Black Mesa: Definitive Edition is ready for public consumption but there’s a catch. Humble releases a Bundle for streamers, Vulkan gets official support for tracing rays, GeForce NOW is headed to Linux, and Valve bans the banning. Then Superliminal faces the ChairQAsition. All this, plus your hate mail.
Listen:
Download:
Subscribe Spotify | Pandora | TuneIn | RSS | More
Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
06:21 Top Steam games of October
08:22 2020 Steam Autumn sale
10:01 Steam Award
12:16 Most followed Steam games
14:51 Valve sponsors Zink
17:31 PS5 update for Steam client
20:26 Valve employee banned from banning
24:06 RetroArch on Steam
28:16 Black Mesa Definitive Edition
31:47 Pedro cocks up an intro
32:00 Shameless self-promotion
35:34 Humble music Bundle
40:59 Ruffle Flash player
44:34 Vulkan official raytracing
48:54 GeForce NOW headed to Linux
52:14 Private Eye re-implimentation
55:01 C-Dogs 0.10.0
57:06 Review Superliminal
01:14:56 Hate Mail
Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro
Steam: News
- Jackbox 7 and Amnesia 3: BFE are your linux picks for octember
- I had not heard of Solasta, which apparently uses 5e dungeons and dragons for it’s game rules. Seems interesting. Not worth a heretic purchase just yet
- Also torchlight 3 on linux wen?
- Oh! Noita hit 1.0. I did not know that.
Steam Autumn Sale and Steam Awards
- Deep Silver needs to poop or get off the pot with the Metro port.
- Welp guess they got the message.
- Still not buying it until it’s out.
- What’s the over under of native linux games who get an award here?
- Seems to be tracking folks who follow games on steam. I guess people do that
- Predictably cyberpunk 2077 is at the top
- Interesting, if you hover over a game it tells whether it has EAC or not.
- I would like to have a way to search for EAC/third party cheat “protection” games.
- And clearly the functionality is already there.
- But I suppose there’s always the official list: https://www.easy.ac/en-us/partners/
- I can definitely see why Valve wants this shit working with a quickness.
- By moving more of the driver space to vulkan, valve has a shot at fixing some of the longer standing openGL performance issues for games under linux
- Would be nice to get that Vulkan button for the existing games which will never get updated.
- I looked up the steam-devices changelog in Ubuntu and it looks like Wimpy has submitted the last couple of patches.
- I’m sure it will be updated soon but I had to add:
- KERNEL==”hidraw*”, KERNELS==”*054C:0CE6*”, MODE=”0660″, TAG+=”uaccess”
- To the steam-input udev rule (/lib/udev/rules.d/60-steam-input.rules) for the LEDs and things to change over blueteeth
- And
- KERNEL==”hidraw*”, ATTRS{idVendor}==”054c”, ATTRS{idProduct}==”0ce6″, MODE=”0660″, TAG+=”uaccess”
- For USB
- They also updated soldier so mango and the like should run.
- Don’t abuse your moderation powers kids
- This dude (a former campo santo dev) apparently didn’t like what one of his teammates were doing and shoved him into the punishment hole (low priority pool) so Valve has disabled manual bans like this going forward.
- Wow, dude pulled the old do you know who I am.
- Going to go out on a limb and say that should not have been something everyone had access to.
- Yeah, if the power is there and isn’t regulated someone will abuse it.
- And seriously?! Making a tactical decision to let the middle tower die, since when is that even remotely a bannable offense?
- It always sucks when one person goes and cocks it up for everyone else.
Steam: Game Updates
- Gotta request access, but it looks like they’re just giving it out4
- It runs, but installing cores doesn’t seem to work just yet. Tried to play some Pokemon Blazeblack using it and no dice. Doesn’t detect the rom. Works for others though
- It launches but I have nothing to test it with.
- I had to plug in my external hard drive which has a local backup of the GBA games I had bought.
- Which were totally acquired by legitimate means.
Black Mesa: Definitive Edition
- The final update.
