Category: Editorial

A new report from Omdia currently doing the rounds is that the Steam Deck from Valve is set to hit 3 million sales during 2023.

While the Epic Games Store doesn't support Linux or Steam Deck officially, this industry news is something we should all know about with Epic now opening up self-publishing along with some new rules for their store.

Marble Blast was first released in 2002, before being updated to Marble Blast Gold in 2003. The demo can be obnoxious, with it showing a begging screen imploring you to buy the full game after completing each and every level. Considering the state of the registered version as it exists now, this can feel more than a bit galling.

With the Steam Deck recently having a first anniversary, no doubt many are thinking on what's next — I certainly am. Valve don't exactly need much to make a Steam Deck 2 a success either.

I have mentioned before how I was unable to get Dave Taylor's original port of Doom to work as it was built as an outdated a.out binary rather than ELF. Since then, I stumbled on an article by Jason Heiss that describes how to load the binfmt_aout kernel module to attain a.out binary support, as well as installing packages from earlier Red Hat Linux releases to provide the necessary libraries.

It turns out it was Knoppix 3.4 released in May 2004 that obsessed me as a child, providing me with some of my earliest steps into a larger world. Not only that, but the CD-R disc it was burned on still reads even after all of these years. Considering the volatility of such media, this surprised me.

I'm starting to feel old. I remember a time before Steam for Linux, back in the dark days even before the first set of Humble Indie Bundles, it's truly crazy how far Linux has come overall as a platform for gaming.

Back when I first played through Quake: The Offering I found that I enjoyed the two mission packs even more than I did the original Quake campaign, and while these were the only official addons sold for Quake, several third party expansions and total conversions exist that also had retail releases. Two of these, Shrak and Malice, were published on CD-ROM in 1997 by Quantum Axcess. 

If you look at the commercial Linux gaming catalogue at the turn of the millennium, in amongst all of the 3D shooters and strategic simulations being released, one glaring omission seems to have been the lack of any racing games. Loki Software never ported any to Linux, nor did any of the other porting houses. This left a void for the free gaming community to fill.

Some of my first real experiences of using Linux as a child came through the use of Knoppix, one of the first distributions to popularize the use of Live CDs. This allowed me to explore a wide swath of Linux applications. One of these was a role playing game which I recall I never got to work well, but lingered on in my imagination regardless.

It's been close to a year since the Steam Deck launched, so here's where things currently stand and my thoughts on it.

While their foray into interactive storybooks did fail to impress, it did help remind me of BlackHoleSun Software, one of the earliest Indie developers to create games with Linux in mind. Their most famous game Bunnies was released as shareware in 2001, providing a demo version you could later update through use of a retail key. Thankfully, the story does not have to end there.

The GPU industry is so broken right now and to make things worse, MSI thought it would be a good idea to do a lottery for a chance to win the ability to buy a GPU.

In light of some recent news surrounding the MSI Afterburner software, it's another reminder that it's quite important for people to directly support projects they use and enjoy.

Sold as interactive storybooks, these took the form of narrated picture books which went over the story from the film while allowing for a certain degree of user agency, typically by allowing a selection of quirky animations to play by clicking around with the mouse. UAV must have wanted in on this craze as well, and so Atlantis: The Underwater City - Interactive Storybook was born.

Given the the company's current focus, the name Hyperion Entertainment seems an odd fit for the modern maintainer of AmigaOS, betraying its earlier status as an Amiga focused video game porting house. One of their ports, that of SiN, to this day remains from them an elusive Linux exclusive.

The end of a year is a good time to sit, think and reflect on what a year it has been and what we hope 2023 will bring so here's some of what I want and what I think could happen.

Here's my own take on a top list of games to check out for Steam Deck that were released in some form in 2022, or had a major update to improve them.

Well, this wasn't what you were expecting to read was it? I have been converted. After years laughing about people who go over the top with RGB lighting in their PCs I am now a convert.

Now and then the exclusive game discussion pops up, because someone thinks it would be a good idea to lock games to a platform. Here we go again.