Valve releases Steam Link for Linux! Loop Hero gets a day-one release, Warzone 2100 travels to Vulkan, and Heroic Games Launcher automagically checks for game updates. Then Laser Cup gets roasted in the Chairqasition.
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Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
04:31 Steam Link comes to Linux
07:41 Steam kills Artifact
12:06 More Portal 2 updates
13:41 Pocket Cars update
17:32 Loop Hero
19:27 Star Picker
21:37 Refactor
23:07 Crazy Wheels
25:22 Urtuk
27:07 Plugs
30:47 DXVK 1.8.1
32:37 Flatpak WINE
34:57 Warzone 2100 Vulkan
37:17 Heroic Games Launcer 1.5.5
39:17 Minetest 5.3.0
42:12 Tanks of Freedom
44:22 Laser Cups
54:42 Hate mail
Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro
Steam: News
- Well, it slammed fullscreen into the wrong monitor and refused to get Steamy.
- Also, flatpak?
- And a Snap! (unofficial)
- Can we get a *.deb?
- Yeah, maybe don’t run it on the same machine you’re running steam on.
- My poor ears…
- That was a two click install from the flatpack version.
Steam: Game Updates
- Artifact 2.0 Beta is no longer being developed.
- You can’t develop new games using Vale Time in 2021.
- You need to:
- 1. move quick
- 2. pump out updates
- 3. communicate with the playerbase.
- What they did
- Stop updating
- Stop communicating
- Never met a single roadmap target
- Never take the game out of closed beta
- “we haven’t managed to get the active player numbers to a level that justifies further development at this time”
- pikachu.jpg
- At least it’s free.
- If that doesn’t get people playing, start asking Richard Garfield if you can open sauce it.
- I actually do hope they open source it
- Right now giving everyone access to all the cards kinda opens up the floodgate
- It peaked at 600 players.
- CCGs are incredibly meta based, and part of the metagame is teh lack of availability of certain cards
- So for those of you still playing artifact, enjoy the mega cheese
- Loads more linux fixes
- Big performance jump on AMD with MSAA
- Wonder what got them dicking around in the old codebase.
- I get those feels
- For me it’s like having a new laptop I can use to dick around with some random Linux distro.
- The sudden realization of “oh, this works really well. Let me try this other thing. Ooooh!”
- That’s the vibe I’m getting from whoever is working on this at VALVe.
- Added windowed mode option to video settings.
- Friend invites.
- Controller rumble shorter at initialization?
- That bullsh*t is intentional?
- Ever seen a controller take off across a glass desk?
- Now that I have put some time in it, yeah, got some performance issues to hammer out.
- Smashing the Proton button does not improve things.
- Yeah, the game will straight up freeze for a full second in the middle of a race sometimes.
- Changing or reducing graphical settings doesn’t seem to make a difference.
- I do like the time reduction from the freeze rocket.
- Being frozen for 3 seconds in the middle of a race gets you in last place very quickly.
- After spending some time with the game it needs a LOT of work.
Steam: New Games
- Reverse tower defense?
- Rougelike?
- Devolver Digital spent some cheddar paying people to stream this one.
- Haven’t got a chance to sit down and watch anyone play
- Seems like a neat riff on dungeon keeper style games, but I guess your focused on getting the heroes as strong as possible
- What?
- That’s sort of neat. They’ve taken the map-based orienteering from games like Sea of Thieves and mashed it up with some parkour
- Dem legs tho…
- Seems to be aimed at casuals, but offers a few modes for speedrunning
- I hazard to say it could probably benefit from some multiplayer too.
- I have yet to play a proper parkour’em up
- A and-yet-it-moves style metroidvania
- Embrace the squiggle. Become the squiggle
- Online PVP.
- Hefty price for EA and what I’m seeing on the screen.
- Someone stole that level from super tux kart
- …Or action henk
- Those levels look frustrating as all hell to play.
- You’re either going down incredibly narrow paths on the ground or incredibly narrow paths on the edge of things.
- The fun of rainbow road was not that you could fall off of it.
- That was the failure state, don’t make your game around the failure state.
- Well this looks like it’s right up my fuckin’ alley
- Darkest dungeon tactics
- Got Fedora 25 As a recommended system. Which I guess means it’ll run on centos streams
- And hey, it left early access! Congrats guys
- If it’s as RPG-y as they promise, I think I will very much like it too.
