Games Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 08, 2023

• Steam Deck Gaming: 75% of Tested Games Now Playable or Verified

  Valve has been speeding up Steam Deck game testing, and 75% of titles checked have been judged to be verified or playable.

• Steam is Banning Games with AI Generated Art

  Steam, the famous online gaming platform, is reportedly banning the usage of AI generated Art assets in games. This decision caused debate, with some developers claiming that the ban is unfair and unwarranted.

• GTX 1650 Still Most Popular GPU According to Newest Steam Survey

  The latest Steam hardware survey shows minor changes in hardware usage compared to May 2023.

• Steam Deck Drops to All-Time Low Price for Top Two Models

  As part of the Steam Summer sale, Valve is selling the Steam Deck for up to 20% off, marking its lowest price ever.

• The Puzzle of Putting Video Games in a Museum

  After years of neglect, art institutions are coming around to games. Can they master the controls?

• Turn-Based Strategy Game Allows You To Run a CPU Company

  A turn-based strategy game was being developed several years ago, with the idea of players being able to run their own semiconductor manufacturing company and compete with others to be the best in the business.

• Run a CPU Company in a Turn-Based Strategy Game

  A turn-based strategy game was being developed several years ago, with the idea of players being able to run their own semiconductor manufacturing company and compete with others to be the best in the business.

• Going Rogue (Digital Antiquarian)

  After an initial foray into the ways that open-source software has failed to live up to its early hype, this Digital Antiquarian article covers the history of rogue-like games in great detail.

• Going Rogue

  The movement’s Little Red Book came in the form of Eric S. Raymond’s 1997 essay “The Cathedral and the Bazaar.” Originally presented as a comparison of a top-down versus a bottom-up methodology in the context of open-source projects, the central metaphor quickly got blurred in the minds of the public into a broader comparison of closed source versus open source, with Raymond’s tacit acquiescence. In this telling, the cathedral was Microsoft’s software-development model, in which a closeted priesthood bestowed programs upon a grateful populace on its own terms and on its own schedule. The bazaar was the hacker way, in which the people came together in a spirit of delightfully chaotic egalitarianism to make software for themselves, sharing their source code in the name of the greater good. “No closed-source developer can match the pool of talent the Linux community can bring to bear on a problem,” wrote Raymond. “The closed-source world cannot win an evolutionary arms race with open-source communities that can put orders of magnitude more skilled time into a problem.” Thanks to Linux and the other open-source tools it enabled, he predicted elsewhere, Microsoft’s eagerly anticipated Windows 2000, the latest incarnation of its server-grade NT operating system, would “be either cancelled or dead on arrival. Either way, it will turn into a horrendous train wreck, the worst strategic disaster in Microsoft’s history.”

  [...]

  Those open-source games which have become relatively popular have tended to build upon previous game designers’ visions in much the same way that Chrome is built on Chromium: think FreeCiv or Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe, worthy projects that are nevertheless more interested in making workmanlike technical improvements to their inspirations than bold fundamental leaps in design. The open-source movement has had the most pronounced impact on gaming in the form of tools, both for making games and for playing them. I could never have embarked with you on this journey through history that we’ve been on for over a decade now without the likes of DOSBox, ScummVM, UAE, VICE, and many, many other open-source emulators and utilities of all descriptions. I am deeply grateful to the many talented programmers who have given their time to them in order to keep our digital past accessible. Still, they do remain purely technical projects, not creative ones in the sense of the games which they enable to run on modern hardware.