When you have a top-of-the-line hacking deck armed with a 56.6k modem and a staggering 256k RAM, it means just one thing: you answer only to the highest bidder.
Blendo Games, the developers of Atom Zombie Smasher, has an upcoming game that’s TURBO-RAD looking, Quadilateral Cowboy. Set in an alternate 20th century, the game uses the Doom 3 engine to create it’s hacker mercenary narrative. The venerable Rock, Paper, Shotgun interviewed Blendo’s Brendon Chung about the title last year:
As for why I chose to make Quadrilateral Cowboy, a lot of games have hacking minigames where you match colors together or whatever. But I’ve always wanted to just type commands into a terminal. That’s a very risky and niche design choice, so it’s understandable why people don’t do that. But I figured that I can do what I want, so I might as well give it a shot.
Second reason is that I felt like there hasn’t really been a game that really, really deep dives into pure cyberpunk. I mean, you have Deus Ex with really strong cyberpunk themes and tones, but I wanted to make a game based completely on cyberpunk [activities].
Anodyne, a retro-themed top-down adventure game which received praise from various quarters, including the IGF, has been released:
Anodyne is an adventure game that focuses on immersing the player through a combination of 16-bit era visual and audio aesthetics, Zelda-esque action/adventure gameplay mechanics, and exploration of the human Young’s dream world, which contains urban, natural, and abstract themed areas.
You can also vote for the game’s inclusion on Steam at Greenlight.
NEW YORK — February 4, 2013 — Paradox Interactive, a publisher of games and a proponent of all religions, and Paradox Development Studio, today announced a new expansion to the world of Crusader Kings II, the critically acclaimed RPG strategy title. The forthcoming expansion, titled Crusader Kings II: The Old Gods, will add a number of widely requested features to the game, including the ability to play as a Pagan or Zoroastrian ruler, expanding empires through war, pillaging, and ruthless brutality. Players will also be able to begin their in-game reign as far back as the year 867 AD, making The Old Gods officially the Paradox title that spans the longest period in history.
The base game and its current expansions/DLC are available for Linux on Steam.
Vendetta Online has launched a campaign Greenlight to bring the game to Steam; head over to give your support if you want the space combat MMO to be able to integrate the community and achievement features from the platform.
TTimo has posted his thoughts on his last years at id Software, Linux support, and Wine over at Reddit.
Guild Software, a long-time Linux supporter, let us know they’ve launched a Kickstarter project for their space combat MMO Vendetta Online to further extend the game’s scope:
Help fund the creation of “Vendetta Online 1.9″ by late 2013, with drastically expanded and polished gameplay. This will include improved graphics, sound and rendering technology, advancements to our universe, economy and conquerable territory, plus improvements to player-owned capships and other areas (detailed further below). Your support will make this timeline possible!
Quick note that Valve hasn’t just introduced Steam for Linux; they’re actually promoting it very prominently, even to the point of linking Ubuntu itself on the Steam about page.
If you had told me 15, nay, 10 years ago that in 2013 the stars of CES would be a viable Linux game console and a VR headset… well, that’s the position we’re in. The Verge has posted their best of show awards, and Valve walked away with “Biggest Story” honors for their “Steam Box” efforts:
With nary an announcement (and more of a fortuitous run-in with Gabe Newell), Valve laid out its vision to us for gaming hardware — its own Linux-powered box, a range of branded partner devices, and some rumination on multiple new methods of interaction (e.g. biometrics). It’s a new way of thinking about gaming platforms, and it’s one that Valve really has the leverage to pull off.
But the strongest praise was reserved for the Oculus Rift Virtual Reality headset, which won their “Best Gaming” and “Best in Show” honors:
My childhood (at least the formative years) was spent reading novels like Neuromancer and Snow Crash, and poring over stories about a future promised by Mondo 2000 and Wired. Virtual reality has long been the ultimate promise of technology — the magic mandala, a doorway to the infinite. But the thing is: it never happened. We got touchscreens, motion sensors, the tablet revolution, body-hacking… but we never got our cyberdecks. Until now. The Oculus Rift actually delivers on the promise, and then some. It’s really, really amazing. Truly and honestly a revelation, a trip, a rabbit hole. And I’m going in. Forever. Goodbye universe. Hello universe.
One note: while the initial Kickstarter effort mentioned Linux support (complete with Tux logo), it appears at least the initial SDK will be Windows-only. In any case, I’m sure it won’t be long before we can go FULL GARGOYLE:
Also, for an in-depth discussion of the challenges of presenting “realistic” VR, Valve’s Michael Abrash (who has had a long, illustrious career) has a great blog entry here.
It still feels weird writing this, but Team Fortress 2 received an update last week to add promo items and bugfixes.
