The Mind Of OverlordTomala
Gaming

Starting a new game with old school vibes.

I made an attempt to go through an area of my game library so that I may strike off another game from my ever expanding backlog. Starting at near the top of my library I decided Alan Wake looked interesting, it was made by the same people who worked on Max Payne 1 and 2, and it had that Remedy style to it when it came to storytelling and the overall environment you’re contained in.

The best way I could describe Alan Wake is like this: Imagine the bad dream sequences from Max Payne, make them slightly less trippy (but still trippy as balls) and make the protagonist reminiscent to Stephen King. You even start out by having a nightmare, you’re being chased by a murder from your own story and eventually you’re woken by your wife, though not too much further into the game your nightmares soon become a reality. You can also collect manuscripts of stories that you never wrote, yet they seem to be yours. Every page you collect gives you the rundown of what will happen to you as well as the others around you. There was also a couple Easter Eggs I found among the pages collected, this was one of them:

I had to listen to this and another page,, the voice reading this page was different from Alan’s and I had to make sure I wasn’t imagining things. Then I confirmed it; this was a reference to Max Payne including his voice actor. That made my evening.

I played it both on Windows and on Linux tonight (science, fuck yeah). Other than some graphical glitches while dodging and a slightly lower framerate it seems to handle just fine through Proton. I may want to do a stream of this game sometime in the future, possibly during October if I have any time to do so. This would be a perfect game to play on a cold dark night lit only by candles and the light from my displays and tower. People might be bummed if I did stream it though, if they’re wanting to watch me get scared they’re going to be bummed. I don’t quite approach horror and jump scares like more popular streamers and YouTubers. Somehow I can’t cry like a little bitch and make my voice go as high as the most popular guys who specialize in this field. :zorak: That is why I’ll never make the big bux.

I guess playing these games before bed isn’t really a good idea considering the Max Payne nightmares fucked with my head when I was much younger, but considering I had a nightmare about going bald last night I think I’ll do fine going up against some annoying axe murdering phantoms. We’ve already confirmed that I’m quite a fabulous murderer myself. :trollface:

Gaming

Weekend Open Thread

With another work week coming to a close I had a nice nap, a little time in the Gmod Cinema, and then a stupid DOOM Slayer match in Quake Champions of our own creation.

One of these dudes is not like the other.

We had a warmup match with all the bots on medium. I wanted to start another round on hard just to see what chaos would ensue, but after a couple attempts it wouldn’t let us connect to a dedicated server. That’s one shortcoming I have with Quake Champions, the inability to go through a server browser and select your own game like in other games released within the last decade. Everything is streamlined these days to work on company servers, but what happens when those are no longer supported? I’m seeing this as more of a trend in newer multiplayer games and I don’t like it. People should be able to run their own dedicated servers if they so choose. This is why to me I’ll always cherish Quake III Arena and consider it the superior game compared to Champions. It’s still an active game despite being almost a couple decades old, servers still exist and the modding community is still as alive as it ever was. Champions isn’t a bad game, and is quite a lot of fun to play. But for this being one of Bethesda’s fewest PC exclusives it’s just a stripped down version of Quake III with a modern paint job and super powers.

Gaming

Steam Play Test Results 8/24/18 PLATINUM EDITION

Oddly this all started when I tried to test Bayonetta via Steam Play, here are the results of that and some others:

  1. Bayonetta: Played perfectly fine until I quit and tried to restart, the window became unresponsive.
  2. NieR Automata: Despite being whitelisted by Steam this title will only load itself into memory and does fuck all on my distro.
  3. Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance: Almost perfect, with only a couple glitches like small bits of lag and lights appearing through solid objects and people (including me). Is actually running on a hacked executable to run at 1440p as well as some graphical modding. Can restart the game multiple times and it won’t puss out like Bayonetta. No I’m not picking up any Nirnroot for you.
  4. Okami HD: Loaded a window, but it was nothing but a short lived world of graphical terror that would eventually collapse into itself, not even Amaterasu could save this poor world…

So out of all of those games I could only get MGR to work, that would be my fucking luck… :melon:

All in an Overlord's day / Hobbies

Evening Open Thread

I wanted to take a nap today so I could be well rested for doing a livestream, but that didn’t happen… which is ok because I never got to do a livestream due to not feeling well. Hooray! I’ll have to remember to double up on drugs and candy before I go in tomorrow, my breakfast of champions I guess.

I also didn’t get a chance to really do any Linux game testing today, in fact the only time I touched a game was during lunch this morning. I was introducing a co-worker to Freedom Planet. I pondered doing a stream of either that or one of my Saint’s Row games, that’ll just have to wait until another time.

I have made a bit of an effort to make my Twitch profile look a little more lived in, adding more things as I go along. In fact if you’re bored you can watch my latest Okami Stream (two videos due to OBS crashing). I think I’ll shorten the video down for YouTube if I find any highlights from that particular session.

Gaming

Steam Play Test Results 8/22/18

Now that I’ve had more time to play with the new Steam Play feature I’ve decided to make a list for what I tested last night and this afternoon:

  1. DOOM 2016: Default OpenGL version failed to load; had to rename DOOM64VK.exe to DOOM64.exe in order for it to launch. Everything but the mouse worked.
  2. Quake Champions: Locked up solid, had to reset.
  3. Hard Reset Redux: Worked perfectly.
  4. Obduction: Same result as Quake Champions.
  5. Blade Kitten: Didn’t even try to run.
  6. Tomb Raider Underworld: Keeps steady frame rate for the most part, but dislikes the Steam Overlay no matter which monitor I run it on (which it kept deciding for me). It also didn’t like me clicking mouse buttons during certain sessions.
  7. MGSV:TPP: Everything but the sky is black.
  8. Commander Keen, but that runs on the Windows version of DOSBox, so kinda hard to fuck up.

I don’t expect every game to work out of the box instantly considering this update only took place yesterday, and the fact we’re able to even attempt this at all is amazing. I feel like it’ll only get better from here. Like I said in my previous post, if anyone has a suggestion for what to test next feel free to let me know, you can have a look at my game library if you’re not sure. I think I’ll take a break from it today to focus on some other stuff. :happy:

Gaming4

Valve just made Linux Gaming a little more attractive

If you’re on Linux this is an option now.

Good news everyone! Steam just rolled out an updated version of Steam Play for Linux users!

 

  • Windows games with no Linux version currently available can now be installed and run directly from the Linux Steam client, complete with native Steamworks and OpenVR support.
  • DirectX 11 and 12 implementations are now based on Vulkan, resulting in improved game compatibility and reduced performance impact.
  • Fullscreen support has been improved: fullscreen games will be seamlessly stretched to the desired display without interfering with the native monitor resolution or requiring the use of a virtual desktop.
  • Improved game controller support: games will automatically recognize all controllers supported by Steam. Expect more out-of-the-box controller compatibility than even the original version of the game.
  • Performance for multi-threaded games has been greatly improved compared to vanilla Wine.

At present I’m installing DOOM 2016 under Mint, that is actually one of the games that has been added to Valve’s whitelist of games that will work under Steam’s version of Wine: Proton. As a result you can now purchase any of these games under Linux if you don’t already own them:

Some of the titles can already run on Linux natively; such as early ID Software titles either in the Linux version of DOSBox or Sourceports of games that you can either download from a repo or compile from source. However, in order to even obtain the files to run them natively you had to either have a disk for your desired game or have the files already available in some other method. If you’re running a pure Linux system the only way to previously buy any of these games was to either run the Windows Steam client via Wine, run Windows in a VM, or do what I do and Dualboot. Seeing games like Tekken 7, DOOM 2016 and NieR Automata is already sounds impressive. Of course if you’re an enthusiast and want to try getting a game not listed on the whitelist running under Proton that is also a possibility with the built in compatibility tool.