- And they nuked your save, again, motherf*ckers.
- Now is it finally safe to play the damn game?
- Like for reals?
News:
- Big honking royalty free music Bundle.
- Having some issues getting them to unzip.
Flash Player emulator written in Rust
- Good.
- A lot of late-90’s, early aughties internet content would probably be lost without something like this
- If you have .swf games and they don’t run terribly well, you may want to poke them in the issue tracker on github.
- It’s what the internet Archive is using to serve le Flash.
- Grab your updated nvidia drivers here https://developer.nvidia.com/vulkan-beta-4554602-linux
- AMD and Intel via Mesa is likely still going to take a while, although apparently Xe has this baked in
- I’m curious to see how Josh and co can integrate this into dix vix/vkd3d
- Would be nice to see anyone outside of NVidia releasing a Vulkan game with benchmark tracing.
- Updated NVIDIA drivers seem to work.
- Yay, I guess?
- They’re still rolling out the webRTC client.
- But soon we’ll be able to play forknife!
- It sincerely vexes me when browser based tech gets restricted based on what host OS you’re using.
- Kinda defeats the purpose.
- This may be the only way to play Easy Anti Cheat games which aren’t Linux native for a while still.
- Then again, it might be close enough that it won’t even be much of an issue.
- As usual, Nvidia is playing the long game and rolling things out when they are ready while Google will probably nuke Stadia in 2021.
- The heads up was when they gave out Stadia gaming kits to YouTube premium subscribers.
Re-implementation of the game Private Eye
- The cursor is a little different in this, which apparently makes the game harder
- The game has an old ass demo that you can use to test it out
- Written in Python and uses pygame and SDL2.
- You will need the original assets or the free demo.
- Holy moly that list of officially supported distros
- Everyone but scoop and opensuse tumbleweed is out of date. So go suse for once
- Oh, wow! It’s not in the Ubuntu repos at all.
- I wonder what the story is behind that.
CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope
– Not sure if want
– Check it out
– Shutupandtakemymonies
Game: Superliminal
Devel: Pillow Castle
Engine: Unity
Price: £15.49 / $19.99 / $22.79
Wazzat: Perception is reality. In this mind-bending first-person puzzler, you escape a surreal dream world through solving impossible puzzles using the ambiguity of depth and perspective.
Mandatory Disclosure: Big thanks to the devs for sending us keys on Curator Connect
Venn:
Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control
- This bad boy is running Vulkan OOTB but it has issues.
- There is a damn near a full second delay in the menu cursor.
- Flibit suggests -force-opengl and that’s what sorted it on this end.
- Doing this killed my beloved Mangohud.
- Steam overlay was able to report 170/200 at what I’m guessing is 2160p.
- I say guessing since the game lacks resolution options.
- Yeah, it lacks a windowed mode as well so don’t expect any streaming of this game from us.
- Moves move and sounds sound.
- It is playable with the Xbox 1 Sx1 controller.
Fun?
- Remember the openGL hack?
- Yeah, it breaks the game right about har.
- https://imgur.com/a/glQ6BG0
- After 10 minutes of figuring out what the hell I was doing wrong I looked at a walkthrough.
- Yeah, fk that noise.
- A bit later I cheesed my way through the menu in Vulkan and it works as expected.
- At this point I had 75 minutes in the game but 20+ of them were troubleshooting.
- But we’re here to talk about the fun, right?
- Well I went and cooled off a bit bit and came back to the game after a few hours.
- I was at the exit of the motel with the warped door.
- This is where the game autosaved.
- Only one of my boxes remained on the lower level and there was no way to finish the puzzle without restarting.
- Does any of that sound like fun?
- The puzzles might get more challenging later in the game but what I played so far felt like running about completing tasks.
- I found the perspective mechanic hit-or-miss often relying on the drop on head maneuver to embiggen and smash into wall to debiggen.
- At the end of the day it’s a serviceable little puzzle game but that’s about it.
