Linux Game Cast 504: Big Deck In Japan

Back 4 Blood brings zombie mayhem to Linux! Dead Cells adds accessibility options in their latest alpha, tracing rays on the Steam Deck, and the Radeon RX 7000 counts to 7.

Special thanks to:
Pickjeff (shirt)

Listen:

Download:

Subscribe Spotify | Pandora | TuneIn | RSS | More

Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
10:04 Steam sees an uptick in Japan
14:14 Ray-tracing on Steam Deck
17:46 ChimeraOS 32
20:15 Lumencraft
21:35 Airborne Motocross
23:25 Back 4 Blood official Linux support
26:34 Dead Cells accessibility update
33:23 AMD Radeon RX 7000
38:58 Bottles update
40:28 PushOps open sourced
42:28 Open NOX
45:14 Review: Shell Out Showdown
55:52 Emails

Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro

Steam: News

Steamy Japan (Rtheren)

I wonder what caused the bump.
PC gaming in Japan is not exactly popular.
No steamOS results in the referenced steam user survey
Once you get passed the initial buy in cost, PC gaming is certainly a lot cheaper, which may also account for the uptick in popularity
Well, that explains why I’ve been seeing so many Japanese peeps on Twitter talking about plank shaped, boiling water powered, handheld gaming devices.
Deck outselling Elden Ring.

Steamy Rays

Rocking a solid 60FPS @ 252p with full ray tracing enabled.
Raytracing on RDNA2 is supported by mesa as of 21.3
- Proton might also need some extra sauce to take advantage of it?
- That it do
Much like for NVidia’s RT stuff, Proton or more likely DXVK/VKD3D need to made aware of AMD’s ray tracing bits.

Chimera 32

Smashing that power button (fam) puts the system to sleep.
Hope that has a toggle because that’s my nuke from orbit option these days.
People are running it on the Aya Neo.
Setting Global proton versions borks external apps, but that’s Valves fault
The deck UI is also borked, but they want feedback so they can unbork
RPCS3 is installed by default again
They did mention on Twitter that the current DeckUI is full of Deck specific stuff, which probably doesn’t work well when being translated to a more generic system.
I guess until VALVe releases it for BigPicture mode one would have to create a bunch of workaround/null scripts which stub out the deck specific stuff.

Steam: New Games

Lumencraft

The top-down baby that resulted from the orgy of Deep rock galactic, terraria and plants vs zombies
Fully destructible environments is neat
10 bucks is a reasonable ask for early access
It’s got split screen coop, but buddy you better be adding online multiplayer before you leave early access

Airborne Motocross

If you’re going to put your free mobile game on Steam for $6 at least add multiplayer.
Yeah, you only really get action-henk style multiplayer “tournaments”
Turns out building a “Sky Bike” is something you can do at home with the family.

Steam: Game Updates

B4B

The only issue was having to toss -dx11 into the launch options.
That, and Katana scaring the hell out of me last night.
As per thursday, it works pretty good
It does nuke steam overlay and getting into steam friend’s games is a bit circuitous. I just wanna right click join
It has the same issue as Elden Ring with the overlay.
You can get Overlay working if you use GameScope, which means people on NVidia are still pretty much SOL.

Accessible Cells

Control tweaks include hold to double jump, shield toggling, hold to roll and some easier ways to handle multi-input combos
They also added a continue mode, so when you die you restart at the beginning of the stage instead of fully restarting you (although rage quitting did something similar)
You can also adjust parry timings
Text colour and size adjustments too
And of course there’s already a small group of assholes in the comments bitching about “difficulty” and “accessibility”
Why wouldn’t you want more people to play the game you like?
How elitist do you have to be to want a game you like to die out because it’s completely inaccessible to new players who want to play it but physically can’t?
As someone with a congenital physical defect, I very much appreciate these efforts, even if I specifically don’t need them.
And it’s very much why I keep dinging chairs when games don’t allow you to rebind controls.
And good on Motion Twin for supporting their game for as long as they have with free content and improvements.

News:

Radeon RX 7000

7 chiples are nice.
Can I get it for under $800?
It is really hard for me to give a damn about new GPU releases when prices are still this inflated.
I don’t like the idea of paying £100-£500 over the MSRP on 2 year old cards.
Why would I want to pay even more for a new one?
Nvidia opened up the supply taps during the past two weeks and GPU prices have plummeted.
Thanks Intel.
There have been several rumors stating that the upcoming RDNA 3 GPUs are going to outperform whatever NVIDIA has to offer in terms of rasterization performance.

Bottles trento

The kill all button asks if you’re sure
It’ll detect the default wineprefix
Fancy schmancy new load screen

Push Ops

It’s on steam as well for $2
Built in love2d
Push physics stuffs to make progress, so it’s Goat Stimulator with a purpose?
It’s written in love2d so you get to love . the terminal.
It’s heavily inspired by Downwell and Nuclear Throne.
Think of it as a Control demake.

Open Nox

Engine reimplementation of the 2000s EA Action Game Nox
Done in GO, C and SDL2
Their new release has a built in ssh server and faster saving and loading
Ah Westwood’s attempt at Diablo!
I only ever played the demo back in the day and I had forgotten how much Dungeon Siege copied from it in the UI department.
Might be worth a play now that it has an open sauce engine.

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies

Game: Shell Out Showdown
Webzone: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1556660/Shell_Out_Showdown/
Devel: manadream
Engine: Löve
Price: £5.29 / $7.99 / $8.99

Wazzat: A hectic, food-fight, reverse battle-royale set in the near future. Take on the role of a sapient vending machine and throw food to sublimity! Be the first vendor to give away all your items and remain empty handed for 10 seconds to win!

Mandatory Disclosure: Devs sent us keys on Curator Connect

Venn:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

Rebindable controls.
No option for windowed.
Pixel pushing performance at 2160p.
No ray tracing :(
Bumping little pixel soundtrack.

Fun?

I spent the first 5 or so minutes of this game trying to figure out how to add bots to the single player mode.
After that moment of derp I loaded the room with bots and attempted to separate my character from the background.
Seriously, maps like Neo New Orleans can eat a bag of dicks with anything more than two players.
Other maps are A O K.
Double jump, dash and sling your internals at other players.
Tag + platforming.
Simple mechanic but it’s a bit of fun when playing with fellow humans vs bots.
Big round of applause for adding online multiplayer.
Sadly, like the game from last week, nobody is playing it.
The peak for April 16 was 2, and that was us.
10 minutes of open lobby on a Saturday and all I caught was a Jordan.
While $7.99 is a fair price for a party game it’s a hard sale for single player.
Speaking of single player, that involves you, some bots, and a level.
Rinse and repeat.
I will say something again, you need to seed an online player base.
Be it steeply discounted multipacks, free weekends, or straight-up free for a limited time ™.

Jordan:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

Launches OOTB
Fullscreen or bust baby,
When you got several dudes on screen, you do get some real bad character blindness
DS4 worked normally. They use the generic button position prompts
The soundtrack is there

Fun?

It’s okay, it just needs players
The rules are a little weird. Basically you need to get a certain number of hits, but their explanation is a little ass backwards. You can figure it out without too much braining tho
As it stands, my options are get stomped by bots or get stomped by Venn
I filled a room with bots and the game became super chaotic. Which could be fun if they were real people you could shit talk instead of computers
It’s a fun riff on the towerfall formula
At 8 bucks it’s a good party game. At least it does have online multiplayer so you can actually play it with folks

Pedro:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

Launches out of the box
Holds 60 at 2560×1440 on this box and 60 at 1280×800 on the Deck
Controller worked out of the box and you can rebind everything.
Some levels make it very hard to see characters.
You can only really tell that they’re there because there’s movement

Fun?

As a party game, this could be fun
Even playing against bots, I did find myself throwing my arms up in celebration when I won.
Usually if a game elicits a positive physical response from me, it’s doing something right.
But you will be playing against bots unless you have a regular group of people who you play games with.
There’s no one else playing it, and it only came out of early access on the 4th of April.
It really does seem to have lived and died in Early Access.
Which is unfortunate since it’s not a terrible party game at all.
It’s simple to understand and once you do give all your things to other players, it’s very exciting to run away for 10 seconds to dodge everyone ganging up on you.
It is fun, it’s just a very lonely kind of fun.

Verdict:

Venn:
Jordan:
Pedro:

Hate Mail:

Linux machine