Humble brings back the sliders! Star Citizen teases Vulkan powered penguins, Steam is working on a new runtime, and Portal Reloaded & Grifflands make their Linux debut.
Special Thanks To:
??? PC-100A from whiszone (no note)
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Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
06:01 Wolfire class action update
11:38 Steam Sniper runtime
14:18 Remembering the L4D2 boycott
17:18 Geneshift updates
19:10 RetroArch 1.9.2
21:46 Project Heartbeat 0.10
23:46 Griftlands comes to Linux
25:36 Metro Exodus Enhanced is Windows only
27:56 Portal Reloaded
29:26 Crowsworn
37:05 Humble brings back the sliders
42:05 Stadia death watch
45:25 Star Citizen
48:15 Speed Dreams call for devs
50:05 Jedi feets
52:45 Soundux soundboard
55:35 Review: Regrowth
01:06:58 Hate mail
Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro
Steam: News
- https://twitter.com/thexpaw/status/1388064473521573888
- Looks like that’s only in the docs, not the agreement.
- Now I could see Steam asking Rosen not to sell Steam keys for less on Humble, the game store he owned / operated at the time.
- Key word being “asking”.
- And the keys themselves being the fulcrum of this whole thing.
- With G2A already running fast and loose with the grey market, I can see why they wouldn’t want to basically greenlight (get it?) that practice entirely.
- The fresh hell is this?
- Debian 11 based runtime libraries, maybe?
- Could be.
- Whatever it is, it’s still in private beta so we don’t get to poke at it just yet.
- The last runtime introduced some new containerization stuff for the steam runtime
- Every time I see one of these I wonder if they’ll have a solution to the graphics driver problem
- Hindsight and all that, something tells me L4D2 was more a necessity since Turtle Rock didn’t want to turn into just hat developers for TF2.
- They got called sellouts because they accepted VALVe’s invitation to come play the game.
- I remember the controversy from back in the day, but I think universally L4D2 is a better experience, especially with the older maps ported
Steam: Game Updates
- Death to manabars! Long live cooldowns!
- More gameplay changes like infinite boosts, altered bonus lives and non-replemishable ammunition with bonus damage on the last few bullets in the clip
- Zombies can no longer use guns in the red zone, finally!
- This game has zombies now?
- Greedy car thieves, still in Early Access.
- One of the few left.
- Hey, you can play GBA games on your PSP again. Pedro must be thrilled
- That’s for the Vita, never had one.
- They’ve added the ability to stack multiple filters on the file search so you can narrow down what specific Final fantasy you really want to play
- Screw your 140 hz display, we got 50hz support
- Screensavers!
- Are they trying to ditch the need for EmulationStation altogether?
- Alex is still alive you guys!
- There’s a new song, vram usage improvements and better support for a bunch of filetypes I needed to look up and am now worse off for
- “Griftlands is a deck-building roguelite…”
- And it supports Linux.
- They had my interest at deck-building, my attention at roguelike, and my money at Linux.
- From the Shank/Mark of the Ninja peeps.
- Looking at their backlog, Hot Lava was their only game without Linux.
- Looks like a fantasy-ish deep sky derelicts, which I am here for
- The art direction looks terrific
- This motherfucker only works with Steam play.
- Let me tell you how Proton works with RTX, it doesn’t.
- I look forward to the Linux version of this being released in 2023.
- I might even be able to buy an RTX GPU then, too.
Steam: New Games
- Now with Linux goodness.
- 3 portals of paintime await.
- Uh oh time hole
- Plagemarizzo intensifies.
- Like, this has to be the same artist, right?
- To say it borrows heavily from Hollow Knight would be like saying the Boston Museum robbery was just an “after-hours visit”.
News:
- Admiditaly I never mess with the sliders.
- I’m guessing most people didn’t (and they had the data to back that) but internet gonna internet.
- I usually maxed out the charity and developer sliders cuz I felt they were the ones deserving of my money
- Moral of the story is, if you don’t want people to complain when you take their choices away, don’t give them the choice initially.
- Most google projects tend to die without much drama until the big G in the cloud pulls the plug.
- Stadia will probably have it’s own movie or mini-series in about a decade, at this rate.
- Imagine taking a job working with Stadia for anything other than the money.
- Like, did you think google wouldn’t kill it?
- Six more staff have humped over to Haven Studios.
- The VP noped a few months back and Google nuked the internal development studio.
- It’s on a list like waxing the floors and doing spring cleaning is on a list.
- Apparently their linux guy is named Christopher Bolte, who is an experienced game engine programmer.
- I hope he doesn’t leave until that linux port gets done in 2707.
- Yeah, having the Linux build rely on the one guy at the studio who likes to fk around with Linux rarely ends well.
- They will have a Linux build one day, much like the game itself will be out one day.
