Steam limits user accounts for liking a review, NVIDIA 4070 is a pile of meh, Mangohud gets a retro button, leaked Microsoft handheld experiments, and Valve has shipped an estimated 3 million Steam Decks.
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Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
01:19 Dragon Ballz & DRM
02:59 Android diet
03:34 APB cheaters
05:31 3 MILLION Steam Decks
13:06 Leaked Microsoft handheld experiments
16:29 Steam limiting users accounts for reviews
NEW GAMES
21:21 Photon engineer
GAME UPDATES
23:21 AQtion Q2 assets
26:03 Factorio goes Wayland
27:49 Grounded gets support for Steam Deck
NEWS
35:07 NVIDIA 4070 is a thing
45:35 NVIDIA Remix open-sourced
51:35 Mangohud gets retro
53:53 Minetest performance bumps
REVIEW
58:31 Goblin and Coins II
HATE MAIL
01:10:05 Problems with Gamescope
Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro
Steam: News
- In the interest of comparison, the latest xbox series sold about 26 million units by end of 2022 after about 2 years of GA
- Let’s not bother talking about switch numbers.
- We wanna compare apples to oranges, not blue whales
- You can walk into any drug store and walk out with an xbox.
- The steam deck’s availability and sales channels were always gonna hamstring it’s adoption, but 3 million is still respectable.
- Dedicated handheld gaming devices are niche.
- Granted, the Deck ™ is a bit more versatile.
- For comparison the Switch sold 2.74m during the first 3 months of release.
- The base Deck is $100 more than the original Switch at launch.
- 3 million is not bad for a new platform to get to in under 2 years.
- I look forward to what those numbers may mean for VALVe’s continued investment in Linux.
- Gimme an Embrace!
- If you were on the internet this week, you probably saw the “leaked” internal hackathon talk about a gamepad UI for Windows.
- Would be interesting to see Microsoft give a damn about gaming on their OS for the first time since the XBox released.
- The review in question brought up several concerns with the anti-cheat technology of Warlander, a free to play game
- People who marked it as helpful had their accounts restricted so that they can’t vote or leave reviews.
- All 2500 of them.
- According to the devs, this seems to be a thing on steam’s end as they don’t even have a facility to do this?
- They said only Steam moderators can do it.
- Moderators are randoms that Valve picks based on, something.
- Any bad reviews mentioning anti cheat tend to get this treatment
- Allegedly this is to protect against review bombing.
- Reading posts on the forum thread from today it looks like Valve is reversing the bans.
- Thanks Slashdoot.
- You would think a company the size of Valve would have created some type of customer advocate position by now.
- Someone who could monitor this stuff and have it taken care of before we do the Valve thing.
- The Valve thing is waiting until a problem Blows Up ™ before addressing it.
- Proactive vs reactive.
Steam: New Games
- Cell Shaded Talos Principle?
- The engine is open sauce. C++ based, OpenGL
- Big thank you to the developer for sending us keys.
- It has some heavy Portal vibes but that’s not a bad thing.
- Does it have a psycho robot to keep you company?
Steam: Game Updates
- No more Q2 assets.
- TIL about action quake.
- Quake with “realistic” weapons and damage.
- Has options to launch with X11 and Wayland.
- Fails to start on Debian Testing.
- Brought to you by SDL2! Game devs: use it!
- Minor memory corruption bug got fixed on linux too
- Deck updates from team Xbonx.
- Mostly you can get past the launcher and you can use the onscreen keyboards on the text prompts.
- It’s a good way to get eyes on an older title.
- Them bullet points are basically what every dev should check for if they want to entice Deck owners.
- Although, that XBox login window mention is worrisome.
- Though I suppose I still have my hotmail account that I use for Minecraft and Github.
News:
- All of the performance of a 3070Ti for the price of a 3070Ti.
- Yeah, $600 mid-range can eat all the dicks.
- NVIDIA has somehow managed to prevent their AIB partners from putting 30 series cards on firesale.
- They were also pretty aggressively limiting stock as well
- 12 GB is a wicked low amount of memoryram.
- The only reason this looks remotely reasonable is three years of the dark times mixed with recent FK YOU pricing on the high-end.
- $500 8GB 4060Ti incoming with a $400 6GB 4060 to follow.
- Looking at the Windows numbers, AMD just needs to bring the 6800XT down to $500 and all of a sudden that 4070 isn’t looking great for rasterization performance.
- Amd just needs to release a fucking midrange card already
- I agree with the article that this should have been a $500 US card
- 810 CAD is steep for a 12 GB card when you can get a 6800 16 GB for $100 less
- In the ‘say something nice’ department: It uses very little power.
- Reminder, we’re no longer the customer.
- Only works with directx 8 or 9, for now.
- Neat, uses DXVK under the hood
- Nvidia has 300+ repos on github.
- I want someone to get that Morrowind showcase they got working with OpenMW and something other than NVidia cards.
- This is done via omniverse, which plugs into your 3d editing software of choice and gives you a bunch of nvidia AI black magic to play with
- Now with a retro option.
- Eggy fans rejoice as nobara has official support in the install script
- It’ll properly detect your 64 bit wine now
- Low latency vs frame smoothing FPS cap is very nice to see.
- Better performance on modern hardware in 17 easy steps.
- OpenGLES is now the default on Android.
- Reduce server CPU consumed by occlusion culling.
- Flatpak, eww.
CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope
– Not sure if want
– Check it out
– Shutupandtakemymonies
Game: Goblin and Coins II
Webzone: https://store.steampowered.com/app/694990/Goblin_and_Coins_II/
Devel: Nikola Bulj
Engine: GameMaker Studio
Price: £4.29 / $4.99 / $ 6.49
Wazzat: Years have passed, decades maybe. Little goblin moved on, all but forgot about the great coin trouble, not even realizing that a new trouble is awaiting behind the doors!
Mandatory Disclosure: Dev sent us keys via Curator Connect
Venn:
Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control
- It launches.
- Do you like 30 FPS?
- No controller support on Linux.
Fun?
- I didn’t play platformers with a keyboard on the C64 and I’m not doing it in 2023.
- This falls right into the ‘you had one job’ category and you cocked it right up.
- I’m tempted to tell you that’s my review because it’s so important.
- However, I tried playing this bad boy with a keyboard and as Jordan said, up is jump.
- LOL, no.
- Cracked open a copy of Proton and behold, the xclone picked right up.
- It’s, playable.
- You jump, collet coins, and die due to the sloppy platforming mechanics.
- The auto-grip is frustrating and it straight up misses jump inputs while running.
- We play little games like this because discovery on Steam is HARD and you never know.
- Sometimes you run across absolute gems like Vampire Survivors.
- A retro pixel game made by a single developer.
- And sometimes you run across people learning to gamedev in production.
- That’s the case with Goblins and Coins II.
Jordan:
Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control
- Launches OOTB
- Controller support is completely borked
- Setting it it to WASD in steam input is necessary, but there is some futzing you need to do
- Up is not “jump”. We live in current year. People who do this need to stop
- It also genuinely seems like the dev wants us to use a keyboard for this. There’s even an option to disable controller input entirely. But hwy?
- Graphically you can be in fullscreen or no, w/ a side of vsync
- The music is probably the least unpleasant part about this game
Fun?
- In a word: No
- I don’t share pedro’s complete disdain for platformers. It’s not my faviourite genre and it certainly isn’t one of my strong suits but I can respect a well executed one
- And there’s nothing wrong with making a barebones pure platformer, especially for that $5 and under price tag
- The thing about that though is that you actually have to make a good platformer.
- The controls are kinda ass, which definitely detracts from the fun
- Miyamoto kinda nailed it back in ‘85 and if you regress from that, you’re gonna have a bad time,
- And this is kinda that. It’s bad mario. You can spend the coins you collect, but that’s kinda it.
- It feels like one of those old flash or DOS platformers, and according to the Dev’s bio that’s the kinda stuff he’s into
- I’m certainly not
Pedro:
Launch/Looks/Sounds/Control
- Launches out of the box
- It’s locked at 30 FPS
- Controllers don’t work, despite the fact that Steam Input is enabled by default for everything.
- Setting Steam Input to WASD mode works.
- The background music sounds like the kind of music I’ve created on the Music Editor in APB: Reloaded
- And the graphics are fairly simple.
- It’s a shame then, that when I start moving the background scrolling at 30FPS is blurry as all hell.
Fun?
- I’ve said it many times and I’ll say it as often as I need to.
- I don’t like platformers for the sake of platforming anymore.
- During my early childhood and early in my Linux gaming years, that shit was the bulk of what I played.
- Until I got Neverwinter Nights working but that’s another subject.
- If you want to sell me your 2D platformer in <current year argument>, you better have Blasphemous, Salt & Sanctuary, or Hollow Knight level of credentials.
- Clearly Goblin and Coins 2 is the second venture for this particular developer.
- And thank you for sending us the keys.
- I just don’t like this genre anymore and your game keeps reminding me why.
- Pair that with broken controller support and 30 FerPS on my 144Hz screen and you get 1 chair.
Verdict:
Venn:
Jordan:
Pedro:
Hate Mail:
- Some games do not know how to Gamescope.
