Steam Deck Docks get upgraded USB holes, Playdate consoles begin shipping, Overgrowth goes open-source, updating DualSense firmware from Linux, and a big blue fox invades Half-Life 2.
Special thanks to:
swein (new patron)
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Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
14:52 Steam Deck is top seller
18:21 SteamOS UI speedup
20:00 Upgraded Steam Deck Docks
23:49 Retrodeck
26:33 New games added to Proton 7.0-2
30:23 Portal writer wants to make 3
33:42 Starfox Half-Life 2 MOD
43:11 Playdate handheld begins shipping
46:49 Open-source Overgrowth
50:54 Updating DualSense firmware from Linux
54:54 SDL reverts to X
01:00:51 Cytopia city builder
01:03:47 Review: Chest Mate
01:15:27 Emails
Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro
Steam: News
- It’s called Aerith now? Is squeenix gonna sue somebody? I thought it was jupiter
- So if we trust Tomshardware’s math based on it’s position in sales by revenue compared to elden ring, ~100K consoles have been sold.
- However, considering valve gets 100% of the revenue as opposed to other games, I’m not so sure
- Clearly the demand exists.
- Sucks for anyone who wants one.
- At least you can get in line and one will show up, eventually.
- It’s a really nice gaming device.
- Apparently the deck UI ate shit if you had a ton of games. It’s fixed now
- The regular UI did too not too long ago.
- In the grand scheme of things I don’t even have those many games in my account, and I can see it struggling when I scroll down a little too quick.
- All USB3 all the time is pretty nice
- Hopefully they don’t do apple pricing
- They had to confirm it was gigabit ethernet.
- That dock looks like a cable mess-o-tron.
- Yeah, the art with the dangling cable to plug into the top looks a wee janky
- If you are to have it like that from the front, that hides most of the cables, especially if it’s towards the back of the desk up against the wall.
- Looks a lot less messy than currently existing solutions and I’ve seen quite a few at work.
- Plus it has a little holding slot to work as a stand.
- Another project that aims to bring easy emulation to the Deck.
- This one is now one click install from Discover.
- Also comes with EmulationStation preset and a Deck friendly theme.
- This looks simple enough that I might actually do it.
- The HZD fix may be in reference to LinusTikToks Mid game slowdown on the steamdeck
- You can play Elden Crack without needing Experimental, since this is the big one.
- This is the version of Proton stable that actually makes use of the newly added EAC support.
- And as I mentioned last week, this was the bulk of what was in Experimental.
- If you look at the notes for that now, there’s not much there.
- 300 headcount at the Valve.
- That was my big takeaway from this.
- No, don’t call it portal.
- Or call it a Portal Story: Cave’s Johnson
- There’s not enough Steam Deck sales that’ll get rid of the VALVe can’t count to 3 meme.
- Ingress 3.
Steam: Game Updates
- So there’s a mod that replaces Alyx Vance in HL2 with Krystal from Star Fox adventures for the gamecube
- Much like Lola Bunny from space jam or Ron Perlman in Beauty and the Beast, Krystal was the direct cause of the sexual awakening of many pre-teens and as such people have a fondness for the character
- They actually got the OG voice actor of Krystal, who apparently got out of acting to reprise the role. So they must have some damn good blackmail
- The jiggle, tho…
- Not knowing what the hell a Krystal was I looked it up online.
- This was a mistake.
- Parents & older siblings, hear me.
- Install this MOD and let the youths grow up thinking it’s cannon.
News:
- Yes, that crank will break.
- Probably not from overuse, since I don’t think anyone will crank it as long as they have an alternative, but from constant fiddling or forgetting to tuck it back into the side and sitting on it.
- People complain about the screen, but I don’t know how they expect the battery on something that size to last more than 30 seconds playing games if it had a full colour, backlit, screen.
- Well, games that are made nowadays anyway.
- That could be a good medium to bring back a bunch of old GameBoy or pre-Symbian phone games.
- Order today and you might get one in 2023.
- $179 is in the ballpark for a little tinker device like this.
- Should be interesting to see how devs incorporate the crank into their game.
- I guess people didn’t want to pay $25 for it, so they tossed it on github
- Well, not really. This is just the engine. The assets and levels still cost $25
- If you’re someone who really likes rodent beat’em’ups or can see the beautiful perfect game in the block of marble that is the overgrowth code base, you now have the opportunity to pick up where they left off
- Apparently they are also accepting PRs for improvements. Nice to see
- The animations looked alright.
- I remember the video series they did, there was one episode all about the animations and how to make them look natural and like they flow together.
- What I’m saying is: if you’re an indie game developer and you don’t know how to do that, go have a look!
- Still some lingering problems with third party software, particularly with nvidia drivers and some of the wayland libraries
- You can override this behaviour if you want wayland to be first class
- Hmm, even after introducing GBM compatibility via EGL Streams, wayland on NVidia is still a bit poopoo.
- Beyond this you see distros not defaulting to wayland if they see an NVidia card and gamescope straight up still doesn’t work.
- The latter entirely being nvidia’s fault.
- This is why we can’t have nice things.
- SDL is 100% ready for Wayland but a couple of game-breaking issues have popped up.
- Nvidia gets the blame right out of the gate but Steam overlay not working with Wayland is kind of a big one as well.
- Is that a Nvidia thing or does it work on AMD?
- Sony released a windows firmware updater for the ds5, which has been plagued with firmware issues
- Runs in wine good too, so if you have a dualsense you can get better charging and battery
- I haven’t really had any of the issues this is supposed to fix, so I’m not gonna.
- Do you have a perfectly functioning PS dualsense controller laying around?
- Want to do something about that?
- Prior to this the only way to update the controller was if you had access to a PS5.
- Might be worth the risk if you have an early one with terrabad battery life.
- Might.
- Pan works with wasd and arrow keys
- Lots of control tweaks in their latest release.
- It’s got the retro feel down.
- Ships a portable Linux bin.
- Qt based tile editor for editing TileData JSON files.
- SDL2 based rendering engine written in C++.
CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope
– Not sure if want
– Check it out
– Shutupandtakemymonies
Game: Chest Mate
Webzone: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1889790/Chest_Mate/
Devel: OptizOnion
Engine: Unity
Price: £4.99 / $4.99 / $5.69
Wazzat: A precision based tower defense/puzzle game that focuses on optimization! Control your cannon, optimize your defenses and defend your mate! Chest Mate is a challenging aim-based strategy game.
Mandatory Disclosure: Devs sent us keys on Curator Connect
Venn:
Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control
- It launches, has that going for it.
- Options are a bit sparse.
- Volume control and… just volume control.
- No resolution settings, no windowed mode, no rebindable controls.
- I didn’t pop open the ferps counter but it was well over 60.
Fun?
- Chest Mate is a pioneer in one way.
- I believe it’s the first example of a developer waiting until development wrapped and said FK MOBLIE, we’re doing Desktop.
- Without changing anything.
- Drag-and-release does not translate well to the gerbil and that goes double if it’s wearing a tracksuit.
- I don’t know if Steam has a warning for “requires touchscreen” but this game needs it.
- 18 minutes in and the situation was unmaintainable.
- I don’t like getting killed to death due to shite controls and this does not qualify for git gud, scrub.
- Tried it with the Xclone and that was an adventure in not locking the cursor on the game screen.
- Yes, it uses mouse+keeb emulation to accomplish this.
- Surprising what button mashing can get up to when the cursor is on another screen.
- The game mechanic is not bad.
- It’s basic tower defence with a put shit in the way mechanic.
- But unless you have a touchscreen on your lappy it’s going to get refunded with a quickness.
Jordan:
Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control
- Launches OOTB
- No windowed mode
- Also completely ignores the prefs file, so I hope you have gamescope if you want to play this in a window
- Uses a cursor, but really feels like a mobile game. Clicking and dragging in this feels so alien. Swiping with a finger makes more sense
- Even weirder still, I don’t see it on itunes or play
- By the way, it doesn’t lock your mouse either, so have fun losing yoru shot when you accidentally nudge your mouse out of the window
- It does have a sweet pirate soundtrack tho
Fun?
- Yeah, this really needed to be on mobile
- I’m not a fan of the whole shooting mechanic with a mouse
- It’s just not fun
- Pedro is right about the spazzy reticule as well.
- The game itself is about trying to either buy yourself enough time to shoot all the enemies or corral them all into a single location so you can kill a bunch of them with a single hit
- Each level also has a “storm mode” which seems to be a rapid fire shooting test
- It’s not a lazy game by any means, it just has bad controls
- And not even that, if it were on a touch screen it could be good controls. And the steam deck has that!
- But I don’t has a deck, so I’m not a fan
Pedro:
Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control
- Launches out of the box
- On Steam Deck as well but wiggling the analog sticks didn’t do anything.
- So no controller support.
- Mouse and keyboard it is then.
- Why do the cannons spaz out when I release the left click?
- I missed so many shots because of that little spaz attack, I don’t want to keep playing anymore.
- And oh, look! It’s a stupid little folder on my home directory with the developer’s name.
- Minus one chair
Fun?
- There was very little fun to be had.
- I’m serious, it’s your typical tower defence but you have a completely unintuitive shooting mechanic which gave me flashbacks to some really nasty games of the 90s and early 2ks.
- Silver being the worst offender.
- I liked the story and exploration in Silver, but everytime I got into combat I’d stop playing.
- And after struggling with the cannons spazzing out, tying my brain in a knot to try and memorize the simple combat mechanic of shooting such spastic weapons, I couldn’t hit the Next button because I had to go back to the map screen to progress beyond level 5.
- I’m not joking.
- The game actively stops your progress, not by virtue of its accomplishments, but because you really have to go back to the level select to see some clouds move away.
- I suppose this is where I mention that we can’t give games 0 chairs.
Verdict:
Venn:
Jordan:
Pedro:
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