LinuxGameCast Weekly 362: Special Unicorn

A special unicorn has arrived on Linux! GamerOS brings Steam’s Big Picture to Arch, Red Hat talks about gaming, and AMD 5700 XT Linux benchmarks.

Timestamps:
04:41 AMD explains market share
07:29 TF2 economy crashes
11:19 GamerOS
14:51 Fantasy Strike launches
17:40 Risk System
19:19 VEmpire
21:36 Shameless self promotion
25:09 Smash Z in the wild
29:12 AMD 5700 XT benchmarks
23:57 Humble Multi Bundle
35:34 Defiant development shutters
38:09 Red Hat on gaming
40:34 Game mode Flatpak
43:00 Actua soccer source code
45:48 CHAITQASITION: Streets of Rouge
57:11 Hate Mail

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Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro

Steam: News

AMD explains market share

So apparently mystery solved.
Cyber cafes count multiple logins on the same system as descrete “systems’ for the hardware survey
Valve doesn’t seem interested in fixing this and that’s why you should make your game an epic store exclusive.
Still doesn’t explain why I’m the only person with a 2060.
That certainly explains why, despite the popularity of Ryzen, Steam Market share isn’t reflecting that.
Seeing as most Linux users are usually the only ones who login on their Linux PCs and they don’t share the seat as much with others, I think I can see why our market share isn’t going anywhere either.

TF2 hats off

So apparently a glitch in the matrix exists that causes specific l00t boxen to drop items that normally are worth $100USD+ reliably
And because rarity correlates to cost, this is fucking up the hat economy
The gray market for these items are going nuts too.
The moral of the story is don’t put all your eggs in one basket, they could be worth nothing at the drop of a hat
The crates believed to be glitched were worth more than the items at one point.
What’s going to be interesting is seeing how Valve sorts this one.
Looks like they have halted trading for all the items that were dropped but where go from here?

GamerOS

Someone’s gonna make their own SteamOS. WIth blackjack. And hookers. And AAAAARCH
With Valve pretending SteamOS never happened, I’m okay /w this.
Can we make this slightly more distro agnostic?
Or maybe add some checks to see if it’s debian or rpm based it pulls the equivalent packages?
Maybe in the future even add the option to remove all the superfluous packages?

Steam: Game Updates

Fantasy Strike launched

For the love of FSM update those button prompt graphics for different controllers.
You can manually set which kind of button prompts you get, which is just a nice general feature
They added a boss rush mode with improved (read extra fucky) AI
The learn videos in linux now work. woo

Risk System

Big thank you to the devs for sending us 3 keys over curator connect!

Steam: New Games

VEmpire

We need Venn drinking tomato juice and talking about this game
Vampire hapsburgs eh? What do you call a hemopheliac vampire? It’s not a joke, I genuinely want to know

News:

Z in the wild

Backers are getting notification emails.
It’s fkn loud.
- Yeah, the switch has a fairly audible fan noise in handheld mode too, but what I heard in the video reminds me of datacenter fans
It struggles /w DOOM 2016, on Windows.
Yup, thoroughly unimpressive. Kudos on them for actually shipping though. I lost that bet
It really does have a Lynxxx vibe going for it.
They got a prototype out a youtube person, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

AMD 5700 XT

The old 2060 gets 79.63 in Tombs.
As it stands, the only way to get this card working is to use amdgpu-pro, which is not really designed/optimized for gaming in any way
I”m inclined to take these benchmarks with a rock of salt, as this isn’t how most people will end up using the card.
Also, don’t buy the reference 5700s.
Apparently, they’re loud-ass space heaters!

Humble Multi Bundle

Barony is the one Linux game in this Bundle
If like me you’re gonna buy for Killing Floor 2, make sure you slide all the non-Linux game sliders to 0.
Yeah, one Linux port but a gang of this nonsense works /w Proton.
Minus Bloodharvest because battlenetplayspy thingy.
Not gonna lie, yoniked it for KF2.

Defiant development shutters

RIP HOF.
They will remain in shell mode to support their existing games.
These things happen. Not every game development company will live long enough for EA to buy them out and ruin them.
The Hands of Fate games were flawed but they were really nice!
I do hope these folks find more opportunities and money to make more games.

