Linux Game Cast 522: Narch The ARCH!

Running the Nintendo Switch’s Horizon OS on Linux, W4 plans to monetize Godot, Half-Life smashes its concurrent players record, and is Win32 the only stable ABI?

Special thanks to:
Game_mo_tron (twitch resub)
Don_M (twitch resub)

Listen:

Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
01:35 Buying a used motherboard
03:05 Jim at Guitar Center
09:22 Half-Life smashes its concurrent players record
12:17 New games added to Proton 7.0
12:33 WTF is Chuzzle Deluxe
16:24 Proton Exp fixes Re-Volt and Vermintide 2
19:29 Valve year in review but with metrics?
21:44 Neodash
23:14 Climb Challenge at 15FPS
25:49 Pillow fights with Bulanci
28:29 Blossom Tales II: It’s not Zelda, probably
31:54 Linux & Thrills bundle
42:49 Why win32 is or is not the only stable ABI
51:44 W4 plans to monetize Godot
57:09 Running the Nintendo Switch’s Horizon OS on Linux
01:00:29 SRB2Kart v1.5
01:02:59 Review: Kung Fu Er San
01:14:29 Emails

Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro

Steam: News

Record crowbars

We did it internet!
12,280 Half-Life players got together to set a new all-time peak player record for Half-Life.
The #RememberFreeman campaign is a sequel of sorts to last year’s “Breaking the Bar” event, which smashed Half-Life 2’s concurrent player record.
I fully support the community coming together to play the actually good old games, not the website.
It was the largest spike since Steam Charts started recording it: https://steamcharts.com/app/70

Proton

Our long national nightmare is over. You can Play Chuzzle Deluxe on linux
No big features, just game specific fixes.
WHAR spoodermang fixes?
That is a fat chunk of what was in Experimental.

Experimental

Re-Volt and Vermintide 2 have been fixed.
I would strongly recommend you use Luxtorpeda and set Re-Volt to run with RVGL.
It runs much better on the Deck.
Cutscenes in Dragon’s Dogma Dark Arisen should be slightly less choppy now.
Halo Infinite gets ingame on AMD. GE has had it running for a while, but it’s good to see mainline proton catching up
Apparently Vermintide is still a little unstable if you’re not the host
Elite dangerous is still borked for me

Steam numbers

Valve is working on a “year in review” page for the winter sale.
So far it indicates playtime and total sessions for the year.
Deck playtime is one of the metrics and that’s worth watching out for.
This is per user as of right now.
Those numbers you see were just from the xPaw himself.
Though, I do hope someone will figure out a way to get the info of that out of at least the public SteamIDs.
It would be great to see those deck numbers vs. the mac and desktop Linux numbers.

Steam: New Games

Neodash

Distance minus the multiplayer
More physics platformer with wheels.
I think I played this during the snek peek event a while back.
One dude spent the last two years making this.
Single player and clocking in at a hefty 1.4 Hollow Knights.
Drift-stance?
Super Distance Kart?

Climb Challenge – Castle

Someone decided to take the colossi out of shadow of the colossus
That trailer frame rate is baaad.
- Gotta have a video on your store page, no one said anything about not overloading the encoder when you recorded it.
Imagine Ass Creed on the N64… but worse.
This looks like a half-functioning prototype mage in grade school.

Bulanci

Incredibly violent pillow fights the game
And hey!
LAN and online multiplayer!
That mandatory party game feature that people seem to neglect.
Somebody on the team knows how to art but ya might want to invest in someone who knows how to gameplay.
That gameplay trailer is a posterboy for uninspiring.

Zelda Tales 2

Big thanks to the devs for shooting us some keys!
It looks very Zelda-y
Blossom tales 1 doesn’t have a linux port, so good on you guys for making one for the sequel
I stopped playing Zelda when it peaked. Zelda II.
This looks like someone who never played Link to the Past had it described to them by a rabid fan.
Can’t exactly put my tryhardforce on it but that sword swing animation is, off.

Steam: Game Updates

Linux & Thrills Bundle

Giving this a quick mention since they wrote in to let us know about it.
Save room is basically “Resident evil inventory management: the game” and I find that hilarious.
- That came to mind.
I’m on observation duty 4 is a five nights at freddy’s like
Zodicats is a scrambled image puzzle game
Stone story is an ascii art RPG

News:

Win32 future

I keep misreading the url out of the corner of my eye as “blog.hitler.eu”
I definitely don’t know about win32 being a stable API, but it is certainly the one most developers are used to dealing with
- I think that’s ultimately the rub. Win32 has too much forward momentum. We can provide all the technical benefits in the world but most people don’t want to change their workflow
  - Hell, that’s 90% of the “we tried linux but too hard” apologia we cover
Compared to GLibC, WINE has been a lot more stable when it comes to backwards compatibility.
And Windows, up until Windows 7 at least, had very good backwards compatibility.
Something Linux, as far as video games go, never did.
Mostly because of glibc and its now infamous ABI breakage.
As much as I wish native games would have taken off, I can perfectly see why Proton was the solution.
I can see why glibc ditched DT_HASH over DT_GNU_HASH, the latter is much newer, faster, and probably better documented.
But they didn’t care about breakage and if EAC stops working, a bunch of really popular multiplayer games stop working on Linux.
Heck, Venn’s game of choice for comparison, Hollow Knight stopped working with glibc 2.36.
And if we go back to 2010, the first Humble Indie Bundle, there’s several games you can’t play no matter how many of the other deps you change.
I’ve been playing games on Linux with WINE (WineX) since 2002/3 ish.
Back then it was part neat, part novelty.
Who knew it would be the default way to game on your Linux handheld from Steam in 2022.
Man, I would love to pop back and attempt to wrap that around my own brain.
Ivyl has a hot yet accurate take on why we’re unable to have nice things.

GODO$

W4 Games CEO is one of the founding creators of GODOT.
They have $8.5 million in seed funding to make GODOT a big boy.
Helping corps adopt GODOT by giving them someone to blame.
They can also help with porting games to consoles.
- That’s been a recurring complaint about godot
Having a body that can handle the console porting business is gonna be huge for their reach
Having people who know and can help you with engine woes so that you can focus on the game, that’s probably worth the extra monies.

Horizon Linux

https://github.com/kentjhall/horizon-linux

Run switch stuff directly on Arm64 Linux? Yes please
Horizon is a fork of the linux kernel that modifies its standard behaviour to play nicer with what the switch expects of memory management, system calls
Mizu runs all the background services that would otherwise be available via the Switch OS
This is just really freakin’ cool
Native Horizon support, directly from the Kernel.
I commend the patience and the knowledge required to do this, that’s crazy!

SRB2Kart v1.5

I had to do a double take. This is a sonic racing game made in doom
They have a massive new release out
Discord rich presence integration for invites is pretty neat
Would it kill you lot to write down some build instructions or something resembling a vague guide.
I want to tinker with the game but not to the point of backtracking cryptic makefile errors.
Runs in WINE.
It’s racing minus the carts.

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope
– Not sure if want
– Check it out
– Shutupandtakemymonies

Game: Kung Fu Er San
Webzone: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1852530/Kung_Fu_Er_San/
Devel: CMC Games
Engine: Custom
Price: £2.09 / $2.99 / $3.39

Wazzat: Kung Fu Er San is a 2D retro pixel side-scrolling beat ’em up, inspired by classic games and martial arts films.

Mandatory Disclosure: Dev sent us keys on Curator Connect

Venn:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

You know what we didn’t do back in the C64 days?
Plug in Fuck mothering headphones to the tape deck, fuck.
At least not on and operational during the tape load.
I would have refunded Kung Fu Er San within the first 10 seconds of playtime for that level of bullshit.
I should say the first 4 minutes and 10 seconds since that’s how long it took me to get in the game proper.
Kung Fu Er San started right up… on my center monitor that’s in portrait.
It displayed nothing, nada and force close it was.
Edited the ini (how retro) to fullscreen off and it launched in the far left monitor but I was able to drag it to the far right monitor AKA the one set as primary.
So my first impression of Kung Fu Er San was being sonically attacked and having to crack open a *.ini file in 2022.
The xbox1x1S controller worked but the input was so delayed & sloppy I tapped that Proton button thinking something was wrong.
Same thing, yikes.
Then I noticed some legit slowdown while getting my arse kicked by the first boss.
Kung Fu Er San had one of my 24 threads pegged at 100% and fk all elks.

Fun?

I would much rather be playing Kung-Fu Master or Yie Ar Kung-Fu on the C64.
My challenge for today was trying to beat Mr. Wheelie boss man #1.
I gave up, ran out of cares.
Maybe my button mashing and or age is failing me but dude is like a brick wall.
Something along the lines of a tutorial might be a welcome addition for those of us that are not you, the developer.
Then again it could be the controls.
In theory I could adapt to them given time but why would I do that to myself?
Why would anyone?
I grew up playing these games in the 80s and there were plenty of terribad kung-fu fighting games to be had.
This is like a modernized version of them.
But I want to close with something nice.
The pixel art is a bit of alright, I’ve seen far worse.

Jordan:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

Beeeeeeeeep
The resolution settings are completely fucked to start off with
I had to guess my way into setting windowed mode So I could actually see the list of resolutions
Every time you change any of the settings, you gotta restart the game. Which brings me back to beeeeeeeeep
Controls are pretty simple, but hot damn there’s a real delay between your button press and the actual move
Which sucks because once your timing is fucked up, you just end up eating every enemy on screen

Fun?

One of of the chief complaints I hear from strider is that we only review amiga games
Well, here’s one
It definitely feels like I’m playing on an amiga
I gotta agree with pedro. This sort of game was produced simply because of the limitations of the era. People look back fondly on these games because of nostalgia
As computers got better, we could add things like responsive controls, and the ability to change settings without having your ears fucked
Having just finished Shredders revenge and SoR4 before it, this feels like such a regression.
If you want to play black belt or karateka, you can do that in a browser now
I think maybe if this game kept the retro aesthetic but modernized the gameplay to make it feel buttery smooth I’d be a lot less harsh on it

Pedro:

Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control

Wow, launching this game was a shitshow.
Fullscreens into the wrong monitor at the wrong resolution
Had to feel my way around the menu to put it into a window and then expand the window to be able to see the options and set the resolution
I think Kung Fu Er San knows the score I’m going to give so it beeps aggressively at me, twice, whenever I start it.
And thanks to that shitty little dance I had to to get to display properly, I had to hear those 2 fucking annoying beeps multiple times.
I don’t think I ever fully muted a game for the chairs, but here we are.
Vsync is a lie, the game is always capped to 60 regardless.
I can tell you that’s a bad idea when the Steam deck deliberately allows lower limits to save battery.
But it still manages to be even worse, as in it won’t show anything on screen at all unless you have the it set to 60Hz and are not capping it at anything lower.
If you enable Steam Input and use a DualShock or Dual Sense controller, it rumbles for 30 seconds non-stop at full blast.
It’s great if you’re trying to get yourself off, but not great if you’re trying to play the game.
And in its efforts to have low latency and lag compensation, it sometimes seems to have some rubberbanding to the movement.
That’s not a good thing in a beat’em up as unforgiving as this.
It has SDL 1.2 libs in the folders but running LDD on the elfs doesn’t show them as being linked.

Fun?

No.
I honestly don’t think I’ve ever played a game which was made to be as hostile to its players as Kung Fu Er San.
Yes, yes, the old games from which this took inspiration were pretty bad too.
But at the time, no one knew better.
It’s <current year argument>.
Most people do know better now.
No matter where I look, I can’t find a single redeeming feature.
The movement is sticky, it rubberbands the “physics”, it takes for fucking ever to go between screens.
Hell, I didn’t even mind the difficulty. I just wanted it to hurry the fuck up and let me try again instead of delaying the ever living fuck out everything.
Congratulations! This better have been deliberate, because if it wasn’t… goddamn!

Verdict:

Venn:
Jordan:
Pedro:

Hate Mail:

Inquisitions

If anyone out there wants to try their hand at being a booker, call me.
I don’t have the time or patience to play email tag for weeks on end to pin down someone for an interview.
That said, if you would like to have someone on the show, ask them.
We are really easy to get in contact with and there is no “process” for getting on.

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