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

  • 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?


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:


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