The weekend round-up: tell us what play button you've been clicking recently

What's that? It's the weekend? It can't be already can it? Yes. It's time for the weekend chat about what we've been playing and what you've been playing.

There's been so many good Linux supported releases lately I've been a bit spoilt for choice including these just in the last week: DemonCrawl, UnderMine, The Battle of Polytopia, Littlewood, Monster Crown, Core Defense and Hellpoint (plus plenty more I've missed).

Recently though, I've been having masses of fun in Orcs Must Die! 3 on Stadia with a co-op partner. Getting to test out all the different trap combinations, it's genuinely good fun. It was fun enough by myself but now with a partner, it's far more amusing especially trying the later difficulties. Good manic entertainment.

As for actual Linux-desktop games, Jupiter Hell sucked me right in once more. Jupiter Hell is the spritual successor to DRL (D**m, the Roguelike) and it's one of the most furious roguelikes I've ever played. While turn-based, it's so streamlined and fluid it feels almost realtime. It's also quite gorgeous in places. Jupiter Hell has evolved quite nicely during Early Access and it's easily worth a look.

I also spoke to the developer of Haque, a rather fantastic glitch fantasy roguelike from 2017. As great as it is, the Steam build had a bug where a file was named "Haque_Text.zip" but the game was looking for "haque_text.zip". Linux case-sensitivity strikes again. They mentioned they will fix it as soon as possible.

Additionally: it appears that there's another big CPU security issue, this time not just affecting Intel. According to the paper it should affect Intel, ARM, IBM, and AMD CPUs.

Lastly, NVIDIA put up a new Vulkan Beta Driver 450.56.06 with the sole change listed as new support for the VK_EXT_4444_formats extension that landed with Vulkan API spec 1.2.149 that we reported on here.

Deals Reminder:

• F1 2018 is free on Humble Store
• Humble Choice giving away all 12 games this month for the Premium/Classic subs
• Valve's QuakeCon Sale has plenty of games that work with Proton - GOG also has a QuakeCon Sale
• Humble Raw Fury 2020 Bundle - 3 days left
• Humble Double Fine 20th Anniversary Bundle - 5 days left
• Humble  also has a Game Design & Animation book bundle for anyone interested in that side of things

Over to you in the comments: what have you been gaming on Linux lately and what are you looking forward to the most across this year?