Linux Game Cast 487: Silent Girth

Valve shrinks the Steam Deck, Amazon wants a Linux gamer, CS:GO gets a Vulkan button, and Open Razer makes 10 new devices blink.

Special thanks to:
Nubbn (increased patreon pledge)
Xanthirus Gaming (new pat)
Akselmo (new pat)
Roux (new patreon)
Nory – (wishlist gift)
RTheren – (wishlist gift)

Listen:

Download:

Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
06:37 Steam awards 2021
09:57 Shrinking Steam Deck images
12:27 Steam Labs experiment 13
14:57 Baldur’s Gate Dark Alliance
18:34 Jupiter Hell 1.2.0 mouse support
20:34 Ducks Goodies DLC
22:54 CS:GO broken on Linux
26:20 CS:GO gets Vulkan support
38:12 Nvidia mystery drivers
40:24 Open Razer adds more blinking devices
43:12 Amazon wants a Linux developer
48:24 GameBoy Studio update
50:22 Space shooter
52:17 Review: Rob Riches
01:00:05 Emails

Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro

Steam: News

Steam Awards 2021

Current categories are “sit back and relax” and “outstanding story-rich game”
- Oh, they added best soundtrack since the last time I checked.
  - And best game you suck at
I guess I’ll wait until all the categories are released and vote… if I don’t forget about it.
People are gonna forget about it.

Shrinking Decks

Apparently there’s gonna be two types of RAM in circulation. Micron and Samsung.
OS image shrank by ~⅔
UI sounds are implemented. Small feature, but it’s cutting it real close
Touch screen should work after a reboot now. Should.
Kernel driver updates for WiFi, Audio, GPU, and others.
Shader caches.
10GB is still a bit, a fresh install of KDE Neon with the Nvidia drivers and Steam was only 9GB for me.
Admittedly it was a while ago, but still.

Hubs

I’m too dumb to use this.
This takes away my full list of Linux games sorted by release date in 4 clicks
It just forces you to use their AI sorted version and a pretty bad scrolling situation to find the full list.
No, thanks.
You could still access the list by clicking on the search magnifying glass and then selecting Games, Linux, and sorting by release date.
This one seems like it’s changing my way of doing things for no actual gain.

Steam: New Games

Dark Allinux

Surprise Linux version? Prolly out in time for the deck
I played a shit ton of this on PS2
- Same
Interplay is still listed as the publisher, are they back from the dead?
Straight outta 2001.
And it out
That £30 price tag for a PS2 game, though.
- Yeah, almost 40 CAD. Way too spensive

Steam: Game Updates

Jupiter Hell 1.2.0

Not-doom the roguelike hits 1.0 after 5 years
Congrats team.
Another game made it through kickstarter/EA purgatory
You can play with a mouse now.
- After 5 years they are still salty about that.
Funkier gear in the early game to spice things up
DoomRL was playable with the mouse, the SDL version was anyway.

Dusk “The Goodies”

DLC containing a bunch of random shit
Alpha builds, developer memes, assets, music
It’s kind of like Lord of the Rings Extended edition, but for dusk
Really dank soundcard is recommended
Is free!
And it has a Cheats text file.

CS: Broken

https://openforeveryone.net/articles/csgo-does-valve-really-care-about-linux-gaming/

VALVe released a buggy version of CS:GO for Linux and Mac
Article presented as evidence, but wasn’t the only one.
Where were these articles asking if <game company> cares about <platform> when <broken game #1302> got released this year alone?
At least it isn’t a critical piece of software. <_< >_>
Still, I think the clickbait headline is unnecessary catastrophising
- As an aside, if you engineer and instrument your shit properly, you can deploy on a friday.

Vulkan GO

DXVK treatment but it launches just fine.
Now that CSGO is using dixvix native, you can also theoretically run this using NINE by Blumenkrantz.
I launched it, it launched.
That’s quite the busy interface.
I fired it up and shut everything else down to play it like I did back in the day.
It holds 144 with Vsync on but you don’t want that in this kind of game.
Unfortunately, the moment you undo the vsync, you get really bad frametime inconsistency.
Stuttering!
That needs fixing.
Also, it doesn’t like to shut down. Had to kill -9 it.
- If anyone was wondering why I had 6+ hours in CS:GO this week.

