#it was an adventure getting this display to work properly with linux

[khalaris]

Heute ist mein neues Spielzeug (Grafik-Display) angekommen und weil ich krank bin (buuh!), konnte ich es auch gleich ausprobieren (yay!).

[umamisoy]

Blasphemous

Name: Blasphemous Initial release date: September 10, 2019 Developer: The Game Kitchen Publisher: Team17 Digital Limited Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows, Linux, Macintosh operating systems Genres: 2D Platformer, Action-adventure, Metroidvania.

A journey of penance and guilt. The Game Kitchen creates a world of virtuous suffering for their newest non-linear action platformer.

Blasphemous makes a striking first impression through its art style, presentation, and general aesthetics; the mix of catholic-inspired imagery and detailed pixel art is the strongest quality of this game and it carries the whole experience.

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What is the game about?

You take the role of The Penitent One, a member of The Congregation of the Silent Sorrow. Armed with the sword Mea Culpa, you being a pilgrimage to purge the world of The Miracle, the corrupt manifestation of divinity that influences the land of Cvstodia.

The player character, The Penitent One

How does it Play?

It plays like a solid 2-D action platformer, mainly of Metroidvania conventions (non-linear exploration and progression of the story) with gameplay elements of the souls-like genre (altars where you are healed and regain the flasks used to restore your health, as well as serving as savepoints / respawns).

The controls are very simple: 4 directions, one jump, one attack basic attack button, one special/ranged attack button, parry button, and a spell button, plus the map (under which is the options menu and exit game… for some reason), inventory menu that's about it.

You notice how different this game is from other famous metroidvanias (like the Metroid, Castlevanias and more recently Hollow Knight) when you understand just by looking at how the levels are designed, that there's no fancy super jumping, no flying across maps or overpowered abilities; all you do is running, jumping, dashing and attacking, and the game does it very well.

Blasphemous Announcement Trailer for PS4

The whole theme of the game is suffering, pain, penance and the vulnerability of people at the mercy of higher wills, thus you are never almighty. In a similar matter to the games of the Dark Souls series, you are just a very VERY persistent warrior that through will and skill manages to surpass great obstacles. In short, your skills and stubbornness are your superpowers.

The Penitent one encounters Ten Piedad (Have Mercy)

In order to enjoy this game properly you must be aware of something: This is NOT a souls-like (even when it borrows elements like the Bonfire and Estus System), nor does it lean fully into the conventions that Castlevania Symphony of the Night established so long ago. What's here is a very linear upgrade tree (better versions of your attack and attack damage increase) plus health and mana increase, but there are no builds or different gameplay types.

This game is more of an action platformer first, and everything else second. The main focus of the gameplay is traversal through interesting, varied and challenging environments. On the technical side, the game runs great overall; load times are snappy, configurations cover the necessary standard of display, sound, and control input so there's nothing to complain here.

Plus, you can turn screen-shake on and off (which I greatly appreciate). You can rebind your inputs on your keyboard on PC however using the Y and H keys will always move the camera up and down respectively, even if you rebind them.

This is something that will most likely get a fix down the line. If you don't have a controller I recommend the following keybind setup: WASD to move

H to jump

U to attack

O to parry

J for range attack F for healing flask

Space Bar for Sliding

M for map

B for Inventory

I always use this type of setup for 2D games on my PC, following the standard arcade stick type of layout and it works well for pretty much every game 2D game I've played, including this one. Aesthetics Lady of the Six Sorrows. To the left the final execution, to the right the concept art (taken from @Blasphemous on Twitter)

Visually the game's pixel art style takes from classical catholic iconography from Spain (mainly from Francisco Goya's paintings) to set the tone of its environment, setting, and themes; I'll admit that pixel-art and romanticism are not something that I would imagine mixing well, however here it's executed masterfully with some of the best aesthetics I've seen in a while. Gameplay-wise animations are fluid, weighty, and easy to understand so you never feel like you were cheated by some attack that wasn't properly communicated. For the environments, every important element of the game conveys exactly what they want, be it the pain of the afflicted by The Miracle at the congregation of the Kissers of Wounds, or the divinity of the Lady of the Six Sorrows (Shown above).

The music goes for warm string arrangements to mellow piano melodies, then back up to intense guitar riffs for boss battles. The soundtrack of the game was made by Carlos Viola, who also made the music for The Game Kitchen's two previous games The game doesn't lean hard on the stereotypical church chorus, thus avoiding the cliche and making itself stand out even more. It's a great soundtrack, while not something you will be humming later (but personally I would enjoy listening to in some rainy days), it does its job perfectly: set the tone and create atmosphere. My favorite tracks are Tierras de Azafrán, Una Senda de Pasos Blancos, Prohibidos y Cubiertos de Polvo, Titles that translate to Lands of Saffron, A Pathway of White Footsteps, Forbidden and Covered in Dust, respectively.

. . .

How do you get into it?

The main drive of the game is not to obtain new and very different ways to play, rather the lore and themes that surround each interaction, story, and location.

Distances between zones and points of interest are far and going from one area to the next is hard, which goes in line with the hardships that are told throughout the game. It was at this point when I was convinced of the love and care that went into making this work. Everything is that written, shown, told, and experienced is in universe.

The penitent one requires fervor in order to perform his prayers, the main character is mute because he belongs to a congregation that takes silence as their penance, healing requires smashing a glass flask full of blood and smearing that to the face of the penitent one's mask, blood that is taken from a statue that bleeds, and so on and so forth.

If you are looking for a mechanically rich game with many different gameplay styles, this won't do too much for you, but if you want some good platforming, very interesting themes, setting and style this game will definitely be for you.

Final Notes (with mild game lenght spoilers)

It took me roughly 16–20 hours of my first playthrough to complete the main quest to obtain ending B, after that I did all other side-quests to then finish the game with the ending A. This varies, of course, depending on your ability to remember important spots to return to once you have the necessary items, and how good you are at the platforming and combat.

edit:

This was written shortly after the game's release and does not take into account any changes or addition that might have come up with updates and extra content.

[linuxlife]

Linux Life Episode 55

Hey ladies and gentlemen and welcome back to Linux Life.  My ongoing adventures in the sphere of the Linux world.  There is no fixed schedule for these episode releases due to I don’t always have time to make one every month say consistently.

Anyway since episode I am still playing about with the Xeon.  I managed to add the repo-ck to the listed repos checks.  So now it doesn’t have to rebuild the kernel taking 4 hours it just pulls the latest version from the repo meaning it is a lot faster to update.  Which is good considering it has had two updates since the last episode.

Pamac is still unable to connect to the internet very well so in the end I actually uninstalled it using Yay and have been using that to keep the Xeon up to date.  Yeah I know it’s a terminal thing but I will just have to live with it.

The hope with Arch is using the terminal as little as possible, but if it means I can keep the software up to date its a small price to pay.  In time I hope to upgrade the memory on the Xeon.  Don’t get me wrong 12MB of RAM will ruin most things but its just nice to have that bit of overhead should you need it.

The HP Z400 workstation that it is can apparently be upgraded to 24MB of RAM according to them, but I have seen reports that if you get the right type of 16MB ECC memory it can actually have 48MB of RAM installed.  However that is a long way off as at the moment i have a few things I need to sort before I even think about adding memory to this machine, but it is a future update plan.

I once put more memory in a Mac (can’t remember which one) it worked but was a bit temperamental with the extra ram so I may just settle at 24MB which is enough for most things.

Something I am intending to look at between this episode and next is a program called Scrcpy which allows you to connect your Android phone to Linux and display it on your desktop and control it.  Why you would want to do that I am yet to know, but hey it will be fun to try out.

I was testing the Xeon with emulators.  Now previously when using Amstrad stuff I was using Arnold.  However most do say the best one is Caprice32.  Now Caprice32-git is in the AUR but when you try and build it you get issues with the free-type libraries.  SO I had never managed to get it to run properly from the AUR.

It seems the one in the AUR has not been updated for a long time and I am not even sure if anyone is ever going to update it as it doesn’t seem to have a maintainer keeping it in check.

So I just wanted to see if it was worth all the hype involved.  So I downloaded the source and tried to build it that way.  It also hit the free type error.  The crazy thing is both Freetype and FreeType 2 libraries are on there so I don’t know why it doesn’t compile apparently some file is missing.

So I installed Snapd (yep I can now use Snaps from Canonical), I honestly was not sure it would work given that Snaps are based in Ubuntu and with the differences between Ubuntu and Arch I had no idea whether it would even work.

Sure enough I downloaded the Caprice32 Snap.  Now I know Snaps are a self contained package which includes all the libraries it needs to run so obviously it’s a bit bigger to download.  However I am happy to say it ram just fine.

Now i will admit I was not an Amstrad owner or user so although I have tested the system using DSK files of programs I kind of know.  I really don’t know which Amstrad games are the best ones to look at to show it off.

I did try the Amstrad version of my favourite Spectrum game Tornado Low Level and man does it play slightly different.  If you remain low the plane turns and moves much slower and the wings only sweep back when you get to max altitude and the screen then has a strange effect and the plane absolutely motors along the map.

It’s bizarre to say the least.  It does however seem a lot of Amstrad games were just straight Spectrum ports and given that Amstrad eventually owned Sinclair this is not a huge surprise.

So has anyone got any Amstrad games to recommend to me to have a look at?   If so feel free to add them in the comments or send me info via the Facebook group etc.

Also I installed Vice and Fuse (Commodore 64 and Spectrum emulators) on the Xeon just for test purpose.  The Xeon seems to have no major problem running these.

As a man who absolutely adores emulation I believe I have looked at most of the possible available emulation options for Linux, but if you are aware of any I have not tried or checked out please feel free to let me know about them.

I keep meaning to start on YouTube videos but to be honest I keep backing up on them because I really don’t have a good enough idea to run as a series.

I did intend to do a thing regarding the history of emulation looking at the likes of MAME version 0-.1 and various DOS emulators but the timelines and history is so all over the place.  It would be a nightmare to sort out the spaghetti.

Also many early emulators did not include dates so knowing when they were released is total guess work.  I mean it is amazing some of the emulators that ran in DOS and how well some of them worked.

Maybe one day I will figure a format that works so for now that remains on the back burner for a little longer.  I have no idea if anyone would be interested in seeing old emulators but I think it could be an interesting subject to look at.

MAME 0.1 for DOS only ran five games (Pacman, MsPacman(bootleg), Pengo, Crush Roller and Ladybug).  Regarding Crush Roller the palette was guessed by Gary Walton as they didn’t have the actual palette information to hand.  So Nicola Salmoria and crew ere really winging it in the first MAME release.

Any way I’m waffling on about nothing Linux related so forgive me.  However if I do decide to take this series on I will no doubt be sorting the videos using Linux.

So it’s back to looking at the Likes of Davinci Resolve, KDEnLive, Natron 2, Flowblade etc.   I notice a lot on YouTube seem to use KDEnlive and I have played with it and it seems reasonably easy to use.

I am open to suggestions regarding which video editor is best...  Anyway that’s enough waffle for this episode so until next time.... Take care.

[chassidyjemison-blog]

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