Linux Game Cast 456: Metroidvania Waifus

The Smach Z project calls it quits! GabeN mentions consoles and the internet explodes, Proton 6.8 GE turns Replicant into Replican, enhanced Quake 3 engines, and a new take on the GODOT Jam.

Special thanks to:
Rtheren (Ploop filter from the Wishzone)
Steven B (new patron)
DOOM2.WAD (new patron)
FlutterShy2077 (5K bits)

Listen:

Download:

Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
03:51 Newell teases consoles
08:44 Steam rejects Holodexxx
12:31 Proton GE fixes Nier Replicant
14:51 Proton 6.3-4 fixes Sacred Gold
18:11 Rust powered CLI Steam
20:21 Fall Guys leaks source code
23:01 Mean Green Van Dam DLC
24:51 Lost Ruins
27:11 Huntdown
35:28 Go Godot Jam
38:18 Stadia death watch
41:38 Smach Z project update
46:48 Daemon Engine
49:38 Quake 3 Enhanced
52:38 Bitfocus Companion
54:39 In the House of Silence
01:05:59 Hate mail

Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro

Steam: News

Steamy consoles

https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/gabe-newell-teases-the-possibility-of-bringing-steam-games-to-console/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pl80LvMsnfo
Steam consoles confirmed with HL3 exclusive11!
I’m curious what it could mean, if anything.
It’s not like Steam makes a lot of games to put on other platforms.
Half-Life: Alyx on the PS5?
Steam machines would make a helluva lot more sense in 2021 with Proton.
Seems like it got disappeared.
My thoughts were more towards “steam” for consoles, so you get the friends list, remote play together and maybe some save syncs if you’re nasty.
Microsoft and EA have similar “digital passports” on steam already, it makes sense that steam would be looking to expand similarly
Nothing nefarious with the video being removed. The school wanted the kids’ faces blurred.
“You’ll get a better idea of that by the end of this year…”
There’s some rampant speculation out there based on Gabe’s ability to not say anything.
I guess if he does get into politics in a country I can vote in, I’d vote for him.

Steam XXX

No porn. Porn is bad. Only murder please.
Is the steam policy hypocritical as hell?
Yes.
Does steam absolutely sell porn games?
Oh hell yes.
Seems the point here is the depiction of real people, and VALVe have enforced that one on a couple of occasions in the past.
I can’t imagine the bureaucratic nightmare that would result from having brand name porn on the same storefront as hello kitty. Oh wait that was blockbuster back in the 90s
Having straight up porn-porn on steam would result in a lot more public scrutiny of valve from “concerned parents”, so I get why valve doesn’t want it there

GE Neir fix

It works, yo.
Bit of a craptastic cutscene if I’m honest.
You can get through the first playthrough now.
Big steppy vampire mama’s house is now playable
That’s a bit of a size increase from 6.1 (890MB – 1.4GB)

6.3-4

I was looking forward to finally being able to play Sacred Gold again without stupid textures clipping through models, but no.
The game won’t even start for me anymore.
I have all my games on a dedicated SSD, it’s mounted on /mnt/1TBSSD
Sacred Gold doesn’t like running from there.
I had to move the install to Steam’s default ~/.local/share/Steam to work around the “Application load error (0x02)”
I’m hoping by putting this in the show notes people will be able to google that error when they run into it.
Because there’s no other concrete information out there.

Rusty Steam

The creator has a real crappy PC that don’t run steam too well.
I guess steam does have games with lower sysreqs than steam itself
- Quite a few, like Sacred Gold.
Tried to get this working on the netbook because of the very low spec, but no one’s packaged SteamCMD for Fedora and I couldn’t be assed to get TUI to pick it up properly yet.

Oopsie Guys

Not a Linux game but Steamy news nonetheless.
It’s not everyday a company drops their source into Steam.
Probably going to see some unofficial clients pop up in the upcoming weeks.
They also leaked the sauce for the Easy Anti Cheat client, hint hint.
.gitignore files are your friend
What could be nice is if fall guys open sources their code as a result of this now excuse me I need to take another bong hit

Steam: Game Updates

Green Van Dam

DAE 90’s wrestling?
Ah yes, Robert Alexander Szatkowski.
I totally didn’t have to Google that.
Wrestling has fallen on hard times if they’re looking at The Green Means as a… well, means of publicity.

Steam: New Games

Waifu-Vania

Okay, the graphics are very Dead Cells-y with more animu.
But the gameplay is very slow and deliberate like your typical metroidvanias.
It’s not a roguelike, which is pretty noteworthy for this sort of game these days

HUNTDOWN

Local coop, bah!
Pixel art is nice.
The movie trailer narration on that second trailer is pretty good.
- Very grindhouse
Apparently they have a UT style caller for the arcade moe?

News:

Announcing Go Godot Jam

This is more of a tutorial jam
They want lots of tutorials, practical examples, etc to make it easier for subsequent folks to get started on godot
It’s a neat idea, hopefully some useful stuff comes out of it.
The theme for the actual Game Jam will be announced closer to the date.

Totes doing great

Stadia’s webstore got a search bar at the end of April.
You don’t push out advancements like that for a product you plan to kill.
Heck for all the arguments about Steam’s doomsday scenario, there are plenty of cracks to allow you to pull a game from Steam and play it without the client.
No such thing for Stadia.
I mean, it’ll stay alive as long as google’s willing to pump money into hiring devs to port things over
No longevity short of google switching over to a more geforce-now is model tho

RIP Z

It’s dead, Jim.
You’re not going to find additional investors.
I don’t think anyone else is willing to let you fuck up perfectly good money.
This team has demonstrated their inability to execute on multiple occasions.
GPD and the AYA Neo came in and ate their lunch, dinner, and next day’s breakfast.
I hope no one listening threw them money, because you’re not going to ever get anything back.
Yeah, I don’t think they don’t have enough assets left to even hope about giving most people their money back
Who knows, maybe some firm will get a hold of the two prototypes they actually produced as part of the bankruptcy sail and actually try a run *takes another bong hit*
Thing is, anything they have prototyped is wicked outdated compared to what’s on the market.

Daemon Engine (beta)

Still impressed when anyone wants to tango with theat codebase.
It’s been there for your consumption for a while
I’m with Venn though, given the other more polished alternatives out there building your game on Daemon is a bit of a hard ask
Still it would be nice to see some more open source shooters on Linux that aren’t just vanilla quake 3 clones
It’s impressive they’ve managed to keep it as compatible as they did.
Granted, any GPU that doesn’t support OpenGL 3 is basically marked as slow, but it does technically still work with 2.1
I do wonder how they get around z-fighting with the multitextured surfaces.

Enhanced Quake 3

A nicer, secure and more performant quake 3
I wonder though, what will last longer? COBOL or Q3
Optimized Vulkan render BECAUSE I CAN!
Improved server-side DoS protection.
Expect a 10% to 200%+ FPS increase.

Companion

<Kiwi>It’s a way to control your Deck without losing focus.
The normie implementation streamdeck-ui relies on xdottool to switch.
If you are playing a game you can see how that’s a big honking problem.
This is a gui for the hackfest nightmare setup I’ve been using for the past year.
It’s using obs-websockets and a server to take control of the Deck.
This way your Deck won’t be flopping about.
It comes with a Pi image so you can have a dedicated Deck.</Kiwi>

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies

Game: In the House of Silence
Devel: Kai Ruma Games
Engine: Godot
Price: £11.39 / $14.99 / $17.49

Wazzat: In the House of Silence is a roguelike dungeon crawler RPG where your equipment is your own body parts. Mutate your body to fight otherworldly abominations as you delve deeper in the House of Silence.

Mandatory Disclosure: Devs for sent us keys via Curator Connect

Venn:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

Everything works out of the box, for the most part.
It does the “windowed mode” where the user decides what random geometry is on display.
Controller kinda works?
You can use it to get ingame but it was clearly an afterthought.
Ya know, the right analog stick becomes a mouse cursor kinda afterthought.
Be prepared to play this with WASD.

Fun?

This thing poops achievements, doesn’t it?
Change your stats by mutating your body parts.
Manage your sanity to prevent alterations to your perception of reality.
Bump into baddies!
Accidently replace your head with a sword and spend 15min using the minimap to navigate to the end of a level.
It really is fun for the whole family.
Im kidding, this is some framework Early Access nonsense someone had the audacity to slap the done tag on.
There is no content here.
Play the first 5 minutes and ask yourself if you want more of that because that’s all you’re going to get.
At least that was my experience after 70 minutes.

Jordan:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

Launches OOTB
Very basic graphics
There’s not really a lot of animation. More general squishing in a given direction
The soundtrack is actually pretty bumping

Fun?

This game really hammers in the difference between rogeulikes and roguelites
It’s rogue with a sanity meter
Don’t get me wrong, I love rogue and nethack. They’re great for killing time on production boxes, but vultures’ eye/claw is free if you want a tileset
The problem here is that when you’re asking for 15 bucks, you gotta do a little more
The navigation is fun enough, and filling out maps triggers dopamine production in me like you wouldn’t believe
I dunno, it’s a little too basic for me and it lacks a lot of the polish that it’s competitors have
And that really affects the staying power. The game works for quick coffee-break sessions, but past the 10 minute mark I find myself struggling to care
Can’t really give it 1 chair. It’s not awful. It’s that one worse sin: Mediocre

Pedro:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

Launches out of the box
Holds 144 at 2560×1440
WASD and the arrow keys are mapped out of the box
The music is subtle but it conveys the silly yet horror-y atmosphere perfectly

Fun?

It’s time to break out the “I really like Roguelikes but I’m not very good at them” spiel
That was it
And In the House of Silence is no exception to that rule.
The thing that sets it apart but keeps the mechanics pretty much the same is the replacing of your character’s appendages with… different ones.
And as you progress and find yourself becoming more and more like the “monsters” the line begins to blur as to what the hell is going on.
The RPG mechanics are few and far between but as roguelikes go, this one is on point.
And it doesn’t screw you over by removing your currency before you’re given a chance to spend it.
If I had to point out a flaw is that you don’t really see much of anything on screen, even with two human eyes.
And if you get rid of them, you see even less.