Linux Game Cast 497: Decks Out For Harambe

GOG suggests installing Windows on your Steam Deck, Deck compatibility guides, and salty Deck reviews. Then we talk about a new game from Valve, adding scripts & macros to gamepads, N64 emulation in the browser, and Vermintide 2 heading to Linux.


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Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
06:53 Steam Deck launch day details
09:09 Great on Deck
12:05 GOG suggests installing Windows on your Steam Deck
16:65 Salty Steam Deck reviews
21:45 Steam limits discounts to 90%
45:15 Steam headed to ChromeOS
27:15 Aperture Desk Job
29:25 Vangers HD
31:47 Dwarf Fortress roadmap
33:45 New DOTA hero
36:55 Steam deck testing for Vermintide 2
48:28 Heroic launcher adds GOG support
50:58 Gamepad scripts & macros with AntiMicroX
54:08 Hypnagonia: A Spire inspired deck builder
56:35 N64 in web assembly
59:55 Review: Beyond Mankind: The Awakening
01:14:42 Emails


Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro

Steam: News

Launch Day Deets

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1675180/view/3113680716504852534

  • Hope you still got the scrip.
  • If not you got 3 days to get it together.
  • Notification emails started flowing on Friday.
  • You have 72 hours to give Steam the wet stinky cash.


Check your Library

  • Ultimate chicken horse was surprising to see on the unsupported list. Supraland is not.
  • Great on Deck will be a good resource for finding Proton games that JustWork ™ .
  • I’ve been using the third party CheckMyDeck website because you can sort by verification date.
  • I’m really damn curious about GOW in Deck.


GOG on Deck

  • Get’em Frenchie
  • Yeah, GOG would very quietly like you to forget that they ever offered linux anything
  • Do not. I repeat DO NOT install windows on your deck.
  • It’s going to be fun watching companies double-down on ZOMG Linux BAD.
  • The social media human could have said “No.” and that would have been that.
  • Why would they ever consider making a buttload more money by supporting the competing platform?
  • With the amount of people I see claiming that GOG is the best on the Steam forums, you’d be almost fooled to think they’re relevant in any way in the Linux gaming space.


Deck me maybe

  • Battery life is always going to be a fair complaint, especially when you can’t swap them out
  • I feel bad for the lilliputians who have to grasp the mighty deck.
  • “Several YouTube channels such as GamersNexus and ThePhawx have already had the opportunity to test out the Steam Deck and found that they were only able to get around 85-90 minutes out of the device before it ran out of juice.”
    • That’s disingenuous at best and downright false at worst.
  • Steve from Gamer’s Nexus specifically called out shit clickbait “journalism” for claims exactly like these.
  • But sensationalism clicks, apparently.
  • The rocket League thing is a legit problem tho.
  • This reads like a motherfkr salty about not getting a review unit.
  • At $400 you can’t buy a more powerful PC, much less handheld in today’s market.


RIP 91%

  • What does this fix, exactly?
  • Preventing developers from pumping the price and discounting 99%?
  • Guess if you want to go below 90% off, you can just make it free.
  • Then again, the developer can just set the price lower if they really want.
  • Though that will probably count towards the changes to the Steam page they’re allowed to make before VALVe gets involved.


Steamy ChromeOS

  • So all of the chromebooks on this list have XE iris graphics, so I guess we’ll see how much juice they can pull out of a mobile package
  • If your Chromebook has an (11th gen) Intel Core i5 or i7 processor & 7 GB of RAM you got a lappy with a nerfed OS.
  • I look forward to google artificially limiting that on even more Chrome boxes than just the ones that don’t meet those requirements.

Steam: New Games

Aperture Desk Job

  • It’s a controller tutorial
    • A “fun” one
  • They promise some portal lore tidbits
  • Not Portal 3! Because that had to be pointed out.
  • All that does is make me want to start poking around for some Frog Fractions.
  • Hey, it’s free.
  • Is there an app to map a controller to the keyboard?

Steam: Game Updates

720p Gibberish

  • Released in 1998, last updated in February 2022.
  • And it’s open sauce, now!
  • Anyone keen on getting it to run at 30 FPS or oven 60?
  • Just me?
  • Ok.
  • Stability of Multiplayer mode was significantly improved?
  • It has multi, TIL.


Dwarf Fortress Roadmap

  • Massively refactoring the GUI for a game which basically had none
  • Especially for a game like Dwarf Fortress.
  • You get even the smallest bit wrong and there’s a rabid fanbase just waiting for the slightest cockup.
  • Linux builds coming spoon


DOTA 7.31

  • Ctrl-f deck or linux comes up with a biiiiig goose egg
  • There’s a brand new hero that’s totally not the rancor
  • A bunch of balance tweaks that no doubt will piss off players who actually understand what they mean.
  • MOBA gonna MOBA but I’m curious about how that genre works on Deck.


Those rat bastards

  • Well well well, what do we got here.
  • Someone is trying to get certified.
  • Gonna have to push that button then, boyos.
  • The dominoes start to tilt.
  • Valve has given developers a fk around and find out button and I expect it will get pressed (internally) at least once… by everyone.
  • Smashing that Proton button does not = addition sales ATM.

News:

Heroic GOG

  • Having the ability to use the steam runtime for heroic games is pretty neat
  • Also GOG support. See frenchie’s previous comment.
  • It can work as a GOG client if you don’t have an Epic account.
  • Good.
  • I want an open-source client to gobble up the market share on Deck before GOG bends the knee and drops Galaxy official for Linux.


AntiMicroX-3.2.2

  • Fancy new tray icons and it’ll check for the latest debian package on GitHub
    • If you installed it from the deb they give you, you no longer have to manually check to see if there’s an update.
  • Before Steam Input, this was the thing people used to map keyboard input to controllers.
  • Gather round children and let me tell you about a time when gamepads didn’t work under Linux.
  • Apps like AntiMicroX have their uses in modern times allowing people to play “retro” titles.
  • You can even map mouse / scripts & macros to a gamepad as well.
  • Hell, you can assign multiple switchable sets of mappings to the gamepad.
  • Did I mention it has profiles?


Hypnagonia

  • Open sauce deck builder “heavily inspired” by slay the spire.
  • Looking for other peeps to fill in all the roles, from the sound of things.
  • Always love a browser version. It runs a bit like poop, but the linux download is just a single executable
  • Very relaxing piano music

Web N64

  • Browser based n64 cuz why not?
  • If you want to actually do debugging you will want to get the Windows version working on your machine.
    • Imma go vomit, excuse me
  • Gotta host your own if you want save states

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies


Game: Beyond Mankind: The Awakening

Webzone: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1301590

Devel: Brytenwalda

Engine: Unity

Price: £15.50 / $19.99 / $22.79

Wazzat: Beyond Mankind: The Awakening is an indie old school type RPG taking place in a post-apocalyptic world. The game sports a mature and deep narrative, rich exploration, tense combat, and immersive RPG mechanics.

Mandatory Disclosure: Developers sent us keys



Venn:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

  • Launches out of the box and has all the basic settings for sights & sounds.
  • Once in-game you will start digging around in the graphics because it struggles to hit 60 on a 2060 @ 1080p.
  • I had to dial the pretty all the way down to fugly to hit that 60 fps target.
  • I dare anyone to notice.
  • It’s fully voiced but only in the sense that someone was given the job of reading the lines in front of them.

Fun?

  • Xmen > Mad Max > HALO + DOOM 3 airlock.
  • That’s the however long intro boiled down to a few seconds.
  • I got about an hour into the game and according a forum posts that’s ⅓ of the actual gameplay.
  • During this time I poked around a house, drank some beer, and killed a few rats.
  • Then I go next door and get the first fetch quest.
  • Killed some more rats, read a wall, and unlocked a door.
  • This was all to get a fusion powered moon tablet.
  • Not daddy gave me a mission, shit went down, and I ran off to do thing #2.
  • Then I ran into a couple of big doges and noped into a house and up the stairs.
  • I watched the dodge spin in circles while the pathfining was failing in a hilarious way.
  • That’s where I tapped out.
  • A clear attempt to tell a story was made but Beyond Mankind is an example of ambitions outweighing ability.
  • Between the performance issues, generic story, and boring gunplay I have to give this a pass.
  • I appreciate the effort that went into the game but it feels & looks like something from 20 years ago.
  • You might miss when swinging for the fence but at least you swinged.


Jordan:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

  • Can only change the resolution settings
  • Struggles to hit 45 ferps @UHD. 90+ @1080 sometimes with Vsync off, depending on what hallway you’re in
  • This is some Xbox 360 goodness in the looks department. Very Oblivionesque
  • The voice acting is pretty meh, but you can only do so much with the dialogue given

Fun?

  • Yeah, that intro segment is loooong. There’s a thing in writing called “show don’t tell”. There has to be a better way to expose you to the steady state world than sitting you down for 30 minutes of nonstop monologuing
  • Well, it’s Not-Fallout3
  • I thought the character creator was gonna go full eugenics on us for a second, but they pulled away at the last minute. They do the whole “different stats for different genders” thing that i’m not a super big fan of
  • Those rats man
  • Pro tip, dropped ammo and resources don’t persist across reloads, so if you run out of ammo and you died, you’re gonna have to go back to an earlier save point where you had some gun food
  • Some of the dialogue choices are so cringeworthy. I just tried my best to seduce everything in a five mile radius. Also watching daddy get a bullet in his head was hilarious
  • Gameplay wise, it’s okay. It feels very stretched out though


Pedro:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

  • It launched out of the box
  • It barely hits 50 in game at 2560×1440 on High.
  • It’s a WASD/cursor keys type of situation.
  • You can rebind most everything from what I saw
  • And the voice acting was actually better than I expected.
  • The voice actors themselves often corrected the cock ups in the writing which I thought was pretty funny!
  • But yes, the graphics are very 2007.

Fun?

  • It’s unintentionally funny.
  • I’ve mentioned the voice actors delivering the lines better than they were written but there’s also the clear amount of dedication and work that went into making Beyond Mankind.
  • Made by a group of people who were clearly in over their heads but they weren’t about to let that stop them.
  • It’s like it was made by two people and one really liked S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and the other really liked Mass Effect.
  • I don’t hate it.
  • In fact, I caught myself just playing the game until I ran into the first Pale Sack.
  • Those are the humans mutated by the genetic medicine/virus thing the intro talks about.
  • That bit broke my immersion because I unloaded 12 shotgun shells to his head and the fucker kept coming.
  • That’s why I stopped Borderlands halfway through and that’s why I stopped here.
  • I didn’t actually hate the story but I do agree with Jordan on the needless exposition.
  • You have a videogame, you can show me all that shit and even let me play through it.
  • You don’t need to spend 20 minutes in a dialogue tree explaining it to me.

Verdict:

Venn:
Jordan:
Pedro:


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