Steam may be changing the Deck Verified program (for the better)
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This week, we've seen a ton of games announce their upcoming Deck Verified status. Could this be a change of pace for Valve? We'll talk about it! Plus, a new companion app for the Steam Deck aims to improve your gaming experience. A classic boomer shooter gets a source code release and it has the community excited. All this and more today!
The next release of RetroDeck is here, version 0.8.0. This release is an important one as it's RetroDeck's first to react to the Nintendo vs. Yuzu settlement. Let's look at the release notes:
Removed Yuzu and Citra 20+ more systems are available in RetroDECK. New Engines: GZDOOM, Solarus, IkemanGO (M.U.G.E.N), OpenBOR. New Emulators: Vita3K, Ryujinx, MAME (Standalone). New: External Controller Layouts. New: Steam Deck Layouts - Simple and Full. New: Radial Menus in the Full Steam Deck Layout. New: GZDoom parser and RetroDECK .doom file format. New: Ponzu as an as-is Legacy AppImage Loader Updated Everything Tweaked all configurations Enabled 2-4 players in all systems where possible.
According to the notes, quote:
If you are upgrading from an older version: This does not remove any roms, saves, bios or configurations you had. It only removes the ability to run the games via those emulators as they are no longer included.
Next up, I wanted to talk about this new app called DeckFilter. DeckFilter bills itself as a "Steam Deck companion app." It lets you filter your Steam library quickly by How Long To Beat, ProtonDB, Deck compability & tags and generes! It's available on Google Play and Apple's App Store.
Not only that, but the app's creator (who, full disclosure is a Patron of this channel and a member of our Discord channel) publishes blog posts about various game bundles including the Humble Monthly bundles among other fascinating reads. I highly recommend checking out deckfilter.app!
Humble Devious Deckbuilders Bundle
And speaking of Humble, the Devious Deckbuilders bundle is now upon us. $20 will get you seven Deckbuilding games. They include: Book of Hours (which has an Unknown Deck rating but has a native Linux client), Astrea: Six-Sided Oracles which is Playable, Dungeon Drafters which is Verified, Mahokenshi - The Samurai Deckbuilder (which is Playable), Zoeti which is Verified, Gordian Quest which is Verified, and Floppy Knights which is ProtonDB Gold.
As with all Humble bundles, a portion of your purchase goes towards charity. And if you use my affiliate link below, you'll be helping the show out at no additional cost to you! And if you do use my link? Thanks!
Tons of games are announcing verified status
So this week we've seen several popular games either get Verified status or announce they'll be Verified at launch. The first is Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengance. This is the hotly anticipated title from ATLUS and SEGA which is slated for release on June 14th. This is super exciting since this means that Valve's done the testing needed to validate the game well in advance of the game's launch.
Clicking the 'Learn More' button on the game's Verified badge does have an important caveat.
The game's first-time setup requires an active Internet connection
So if you don't like DRM, this probably isn't going to be the game for you.
Next up, we've got Fallout 4 which has upcoming Verified status with their next free patch on April 25th. This patch also includes ultrawidescreen support, fixes to the Creation Kit and a variety of quest upgrades. Plus stability, mods and bug fixes. There will be even more updates coming to the game, too!
Next up, we have Black Mesa's Necro Patch which includes some key updates for the Steam Deck.
They've improved Vulkan support, they've added a new renderer and new optimizations for post-processing
- Fixed crashes as well as UI flickering and artifacting
- Improved controller support using Steam Input
- Fixed hitch when weapon decals are first applied to gun
- Re-enabled weapon decals by default
- They've also added proper gyro support for Steam Deck
Then we have Ghost of Tsushima's PC port. While the port has no official Steam Verified status (yet), given Sony's track record with supporting the Deck from day zero, we can anticipate the game should be at least friendly to the Deck. And since Sony revealed the minimum specs for the game on PC? Well, we can deduce the Steam Deck falls somewhere between Minimum and Recommended, closer to Minimum.
So, classic boomer shooter Descent 3 has just had its source code released under the MIT—or sorry… no. It looks like no license? Yeah, it looks like GitHub's default MIT license was originally used when the repo was created. But Kevin Bentley wasn't sure if that was the right one to use, so he took that down for now. There's an ongoing discussion about the licensing on GitHub.
The code has seen a ton of development since it was originally posted, despite the licensing issue.
About this release, Kevin Bentley said, quote:
This is the latest version of the Descent 3 source code. This includes the '1.5' patch that Jeff Slutter and Kevin Bentley wrote several years ago. At the time, it worked for Windows, Linux, and Mac.
Some proprietary sound and video libraries from Interplay have been stripped out (the ACM and MVE format). I have that code if someone wants to help make a converter so the old cutscenes work. It'll take some effort to stub out that code so it compiles.
The first thing I want to do is get everything compiling again, and ideally some CI/CD actions. After that, the code needs to be cleaned up some, to remove old version control comments, etc. A lot of this code was written by a really great team, but keep in mind we were much younger and less experienced back then.
I love it when old games have their source code released. I'd love to see where this goes. Hopefully they'll get the licensing figured out and source ports will start appearing on FlatHub and in other repositories.
-- Chapters --
00:00 Introduction
00:25 RetroDECK v0.8.0
01:43 Thank you to World of Warships
02:55 What is DeckFilter?
03:32 Humble Devious Deckbuilder Bundle
04:13 Steam's now Verifying games ahead of launch
06:35 Descent 3 gets its source code released
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