Naturally I expect that these games won’t have the same level of performance as Windows, at the same time it shouldn’t matter if your game can run at your display refresh rate or above. I’ll be experimenting with games in my ridiculous library, if anyone here has any suggestions for what you want me to test under Linux feel free to float me a comment. I already have some ideas. :happy:

All in an Overlord's day / Gaming2

OBS Recording woes

I’ve been plagued with a weird problem in OBS as of late, and I even thought I had it nailed down today… but during a livestream I decided to do tonight OBS decided to go tits up. It’s been doing this thing lately where it won’t stop recording, and I have to terminate the process via task manager. In most cases it corrupts my video making it impossible to watch. I’m thinking that I should probably switch from mp4 to mkv as I’ve read that file extension has a better chance of survival. After all Shotcut can read mkv files so it’s not like I have to remux my recording for proper import.

But tonight while recording and streaming it just decided to come to a screeching halt, and when I tried to stop and start it decided to hang; resulting in me terminating the process and restarting my stream… annoying. Reading around online doesn’t seem to give me much info. One of the tricks someone recommended was running OBS in administrative mode but so far that seems to do fuckall. Now I’m going to experiment using the h.264 codec for recording instead of h.265 to see if that makes any difference. I haven’t had as much time to record gameplay lately, and it’s bad enough that I keep losing data because of these random hangs.

If this continues to persist I’ll consult the gurus over at the OBS forums. I think I have an account there from years ago. I do also have my laptop setup to receive my desktop stream if push comes to shove, but I prefer to leave that for Vulkan and DX12 based titles rather than be the ultimate solution. In most of my cases my desktop is more than powerful to handle games like Skyrim and Okami while both streaming and recording from the same system at the same time.

All in an Overlord's day

Late Night Open Thread

I had a calm day off. I made a nice omelet with a homemade tomato sauce using a pepper wine I made recently. Over the last couple days I chipped in and cooked a couple things. I made a homemade mac and cheese with Cheddar, Parmesan, and Amish Blue with prosciutto with corn on the side; and last night I made a greek tomato and shrimp sauce that also used the pepper wine. It’s basically sherry wine fused with the essence of serrano peppers for about a week, really compliments the tomatoes or almost any soup you cook it in.

The weather was nice enough that I went out for a walk, town was still a bit hazy but at least I didn’t smell any smoke today. I tested Obduction on my new hardware and it’s much more tolerable. The only complaint I have now is the LOD issue when walking in between areas. Then I tried to play some Saints Row 4 with Yutram, but there was no success. We ended up going into Quake Champions together for one frag match before bed.

On that note, goodnight.

Entertainment / Gaming

OMG Metal Gear Movie

It was recently announced that a Metal Gear movie was being planned. With no surprise I have mixed feelings on the subject, just as I did when Ghost in the Shell’s live adaptation hit theaters and completely fucked the story. I could be wrong, perhaps the movie will be a shining example of how to adapt a video game into a good movie as the Metal Gear series is cinematic in its own right going as far back as Metal Gear Solid. At the same time that presents another problem. Each game is like a movie on its own, how are you going to take elements from each title in the series and make something coherent? Dune the movie was based on the Dune book series, and it is known for being notoriously bad due to trying to cram as much of the series into one film, and if they’re not careful this title could meet a similar fate.

Despite that I do like the concept art that was released. It looks like they’re mostly referencing MGS3 and MGS with some MGSV thrown into the mix. This also makes me wonder who they’ll bring in to play what characters? and what characters will appear in the movie? I can only think of this particular character chart someone did:

If he were still alive it would have been fun to watch him play every single character, including the women. :meeseeks: At that point it wouldn’t even matter if it were a terrible movie, people would be talking about how he played every fucking character.

In all seriousness though, I can sum up my feelings like this: You know that one episode of Futurama where the Amazonian women sentenced all of the men to death by snoo snoo? and all of them switched between faces of happiness and absolute horror?

Yeah, that’s how I feel right now.