A new version of FTL was made available prior to the start of the new year with a colorblind mode, new hotkeys, and various fixes. The patch is available from the Humble Store (via http://www.ftlgame.com/) or Steam. The game’s complete soundtrack is also available for listening online or purchase now.
Phoronix pointed out that there’s a few Linux gaming sessions planned for the Free and Open source Software Developers’ European Meeting, or FOSDEM, which takes place February 2nd and 3rd in Brussels, Belgium.
Marlon Drescher mentioned that his indie MMORPG, Forgotten Elements, can now be played, which he created as a single developer (!).
Ensign-1 is a space combat sim (is it just me or are those kinda rare these days?) being updated iteratively on Desura (the price rises as they grow closer to completing the game ).
Valve Software has a presence at this year’s International Consumer Electronics Show, during which founder Gabe Newell gave an extensive interview to The Verge about Steam, Steam Box (the term being given to Valve’s living room PC project), and more. Money quote:
So are most of these going to be Linux-based Steam Boxes?
We’ll come out with our own and we’ll sell it to consumers by ourselves. That’ll be a Linux box, [and] if you want to install Windows you can. We’re not going to make it hard. This is not some locked box by any stretch of the imagination. We also think that a controller that has higher precision and lower latency is another interesting thing to have.
Newell also states:
Beside’s Valve’s own Linux-based box, there will be other “Steam Boxes” from various hardware manufacture partners which may or may not run Linux as sold (but nothing would be stopping you from installing it yourself).
Valve is interested in new/alternate methods of game input, like biometrics.
Steam may eventually become an umbrella platform for myriad user-created “stores”.
Windows 8 doesn’t impress him.
A single Steam Box could potentially power several games across many rooms and televisions in one abode.
The esteemed Rock, Paper, Shotgun (also, Kieron Gillen’s recent run on “Journey into Mystery” was a.m.a.z.i.n.g) has a fun article about coding in Minecraft using the ComputerCraft mod:
It’s the creation of a very smart chap called Dan200, and it adds in-game computers with a full OS, filesystem, and a selection of built-in programs. Over the course of a short series of articles, I’m going to teach you how to write software that can password doors, automatically mine, make a big digital clock for your base, and even send chat messages to other players’ in-game computers.
The Independent Games Festival (IGF) juries are announcing the Main Competition finalists for its historic 15th annual awards – nominating nearly 30 outstanding independent game titles to come out of the worldwide community in the past year.
This year’s finalists for the most prestigious independent video game awards and showcase were each picked by a discipline-specific set of expert juries, following playthroughs and recommendations of the 580+ IGF entries from over 200 top independent game experts.
I haven’t had a chance to exhaustively pore over the list for which ones support Linux, but I was pleased to see my fav title from last year, FTL, nominated in a few categories. The winners will be named during the festival proper on March 27th.
Eurogamer has word that PC manufacturer Xi3 is showcasing a mini-modular computer (and I mean mini; you can grip it in one hand) codenamed (unknown if it’ll eventually be marketed as such) “Piston” at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show. While based on an existing PC, the Kickstarter-funded X7a, specs for Piston haven’t been released yet, just that it’ll have Steam integration and is intended to support the distribution platform’s “Big Picture” mode on televisions, as Valve is a backer of the project. However, while Xi3 offers Linux as an install option for their other systems, it’s not explicitly stated that Piston is intended only as a Linux PC (at least at this time).
The venerable Phoronix pointed out that Robert Beckebans has adopted the open source code to Doom 3 to support the recent revamped retail release, Doom 3: BFG, on Linux. Robert’s fork can be found here.
An alpha build of Ur-Quan Masters HD, a free community remake of Star Control 2, was released. The alpha is distributed for Linux as .deb files, so be sure to comment if you run into any problems/etc.
Valve has released the results of their monthly Steam survey, and after a few weeks of Linux availability and 55 titles to purchase, here’s the OS breakdown:
Ubtuntu Linux flavors are almost 1% of the pie, although some of the “Other” category might also include some Linux users.
Speaking of titles, Unity of Command was among the games being distributed through Steam that caught my eye. It’s a WWII-themed wargame; there’s also an experimental Linux demo available from the game’s site:
Finally, it’s been apparent that a major rationale for Valve’s Linux support has been the development of a Linux-based Steam console, which Ben Krasnow spoke briefly about recently [German].
Not to be outdone by Google’s now-mature Android OS, Canonical has announced that the Ubuntu Linux distribution will soon have a version specifically designed for smartphones. While there are no specific devices planned yet, Canonical’s marketed advantage is that the phone would be able to serve as a full-fledged thin client Linux desktop while docked. Additionally, this iteration of Ubuntu will have touchscreen gesture support to invoke various OS and application level functions. Unlike Android OS, there will be no Java layer, so native apps (and HTML5-based apps) are planned. No specific mention of games that I’ve seen so far, but on the whole this is a new mobile player we’ll be keeping an eye on.