News:

12GB Nvidia

Suspiciously similar notes to the last release
$3.50 they slipped the 2060 12GB support in.
Have they fixed the DBus message spam?
- No!

Blink 3.2.0

Ten new blinking gadgets.
Razer have never wronged me directly, but then again I never had any of their devices.
But I associate the brand with douchey youtubers and annoying people in general.
It’s like Beats but for gamers.
And I fucking hate that.
But if you need (more) ammunition to call me a hypocrite, I would pay money for a first Gen Razer Blade laptop with the little lcd screens in the keys on the keyboard
If anyone has an ornata, try the starlight_random effect. It may or may not explode your mouse!

Stream team

Unlike Googs, Amazon will give something a few years of support.
- Before getting dumped on the linux foundation?
- You say that like it’s a bad thing.
Like it or not, streaming is the future of gaming.
Be whole-hog or partial.
Companies working on it now will be the market leaders in the future.
When we have 5+ companies offering space-internet with tens of thousands of satellites covering the sky things like streaming begin making sense.
I wonder if they’ll shaft people playing from Linux with the stupid low quality stream like they do with Prime.
Amazon seems to be wanting to be working with upstream proton.
I guess more engineers working on it is for the better?

GB Studio

Hotfix got released this week to fix a bunch of bugs with 3.0.0
A new GBVM engine, support for idle animations, 3 save slots, Analogue pocket native support, UGE audio format.
When Electron and C have sexy time.
No more nineteen actor crashes.

Pew.c

This is dependency management done right.
- As in it barely has any
System libraries only, very nice!
Doesn’t work great with the dualshock 4

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies

Game: Rob Riches
Webzone: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1655670/Rob_Riches/
Devel: Megapop
Engine: Unity
Price: £5.19 / $6.99 / $7.99

Wazzat: You are Rob Riches, fearless adventurer and treasure hunter. Plan your steps carefully as you traverse ancient temples filled to the brim with dangerous traps and mysterious puzzles.

Mandatory Disclosure: Dev sent us keys

Venn:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

The first thing I check when a mobile game shows up on Steam is the fullscreen and resolution option.
We have a fullscreen option but all that does is put a border around the 2160p window.
Developers, I expect better.
The music in the setting screen is about a note away from a Nintendo lawsuit.
Controller worked out of the box.

Fun?

Welcome to another episode of I’m going to overthink this because games like Baba and Steven have damaged me.
In the first thirty minutes I had to hop over to YT for a level knowing it was going to be something wicked-simple that my brain refused to accept as a possible solution.
It was.
It’s a nice little puzzle game that tosses a few thinky challenges your way.
I can say 60min it was still introducing new mechanics.
It’s something you pick up, puzzle around a bit, put down.
Granted, that’s a harder sell on the desktop vs mobile but this can keep you occupied for prolonged stretches.
It even saves to the level where you rage-quit because you were using the controller and the autohop BS got you killed to death because FK drums.
For $6.99 it gets a pass.

Jordan:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

Started in Russian comrade
Brought my system to it’s knees with the graphical power!
Dualshock 4 worked OOTB
The music is pretty funky

Fun?

It’s a sokoban puzzle game!
Do you want more square by square movement puzzles? This game is definitely for you
It keeps things fresh by introducing a new twist every couple of levels
It’s perfectly adequate…I don’t really know what else to say.

Pedro:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

Launched out of the box.
Holds 144FPS at 2560×1440.
DualShock 4 and Dual Sense work out of the box.
Hooray Unity!
The graphics are serviceable and the music is a lot more atmospheric than it should have any business being.
You look at the graphics and you get this epic exploration music and you wonder what happened there.

Fun?

You’ve played this game before.
In fact we played this not too long ago with a different skin and it was called Dark Crypt.
Here it’s less about the undead and more about the traps of some long forgotten civilization.
But you’re still jumping one square at a time to traverse the protagonist person from one side of the map to the other, collecting all the things while avoiding the hazards.
I think I still prefer the PS1/Saturn era 3D to hipster pixel, so in that respect Robert Richmondson here takes the edge over Dark Crypt
But an edge does not a chair make in this situation.

Verdict:

Venn:
Jordan:
Pedro: