Valve gives Portal 2 Vulkan powers! GTA 3 and Vice City reverse-engineering project gets nuked from orbit, 4A Games confirms Metro Exodus is still headed to Linux, and Nvidia does something silly with the 3060.
Special thanks to:
Dark Wing – iFYOO Pro One controller
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Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
07:44 Positive developer banned
10:29 Apple needs Steamy data
13:56 Proton 5.13-6
16:16 Proton experimental updates
17:16 5 years of no Street Fighter V
18:56 Portal 2 Vulkan update
22:36 Metro Exodus Linux update
26:26 Blasphemous Strife & Ruin
28:21 Rochard removed from Steam
33:16 群鹰之岛
35:56 Plugs & Thanks
43:26 Nvidia cripples 3060
50:06 GTA project removed from github
56:16 Humble Plug in Bundle
59:16 DXVK 1.8
01:01:46 0 A.D. Alpha 24
01:04:01 Volo Airsport open sourced
01:05:36 Review: Celeste
01:18:46 Hate mail
Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro
Steam: News
Steam developer gets banned for “Very Positive” review trickery
- Ah yes, the old “American Beef” brand hotdogs goof.
- It’s a classic for a reason
- Can’t really blame a guy for trying.
- I would go with goof, not trick.
- It was not exactly convincing and I don’t think anyone thought it was.
- And once again, VALVe only does something about people’s shenanigans on their own store if it reaches the mainstream media.
- Do you want to burn that bridge?
- Because that’s exactly how you burn a bridge with VALVe. Ask Digital Homicide what happened when they subpoenaed VALVe.
- Mac is miniscule when it comes to gaming and with the M1 it just got a lot smaller.
- I kinda want to see GabeN go scorched-earth on Apple.
- So Apple wants a list of all the games available on steam, how much they and their in app purchases make, how much advertising money they spend and make off steam. Basically, all the financials related to the operation of an app store
- Could be used to make a case regarding the size of a competitors market, essentially to dispute that they have a stranglehold on all “app-sales”
- There are quite a few arguments you could levy against this take.
- For sure valve doesn’t want apple or epic to be able to see their financials. Epic tried with steamspy and that well has gone dry
- Nioh 2 is available for your non-sekiro-samurai pleasure
- Otherwise it’s a lot of bug fixes, ‘specially if you have a PS5 controller.
- Pedro will tell you if it made any difference though
- With Steam Input, assuming the game allows for the Steam overlay, it’s been pretty good.
- It’s good that they’re actively addressing the whole “Game still takes input while you’re typing a message on the overlay chat” situation
- Looks like it’s just some better controller handling for hades.
- Man I hope supergiant comes out with the linux version. It’s just FNA
Steam: Game Updates
- Happy valumtime’s day.
- When did you truly give up hope?
- I was still thinking about ValveTime for at least the first three years.
- That’s a lot of Linux fixes.
- Were those all lined up and it was just a matter that no one at VALVe could be assed?
- Or forgot? Side effect of using DXVK also fixing all that stuff?
- Let DXVK do the heavy lifting.
- Time demo
- Vulkan: 4132 frames 7.854 seconds 526.09 fps ( 1.90 ms/f) 110.872 fps variability
- OpenGL: 4132 frames 13.707 seconds 301.45 fps ( 3.32 ms/f) 53.283 fps variability
- No more mice type in the menus.
- Using DXVK for the vulkan backend is a pretty smart move. No need to re-invent the wheel, and you can use your existing DX11 knowledge for the actual render code
- It pays to have your own implementation of a graphics API done on an open standard
- It’s pretty smooth
- March+ ?
- Great, nine more months until the next vague ass-update.
- It requires RTX at minimum.
- For the enhanced version at least.
- The language in the press release is a bit vague about which version we’re getting
- RTX on.
- Gotta keep catering to that dying mac market though.
- Get that Mac deliverable before the linux one.
- I’m still waiting for that Linux version to even fire it up.
- The only time Bloodstained: Symphony of the Night (I know what I said) comes to Linux.
- You get an extra quest with 5 hidden challenges to help the Broken-Linux-Promise-Vania protagonist.
- Boss rush mode is also available with 2 difficulty modes and 5 variations.
- Some extra changes and additions to mechanics and areas.
- Once upon a time, this was the hot shit on linux.
- RIP in peace. Hopefully someone dumps the source for this
- This was one of the OG Unity titles to show up for Linux.
- If you still have the Humble key and haven’t redeemed it, you might wanna do that quick like.
Steam: New Games
- Explore the mysterious island of eagles with Quill and his loyal owl buddy Xiaozhi!
- With love from China.
- Don’t see much of that.
- The Art says “Eagle Island”, so I’m gonna go with that
- It’s a roguelike platformer/shooter
- For the first time in this segment I had to look at the language table on the store page.
- English – Not supported
- Oh, well…
News:
- Performance restrictions will be going in for their Linux drivers as well.
- AND, it’s built into the BIOS.
- This is not about protecting consumers, no sir.
- This is about forcing miners to buy the cards with a higher profit margin.
- Can’t blame nvidia here, selling defective rtx cards as mining processors means they have less waste and potentially happier customers.
- Cards with no resale value that go straight to the landfill.
- We’ll see if it actually has the desired effect
- There’s already websites claiming that despite the attempted performance gimping, the 3060 will still generate $7 a day.
- Thanks, Tom’s Hardware
- Also, from Tom’s article, if Ethereum were to change the hashing process even a little the limitation would be completely invalidated.
- Scare tactic or legit?
- Now everyone will know about it.
- I knew of the project but didn’t really keep track of it.
- Were they doing a legit disassembly?
- Did they have assets from the game?
- Maybe the screenshots?
- It seems the time has come for open sauce engine implementations to face the DMCA
- You may want to search for some of the other forks, which may not have been included in the takedown, and get yourself the sauce.
- #NotALawyer but how do you claim copyright over a reimplementation which still requires people to own the game and use the assets of said game to play it?
- Is it for their use of the word GTA?
- Is this a Bethesda “don’t call it Open Morrowind or we’ll sue you for trademarks” type of situation?
- Good mix of linux native games
- I wonder if they ever fixed that game breaking bug in epistory.
- It was a pretty fun typing tutor
- Needs Klingon.
- Hover always looked like a fun game but multi is way ded.
- No Steam Keys for Chroma Squad at this time, which was the main reason I bought this one, since I already had all the other Linux titles.
- “We are currently experiencing issues with Steam keys for Chroma Squad. We are working to resolve this problem as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience! In the meantime, please try out the DRM-free version of the game linked below!”
- Ah, that explains the error.
- You do get the DRM free version download to play in the meantime, if you like.
- Dark Messiah of Might and Magic out-of-memory fixes!
- Yay! I might actually be able to do a playthrough of it on stream.
- Multi-monitor support is implemented, so with a brand new wine and xrandr you can set up your mechwarrior battlestation
- Hitman 3 needs some of the same fixes hitman 2 does. Guess that engine hasn’t changed much
- Building snapping.
- Lobby improvements.
- New art.
- Can we drop the Alpha after a decade?
- Never left EA on Steam.
- $1 bargain title gets open sourced.
- At least now if someone wants to make a kickass wingsuit adventure game, they’ll have a skeleton to start from
- At least dude came out and said he was no longer working on the project.
CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope
– Not sure if want
– Check it out
– Shutupandtakemymonies
Game: Celeste
Devel: Matt Makes Games Inc.
Engine: FNA
Price: £14.99 / $19.99 / $21.99
Wazzat: Help Madeline survive her inner demons on her journey to the top of Celeste Mountain, in this super-tight platformer from the creators of TowerFall. Brave hundreds of hand-crafted challenges, uncover devious secrets, and piece together the mystery of the mountain.
Mandatory Disclosure: Venn bought us keys
Venn:
Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control
- Solid solid solid.
- Everything works and joysticks reconnect when them batteries run out.
- 60@ 2160p & 1080.
- It has a nice bumping soundtrack and that’s appreciated when getting wrecked.
- After the initial blame the hardware reaction is out of your system you will find that the controls are in fact, tight.
Fun?
- Before we get started I need to comment on how delightful it was watching Pedro nope the hell out on his recorded video.
- It’s a shared experience since I remembered those feels.
- These games are my crossword puzzles.
- No RNG, no extra bullsh*t, just 100% get good or die, fucko.
- They force you to develop skill through trial and error.
- You’re not going to think your way out of a situation without being able to translate that think into action.
- It’s brains and brawn having to work in something resembling harmony.
- It’s also something you will not be instantly good at.
- It forces you to humble your arse, sit down and learn vs ree and quit.
- Ragequits are ego fucking with you. Fuck ego.
- Speaking of, Alt+4 will not save progress and force you to restart.
- Celeste is a fun & fair precision platformer despite being all hipster-pixel.
- They even took the time to throw in a story that’s borderline interesting.
- If I had to fault it for something it would be the characters “voices”.
Jordan:
Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control
- Launches OOTB on AMD and Nvidia
- Dualshock and Switch Pro both worked OOTB with no issues
- The pixel art is well done. The 3d menus are a bit jarring, but oh well
Fun?
- Yeah, I just don’t like precision platformers
- It’s my curse I guess. There are supposedly a lot of really good games out there with solid narratives
- But I have what my old piano teacher Mrs Mellenger calls “stupid fingers” and some bad neurochemistry that doesn’t play nice with the genre or my hardware
- And to the game’s credit, they give you a bunch of accessibility options for those of us who are less dextrous or patient.
- But it feels a little too much like cheating, even if you do just use invulnerability to practise jumps so you end up restarting rooms anyways
- There’s a really cool story in the game as well and that’s really the carrot to drive you forward
- but at the end of the day, I don’t play games to feel bad and that’s perfectly fuckin’ fine
Pedro:
Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control
- Launches out of the box
- 60 FerPS, which means that VSync option is a damn lie
- When I saw the 3D menu I was hopeful like “Is this an option?”
- No, it’s hipster-pixel.
- Heck, there’s even the Pico8 version of the game in the game.
- For when you want hipster-pixels in your hipster-pixels.
- Controller-wise the DualSense needs Steam Input to work properly, the DualShock4 and the iFYOO Pro One work out of the box.
Fun?
- I’ve said my peace on hipster pixel platformers on many an occasion.
- This one is more of a puzzle platformer than the standard action platformer so I can at least appreciate the puzzle aspect of it.
- And it’s very good in that particular regard!
- Most of the puzzles have everything you need to solve them on screen and the ones which don’t usually involve another element of urgency that require you to keep moving so that adds to the challenge.
- I got stuck for almost 20 minutes on a single map during the “Dream” sequence when there’s 5 ghosts following you and it’s a damn massive room that spans about 3 or 4 screen lengths and if you die you go back all the way to the top.
- But that room also helped with my confirmation bias that the DualShock 4 is the best controller.
- Let’s talk about the D-Pad in controllers.
- A good D-Pad makes it so you can reliably hit any of the eight directions with minimal to no cock ups.
- A bad D-Pad means it will send you diagonally when you want to go straight vertical or horizontal or vice versa.
- The iFYOO is the first kind of bad and the DualSense is the vice versa.
- Back to Celeste, the DualShock was the only one I could reliably hit the direction I actually wanted to dash in with no cock ups.
- So, yeah. If you have a controller you can trust yourself with this will be a very satisfying experience.
- And Celeste stands high above the typical hipster pixel platformer crap Steam has on offer.
Verdict:
Venn:
Jordan:
Pedro:
Hate Mail:
