Steam

Steam - the video game distribution and launching platform from Valve, is twenty years old today. Steam has become quite a fixture of PC gaming life in those two decades.

I didn’t really pay any attention to Steam initially. I wasn’t really into PC gaming in 2003.

At least partly because, coincidentally, my daughter also turns twenty today. She was born just hours ahead of Steam.

A short while later, here we are, probably not thinking about video games.

(yet)

tl;dr In a recent thread on Mastodon, it was revealed that Ubuntu 23.04 users can’t install the Steam deb package from the Ubuntu archive without jumping through some technical hoops. It turns out this was a mistake, a bug was filed, and future builds shouldn’t have this problem.

It’s not immediately apparent whether the (currently ‘broken’) ISO images for Ubuntu 23.04 will be rebuilt (unlikely) or if this will stay broken in 23.04, and users will need to ‘cope’.

Last week I posted about my guilty collection of unplayed games in Digital Hoarding: Gaming Edition. In short, I have a ton of games I’ve bought over the years and never played, even once. I set myself an internal goal to play more of the games I already have, and reign in my game purchasing.

I used the dynamic collection feature of Steam to show me the unplayed games, sorted by their steam review score. The idea being I want to play games that are actually likely to be fun. I don’t doubt I have very many good games, but I bet I have the odd stinker in there too. Might as well start at the top.

Well, this is embarrassing! I recently filed a bug against an open source project because I genuinely thought it was broken. It was (almost, probably, entirely) my fault. I thought I’d fess up and explain what happened. It might be useful for others.

As I mentioned yesterday, I recently upgraded my Ubuntu machines, including my main desktop. It’s a funky Skull Canyon NUC with a weird hybrid Intel / AMD GPU setup and an external nVidia card in an enclosure.

Another in a series of “I have identified a problem here!”. I appear have quite a few video games. More than I can probably play in my time left on Earth. Let’s set aside all the retro games I have for a moment, and consider only the ones that run on my primary computer, a PC. To be clear, I’m only talking about ’native’ games.

Aside: I hate the word ’native’ in this context, because what’s native? A ZX Spectrum game running under an emulator isn’t native to the PC, is it? Shattered Pixel Dungeon is written in Java though, and that bytecode isn’t native to my Intel i7 CPU. Theme Hospital running under DOSBox isn’t native either, but wait, it’s DOS, so it is PC native. Does anyone even write video games in 80x86 assembler these days? :)