News:
- Nothing crazy exciting, a couple game fixes and some DX9 regressions taken care of
- I guess that’s where that Portal 2 MSAA performance boost is coming from.
- Similar concept to the containerized runtime VALVe is doing but for WINE proper outside of Steam.
- Could be handy depending on how automagic it is.
- Support for all the graphic things.
- Vulka, Metal, OpenGL 3.0.
- Nuked QT as a dep.
- Everything needs Vulkan!
- The non-lutris Epic Games Store client gets an update
- Download progress bars are always nice. I wonder what liar algorithm they’re using
- The launcher will also automagically check for game updates
- More stuff around having a nicer visual experience when dealing with file downloads
- For those of you running Haiku, there is now something to do on Haiku
- It’s a big ass-changelog, Ctrl-f Linux returns nothing
- I need to get a new battery for that HP laptop I have Haiku installed on.
- Seems as though the last beta came out in 2018
- Which is from around the same time Into the Breach released.
- Only noticed it because it showed up on the top banner in Athenaeum
- Very similar concept to Into the Breach, but clearly more reliant on the traditional Strategy genres.
- Gameplay wise i’d say it hews closer to Advance Wars than into the breach
- Into the breach has more emphasis on “perfect information” this is just battle chess
CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope
– Not sure if want
– Check it out
– Shutupandtakemymonies
Game: Laser Cup
Webzone: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1496220/Laser_Cup/
Devel: Dreamlabs
Engine: Unity
Price: £3.99 / $4.99 / $5.69
Wazzat: Have you ever wondered what it would be like to play air hockey with bumper cars? Then Laser Cup is the ideal game for you! Select one of 8 teams to compete in high paced, physics-based online matches.
Mandatory Disclosure: Dev sent us keys via Curator Connect
Venn:
Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control
- Out of the box everything works, technically.
- Menu selection with the keyboard is a bit all over the place, use a controller.
- Setting the resolution has a fun little bug where it jumps out of the selection.
- Controller worked without issues.
- Performance, well, you can play this on a calculator.
Fun?
- If I called Laser Cup a prototype it would be kind.
- You have one arena, one soundtrack, one car model.
- And a hipster Unity shader that blurs shite up.
- You flail about and occasionally the ball goes in someones goal.
- That’s it, next match is exactly the same.
- You are provided with the occasional powerup but there is no indication as to what the hell it is until it’s unleashed.
- Then the ball flies out of the area. Yes, that happened.
- The big nope with Laser Cup is the slide around on glass while pointing in a direction and smashing the boost driving mechanic.
- You can kill about 10 minutes playing against the AI and another 10 with a buddy online but after that you’ve seen it all.
- If this was in EA or sent over as a hobby project on Itch I would be a lot kinder but it’s not.
Jordan:
Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control
- Launches OOTB on AMD and NVidia
- What the hell is up with the menu?
- Don’t try and adjust the resolution in windowed mode. Do it in fullscreen first and then switch it
- Pretty simple looks wise. A bit to its detriment. You get really bad character blindness with 3 on 3
Fun?
- Oh god the character blindness. What makes it worse is that you can change which dude you are when you have AI players
- I genuinely have no idea what the fuck is going on at any point
- This seems like it could be really fun if you have a bunch of people to play with and are able to trash talk
- Unfortunately, nobody is online playing this game
- Honestly I think the game could do with a little tutorial, just to at least explain what the power ups are
Pedro:
Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control
- Launches out of the box.
- Seems to be capped at 60FerPS
- There’s this annoying CRT filter and fake static effect that I wish there was an option to disable.
- There’s no rebindable controls, -1 chair
- And the default bindings are Space and the left Shift, Ctrl, and Alt keys. -1 chair
- Because that kind of layout is designed solely for people who use the mouse on their right hand.
- Elitist bias doesn’t get you any favors with me.
Fun?
- And that is a real shame.
- Because when I rotated my keyboard 90º so I could have my arms further apart, the game was kinda fun.
- It’s absolute madness of fumbling the ball into the goal and trying to not let the opposing team do the same.
- It’s 2D rocket league with programmer art visuals… and a questionable screen filter.
- I could have probably enjoyed my time with Laser Cup, but you made it damn clear you don’t care for people who might even consider using the mouse on their left-hand.
- So let me be clear, I don’t care about your game.
- Thank you for the keys but if you’re just gonna spit in my face, I’d rather you did it in person. It’d be far sexier!
Verdict:
Venn:
Jordan:
Pedro:
Hate Mail:
