Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II gets an open-source reimplementation! Ubuntu releases a guide for gaming on Linux, Wolfire Games loses their antitrust lawsuit against Valve, and slapping a coat of HD on Neverwinter Nights.
Special thanks to:
Foxy: Cyberpunk
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Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
07:52 Valve wins court case against Wolfire Games
12:32 DLSS comes to Proton official
16:43 Steam inker Launcher gets a Vortex
19:02 HD pack for Neverwinter Nights
22:52 Dead Cells everyone is here update
32:41 How to game on Ubuntu
38:29 Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II gets an open-source reimplementation
42:54 Box64 now runs Crysis
47:54 Prince of Persia DOS disassembly
50:34 Open-source Imperium Galactica
51:41 Review: Astral Towers
01:01:26 Emails
Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro
Steam: News
- I’m glad this was an in-and-out, good judge.
- Wolfire’s lawsuit “does not articulate sufficient facts to plausibly allege an antitrust injury based on that market.”
- Plaintiff’s allegations are not meaningfully different from Sommers v. Apple, where the
- Ninth Circuit found implausible the allegation that Apple’s 99 cent music download fee was supracompetitive.
- Yeah, it’s called competition and Valve has spent 18 years getting to this point.
- Epic is trying the “shite service + free games” approach.
- Microsoft is doing the gamepass thingy.
- GOG is playing the DRM-free card.
- I chuckled a bit at the Judge’s argument that other stores/clients have tried to go against Steam without charging the 30% and they have failed, so that’s not a valid argument for this case.
- As sad as that sounds, the 30% VALVe charges get you a free “Linux port” unless you go out of your way to fuck it!
- Or just not hit the EAC/BattlEye button
- The changes that were living in experimental are now real bois
- Still gotta use GE if you want audio in ME 1
- Fixing crashes in BG3 is always good for me. Also Deep rock should hopefully be a wee more stable
- DLSS is now prime time.
- Even with these fixes and the 75% for the Autumn Sale, I still don’t want to touch Fallout 76.
- Shut up! When you say things like that Foxy will buy it for you
- Lots of improvements this release, Mainly around support for adding mod managers
- All downloads have a status bar now
- RIP one-time-proton button
- The biggest change is that the executable is now steamtinkerlaunch instead of stl to avoid name collision with 3d printer files
- If you don’t want to fix up all your games, you can use an alias or symlink to restore the original name
- Getting Vortex to work on Linux is a big plus.
- As someone who’s tried time and time again to get the Lutris install script to work, and failed, this makes it a heck of a lot simpler.
Steam: Game Updates
- HD textures are in a separate DLC just in case you’re like pedro and insist on gaming on Nvidia ION
- They’re not kidding.
- I can run NWNEE on all the netbooks but the moment I put this on, it goes from 30-ish FerPS down to 5.
- Limbs still look like pieces of kindling, but at least they’re crystal clear kindling
- Jokes aside, with this and the new lighting subsystem, this is the best this game has ever looked
- 4.1GB of higher res textures, models, and meshes.
- It does make the game that bit extra pretty!
- But where is Mr Rogers?
- Hollow Knight, Blasphemous, Guacamelee and, Skul, these we’ve thrown chairs at!
News:
- The timing seems too specific to be a coincidence, but they don’t address the squeaky one’s videos.
- Telling people to install steam from the command line is dangerous. You might uninstall your desktop.
- Steam noped right the hell over to Arch when the 32-bit thing went down.
- Dude is busy slinging out the updates.
- Seriously, I was gonna type up a summary of the latest release, but dude is cranking one out every two days.
- It’s good see a new engine for these games because the original ones don’t scale terribly well in 2021
- Because yes, you can use this open engine to play both DF 1 and 2, you just need to patch a file and recompile it.
- Those poor average gamers!
- Ah, the elusive X87 emulation
- Actually, this is WINE on top of emulation
- CSMT via wine is supported. That was the OG performance boost for GL titles a couple years ago before D9vk
- Which it also now supports
- The video shows a Phytium D2000 running it Crysis , which ships with an rx550 and a chinese built octa-core ARM CPU that I CAN’T FUCKING BUY RIGHT NOW GODDAMMIT!
- This is a preview of “retro” gaming two decades from now.
- This is great but the annoying thing is that you need box86 for 32bit and box64 for 64bit x86.
- And box86 is for armhf but box64 is for aarch64.
- I guess you can’t complain about multilib if it doesn’t fucking exist…
- Disassambled DOS code, enhanced with SDL
- No music, but it now has compatibility with the OG Music files
- Gamepad support for the OG prince of Persia without the use of an emulator or third party control mapper.
- Open Sauce java reimplementation of Imperium Galactica, a 4X game from the late 90’s
- Neat, they have permission from the original devs to ship the game assets
CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope
– Not sure if want
– Check it out
– Shutupandtakemymonies
Game: Astral Towers
Webzone: https://store.steampowered.com/app/983450/Astral_Towers/
Devel: Apus Software
Engine: Apus Game Engine
Price: £3.99 / $4.99 / $5.69
Wazzat: A turn-based card game mixing strategy and puzzle elements: find approach for each of 78 missions.
Mandatory Disclosure: Dev sent us keys on Curator Connect
Venn:
Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control
- It froze once. Had to cast kill -9.
- Limited options but fullscreen & windowed worked.
Fun?
- I’m going to assume this is an extremely simple / stripped down card game.
- Because I never felt I was juggling stats at any point.
- Hell, to the untrained eye I might even appear to know what I’m doing.
- I most certainly did not.
- The thing is, Brad.
- You can kinda brute force your way through this one.
- Reverse engineering sounds classier but let’s call it what it is. Brute force.
- Find a turn solution that does not get you killed to death and work backwards from there.
- I had a 12min battle because Ice wall + Tree grinch combo was doing -1 to the boss card every third round.
- I am a patient man.
- For $5 you could do a lot worse, I guess. Card games are not my jam.
- Online play was locked, that might have been fun.
Jordan:
Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control
- Launches OOTB
- I thought I got a freeze but my KVM burped
- Art is simple and effective. Really as long as the cards are legible it’s all good
- Controls are simple. Click click boom
Fun?
- The card game is pretty simple. Inscription uses a similar attack + hp method for describing cards
- You get 1 of each type of mana a turn, and you can cast spells based off of a limited repertoire
- I was vibing along, du-du-du-duelling until the game starts to change things up a little
- Usually you gotta clear the board, but then the game starts throwing additional requirements to victory
- By which I mean the card game equivalent of a nanny bar. IN this case, you gotta keep dudes provided alive. Which really means deciphering the exact script this opponent plays
- That’s where it starts falling flat for me. Part of what I like about card games is strategizing and trying to maneuver around another player. That’s why I like stuff like Griftlands and why I have a complicated relationship with MTG
- Here you’re just not given your half of the script and gotta figure it out, which reduces the fun for me
- Also, I like the deckbuilding aspect of card games, so not having it present is a bit of a letdown for me
- There’s also a vs mode, but right now you can only do local hotseat or vs AI. Online seems to be greyed out in the menu
- Apparently online multiplayer was going to get added once there was enough players to support it. So you got steam remote play with the hot seat. That’s it.
- https://steamcommunity.com/app/983450/discussions/0/4477100383811581520/#c4477100383812976178
- It reminds me a bit of those chess puzzles that you’d see in newspapers (remember those?). Good for lonely fun but not much else
Pedro:
Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control
- It launches to a black screen with only a little square on the bottom right
- Hitting alt+enter puts it in a window and lets you see the game.
- You can alt+enter immediately afterwards and you’ll be fine
- It maintains 144 at 2560×1440 because it’s only rendering jpegs on screen.
- You click on things and things happen.
- The graphics and the sound are perfectly serviceable
- But those are not why you’re here
Fun?
- You’re here because this is a cheap card game and you’re wondering if it’s worth a damn.
- It is!
- It’s a puzzle game with card game mechanics and you have to figure out what the winning combination of attack/defense/healing is going to get you to survive.
- And yes, burning through turns to get enough mana to summon two 20 defense golems back to back is absolutely valid.
- I think the devs realized this so they’ve made some enemies drain your mana if certain conditions are met.
- Most of the scenarios are fairly easy but there are some where you die in one turn unless you do the exact right thing.
- While I don’t like that, I do appreciate failing quickly so that you can try something else very quickly.
- Honestly, if it weren’t for that little fullscreen cock-up I’d give it full marks!
Verdict:
Venn:
Jordan:
Pedro:
Hate Mail:
