I hadn’t watched this year’s Gamescon, but thanks to Steam Deck HQ, they did a quick summary of the games presented. One particular game that caught my eye was High on Life. It’s a humorous FPS with aliens. The gun the main character uses has a personality and talks to him. Per the Steam store page description: Humanity is being threatened by an alien cartel who wants to use them as drugs.

Today’s beta Deck client update mostly focuses on bug fixes, plus the styling of command names in Steam Input has been improved. Patch notes are as follows: General Fixed scrolling on home recommended screen due to discovery queue Fixed issue where What’s New section was not populated properly Steam Input Replaced the Big Picture configurator in desktop mode with a windowed view of the new Configurator. This currently only applies to desktop mode on Steam Deck.

One thing that always turned me off about Cemu – the Wii U emulator – was the fact that it was closed-source. Nearly eight years after the creation of the emulator, it is now fully open-source and licensed under the Mozilla Public License 2.0. Not only this, but the emulator now has Linux builds available, although for the time being you’ll have to compile the emulator from source: Right now you still have to compile Cemu yourself for most distros.

Denuvo knows how to ruin everything about the digital gaming economy. Just a few months ago they started DRM’ing DLC. Now they’re expanding to emulated Nintendo Switch games. How on earth they’re going to be able to figure that out is beyond me. By preventing piracy on Switch while blocking unauthorized emulations on PC, studios are able to increase their revenue during the game launch window, which is the most important period in regard to monetization.

Small update to GE-Proton today. Besides the usual components being upgraded to the latest git (dxvk, vkd3d-proton, wine), some other features have been added. Patch notes are as follows: protonfix for Flatout Ultimate Carnage (single player only) added – thanks Ranplayer Amazon games patch added (this is mainly for possible future compatibility, please use wine-ge for non-Steam games) wine-staging ddraw-Device_Caps and ddraw-version-check patchsets disabled in favor of new Proton ddraw changes.

In the Q4 category while waiting for your Deck, yet somehow you still got an email? It’s not a mistake! Valve’s Lawrence Yang mentioned on Twitter: Hi all, a few of you may have received an order email for your “Q4 window” Steam Deck reservation today. This wasn’t a mistake! Production has outperformed our estimates, and we’ll be moving more Q4 folks into the Q3 window. Wow. Production is scary fast.

Did you know you can play online multiplayer with Nintendo Switch games on Linux? It’s possible thanks to Ryujinx’s LDN build. Today the LDN build got an update that now enables Vulkan. This means improved performance on AMD and Intel, and all GPU vendors “will enjoy drastically reduced shader compilation stuttering!” Mind you, the last time we saw an update to LDN was back in November, so all the changes made to the main branch since then have made it over to the new 2.

Quite a few new games are playable with today’s Proton Experimental update: Nancy Drew: Legend of the Crystal Skull Re-Volt Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Aspire: Ina’s Tale Battle Realms: Zen Edition WARRIORS OROCHI 3 Ultimate Definitive Edition OUTRIDERS Some fixes and improvements have also been added: Fix cutscene stutter in Disgaea 5. Fix Thrustmaster HOTAS having non-functional dial in Elite Dangerous. Fix raytracing in Crysis Remastered. Fix Planet Zoo randomly crashing. Improve video playback in Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen.

The past few beta updates to the Steam Deck client have now been pushed to the stable branch. Notably, some fixes were added to Offline Mode, a couple of fixes to the on-screen keyboard have made it in, and the hot/cold temperature notification has temporarily been disabled “while we address issues with false postives.” Patch notes are as follows: Offline Mode Fixes We’re continuing to look at making the user experience of playing games without an Internet connection a better, more intuitive experience.

Proton 7.0-3 has now bumped to 7.0-4. Included in this update are seven newly playable titles: Aquarist - My First Job Trove Chuzzle Deluxe Zuma’s Revenge! Karmaflow The Rock Opera Videogame - Act I & Act II The Rising of the Shield Hero: Relive The Animation Disgaea 5 Quite a number of bugs have been fixed, including game-specific fixes for Elden Ring, Final Fantasy XIV, and Civilization IV: Fix Elden Ring getting stuck on a white screen on first launch.