Games: World Video Game Hall of Fame, Proton Experimental, Collabora's Work, and More

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 11, 2024

• Asteroids, Resident Evil among latest titles inducted into World Video Game Hall of Fame

  The honour for Atari's Asteroids comes 45 years after its 1979 debut in arcades, where it was Atari's bestselling coin-operated game. The game's glowing space-themed graphics and sound effects made their way from more than 70,000 arcade units into millions of living rooms when a home version was made available on the Atari 2600.

  "Through endless variants and remakes ... Asteroids made a simple, yet challenging game about blasting rocks into one of the most widely played and influential video games of all time," said Jeremy Saucier, assistant vice-president for interpretation and electronic games at the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, N.Y., where the World Video Game Hall of Fame is located.

• Proton Experimental brings controller support for more launchers

  Valve released an update to Proton Experimental for Linux and Steam Deck today which continues to expand the controller support available for various games launchers, amongst a bunch of other improvements.

• Bungie's classic free FPS 'Marathon' is now on Steam

  Before the likes of Halo: Combat Evolved and Destiny, Bungie created the FPS series Marathon which nowadays lives on as an open source project called Aleph One and now it's available on Steam.

• Collabora detail the improved updater for Steam Deck in SteamOS 3.6

  One of the companies that Valve fund for improvements across Linux, SteamOS and Steam Deck is Collabora and a developer has gone into more detail on the upgrades to the update system in SteamOS 3.6 that's now in Preview.

• Men of War II will be online-only at launch but an offline mode is in development

  The release of the strategy game Men of War II is fast approaching from Fulqrum Publishing and Ukrainian studio Best Way, which is confirmed to have Native Linux support but there's one sore spot.

• Rogue Voltage is a refreshing and very creative engineering roguelike

  Rogue Voltage takes the idea of roguelikes and deck-builders and spins it into something incredible clever with a little engineering involving lots of wires. Note: key provided by the developer.

• Heroes of Might and Magic III open source build gets initial gamepad support

  VCMI, the cross-platform open source game engine for Heroes of Might and Magic III has another fresh release out and they've been working on hooking up gamepad support. Nice to see more classics get that little bit more accessible.

• SteamOS 3.6 Preview for Steam Deck brings numerous big new features

  Valve have now put SteamOS 3.6 into Preview for Steam Deck, so those willing to test can jump in now and check out more big new features.