Linux Game Cast 512: Steamy Double Decker

Vulkan powered Shredder’s Revenge comes to Linux next week! Pokemon invades the terminal, adding a second screen to your Steam Deck, and the best controller with two spinny wheels that you will see this week.


Listen:


Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
07:04 Steamy Double Decker
10:56 Endlanders First Encounter
14:16 Final Vendetta
18:26 TMNT Shredder’s Revenge headed to Linux
27:26 Stop shipping Bottles
32:16 Making WINE static
34:35 Autoclicker for Linux
37:05 Minetest big updates + blimps
39:15 Pi powered Rexy Wheels
44:16 Pokemon in the terminal
46:55 Review: Endcycle VS
01:01:09 Email


Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro

Steam: News

Double Decker

  • Now you can accurately emulate Nintendo (3)DS games.
  • I want….
  • If you want to play certain games originally played on a very well known dual screen handheld the right way, this is the Mod for you.
  • IPS LCD Screen with HDMI Controller Card for Raspberry Pi.
  • Lithium Battery Charger Module.
  • 50 Pin ribbon cable extender.
  • 3D printer.
  • 5/10 TSA acceptance rating.

Steam: New Games

Endlanders : First Encounter

  • Hyper light children’s card game meets megaman battle network
  • Right now the demo is free on steam
  • They have a kickstarter for the full version
  • Requires the Elusive 11 linux
  • It makes use of that same grid-based active combat system we’re gonna be throwing chairs at later.
  • I can you right now, Endlanders seems to do it better.


Final Vendetta

  • Kings of kung fu better watch out.
  • Looks like another streets of rage style beat’em’ups
    • Unlike SoR4 though, no online multiplayer
  • It looks very Streets of Rage 2 but with smoother animation.
  • What we have here is a SNES era Final Fight with the serial numbers filed off.
  • 3 players, 6 areas, 3 difficulty settings, and several unlockables.
  • Move & combos included.
  • Unlike Streets of Rage 4 they went full hipster-pixel and yeah, meh.
  • It looks serviceable in the screenshots but those sharp pixels really show in the video.
  • I get that it’s considered an art style these days but retro games didn’t look like that, not even a little bit.
  • Thank you for attending my TedX, now politely get off my lawn.

Steam: Game Updates

Turtles

  • Dotemu continuing to kill it by offering native ports of their games
  • FNA: It fucking works goddammit!
  • First FNA game to Vulkan by default too https://twitter.com/flibitijibibo/status/1535242234886488064?s=20&t=gyq4IK1wD4DKH0o_QqM_6g
  • On. Line. Co. Op.
  • I spent a lot of time playing The Hyperstone Heist back in the day.
  • This looks a bit like that with some of the original arcade thrown in.
  • You can play as April but not ACE DUCK, BOOOO!!!11!!
  • Visually this falls into the hipster-pixel done right category.
  • Not going to cut yourself on a single one of them.

News:

Shipping bottles

  • Bottles is taking a flaptak first approach and potentially discussing dropping AUR
  • It’s a fast moving project with some newer dependencies that may not be in your distro of choice
  • They don’t want maintenance requests from distro packagers
  • They did offer support for maintainers who want to make high quality, tested integrations.
    • It’s a thing for running Windows games, that just seems to be perfectly on brand.


Static WINE

  • That’s a neat idea.
  • No Vulkan yet.


Xclicker

  • At first I was all, WTF do you need this for.
  • Then I saw the Minecraft and I was all, oh.
  • For anyone who has burnt out a microswitch, yeah, you get it.
  • Not a whole lot of new features in this release but there is support for holding down a button to fire the autoclicker.
  • Like a turbo button.


Mine the test

  • An a-MAZE-ing new game mode where you get one look at the path out of the maze and then you gotta do it.
  • Nodecore ( a mode that is basically minecraft TIS-100) has a bunch of new translations.
  • Steampunk blimps.
  • For those of you who care, that’s all you want to hear.
  • New MOD called xmaps that adds treasure-maps to the HUD.
  • I look forward to seeing what creative uses people come up with.
  • New texture colour MOD that allows you to, you’ll never guess and I’m not telling.
  • A huge crocodile boss featured in March’s post, was released on ContentDB.
  • I like the main menu redesign proposal.
  • Latest and greatest available in FlatPackSnaps.


Rexy wheels

  • Nintendo Power Pad was sooo last year.
  • The new hotness is turny wheely things.
  • Just the thing you need to lathe simulator 1917.
  • Pi Pico powered.
  • I had to look at the dates to make sure it wasn’t April 1st again.
  • £600 seems a lot for a gimmick that in their showcase video requires at least 3 hands to play with
  • Get a PicoSystem, or one of the Pico8 clones that exist now.
  • I’m not 100% against getting one of these to play Trackmania.


Terminal monsters

  • It’s a wee janky but yeah, it’s pokemon in a terminal
  • Well, legally distinct pocket storable nintendo please don’t send your lawyers after us please we beg you monsters
  • You do need a pip install –user scrap_engine tho.
  • That’s commented out in the installation instructions.
  • Nethack TNG.

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies


Game: Endcycle VS
Webzone: https://store.steampowered.com/app/886200/EndCycle_VS/
Devel: 12B3
Engine: LibGDX
Price: £23.79 / $29.99 / $33.99

Wazzat: EndCycle VS is a deckbuilding roguelike adventure that throws you into the heart of war. Master over 4,000 attacks, build your unique deck and see if you have what it takes to end the cycle!

Mandatory Disclosure: Devs sent us keys



Venn:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

  • All of the basics are here and that’s good to see.
  • Windowed / full.
  • Choose your own resolution / fullscreen.
  • Rebindable controls.
  • Music / volume sliders.
  • Pixel art is done well and no complaints about the beep and boops.

Fun?

  • Did you know Mega Man Battle Network is the only Esport played on the Game Boy Advance?
  • I’m not kidding, they have tournaments and shit.
  • Point being, this is Mega Man Battle Network.
  • I have to assume the developers expect you to know the mechanics coming in because that in depth tutorial is about 2 minutes long.
  • Granted, you can pick up the basics rather quick you’re going to get killed to death relying on basic-bitch attacks.
  • I played about an hour into the story but nothing really hooked me.
  • At best, it was an overcomplicated game of dodgeball.
  • The deck building mechanic seemed workable from the view of someone who knows fk-all about that nonsense.
  • I did check to see if there was anyone playing online but as you might expect, ghosts town at 5:08 on a Saturday afternoon.
  • Online player count peaked at 18 during April of this month.
  • Then there is the price, $29.99.
  • At that price I was thinking it was on the Switch. Nope.
  • It’s a free game on Android.
  • I will defend Stephen’s Sausage Roll being $30 all. Day. long.
  • But this, this is only going to work with an active online playerbase and considering it’s a niche genre, it’s not going to happen at that price.
  • Doesn’t matter if the game is worth it or not.
  • The SteamDB lowest recorded price is $6.99 and you might consider skewing closer to that.
  • If you want more than zero people playing it on a Saturday afternoon.
  • I don’t think you’re going to be able to extract $29.99 of fun out of it in single player.
  • Then again, it does have MODs, 16 of them.


Jordan:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

  • Launches OOTB
  • Holy shit it launched an ALSOFT sink in jack
  • Super tux kart does that. I got super confused when the game didn’t show up in pavucontrol. I don’t think other libgdx games we’ve covered have done that
  • Very flexible controller configurator, but you can’t change the button labels without having to reset all the buttons
  • Pixel art is well and the whole cast of , no real issues there
  • The soundtrack beeps and boops

Fun?

  • This reminds me of Indivisible, but instead of having different characters, you have this “deckbuilding setup”
  • Also mega man battle network style grid movement
  • There’s a nice little tutorial that explains how all the various attacks work, and the modification of those attacks and how you can spread them out across three decks to cover the weakness
  • Although, to be honest I didn’t really see the need to change the starter deck
  • I’m with pedro on this, you can kinda button mash your way to success on the preset
  • There is some “gitting gud” with dodging enemy attacks and setting up combos for some missions that require a certain number of combos to be hit
  • But beyond that, mash away
  • There’s a pretty diverse cast of characters and once you go through enough of the missions you unlock all of the abilities so you can mix and match your playstyle with your preferred character
  • Also comes with a level editor
  • I guess vs could be a thing but I don’t see myself getting that good at it. Also unfortunately nobody is online


Pedro:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

  • Launches out of the box
  • Vsyncs correctly to whatever your Hz happen to be
  • Controllers work out of the box, from your DualShock to the Deck.
  • I know there were bloops and background noise, it’s using alsa so I had to link those to OBS to capture the audio.
  • But I couldn’t tell you anything about them other than they were… unintrusive.
  • The graphics are also technically there and the gyrating hips of the Azure Agents will forever be burned into my retinas.
  • That faction has no business being that sexy!

Fun?

  • This is where things get complicated
  • This is a deckbuilder but not in the sense of Slay the Spire or Griftlands, no.
  • This is a deckbuilder because the 12 skills you can have at any one point, called VOCs (voxelized object container), are treated as “cards” with cooldowns.
  • And the cooldowns don’t just affect the current “hand”, no.
  • They affect all 3 hands so you might as well just play with one, adding more hands tends to make things needlessly complicated and far more prone to mistakes.
  • And you get rewarded based on how quickly or effectively you deal with battles, so switching between the three hands is stupid and inneficient.
  • But all this to say the mechanics seem antithetical to the kind of game it’s desperately trying to be.
  • Instead of cooldowns, how about you get a one shot “card” which gets binned once you use it and you get another random one from your deck in that same level?
  • I feel like the combat and mechanics are at odds in this one.
  • Button mashing while dodging up and down seems to be a valid strategy.

Verdict:

Venn:
Jordan:
Pedro:


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