Red Hat on gaming

Yeah, asking redhat to support gaming is a bit like asking dyson to make a mop. They probably could, but it’s not their core business
They do throw some money at gaming related events and causes because many software developers these days are failed game developers.
I’m sure they’d love the opportunity to get some money back by helping VALVe or some other game company to support their infrastructure but I can’t see them making a gaming desktop OS.

Game mode Flatpak

Flatpak apps can now hit the gamemode service through dbus
- Speaking of which, a whole whack of dbus refactora
They’ve also added an environment variable for you to stick command prefixes like primusrun/optirun or PRIME
With stuff like Athenaeum running and installing games from flatpaks, this is a very good thing to see!

Actua soccer

According to wikipedia, Actua Soccer was the first all 3d game available on home consoles
It’s english premier league soccer. Or the sauce for it anyways.
For the purposes of archival, historical interest and research the Actua Soccer Source Code is available to download under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Creative Commons Licence.
There’s some exes mixed in there.

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies

Game: Streets of Rogue
Devel: Matt Dabrowski
Engine: Unity
Price: £15.49 / US$19.99 / CA$22.79

Wazzat: Streets of Rogue is a rogue-lite about player choice, freedom, and anarchic fun. The game takes inspiration from fast-paced top-down rogue-lites like Binding of Isaac and Nuclear Throne, and adds free-form, experimentation-driven, emergent gameplay elements of RPGs like Deus Ex.

Venn:

Does It Launch

You like 1024×768?
Or whatever low-res it defaults to on each and every launch.

Performance @ 1080

60 at 2160.

Graphics

Fluid Hipster-pixel.

Control

Xclone.

Jordan:

Does It Launch

It does. Sometimes it does give you a bloop of noop though

Performance @ 1080

Pixels

Graphics

Also pixels
You do get a wee character blind sometimes

Control

Wasd + mouse works fine. So does the ps4

Pedro:

Does It Launch

The first time it launches in a window and then goes to whatever you set it
They figured it out!

Performance @ 1080

It performs very well

Graphics

It’s not hipster pixel but it’s not far off.
Everything works though

Control

You can rebind everything

QA Score:

Fedora:
Soulless:
Fedorf:

Fun section:

Fun?:

Venn:
- Welcome back to rouge-lite procedurally-generated hipster-pixel month here at LGC labs.
- At least this fucker has a sense of humour about it and you know what, that goes a long way.
- Pick a class, assign attributes, attempt to snek and end up punching your way out of situations.
- Because half the time RN Jesus doesn’t generate option 2.
- I rather liked the soundtrack so it has that going for it.
- It is good for a quick romp and the occasional chuckle but don’t expect much in the way of depth here.
- No matter the reskin you’re still playing a half-shuffled version of the same level.
- But it does have online multiplayer so there could be some unintentional hilarity to be found in that.
- At $19.99 it’s a pass but if you catch it on sale (or in a bundle) pick it up.
- Yes, for this type of game you can consider that a glowing endorsement.
Jordan
- It genuinely does feel like GTA2 in a tinny little blocky procedurally generated level
- And venn brings up a very good point, there’s not a lot of variety in the levels
- The gameplay feels solid enough. There’s a plethora of options for doing your missions. Although you’re kinda stuck with what you have, so sometimes you just gotta cheese the AI
- Sometimes though, the dumb as rocks AI hampers you, especially when you need to protect or escort folks
- There’s some RPG mechanics, but they do feel a wee tacked on as part of the gameplay loop
- I thiink doing this in multiplayer would be fun, but I have an overwhelming suspicion that stealth just gets thrown out the window in MP mode
Pedro
- I like roguelikes and rogue-lites.
- I’ve sunk a few hours into The Binding of Isaac Rebirth, I sunk even more in Enter the Gungeon.
- I just don’t feel compelled to come back to this one.
- Isaac, besides the usual rogue-lite mechanics, complements what you’re doing with just a teeny tiny bit of lore.
- Just enough to make interesting and give it that grim vibe!
- This one has you clicking through text boxes for 10 minutes before it lets you in game.
- By the end of the tutorial I was done.
- I still played on to see what the gameplay loop feels like, but I didn’t like it.