- For $20 I expect resolution options, a windowed mode, and most importantly, things to work OOTB.
- If the game was amazeballs mind bending next-level stuff I can overlook a lot of that.
- But alas, it’s a simple puzzle game so I can’t and won’t.
- A reluctant 2 is all it gets and that’s only because after much futzing it can be made to work.
Jordan:
Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control
- Launches OOTB on Nvidia and AMD. Holds 60fps at UHD. More with tearing if you knock vsync off on AMD. Nvidia likes the vsync off or else you get the chuggies. I’d say AMD wins the OOTB experience on this one
- Also, the resolution options are in the gameplay menu. Why?
- Controls are pretty basic
- Visual language here is really trying to push “Stanley Parable”. But it’s not quite it, is it?
Fun?
- Surreal stuff like this can be really fun, especially if it really fucks with your head
- This game has puzzles that can somewhat do that. A lot of the mechanisms are perspective based, some are physics based.
- All of them make you go “wait a minute…huh”
- And it makes the game really feel like a missed opportunity when you realize what the game actually is
- So often are there little nooks and crannies that seem ripe for exploration. Some lead somewhere, but more often than not there’s a dead end
- The game’s linearity clashes with the surreal gimmick. I want to explore and navigate through this dreamland. Instead it just seems like an obstacle course and it loses some of the fantasticality
- Periodically you get your message from the nice irish doctor. I wish they were a bit more deranged. There’s also a glados-esque announcer lady who constantly calls you out for not following instructions. But they don’t really seem to do anything about 2 hours in.
- That’s part of what made the Stanley Parable so special. There was exploration, experimentation and what felt like an actual struggle at times as you tried to spite the narrator
- It feels like there are bits and pieces here, but not a complete experience.
- I want to see superliminal 2 be like a breath of the wild dreamscape full of shit to traverse.
Pedro:
Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control
- It launches
- It holds 144 at 2560×1440, even with a crap ton of physics objects on screen
- There’s the occasional light flicker when the perspective shifts the size of a given item
- It did the Unity thing where the mouse was stupidly sensitive, but bringing it down to 5 seemed to cool it.
- Didn’t bother with the controller on accounts of first person.
- The music got a bit repetitive, or maybe it’s me and the fact that I hate the smooth jazzy tones they decided to go with.
Fun?
- And that is one of the two things I hate about this game.
- The other one being the price/length ratio
- I get that there’s more to discover and more cleverly hidden tidbits
- But I finished the game, and I honestly don’t feel terribly compelled to go through it again to find the hidden bits.
- It’s kinda like Portal in how you need some lateral thinking but here it’s far more painfully obvious that this is a linear affair.
- There’s the occasional side “path” – they’re more side alleys, really – but there is one way and one way only.
- If you deviate too far from that way, you see the barriers placed around the play area.
- In that respect it was a lot like Portal.
- But Portal “disguised” its linearity by putting you inside a facility with solid walls and no indication that they were in any way traversable, except when it was intentional.
- In Superliminal you are told that perception is reality and it often plays with what you assume to be walls, or ground, not actually being so.
- Which makes those barriers delimiting the play area all the more painfully limiting.
- It’s hard to justify £15 and 50p for 3 hours of being reminded that it’s just a videogame.
- It’s got some really clever puzzles but there’s a dissonance between what the game keeps telling you to do and what it actually lets you do.
- I liked it but I did feel a bit… disappointed at the end.
- But this is the Chairsquition and ‘round these ‘ere parts the technical achievements are just as if not more important.
- And fuck me does this game make some very creative use of the Unity engine.
- Almost every puzzle I was stumped until I started to play with the new mechanics as they’re introduced and, while positively restrained and grounded in reality when compared to Baba Is You, it still made me go “You made Unity do what?! And it’s still holding 144FerPS?”
- Yeah, that certainly put a big fat smile on my face and that’s more than most videogames do to me these days.
Verdict:
Venn:
Jordan:
Pedro:
Hate Mail:
