Nuclear Monster

  • If you’re trying to keep up with the news but can only take so much, I highly recommend listening to The World, it’s available as a free podcast online and features some great reporting from around the world and claims to be public radio’s longest-running daily global news program. Marco Werman is the regular host and I think he is pretty good. I’ve listened for years and linked to stories they’ve reported on like one about Rachel Lopez’ incredible documentation of the colorful taxi cab ceilings of India.

    Unfortunately, the news of Russia invading Ukraine is incredibly sad, but The World gives us a bit under an hour of reporting on this and other stories and it seems like a fair dose to keep up-to-date. For example, today’s broadcast has Werman’s interview with Elena Chernenko which is very good to hear, Chernenko is a reporter from Russia who organized an open letter opposing the war with Ukraine.

    Listen to The World via Apple Podcasts or the RSS feed.

  • I took my first look at Elden Ring last night on Twitch, it’s as awesome as I hoped. Can’t wait to check out more.

  • Valve announced a small, free, game in the Portal universe to introduce users to the Steam Deck’s users:

    Aperture Desk Job reimagines the been-there-done-that genre of walking simulators and puts them in the lightning-spanked, endorphin-gorged world of sitting still behind things.

    You play as an entry-level nobody on their first day at work — your heart full of hope and your legs full of dreams, eager to climb that corporate ladder. But life’s got other plans, and they all involve chairs.

    Designed as a free playable short for Valve’s new Steam Deck, Desk Job walks you through the handheld’s controls and features, while not being nearly as boring as that sounds.

    If Aperture Desk Job is a native Linux game, great, if it’s running in Proton this will be a bad harbinger for what’s to come in terms of Valve supporting Linux.

  • The Steam Deck handheld gaming computer from Valve is finally shipping to users who pre-ordered it last year, and final reviews are going up. 

    Patrick Klepek wrote for Waypoint that it offers personal computer gaming freedom, with some caveats:

    That magic comes with caveats: the (hot) fan runs loudly and constantly, even when idling; the battery life is all over the place and rarely lasts more than a few hours on games that are modestly taxing to the hardware; it’s large and awkward to hold. But time and time again, it accomplished a simple but complicated task: play games wherever I want, whenever I want. It suggests a world that broadens the definition of a “PC gamer,” making it less about how much you overspent on a GPU and more about PC gaming’s other biggest benefit: freedom.

    I think that freedom is a great way to think about it, a handheld gaming computer that ships with Linux, starts at $400 and isn’t locked to just running Valve’s software is potentially very freeing compared to what people are used to from consoles and it’s a great option for beleaguered people who are interested in computer gaming but can’t buy the parts because they’re too expensive and unavailable. 

    Wes Fenlon at PC Gamer ran into the problems I was concerned with regarding Valve’s WINE fork, Proton:

    What’s harder to predict is how quickly Valve will expand its selection of ‘Verified’ games that it has tested and declared to be ‘Great on Deck.’ Out of the 540 games in my Steam library, the number of Verified games has crawled from 40 to 59 since I got the Deck. SteamDB notes that fewer than 500 of Steam’s nearly 65,000 games have earned the badge. Another 350+ games have been marked as Unsupported. There’s simply no way the Deck comes anywhere close to Valve’s goal of playing every game on Steam in the near future. 

    Still, Valve will let you install any game in your library and give it a shot—you can even choose to boot a game with a specific older version of Proton (the software that makes Windows games work on SteamOS) if you’re the type to read through bug forums and think Dragon’s Dogma will run better on Proton 5.13-6, for example. Of the dozens of games I’ve tried that Valve has yet to verify, almost all of them have worked just fine.

    I still believe that any game working with a Windows compatibility layer is a coincidence and that seems to still be true given these reviews. A user shouldn’t need to roll back to an earlier version of Proton or even know what Proton is, and I’m concerned that Valve may still be pushing game developers towards Proton instead of native Linux game ports. That puts developers like Ethan Lee out of a job, which is absolutely horrible to think about. It is also not great for Linux as a platform and the Steam Deck overall because game compatibility will continue to get worse over time as games that were once Deck Verified could become broken due to Proton changing.

    Games that were ported natively to Linux also break over time, but I believe that’s a slower process and less likely to happen without underlying hardware changes like the move from 32 to 64bit architectures. I doubt many of Loki’s software from 1999 and 2000 runs smoothly today without some work, but that’s also true of some games from that era on Windows natively. It would be curious to test games from that era in Proton. Stuff like Heavy Gear 2, and especially something like Quake 3 that has a native port of that era, a Windows version, and later became open source. It’s wild that game console emulators are a more stable platform than Windows compatibility layers like Proton and they also run great on the Steam Deck according to Fenlon:

    I ran into a few other issues here and there that were simply quirks of emulation and not unique to the Steam Deck, but on the whole it’s been as smooth as I could’ve hoped. The one emulator I didn’t test is Yuzu, simply because I don’t have any Switch games ripped (guess I have some jailbreaking to do). But I now have Super Nintendo, PS1, PS2, PSP, GameCube and Wii games on a portable device with the power to play (almost) all of them, and this is before emulator developers have a chance to test the Steam Deck themselves. It’s a damn good start.

    I hope to check in with Ethan Lee and other developers again soon. If you’re a game developer with thoughts about the Steam Deck and Linux, or someone who is on the fence about keeping their pre-order for the Steam Deck due to Proton, please get in touch. I don’t have a Steam Deck yet so I can’t speak from personal experience with the hardware and software combination, but I’ve been writing about Linux for over 20 years now.

  • Elden Ring is the latest in From Software’s genre of ostensibly enjoyable challenge sims, reviews went up for it today. Here’s Steven T. Wright reviewing Elden Ring for Input:

    By modern gaming standards, Elden Ring gives you hardly any direction, especially past its first major dungeon, Stormveil Castle. The most guidance the game gives you for core progression is in the form of vague compass headings like “east of [X landmark]” or “the northwest part” of a continent you haven’t even discovered yet. Even finding the map fragments needed to piece together a basic layout of the world’s topography and scale can be difficult, especially for the more remote regions. While you eventually unlock a hub of NPCs who give you useful (and some less-than-useful) hints as to how to proceed, it’s ultimately up to you to put it together.

    Wright finished the review by calling Elden Ring an “enigmatic, beguiling world worthy of exploration” and afterwards pushed back on the general narrative going around from other reviewers that this is somehow a more approachable Souls-like, but even though I’ve struggled with these games in the past I’m still looking forward to trying Elden Ring when I can. It’s wonderful that From is putting out bespoke unexplained single-player games, that aren’t zeitgeist-chasing daily grinds, on this scale, and has found an audience for them.

    Frustratingly, reviewers were supposedly only given about a week to go through Elden Ring’s 80+ hours of gameplay. A week is enough time to understand a game, but it is painful to think of people being forced to rush through what should be a slow burn, and the discussion around it suffering as well.

    Elden Ring is $60 on the PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and Steam for Windows. It comes out on Friday, the 25th of February.