LinuxGameCast Weekly 383: Faptain’s Log

The Steamy Winter sale is upon us! Life is Strange 2 comes to Linux, Eggroll powered fixes for GTA V, ceiling Unity watches you game, and a working driver for your Xbox One wireless dongle.

Special thanks to:
MikeG (For all the stuffs)

Listen:

Download:

Timestamps:
04:53 Steam Winter sale
07:03 Steam VR 1.9
09:33 Proton 4.11-11 mouse fixes
11:33 Proton-4.21-GE-2 GTA V fixes
14:08 Golf with Friends Museum update
16:13 Life is Strange 2 comes to Linux
18:53 Red Eclipse 2
22:53 Shameless self promotion
26:53 DXVK & D9VK merge
30:38 Unity tracking issues
34:33 Killer Sheep in Vim
35:08 Linux driver for Xbox One wireless
37:18 Open Joystick Overlay
40:03 Linux gaming challenges Windows
46:48 CHAIRQASITION: Dead End Job
57:58 Hate Mail

Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro

Steam: News

Winter Sale

https://steamdb.info/sales/

Heckblade for $9.99, worth it.
Going to have to do better than 30% before I yoink Code Vein.
Might have to pick up Hellblade.
Folks should grab vermintide while it’s 8 bucks so we can do it on thursdays

Steamy VR update

Some honest to god linux fixes, with a little bit of breakage. There is an opt-inable beta to help mitigate it
They are trying to squash some bugs, so it seems they haven’t given up on VR for linux yet

4.11-11

Ah, the gerbil stuttering was not on my end.
Gobbled up the big Dicks Vicks merge, but we’ll get to that later
Backported the patches for the GTA V launcher.

GE 4.21-GE-1

Disabling Proton’s input handler in favor of the Staging WINE ones.
The Halo MCC stuff is implemented as well, so at least you can play in forever stallone mode
Much like the official Proton, GE will also let you play the newest version of GTA V again.

Steam: Game Updates

Golf at the museum

18 holes to shove your bones in.
Runs better than the Worms map, AKA above 30fps.
- Not a particularly high bar, that one!

Steam: New Games

Life is finally strange

https://store.steampowered.com/app/532210/Life_is_Strange_2/

That, that took a minute.
It’s 75% off during the winter sale.
- 3 Bucks is a pretty sweet deal. Only the first episode. Works out if you don’t like the game, doesn’t if you do
Requires Vulkan.
More sitting around and having a story told at you with occasional QTEs
£16 for the complete complete game during the sale.

Red Eclipse 2

Available for BSD. Now we’re just waiting on the BSD steam release
Looks like a quak, smells like a quak, actually based on the Cube engine

News:

The Merge

D9VK is now implemented as a frontend in DXVK
What does this mean? Not much, short of having one less library to manage
Still, it’s nice to have
And this will make VALVe’s job a bit easier to keep Proton up to snuff.
At least, as far as graphic API support goes.

Unity tracking

I don’t mind sending stats but that should be opt-in.
- ^
What gave me the case of GRRR was an uninstalled game still sending the databits.
Gotta set it per game too. I’m sure you could whip together a cron script to make sure that everything in .config/unity3d gets that shut off
I had seen the global prefs file but I never opened it.
That’s a load of BS, having it send up stuff without giving people the choice.

Killer Sheep

For when you can’t install rogue on production servers
Emacs has a video editor but VIM has a game, now.
I’m over here still using nano… You know, as a text editor!

New Xbox wireless

Driver for the new Xbox wireless dongle.
The slim one.

Stream Controller Overlay (RTheren)

Give people the evidence they need to talk smack about how you suck at the video games you stream!
I could see that also being useful for fighting game tournaments

Linux gaming progress

“Windows has always been viewed as the absolute best platform for gaming”
- Someone doesn’t know the history of the Windows Games SDK.
MS had to make that because Windows was an absolute hot mess for gaming.
“… with everything aside from the Logitech C920 webcam working.”
- How?
  - Probably plugged it into the ethernet port
I don’t think Microsoft is worried about Linux becoming a better gaming OS.
I’m willing to bet there are some in the company wishing Proton reached the unishark of feature parity for gaming.
That way they won’t have to worry about it going forward.
It’s been quite an almost 8 year stretch.

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies

Game: Dead End Job
Devel: Ant Workshop Ltd
Engine: Unity
Price: £13.99 / US$16.99 / CA$19.49

Wazzat: Dead End Job sends you into a madcap, Ren & Stimpy-esque world to bust up ghosts. It’s a procedurally generated, couch co-op, twin-stick shooter that straps a vacuum pack to your back and puts a plasma blaster in your hand. For you, it’s just another day in the office.

Mandatory Disclosure: HeadUp Games sent us keys

Venn:

Does It Launch

Has the black screen issue when you first create a profile.
Have to kill the game and restart to get into it proper.

Performance @ 1080

Graphics

No glitches.

Control

The only thing this works with is the Dual Shock.
Steamy, nope, Xclone, nope.

Jordan:

Does It Launch

They really gotta fix that first launch thing

Performance @ 1080

There’s some initial herky jerk, but then it’s smooth sailing

Graphics

Reminds me of a flash game from newgrounds

Control

Everything works and is reasonably mapped

Pedro:

Does It Launch

On first launch I was stuck on a black screen, after creating the initial profile.
Second launch made it so it worked just fine, so I’mma call that a hiccup

Performance @ 1080

Mostly stays at 144Hz @1440p
It’ll dip a bit in loading screens, but nothing that affects your game playing experience.

Graphics

Barring the aforementioned screen of dark on the first run, everything worked.

Control

DualShock 4 worked out of the box.

QA Score:

Fedora:
Neon:
Debian:

Fun section:

Fun?:

Venn:
- What do you look for in a top-down shooter?
- How about a smooth range of fire?
- Dead End Job lacks that, hard.
- Sorry not sorry but that not so little issue has bugged me for the entirety of my playtime.
- It’s like you’re firing in quadrants…
- The gap between up, down, left, and right when making /w the pew pew can eat all the Nixons.
- As for the game proper, it’s a rogue-like plain and simple.
- Pew some ghosts, suck them off, upgrade the things, collect some coin.
- It works as a game, iguess.jpg.
- Unless you count multiplayer, seriously, what the hell it that nonsense?
- Player 2 has the ability to (wait for it) annoy the ghosts!
- Yeah, you basically play the role of a participation trophy.
- Also, the Remote Play Together is a wee touchy.
- At the end of the day this comes across as top-down Luigi’s Mansion that was developed on a budget… of C11H17NO3.
- While old home-recorded VHS episodes of Ren & Stimpy played in the background.
- Seriously, where did you find a working VHS player in 2019?
Jordan
- Dead end Job follows the BOI-esque formula of procedurally generating a maze full of room fights and making you shoot and suck up the ghosts of office supplies, trying to find people to save.
- Make some money, die sometimes, rinse repeat
- It’s almost like you’re working a dead end job for real!
- The humour in this is a bit of a miss. Although ZX Spectre got a chuckle out of me
- The multiplayer feels incredibly tacked on, especially considering steam encourages you to try the remote play stuff
- Your friend gets to play as your ghost grandma/business partner and they can shoot goo
- That goo not only slows the enemies, but also you
- It seems incredibly tacked on. Basically a way to add a mulitplayer mode without really needing to rebalance the game. But it just feels kinda pointless
Pedro
- Clearly there was an attempt to make funny game here.
- Unfortunately the humor is a bit meh and funny does not a fun game make.
- I wasn’t having fun.
- Dead End Job, true to its name, made playing ghostbuster feel boring.
- And when it wasn’t boring, it was disheartening because I was dying from stuff I couldn’t see.
- I can tell there was some work put into the game, but it’s not my cup of tea.