- I would love to play a game as they described in the original crowd funding, but I’ve been around long enough to know that shit ain’t gonna fly.
- Which is bad because this a game about spaceships.
- I remember TORCS and how it defaulted to the track side stupid camera.
- If you want me to get a bad first impression of your racing game, that’s the way to do it.
- And I like Powerslide, so trust me when I say I cut racing games a lot of slack.
- Apparently they’re using STK’s netcode which is kinda cool
- Sucks that it runs like poop over the internet for these guys but that’s why the need devs
- They also need some openscenegraph people to help port their engine over to it
- Danglymeshes sound sexy!
- They have a tool for converting the official subtitles/lipsyncs over to a more neutral json based format, so hopefully less gojira
- It builds on 20.04
- For when you really need to get to da choppa
- It’s a new soundboard that works for Linux and Windows.
- I threw this in bacue “whar soundboard” is a common question thrown in my general direction.
- It uses Pulse so it should be easy enough for an Arch user to get figured out.
- Without support for MIDI CC or Jack audio I’m not going to be messing around with it.
- But it might work well in an amature toolchain.
CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope
– Not sure if want
– Check it out
– Shutupandtakemymonies
Game: Regrowth
Devel: Portgate Studios
Engine: Unity
Price: £7.19 / $9.99 / $11.49
Wazzat: Regrowth is a puzzle game where you race against time to save islands from sinking. Use plants and animals, collect and channel water… However, only with strategy and optimisation can you solve all the levels. Will you be able to save the earthen realm?
Mandatory Disclosure: Dev sent us keys via Curator Connect
Venn:
Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control
- Welcome back to Linux puzzle game cast.
- It’s a Unity joint so things work OOTB.
- Minus that hella long initial load time.
- Didn’t test with the controller but key/gerbil worked as expected.
Fun?
- No sir, I didn’t like it.
- I don’t hate it but there is one thing I’m not a fan of in my puzzle games.
- That thing being, resource management.
- Regrowth leans on that, hard.
- Grow a plant, fill a bucket, wait, scramble to lay some pipe and you’re done.
- Fail to do that in time and shit turns to sand.
- But hey, it’s the second game in a row that forces you to battle snails.
- Later on you have to deal with BEES! But I didn’t make it that far.
- I ended up getting about 45min in and yeah, kinda board with it.
- I put in another 15 to round things out but nothing hooked me.
- There is a difference between “oh, it’s gonna be like that” vs “look, more shit I have to juggle”.
- That difference is small but for me it’s the deciding factor in whether or not I’m coming back to play.
- Did I mention I’m not a fan of resource management?
- At the end of the day it’s a mellow little game sporting solid graphics and a soundtrack that gives melatonin a run for its money.
Jordan:
Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control
- Launches OOTB
- Very simple graphics, and a a barely present soundtrack
- Gotta click. You can also d-pad if you want
Fun?
- Puzzle games can often do a lot with a little
- Stack some blocks, cook some hot dogs, etc
- This one tries to do something with watching grass grow
- THis is actually the 2nd game to face the chairs to do this. Mars power industries had a grass growing bit too
- Mars Power industries also didn’t make me wait with my thumb up my ass
- A lot of these puzzles aren’t necessarily hard, it’s just that mistakes take a long time
- I think a less paddy option might be to let you control the slider, or something else that doesn’t make the game feel like it’s actively wasting my time
- Which is a shame. I’d actually like to figure out some of these puzzles, I just don’t want to have to wait 9000 years. And that kinda kills the fun for me
Pedro:
Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control
- Launched out of the box
- Slammed the FerPS at 300 but I saw the Framerate slider
- Never have I struggled with a slider quite as much as I did with the target framerate one.
- Somehow successfully clicked and double clicked on it into submission around the 145 mark
- I didn’t notice any weirdness with the rest of the game so I’mma chalk that up as a fluke from a game which had no graphical settings until last week.
- That music loop is fairly short…
Fun?
- Queue the loaded statement music
- As much as I like puzzle games, I don’t like it when I feel like they’re wasting my time.
- I could leave it at that and say 2 chairs right now but I do feel the need to unpack that a bit
- Games like these which are timed and time dependent, need an option to let me fail quickly.
- Regrowth does not.
- It’s also not obvious at all what the solution is (it’s a puzzle game, after all), so trial and error is inevitable.
- But every trial and error, or success for that matter, either happens in real time or you just give up halfway and start over.
- Gimme a fast forward button, please
- I just spent the past 10 minutes on this one puzzle, feeling like an idiot and having to wait around for things to happen, just gimme the damn fast forward button.
- So yeah, I do get the distinct feeling I’m wearing a belt made out of wristwatches.
- And that “strategy and optimization” boils down to, find the one tile to spawn grass on which lets you win the level.
Verdict:
Venn:
Jordan:
Pedro:
Hate Mail:
