Axiom Verge 2 exits Epic Early Access! Steam gets crazy with Joy-Cons, simplifying id Software store listings, and NVIDIA releases a bunch of files that end in h. Then Blacken Slash faces, the ChairAQsition. All this, plus your emails.
Special thanks to:
PtDave (twitch resub)
Listen:
Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
00:51 Spider Man on Linux
07:00 Better joy-con support for Steam
10:12 Proton GE 7.29
12:47 Axiom Verge 2 comes to Linux
17:19 Kung Fu Er San
20:04 Live Maze for Twitch
22:09 Forsaken Portals
24:19 id software Steam listings update
34:04 Nvidia releases new old header files
37:49 Big update for heroic games launcher
41:29 Principia goes open-source
44:19 Super VGA golf
48:14 Review: Blacken Slash
58:14 Email
Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro
Steam: News
- Now you can get fancy with the Joy-Cons
- Really fancy.
- Adding the joycon layout to the configurator instead of just mapping the buttons on the switch pro controller is nice
- I guess the steam input guy got a lot of busted joycons and fixed them up
- A hotfix came out shortly after to fix the slightly abnormal behaviour the joycons were exhibiting
- Comes with the workaround to ameliorate the stuttering in Phantasy Star Online 2
- Big kudos to Nova the Canadian on Discord for the heads up on that working on Linux now too.
- Fullscreen hack doesn’t work unless FSR is enabled, but GE decided to make that the default going forward for everything you run with ProtonGE
- And I support this decision!
- I only use ProtonGE for the occasional game and I almost always enable FSR as well.
- Vermintide 2 seems to be running well with this once you update the EAC proton runtime
- Which has a mandatory introduction mission by the way. Please let me get to an options menu before you force me to start playing
Steam: New Games
- Suck it, free time.
- Got a free year of devel in EGS.
- The original nailed whatever game loop the Metroid had back in the day.
- Can we get an option for max framerate?
- MANGOHUD_CONFIG=fps_limit=70 mangohud %command%
- I die a lot.
- That looks like Metroid got real cozy with Blasphemous.
- Big kudos to the dev for sending us keys
- Black belt, the next generation
- Anyone remember Kung-Fu Master on the NES?
- This is a mix of that with a little Street Fighter 1987 thrown in.
- Big kudos to the dev for sending us keys
- So this is a sort of twitch chat interactive intermission
- Hook it up to your channel, Stick this up and the chat can try to race to the center of the maze while you poop
- You can also use this for contests .
- Slightly more interactive version of Twitch plays marbles?
- Big kudos to the devs for sending us keys
- A privateer styled deck builder
- I guess it’s a little similar to the Last federation or Drox Operative in the sense that you can build alliances, space stations and the like as well
- And here I was thinking, man, I could really go for a card game with spaceships ‘n shit.
- IDK, maybe this one does something new.
Steam: Game Updates
- Now you have to buy all the DLC, gotcha.
- If you just own doom 3 you get bonus BFG
- If you owned the classic Doom collection, you now get all the classic Dooms, including 64.
- I can finally play 64 without having to buy Doom Eternal.
News:
- Posting documentation going back to Fermi.
- Pascal support means I’ll have a long term driver option for the 1080TI maybe sorta
- I remember when they released the Maxwell headers originally, Google+ was still a thing.
- These are the headers which contain the address bits for the GPU 3D renderer and texture sampler.
- It’s a very chonky release
- Esync/Fsync is now togglable
- Epic online service integration is now shown through the UI for gog games
- You can sort games by playtime
- More improvements on GOG cloud saves
- Which the native Linux versions of the games they have on their store do not support.
- You need to be using the Windows version to get that!
- And somehow, there’s a subsegment of the Linux community that keeps sucking GOG’s proverbial dick.
- If it weren’t for Lutris, Heroic and the rest of these kinds of clients it would be absolute shit.
- Physics puzzle game from 2013
- Had a less than successful indiegogo
- Now fully open source
- Building on Linux is straightforward.
- Watching the trailer it would seem some fun is there to be had.
- What the fuck that is way prettier than a hipster pixel golf game has any right to be
- The closest thing we’re getting to a linux port of Lee Carvalho’s Putting Challenge.
- Damn thing even has online multi.
- It Looks like Virtua Golf is such a thing existed on the Saturn.
- The only reason I care was that one screenshot of the pool table.
CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope
– Not sure if want
– Check it out
– Shutupandtakemymonies
Game: Blacken Slash
Webzone: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1746560/Blacken_Slash/
Devel: ehmprah
Engine: Unity Godot
Price: £4.99 / $4.99 / $4.99
Wazzat: A tactical roguelite RPG where the items you choose define your character. Create powerful builds from an abundance of loot as you try to save a corrupted retro computer system in byte-sized tactical puzzles.
Mandatory Disclosure: Dev sent us keys on Curator Connect
Venn:
Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control
- Launches OOTB on Debian 11 / Nvidia combo.
- Full Screen and drag your own resolution windowed mode.
- Had a solid FFS moment when I grabbed the xclone controller and the cursor started moving around.
- Mouse emulation?
- Really?
- In 2022?
- Has a couple of soundtracks to choose from.
Fun?
- Fun?
- Well, you might remember earlier on in the review when I brought up mouse emulation being used in place of proper controller support.
- That’s code for you’re going to be playing Blacken Slash with a keyboard & mouse in front of your PC.
- Not chilling on your couch with a controller or with your GabeGear.
- That sucks, because Blacken Slash is a fun little pickup puzzle game that’s full-metal RNG.
- Granted it has options to modify the RNG between runs but what’s the fun in that?
- Anyway, back to my point.
- It’s the kind of game that works best in spurts. Not stidown marathon sessions.
- You move your triangle around, decide on movement, attack and sometimes survive.
- Get some upgrades between levels, mix and match skills, bitch about not getting the heals upgrade and off to the next plain of 3D nope.
- For $4.99 it’s not bad entertainment at all.
- How, fkn, ever.
- If you are going to go through the trouble of putting your mobile app on the Steam don’t fuck up the end game and cheap out on controller support.
- This mobile game was designed for touch, not mouse & keyboard.
- Fix that.
Jordan:
Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control
- Launches OOTB, fullscreen on the wrong monitor
- You can toggle window mode, which turns it into a phone sized screen. Hmmm
- Drag your own resolution from there
- Controls are tap to do everything because it’s a mobile game
- Visuals get the point cross
- The soundtrack is bumping
Fun?
- As far as tactics style games go, this one is okay
- You have a pretty small board and a number of abilities you can expand upon as you kill stuff or try to get obstacles
- Each board has one of a couple mission types:
- Kill all the baddies
- Get to the objective in a certain number of turns
- Last a certain number of rounds
- The maps are varied enough that despite having all the good tiered items, you still never have the exact geometry you need to survive
- The minute I started getting computer puns in the dialogue I started blocking out all of the story stuff
- The missions are pretty short though, so I can see this being a decent way to pass the time between bus stops or while getting paid to poop
- Nothing super revolutionary, but I think it’s probably worth the $5 if you pick it up
- At the end of the day, it’s certainly not awful or lazy, but it is kinda meh
Pedro:
Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control
- Launches out of the box on the Desktop and the Deck
- Correctly v-syncs to your display refresh rate.
- Doesn’t have controller support and on the Deck you have to play with mouse emulation on either and analog stick or a trackpad
- There’s a lot of text and some beep boops to simulate voice acting.
- Simple but fairly effective graphics
- Hovering over things tells you what’s what
Fun?
- Once again I feel I need to reiterate, that despite not being very good at roguelikes I do really like them.
- Most of my sucking in this genre stems from my lack of patience and refusing to take it slow as the turn based nature would seem to facilitate.
- But I didn’t really enjoy Blacken Slash.
- It’s not bad, it’s very well made in the sense that it’s sort of like X-Com but completely solo and randomly generated loot.
- The presentation seems to suggest you’re a 1337 #4x0r and you’re going around helping your another #4x0r who is slightly less 1337 than you are.
- But the actual gameplay is fairly standard and easily understood.
- Honestly, there’s absolutely nothing I can point at to say that it’s bad or poorly done.
- But there’s also nothing I can point at to say that that’s what would set it apart from the rest.
- I have given bonus chairs for a good soundtrack on many occasions and yet the one in Blacken Slash is also nothing to write home about.
Verdict:
Venn:
Jordan:
Pedro:
Hate Mail:
