LinuxGameCast Weekly 400: Task Failed Successfully

Indivisible gets couch co-op! Steam has an upcoming Game Festival, Playing Half-Life Alyx without VR, and custom Lutris DXVK goodness.

Special tanks to:
Christoph3 (new patreon)
Linuxgnuru (returning patreon)

Listen:

Download:

Timestamps:
05:23 Proton 5.0-6
07:23 Proton-5.6-GE-1
09:43 Steam game festival
12:23 Half-Life Alyx no VR
16:12 Couch co-op Indivisible
18:39 Stoneshard
20:30 Shameless self promotion
24:49 Lutris 0.5.6
27:59 Yuzu memory fix
31:06 The Fire of Ardor
32:56 Exuit 10 year update
35:38 CHAIRQASITION: Manual Samuel
48:18 Hate mail

Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro

Steam: News

Proton 5.0-6

DoomRM got fixed
Fallout 3 hanging on launch has been fixed.
- Did they just set xlive.dll to disabled by default now?
I admit, had a good time watching all the cutscenes from the new DOOM.
They really tried to tie that mess of a story together.

Proton-5.6-GE-1

Going to see some black screen with that mfplat enabled.
I kinda like the auto-skip in Proton since it nukes the intro crap on most titles.

Steam game fest

Gotta submit your game by the 24th of April, but you can submit builds as late as May 15th
Gives a chance for developers to promote stuff releasing this year. I wonder how crowded it’ll be

Steam: Game Updates

Toast-free Alyx

Like I theorized last week, there are a couple sections where the lack of having two hands moving around makes things a little sketchy
R57zone does offer some advice on how to get through them though
Oof!
Reading those notes reveals a lot of jank.
Non-toaster Alyx co-op.
It’s what we’ve been preparing for all this time.

Indivisible Couches

Could be a tad more interesting playing with people who have some idea what they were doing.
All the characters are implemented in the overworld which is pretty neat. Plus with remote play, you only need one copy of the game
However, I’m curious to see how the platforming suffers from latency

Steam: New Games

Stoneshard

It’s a bit of a nethack, minus the rogue elements
Looks like Medieval Fallout from the description.

News:

New Lupis

Strider’s taking on a bit of technical debt managing his own DXVK releases
There’s a breaking change with play time tracking now, so if you’re worried about this version, maybe don’t upgrade just yet
De-drunkification of KDE icons
Those fixes to the non-English locale sandbox still don’t let me run a Lutris game via Steam.

Low RAM yuzu

In some games like crypt of the necrodancer and bloodstained curse of the moon they’re seeing in the realm of 80% memory improvement, which is pretty extreme
It’s drastic enough that SSBU is actually playable now
Anywhere between 9 and 81% less RAM used… Hot damn!
Can I play Bayo 2 yet?

The Fire of Ardor 1.0

First person dungeon crawler in the style of early elder scrolls games
It features A boss fight
In Portuguese, Ardor means an intense burning (sensation).
So this is the Fire of Burning

Exult 1.6

After a mere 10 years.
Now has some of that fancy SDL2 hotness.
NPCs using beds are sleeping better now.
Paperdoll support of wearing diapers
- Thank fucking christ

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies

Game: Manual Samuel
Devel: Perfectly Paranormal
Engine: Unity
Price: £7.99 / $9.99 / $10.99

Wazzat: Meet Samuel, he’s handsome, wealthy and most importantly – dead. A deal with Death gives Samuel one last chance to live again if he can survive a whole day doing everything manually.

Mandatory Disclosure: Humble was giving it away

Venn:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

Fullscreen is knackered.
Opens on the wrong monitor without fail.
XBOX controllers do not function.
PS4 controller works, minus incorrect button prompts.
You motherf*ckers built an entire game based on QWOP and you didn’t include keyboard support.

Fun?

The Douglas Adams on a budget narration is just, bad.
Not the VO work, that’s passable, it’s the writing.
Script of that caliber can only be constructed by someone who thinks themselves clever & funny while managing to be neither.
That’s coming from someone in a Wizard robe.
Brass tax, it’s QWOP with some extra shite tacked on.
And the fun wears out where you would think, around the 30 minute mark.

Jordan:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

Launches in a super low resolution in a really big window. On my secondary montior
PS4 works out of the box. It can vibrate too
The art kind of reminds me of old Ctrl-alt-del comics

Fun?

I mean, qwop was kind of funny for a little bit. I always found it funnier to watch than to actually play
Manual samuel follows that formula and adds such twists as: breathing and urinating
I get what they’re going for with the narrator, and all the horsemen being edgelord teens, but the comedy really wasn’t landing for me.
And the gameplay is just kind of obnoxious. I get that’s the point, but again, it just doesn’t land for me

Pedro:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

Launched out of the box, at 850×540
It said it was best experienced with a controller but I had to force enable Steam Input for Dual Shock to work properly.
But outside of those two issues, no other problems were present on my end.

Fun?

Video games are an interesting art medium.
The interactive component is what sets them apart from the rest and, in my opinion, is what makes or breaks a game.
So here’s a game which makes that interactivity service things which in other games you just assume would be done automatically
Like your character’s breathing, or moving a foot at a time, or any of the other stuff that you yourself IRL don’t think about.
Manual Samuel is not the first to do it, QWOP and Octodad immediately jump to mind.
But it is the first to do it successfully, in my opinion.
Any game which causes me to feel things or makes me aware of things I wasn’t before I played it, is a game that has succeeded.
Regardless of my own feelings on it, Manual Samuel fucking wins!
By the time I put the controller down, I had to remind myself that I don’t need to think about breathing or blinking or which leg to move to keep walking.
It’s still one of the annoying rage games, but it’s possibly the best of the bunch.