Valve

Steam End Of Year Review: 2023

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It’s that time of the year again, where The GabeN sits us down and tells us about the multitude of ways we collectively wasted our time throughout 2023. Apparently I’ve been really busy, especially on Achievements. So, how did I manage to have fun this year? Let’s find out!

I have a hard time wrapping my head around this one. How can you be on Steam and only play 4 games? I’m guessing these must be people that only play TF2/Counterstrike and a couple of others. Me though? Apparently I’m full of variety. I played a total of 118 different games over the span of 119 days, meaning I’m not afraid to try something new. Among those 118 games I managed to finish 9 of them, a story for another end of the year thread! 😛 I was two achievements short of getting 400. I’ve set a pretty high bar for myself on Achievements, not sure if I’ll be able to hurdle over it in 2024. 😛

Surprisingly I played a lot of newer titles this year. They were indies for the most part, some I fell in love with during NextFest! Such as; Whisker Squadron Survivor, and Gal Guardians just to name a couple.

For me this was the year of Metroidvanias and Roguelikes. I finished one of the Shantae games, and I progressed further in a multitude of others like Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night and Dust: an Elysian Tail. While I’ve also been playing Whisker Squadron Survivor and Hades. There was also some looting to be had in different variations of the Borderland’s and a tiny bit of electronic warfare of the Cyber and Mech varieties. With my collection of entertainment I’m never allowed to be bored. 😛

One quarter of my overall fun time was done on my Steam Deck with 0% regrets. Every long lunch break it was there for me whenever I needed to kill a bit of time, sometimes literally. Even managed to complete a few games on it that I probably wouldn’t have been able to finish elsewhere, thanks to cloud saving and being able to pick up where I left off after sleep mode. Some of the games I finished on Deck were the first Commander Keen Episode, Shantae: Half Genie Hero and Okami as some examples. After over a year of having the Steam Deck I can honestly say I’m quite happy with my purchase.

In conclusion: This was an amazing year to finish games both of past and present, and discovering new adventures. May the distractions I have in 2024 be just as incredible as previous years.

Aperture Desk Job Did Not Disappoint

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Can I Ride It?

If you’re a Portal fan and haven’t played Aperture Desk Job, that needs to change STAT! It’s mainly made for the Steam Deck in mind, but you can still play it if you have a controller. It’s a thirty minute sit behind a desk simulator, and you play a newly hired employee tasked with performing QC work on… toilets? Your boss is a Personality Sphere by the name of Grady, who is just about as insane as any other employee you would meet at Aperture. Cave Johnson also makes a return!

I don’t want to go much in to detail, it’s like Jazzpunk or The Stanley Parable in a sense. It’s one of those things that is best experienced yourself.

Ok… I Did It.

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I was showing the specs of the upcoming Steam Deck to a friend of mine the other day, when I happened to notice the pre-order date had been extended (despite ending in July according to the official site). I’ve been reading up on the hardware, and admire Valve’s dedication, and even working alongside AMD for this project. I decided since the actual money doesn’t go out until these are ready I said to myself “screw it!” I’ll get in line to pre-order one of these (512GB model for obvious reasons)! I know I would be able to utilize it accordingly, and it would be an absolute bonus if I got my hands on it before a holiday trip next year! It will be interesting to see how many units sell, and if it helps add to the Linux Gaming Marketshare.

The Steam Boy Is The Steam Deck

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I. Fucking. Want. This.

They have the Steam Deck in three different storage sizes, and for the most part the hardware is pretty solid. It also has an optional dock that you can purchase, similar to the Nintendo Switch.

I’m not going to pre-order, but I do want to see where this goes. I don’t see this replacing my gaming laptop or Linux Surface, but it would be nice to have a tiny gaming handheld for long car trips and other situations where I’m forced to sit down and do nothing…

Watch Out For This Source Engine Exploit

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If for any reason you find yourself playing a multiplayer Source Engine game DO NOT accept any invites from strangers.

Secret Club are a not-for-profit reverse engineering group who’ve found a number of exploits with Valve’s software, which they explain in a series of posts on Twitter. Each of these exploits are remote code execution flaws, which Secret Club told me via email gives a hacker “full control over the victim’s system, which can be used to steal passwords, banking information, and more.”

If what is being reported in the article is true then Valve has been aware of this exploit for two years. This is a serious exploit to have open in the wild, and hopefully the exposure encourages them to get off their duffs to 86 it from their code! Be very careful when playing Source games until this gets resolved.

It’s ironic reading this a day after playing around in GMod with Yutram! Fortunately, it was just the both of us goofing around on maps that would probably be unappealing to twelve year olds Fortnite enthusiasts.

In Other News: Valve Is Still Awesome

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I have to hand it to Valve… 99% of their games are awesome, they have a convenient platform to buy games on, more than one platform. Which is why I think its cool that Valve, to this day updates their older games riiiiight when you think Valve will never touch them again. Yes, TF2 had an update recently… BUT PORTAL 2 HAS VULKAN NOW HOLY SHIT.

You don’t normally see many game companies update their older products (or even make them available outside of Windows), which is why Valve will always be my main squeeze.

Now if they could just properly port SFM to Linux…

Music to my eyes.

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After hearing from so many users about cancelled shipments it was nice to hear that I’ll be getting these; hopefully my co-worker got his too. I told him about the blowout when it happened and he immediately purchased. At that price it was hard not to.

Once these arrive I have some experiments that I’d like to run, see how well two Steam Controllers fare in couch co-op games.

Local CoOp Over The Internet

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Steam had an update recently to the public beta branch that allows you to play local couch co-op games with friends even without them owning the game! So say for example I want to play one of the Mortal Kombat games with a friend, but they don’t own any of them. I can launch the game and play it with them as if they were next to me on the couch! I haven’t had a chance to test it yet, and from what it sounds like it’s still not working with quite a few titles. But I do intend to check out this feature! This opens up some new possibilities with games that have no online support, and I might even have to purchase some digital board games when the kinks are worked out.

Now it’s just a matter of what to play first? :melon:

This post is brought to you by a company that has made fewer mistakes in over a decade than Bethesda has made in less than a year.

Valve just made Linux Gaming a little more attractive

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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: