I had the pleasure of interviewing a game developer who works on Project Heartbeat – a rhythm-based game written in Godot 4. Álex developed this game on Arch Linux. Pretty much every tool that he used in the development process is open-source, albeit for the Steam SDK. As LGC cares deeply about native Linux games, let’s get some insight into the development of Project Heartbeat. (Bold has been added by me.

Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl (NASB), the game that closely follows the trails of Super Smash Bros. as far as fighting mechanics go, has received an update today. When I had reviewed the game on Boiling Steam back in October, I had a few complaints regarding the character selection screen resetting after leaving the Rules menu and no timer for those who are away from their keyboard when matchmaking online. Fortunately for us, those issues have finally been fixed.

We already know the Steam Deck can handle GameCube and Wii games through emulation quite nicely. But notice that keyword: emulation. Well, someone by the name of GingerOfOz took the liberty of taking apart a Wii to get access to the motherboard, trimmed out a tiny section of it, 3D-printed some case parts, a few circuit boards, and tiny GameCube-style buttons, then crammed all the parts together with batteries inside a tiny chassis that resembles closely to the Game Boy Advance SP.

The Ryujinx team has assured us that, despite February being a short 28 days, they paid back an “avalanche of improvements, fixes, additions and ongoing project work.” First thing’s up is Vulkan progress. Check out the video below for a comparison of single-threaded SPIR-V (the shader language for Vulkan) on Super Mario Odyssey vs. multi-threaded: Implementing this obviously wasn’t easy, but looking at the results, it seems the effort really paid off.

Ever play Project Diva? You’ll feel right at home with Project Heartbeat. It’s a rhythm-based game with a heavy anime theme. Big plus for those of you who are anime fans. Please note that the game is currently in early access at the time of writing this; what is said in this review may not be reflective of the changes in the final product. Some things I mention may already be things the developer has in mind for a future update.

Have a look at these benchmarks: Yeah. In case you hadn’t caught up on the news yet, just take a look at how much better SteamOS handles Hitman 3 than Windows on the Deck from Linus Tech Tips’ video. 15 FPS better on average at Medium settings. Holy crap. Doom Eternal and Elden Ring were also tested, and they also clearly outperformed on SteamOS than the Windows version. Linus Sebastian from Linus Tech Tips said “it was just annihilation…Linux just ran away from Windows.

Yup, the Twitter account for LGC is now live. Give me a follow if you want to get your news feed from there, outside of the website itself and outside of the RSS feed. There I will also be posting teasers of my future articles. For instance, I’ve teased my Project Heartbeat review by showcasing the game on my GPD Win 3: DMs should also be open if you want to get a hold of me there rather than email.

Great news to one of Boiling Steam’s contributors. John Kehayias – AKA podiki or 9bladed, depending on where he is on the Internet – just got his Steam Deck today. He happened to be one of the few lucky ones that got their pre-order within the first 10 minutes they went live. He got the email from Valve on Monday, paid for it, got the shipping info from FedEx on Wednesday, and received it today.

I think I will set Friday as a day to cover the various software updates that have come to Linux (particularly gaming-related) during the week. A noteworthy mention is Heroic Games Launcher. Not only has the launcher received gamepad support, but the app is now available on Flathub. This is big news for those of you who have a Steam Deck, as the Deck only has support for Flatpaks. Combined with the gamepad support, now you’ll have almost the same seamless integration as Steam.

Honestly don’t even know why I’m bringing this up. Probably just gives me the opportunity to poke fun of Windows. As Valve isn’t prohibiting anyone from installing different operating systems on their new handheld device, users are free to install Windows, and starting today, they can make better use of Windows on the Deck, thanks to most of the drivers finally being available. The GPU, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth drivers have to be installed separately.