LinuxGameCast Weekly 384: Shoulder Mounted Penguins

Top Steamy highlights of 2019! NVIDIA releases new Linux drivers for old GPUs, Black Mesa releases Xen, and SuperTuxKart improves online multiplayer. Then Hellblade faces, the CHAIRQASITION!

Special Thanks to:
Basil for the pops!


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Timestamps:
05:30 Top-sellers of 2019
08:31 TF2 Penguin fix
09:46 Black Mesa Xen released
13:06 GRAL racing Linux port
16:31 Red Eclipse 2 first week on Steam
20:41 Yoga pants
24:06 NVIDIA drivers updates for older cards
28:26 Minigalaxy 0.9.0
30:51 SuperTuxKart 1.1 RC1
33:51 higan v107
36:56 RigelEngine 0.5.0
40:01 RPCS3 Progress report
43:36 CHAIRQASITION: Hellblade
01:01:06 Hate mail


Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro

Steam: News

Best of 2019

  • A few games we threw chairs at over the year.
  • There’s 4 Free to Play games in the best selling Platinum category.
  • Rocket Cars is still printing money.
  • Tomb Raider is rocking the Bronze.
  • Code Vein still expensive.
  • Now that we have a mature-ish proton, we can actually play some of these games on linux
  • Still, fewer native linux games than last year is a bit of a sad

Steam: Game Updates

TF2 pebbles

  • Looks like the Heavy and Pebbles the Penguin are now on speaking terms
  • This is the other TF2 penguin.

 

Xen Released

  • WHAR Synergy!
  • This ain’t the final release either, just 0.9
  • They did stop you from being able to bail out of the cart before the ending tho
  • The 1.0 goals seem to be mostly QA related
  • They healed the G-man’s case of scurvy.

 

GRAL on Linux

  • Nothing gets my emotion roller coaster going like an arcade racer followed my no online multiplayer.
    • Remote play to the rescue maybe? Depends on the delay
    • Remote play still needs some time in the oven.
  • I like the look of it!

 

Red Eclipse 1 week later

  • Achieved a “Very Positive” review reception with 46 positive.
  • People are actually playing it, bonus.
  • They are making plans for RE 2.1.
  • Steam is a good place for open-source games.

News:

Old NVIDIA drivers (RTheren)

  • Kernel 5.x support for your 8 series and below.
  • And those of you still rocking the 7 series hotness.
  • And more importantly for those of you with rows and rows of quadros.

 

Mini Galaxy

  • If you just have linux games on your gog account, this’ll let you view, install and launch them
  • Can’t uninstall them through this UI tho
  • Is this just for the native Linux games? Seriously?
  • Isn’t Lutris just better in every way for this specific store?
  • If you’re not online apparently this won’t work at all.

 

SuperTuxKart 1.1 RC1v

  • Now that people have been slamming on network multiplayer for a while, the team has some performance and stability fixes for it
  • They’re looking at dual licencing STK so that they can better distribute it over stuff like steam
  • HighDPI fixes and a new spoopy level
  • The game was on Greenlight at one point… so, yeah!
  • IPv6 support, neat.
  • Would like to see some real love thrown on the totes not rocket cars map.

 

higan v107

  • So TIL Higan is a multi-system emulator typically aimed at doing emulation for jrpgs
    • An interesting bit of trivia is that the sound chip emulator he wrote ended up being used by Steven Hawking a few years before he died
  • In addition to MSX/2 and sega cd support, they have a new Ui that needs testing
  • Getting the Linux binaries is about as convoluted and building it without instructions.
  • Here are the build instructions: https://github.com/byuu/higan/blob/master/docs/install/linux.md

 

RigelEngine 0.5.0

  • Options menu and widescreen mode.
  • Most of the registered version of the game is playable.


September in December

  • A bunch of sports games and the tie in game for the first Thor are now working
  • Better USB hardware support has been added, for improved guitar hero justice
    • Or not having to pay for skylanders minis

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies


Game: Hellblade: Sensual Sacrifice (Proton)
Devel: Ninja Theory
Engine: Unreal Engine 4
Price: £24.99 / US$29.99 / CA$32.99 (67% off during sale)

Wazzat: From the makers of Heavenly Sword, Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, and DmC: Devil May Cry, comes a warrior’s brutal journey into myth and madness. Set in the Viking age, a broken Celtic warrior embarks on a haunting vision quest into Viking Hell to fight for the soul of her dead lover.

Mandatory Disclosure: We all bought it individually



Venn:

Does It Launch

  • One-click install with the old Proton 4.11-11

Performance @ 1080

  • On the capeless 2060 it swings between 65-75 with everything slammed on 11.

Graphics

  • They work but this is one of those joints where if there were graphical glitches you would not know.
  • If whoosky motion blur and binky light makes your little tum tum hurn avoid this like an online game that requires EAC.
  • It handles windowed and fullscreen quite well.

Control

  • OOTB with Xclone & Steamy. No PS4 love.


Jordan:

Does It Launch

  • Had a couple of nopes when messing around with the settings, but otherwise no problems in gameplay

Performance @ 1080

  • Struggles to touch 40 FPS @UHD
  • Holds a cool 80 at 1080

Graphics

  • Very pretty

Control

  • Works with the dualshock 4 with steam input
  • For whatever fucking reason though, on teh dualshock it would not let me switch enemy targeting, which made a bunch of fights unnecessarily harder


Pedro:

Does It Launch

  • It do on both this box and El Cheapo

Performance @ 1080

  • It holds around 60 at 2560×1440, even with Vsync off.
  • On El Cheapo it holds around 40-ish at 1080p.
  • There’s some herky-jerks in the set piece transitions.

Graphics

  • It’s hard to tell what should and shouldn’t be there
  • I usually don’t care about the chromatic aberration effect in games.
  • I usually don’t notice it. I noticed here!
  • I also noticed the godawful motion blur.
  • You can turn both of these off by pushing the Post-Processing down to low, but that also brings the AA down considerably.
  • I ended up just disabling those specific two from the config file.

Control

  • It works out of the box with the Steam Controller
  • It needs to have Steam Input enabled on the Dual-Shock 4 for it to work.

QA Score:

Fedora:
Neon:
Debian:


Fun section:

Fun?:

  • Venn:
    • You can Venn this critter in about 11 hours.
    • At its core (spool up your reee drives) Hellblade is a walking simulator.
    • Anyone familiar with what’s required to deliver that level of visuals pretty much knew this one was going to be on some tight rails at the start.
    • But let’s not start hating on it just yet.
    • Because a small team managed to deliver top-notch visuals, sound design, and most importantly, acting.
    • Not to mention a compelling story about delivering bae’s head-organ to the underworld because reasons.
    • The first two hours are genuinely some of the best gameplay (as a whole) I’ve experienced in recent memory.
    • Then that two hours repeats itself over and over and over and over.
    • It goes like this.
    • Walk, walk some more, telepathically communicate with a rock, visually align some shite and walk through a circle.
    • Oh, and sometimes you stab.
    • On the topic of stabbing, it’s hella simple but completely serviceable.
    • Light & heavy attacks mixed with kick & dodge.
    • Nothing fancy but everything has weight and most importantly, gets the job done.
    • That said, by the end of this ride you will be sick of finding new and creative ways of aligning random shapes.
    • But ya know what, with all the flaws I still liked it and look forward to seeing what they do with the next one.
    • Catch it on sale, it’s worth the price of admission.
  • Jordan
    • Hellblade has a really, really strong narrative’
    • And unfortunately, it’s kinda spoonfed to you in a very linear manner
    • I would have liked a little more variety in the kinds of stuff you can explore, because the world is very pretty and it looks like you could have crammed a lot of secrets in there
      • The only ones you can find are basically lore dumps about a bunch of norse myths I already know
    • They could have also done a lot more with the puzzle solving. Cuz it’s not really puzzley. Just walkey
    • Maybe it was because of the DS4, but I found the fights profoundly unenjoyable as I couldn’t switch my target
    • It also suffers from quite a bit of dark souls camera
    • Also, set piece fights don’t really do it for me, where they stick you in a circular arena and duke it out
    • The story is fantastic, pretty well acted, and from someone who engages in a lot of negative self talk, your “furies” or psychosis voices are a little too real
    • The backseat gamer mechanic is fun, as is the risk of permadeath, although that seems more punishing just cuz everything you need to do to get back to your last point is just a lot of time consuming walking
  • Pedro
    • As much as I like the story, I can’t help but feel like the gameplay is a bit… obtuse.
    • Run around until you find a door, solve a “puzzle”, beat some dudes and do it again.
    • There’s no point in exploring or doing anything else until you trigger the door.
    • It’s linear to a fault, almost. Maybe to lead you by the nose down the plot that’s been set out for Senua.
    • I’m a big fan of story in videogames, when it’s properly conveyed.
    • My best example would be Half-Life 2.
    • Linear action game which tells a story without compromising on the gameplay.
    • In Hellblade, the story is literally told to you.
    • I can’t really comment on how good the representation is of the voices in one’s head, but how full of yourself do you have to be to have one such voice be narrator of your life’s story?
    • It is a good story, one I will see through, but as a videogame… it could have been done better.
    • Looks pretty good, sounds amazing and while the combat is a bit stilted, it’s still pretty fun.

Fun Score:

Venn:
Jordan:
Pedro:


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