later catalyzed into stuff we take for granted now (Touchscreen phones, flash, etc)
- MS took a ARM Dorito built from a mobile phone and shoved it into a lappy formfactor.
- Apple will at least build some custom kit.
- I have no doubt Apple will make the OS and hardware work together.
- It’s the third party support I don’t really see.
- If people couldn’t be assed with even the modicum amount of support for Windows RT or anything else on ARM, outside of Android and iOS, I don’t know how this will fly in 2020.
- Maybe ARM will have overtaken x86 by then and I’m just talking bollocks from the past.
Feral radar making sense?
http://www.feralinteractive.com/en/upcoming/
- Clicked on the moving dots and they actually showed games.
- Well, some. Apparently that skank Robert Johnson isn’t dead yet
- Life is strange is now coming out before ROTT?
- ROTT announced Tuesday, 13th February, 2018
- LIS announced Wednesday, 14th March, 2018
- June 21st is still a long way away, apparently!
Game: Neverwinter Nights Enhanced Edition
Webzone: Neverwinter_Nights_Enhanced_Edition
Devel: Bioware/Beamdog
Engine: Aurora
Price: 19.99 USD
Wazzat: Return to the Forgotten Realms in this bestselling Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game. Combines all the content of Neverwinter Nights Diamond Edition with all-new enhanced features. Includes 100+ hours of award-winning adventures and the tools to create your own!
Mandatory Disclosure: They sent us keys.
Makes with the working
- New, fkn, rule: If I have to touch a *.ini in 2018 automatic -2 Chairs.
- If molesting said *.ini file does not sort the issue -1 Chair.
- Your menus don’t work, Brad.
- I have tried windowed, fullscreen, borderless, 1080p, 720p, 2160p.
- Cursor is out of alignment and straight-up nopes when trying to create a character.
- Got it to work with 2160p fullscreen borderless MINUS UI scaling.
- 27 minutes of constant futzing only to get in an unplayable state.
- Yes, 27 minutes and I have yet to play the game.
- Hangs on cloud sync when you force-close because you kinda have to force-close when the menus don’t FKN work.
- Started on the wrong DAC but after all the other bullsh*t it hardly seem worth mentioning.
- And before any of you playing the home game say a FSM damned word; everything I pointed out reads like a preflight checklist from the Steam review page.
- Fix the mouse thing by doing setting Enable HardwareMouse=1
- Oh yes, thar be out of the box issues. Bad Beamdog!
- Also crashes when trying to load games from the Shadow bonus campaign
- …Yeah, this is not a final product that should have made it to production
- When Lutris gives you a better out of the box experience then your for $20 steam game, rethink the choices you made.
- Fullscreen doesn’t work on Linux.
- You can work around it by enabling borderless maximised in the .ini file.
- Cloudsaves cause launch issues.
Shiny / Sounds
- Just like 2003 Used to make
- Considering the game came out in 2002 (2003 on Linux) it looks very blocky.
- Its one saving grace are the awesome community mods which improved graphics a lot.
- That and the improved engine is being tailored specifically to allow mods both old and new to work.
- The big aesthetic yes for me is the Jeremy Soule audio.
- The Hordes of the Underdark campaign, besides being the best in my opinion, also had the best music.
- Can’t give it a full score since they still haven’t made anti-aliasing work and the Depth of Field crap they implemented makes everything look blurry.
Control
- TOEE still remains the high point of D&D PC game controls.
- NWN’s are serviceable
- You can have the typical skycam, overhead follow camera or “free” camera.
- Heavy air quotes around the free bit since it’s still locked to your character.
- You can play the whole game with just the mouse but they will let you control most of everything with the keyboard.
- Mouse is only necessary when dealing with what, in 2018, can only be described as an old ass looking UI.
- Though you can mod that too.
FUN
- The second I hit the character creation screen, I had a big ol’ flashback to sitting at my desk, a dozen 3.5 source books splayed out in front of me trying to pick out feats and prestige classes
- Man, I really don’t miss playing D&D from that era\
- It’s neverwinter nights. It’s a perfectly fun RPG based in a semi-familiar fantasy world
- But for whatever reason, playing it again didn’t really pull me in the same way that kotor did
- You actually get a good amount of game for your money. You get all of the expansions, plus a bunch of additional content from the platinum edition. Kingmaker was actually a pretty fun side campaign (which is what I replayed for this review)
- The technical issues though. Hot damn
- Strider straight up did a better job of this with Lutris than Beamdog did. Sure it lacks the nice online bits that steam does, cloud saves just don’t work.
- Neverwinter Nights is my all time favorite Linux game.
- I’m hoping the Enhanced Edition will live up to its name but it’s hard to ignore the technical issues at play, here.
- From defaulting to that broken ass scaling system, to failing at fullscreen and anti-aliasing, horrible depth of field, and general brokenness in even something like the Steam Cloud saves.
- I have no doubt in my mind Beamdog will fix their shit.
- But boy does it make it hard to recommend this version.
- The thing I like so much about Neverwinter Nights is the multiplayer.
- Having spent several years of my life playing in quite a few servers, I’m glad Beamdog fixed the server browser and made it even easier to join your friends through Steam.
- But, those single player campaigns are very much there and they’re charging £3 for the premium modules.
- Oh and £2 for a freakin’ portrait pack! >.>
Hate Mail: