Nuclear Monster

  • Ben Esposito made a game called Donut County about being a hole that drags other stuff into it. There are also characters, like BK who is a racoon and kind of a dick.

    Donut County’s good so far, but I hear it is pretty short. Also I keep thinking it’s Donut Country, which should be the name of any sequel.

    Donut County is available almost everywhere for $13. Here’s a link to it on Steam for Windows and macOS. Here is it on the PlayStation 4. Your gog link. An iOS App Store link where it’s $5. This is the macOS App Store link where it’s $13.

  • The latest programmo-puzzler from Zachtronics, EXAPUNKS, is available in Steam’s Early Access home for wayward and incomplete games. This is another game in the style of TIS-100 and Shenzhen I/O, with this one focusing more on explicitly hacking the system, man.

    There’s something wonderful about Zachtronics’ programming games. Each one has a special theme, and unique puzzles to solve.

    In this adventure you’re an ex-hacker with a bad case of the phage who made a deal to hack for the cure. You’ll be programming your EXAs, which are the viruses that you’ll use to attack different institutions.

    Just like Shenzhen’s take on Solitaire, there are other games buried inside EXAPUNKS, like HACK*MATCH.

    EXAPUNKS is $20 on Steam or through the Humble store for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Unfortunately the feelies I mentioned back in July are no-longer available, so you’ll probably get a PDF or something with the game to read Trash World News.

  • Valve’s Pierre-Loup A. Griffais announced that they’re including their brand new fork of the WINE Windows pretendulator in a new beta product for Steam. They call it Proton. WINE is an open-source Windows API emulation layer that lets Linux users play Windows games without rebooting into Windows. I call this process “pretendulation” because it isn’t emulating the entire operating system, but it is still far from native.

    That sounds good, more games for Linux, right?

    Well, when I started writing about Linux gaming 18 years ago there was a commercial, closed-source, fork of WINE called WineX. WineX had a lot of fans, it was developed by people who had been working on Wine, which was a more generalized product for Windows software, to target game software. These developers of WineX (later called Cedega) did a good job at writing the software, but it had a number of issues.

    One of those WineX issues was that Windows compatibility is a moving target. Any progress the WineX developers made to support new versions of Microsoft’s DirectX game software programming interface were usually still years behind where modern games were. If the latest Battlefield game came out and it only worked with DirectX 8 and WineX was still on 6 or 7, it was going to be a while until they could support that new game.

    Even though new DirectX versions are less of a headlining feature in Windows these days, compatibility with a wide range of games is going to be a problem for Valve’s Proton as well. 

    Any emulation, or translation, layer, is also going to introduce some amount of performance overhead. You can’t emulate a PlayStation 3 or Dreamcast at full speed on a lot of expensive computers today, but you can buy the original console for $50 that plays those games perfectly. The same issue happens with emulating Windows APIs under Linux. Some games will only have a very small hit to performance, but others might be more of a problem and you won’t get the same framerate that you do under Windows.

    So there are compatibility and performance issues, that’s it, right? Nope, there’s one more technical hurdle. When something breaks, you’re not going to know if it’s the game or the emulation layer. I imagine this will infuriate some developers.

    Valve claims that games they’ve tested and whitelisted in this beta have an almost identical gameplay experience to Windows, and they acknowledge the performance overhead. Valve doesn’t acknowledge the negative effect this will have on real native ports of games. Back in those WineX days there were some developers and publishers who cancelled their plans for native Linux ports because Windows pretendulation was “good enough” for them, even when Wine or WineX didn’t provide a great experience for players.

    “Good enough” Windows API emulation eventually turned into developers porting their games with Wine wrapped up into a library, giving Linux players some of the half-assed ports they have today.

    One additional issue that wasn’t a problem with WineX, these improvements to Wine are only designed to work with games on Steam. You won’t be playing Battlefield  5 with Proton. Although Valve’s fork of Wine is open-source, unlike the old WineX fork which had its source closed behind an agreement that the executives at Transgaming later deleted and refused to acknowledge.

    Proton is an interesting technology, but a bad thing for anyone who loves Linux gaming and wants native ports of games brought to Linux.

  • It’s a requirement for playing Jazztronauts, a mod for Garry’s Mod. Yes, you’ve read that correctly. You have to reinstall a bunch of old Source-engine games and get this weird ass $10 sandbox thing called Garry’s Mod to play Jazztronauts. You’re also going to need to read these instructions to get the game going. It’s worth it.

    There are cats, they talk to you, they want you to steal for them. What are you stealing? Stuff, from random Source-engine game levels, like lamps, or tables, or chairs, or headcrabs in levels made for Team Fortress 2. The cats are funny in their conversations, the gameplay systems are normal but the manner in which you’re to carry them out are just so odd.

    You’ll fulfill the fetch quests the bar-dwelling cats give you with a a “prop snatcher.” That’s the device the cats, and you, use to summon a Half-Life 2 scientist model in a t-pose with a gravity gun to grab the objects in the world and pull them back to the bar. A very strange machine in the bar converts those objects into money that you can use on upgrades and new tools to better traverse and collect objects in Source-engine levels that absolutely aren’t meant for you to explore outside of the original context of whatever game or mod they came from.

    There’s a lot more to Jazztronauts that I wish I hadn’t known about before I tried it out. It’s very strange to play, and fun to explore the worlds that map makers create, with charmingly funny writing, and you can play it cooperatively with friends. Try it out.

  • Highly recommended reading from Heather Alexandra :

    …the intersection of work and labor at play when we buy games also means that there’s a lot more going on. Being a responsible game player requires understanding the dynamics at play.