LinuxGameCast Weekly 329: Condescending Cookie

The Steam Link is dead! NVIDIA teases the TITAN of terror, Counter Strike gets a Danger Royale, and Epic hires the guy behind Steam Spy.

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Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro

Steam: News

Pi Link

The Link lives on in spirit.
I’m honestly surprised this didn’t happen sooner
I know why they did it but grr… a deb? Really?
- Going out on a limb here but isn’t like 99% of the Pi install base running *.deb?
  - Yeah, but I worked hard on those RPMs dammit!
    - And ended up accidentally naming it something terrible!
      - That they ended up sticking with
This is a great move!
There are a lot of people with Pis driving DIY smart TVs, so it’s just a matter of plugging a controller in or pairing with the blueteeth.

12%

And so it motherfu*king begins.
Explains Steam’s new progressive revenue scheme.
“The store will launch with a hand-curated set of games on PC and Mac, then it will open up more broadly to other games and to Android and other open platforms throughout 2019.“
- Speculate!
- Given Epic’s complete and utter lack of fucks regarding linux, I’m not holding my breath
- ^
Also, is Epic going to offer functionality like proton?
Probably not so we as linux gamers won’t be going anywhere anytime soon.
Yeah… Proton, Steam Cloud Saves, in-home streaming, family sharing.
There’s a lot to Steam these third parties forget to mention.
Though, bring on the competition!
I want to see VALVe actually have to give a damn for once this decade.

Plot thickens

Now that’s all kinds of interesting.
Building a store?
Hire the guy who was more attentive to the the Steam Store than Steam.
Might as well.
It’s not like VALVe was doing anything to the questionable value Steam Spy added.
I got a feeling Valve not courting (and acquiring) the Steam Spy guy will be looked at like Nintendo not sealing the deal with Sony way back when.
“Several years” might explain why Valve hasn’t scooped him up. Epic was giving him more money
I don’t really buy the “oops, tee hee” take. Epic was smart to have a guy paying attention to the analytics of their competition
- The student studies strategy, the master studies logistics, etc
- Notice how the article calls out that the epic store isn’t going to give competition the same benefit of the doubt

Whitelist

I made this for myself.
Deal with it.
As someone who was looking for a complete compiled list when they released the second batch, I can see its usefulness.

Steam: Game Updates

Xmas Cars

Oh god. You get two points per ball touch per second. I don’t want or need this information
Tournament creators may not be able to spectate matches
- Sucks if you want to broadcast a tournament
Batmobile is no longer the longest car in the game.
- Pay2win bro!
Now all the “plank” cars share the hitbox.

Damsel Linux

“Engine update” means they clicked export, cuz unity
There’s also a couple of accessibility updates, including leveraging rumble for color matching puzzles and a more lysdexic friendly font

Takes a minute to load, don’t it.
It’s still a better lovestory than CRAZY JUSTICE.
It’s a bit crashy for me.
Setting setting.mem_level to 0 in ~/.local/share/Steam/userdata/<userID>/730/local/cfg/video.txt stopped the crashing altogether.
Three random updates thus far.
Unplug Xbox controller =’s working game.

Steam: New Games

Herty Gerty

Enter the gungeon with destructible environments
And here’s the kicker. They added multiplayer. But not online multiplayer
- Devs. Y u do dis?
Starward Rogue but with different sprites?

Dirt 4.0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WX506pA9LI

…meh.
Has a Gold rating on ProtonDB.
It works just fine with Proton… VALVe! We need that goddamn button!
Feral’s lifeblood now spells it’s DOOM!
The contracts they hammered out with other publishers didn’t take proton into account!

News:

TITAN Terror

Can it do 1440 @ 60 w RTX on?
Because it better do 1440 @ 60 w RTX on.
So… the Titan V is still what you want if you want the most powerful sub $5k GPU?
These are not for gaming.

Open physics

Perhaps one day someone will hack it to work on non-nvidia gpu hardware
They called out self driving cars, which is the new thing Nvidia is all about
Either way, this will either be strip mined for parts or will become more standard because of the name recognition
Again, less than 70 games have used PhysX in the last 12 years.
I will like to see the ramifications of this.
Gaming or not, I want to see if anyone else will put this to use or if people just cherry pick little bits for other stuff.

3080

I’ll stand by the old adage of if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
Hoo boy, them model names.
- Makes sense, it’s not like the XP series days.
A 7nm Navi 10 part @ 150W TDP seems like a solid product that has my interest.
A no 6-pin 75W 3060 has the attention of OEMs.
- And people on older systems looking for an upgrade.
- Look at how good the X50 models have been for nvidia. AMD wants them a piece
If that 3080 can deliver on those claims, AMD has at least a chance at competing.
Which is more than they’ve had for a long time.
The real $3080 question is whether or not they’ll catch fire

Unepic

As much as it pains me to admit it, I have to agree with Strider
This was the only game epic was working on that had anything resembling linux support, and it’s dead.
EPIC STOOOOOORE!
Yeah, the Linux version has always ran like junk and last two times I tried it got nothing but a white screen when in-map.
Why bother with UT when you have Fortnite?

Team 17 Bundle

Everything has linux support, which is kinda nice
Worms games have a tendency to not work on a distro by distro basis
If you’re a fan of the escapists, you get a whole bunch of DLC for it at the over average tier
That’s a lot of DLC.

Ser Jaime Lannister Bundle

If you want some goblin multiplayer stealth without burning a Heretic purcache.
Don’t know if I love or hate the goblin game.
Couple of Linux titles as well.
The force unleashed has a silver rating on protonDB and was a pretty fun game if all you wanna do is be a badass sith lord for a few hours
King of Fighters 13 is also included and works really well!
Metal Slug works after a couple of assertion errors you can ignore.

No escape

Hardcore of the hardcore, netbsd users relinking binaries to use netbsd compiled FNA to play fna games
- Not gonna work without BSD fmod tho
They got a graphical installer working
This is only about getting the installer to work.
Would be interesting to see how the game would perform, but that wasn’t tested here.

Carmageddon

Will they at least tell us the Linux port will never happen?
I need some closure on that.
Can Stainless get the boot, please?
They made a game so bad Proton can’t help it.

Hedge 0.9.25

RIP rubber duck

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies

Game: Yooka-Laylee
Webzone: https://store.steampowered.com/app/360830/YookaLaylee/
Devel: Playtonic Games
Engine: Unity
Price: £34.99 / US$39.99 / CA$44.99

Wazzat: Yooka-Laylee is an all-new open-world platformer from genre veterans Playtonic! Explore huge, beautiful worlds, meet an unforgettable cast of characters and horde a vault-load of collectibles as buddy-duo Yooka and Laylee embark on an epic adventure to thwart corporate creep Capital B!

Venn:

Does It Launch

You like windowed mode?
Cause it launches in windowed mode no matter what.
Have to fiddle with the screen resolution in-game to make it pop fullscreen.
Every, singe, time.

Performance @ 1080

It manages to hold 60 @ 1080, just.

Graphics

I looks a lot better than I was expecting.
Nice and bright with all the 3D models looking straight out of the 90’s.
Even has a dancing save icon.

Control

Quitting is an option.
Seriously, quit is in the options menu.
Even with the camera on manual it’s still a dick.
When it comes to controls I won’t say floaty as FK but I will say floaty as FK’s second nephew.
You can legitimately blame the controls for getting you killed to death.
Sometimes the controls and camera do a tag-team and it’s DIAF city.

Jordan:

Does It Launch

Yup, although all of a sudden disabling vsync makes it really like my leftmost monitor

Performance @ 1080

Holds 60 @ UHD

Graphics

I mean, they’re pretty simple, but they get the job done
Everything is colourful

Control

OOTB with the dualshock 4 controller

Pedro:

Does It Launch

It launches if you don’t exit the game in windowed mode.
If you do, then I hope your GPU isn’t a GTX1080 with a max resolution of 32767×32767
Because the game will do its goddamndest to render at that resolution and fail miserably

Performance @ 1080

60 FerPS at 1080 and 2160

Graphics

Pretty and cell shaded
Sounds get annoying after a bit
And fuck that “voice acting”

Control

The 8bitdo NES controller works ootb
No rebindable controls in 2018 loses you another chair.

QA Score:

Fedora:
Soulless:
Ubuntu:

Fun section:

Fun?:

Venn:
- I’ve never not cared about something so hard in my life.
- Now don’t confuse that with hate, or even mild anger.
- It’s more of an extreme indifference if anything.
- By the time Banjo-Kazooie rolled out I had bought a Voodoo 1 and separated myself from the filthy console peasants.
- So what can i say?
- You run around and collect things to expand things that let you collect more things.
- The game.
- The worlds are mostly empty and the baddies are effectively the same providing more of an annoyance vs any real challenge.
- The puzzles are sometimes complicated, mainly due to being not so well designed.
- So coming from a zero nostalgia point of view you have a rather primitive collectathon with a paper thin story, slippery controls that does little more than remind me of what games did wrong.
- And if you say differently it’s because one of two things
  - 1.Yooka-Laylee reminds you of a different time from the long long ago and good on it for being able to do that and you’re willing to overlook some of the shortcomings.
  - 2. You still trying to justify paying $30 for the privilege.
Jordan
- Its fucking banjo kazooie with the serial numbers filed off
- That’s not necessarily a bad thing
- It’s your bog standard 3d platformer. Run around, collect things, do some puzzles, n unlock powerups, do more puzzles, unlock more puzzles, rinse repeat
- There’s certainly a bunch of stuff to do
- The camera can EABOD sometimes, especially when you’re trying to line up a jump
- It’s a perfectly serviceable game, even if I had to mute the voice audio because it sounds like everyone is having super disappointing sex
- It’s a competently done platformer
- But it’s not $45 good
Pedro
- Didn’t have an N64 or knew anyone with one.
- I have 0 nostalgia for this one.
- That said, it’s a game about collecting things just so you can unlock other areas to – you guessed it – collect more things.
- Back in the day, that was enough.
- Nowadays, the sole reward for doing one thing being more of that thing seems a bit meh.
- I would say this is a good game for a proto-human but after My Brother Rabbit and the Gardens Between, and how much those games did with much less, that argument seems a lot less poignant
- But hey! If you got it in that Bundle a while back, it was the perfect amount of money.