Games: Tangle Tower, Lawgivers, Fertile Crescent and More

• Odds and ends, the Linux and gaming Sunday Section

  Almost time to begin another week full of news, before we do let's run over a few interesting happenings recently. Let's start with two bits of recent news about Godot Engine, the free and open source game engine. The 3.2 release cycle is going strong, with a second alpha release now available. A massive list of new features and improvements coming to Godot 3.2 can be found here. What's even more exciting though is the Vulkan work coming with Godot Engine 4.0, with another short progress report post up for it. The new visual frame profiler coming certainly looks useful to help developers squeeze out some more performance. More AMD news for you, as it has been reported by Wccftech that AMD now command around 30%+ market share of the CPU market. That's some very impressive growth, pushed forward by the Zen microarchitecture from 2017. As seen in the graph below from cpubenchmark.net, this is the highest they've seen it since 2007.

• SFB Games to bring Tangle Tower to Linux post-launch if there's enough demand

  British indie studio SFB Games, developer of the highly rated Detective Grimoire are working on a new game called Tangle Tower and with a little push they could bring it to Linux. Tangle Tower is a fully voiced point and click murder mystery adventure, set in a strange and twisted mansion. You will need to interrogate suspects and solve unique puzzles as you progress. Looks and sounds like a great game. Sadly though it's currently scheduled to release later this month only for Windows and macOS on October 22nd, so no Linux support at launch.

• Turn-based political simulation game 'Lawgivers' adds Linux support with the latest update

  Today I came across Lawgivers, a turn-based political simulation game which recently added Linux support and it looks like it could be a lot of fun. Since it's a political sim, you will be tasked with leading your party into elections. If you manage to get voted in, you will be responsible for approving laws and shaping your country’s destiny.

• The completely silly fighting game Foreskin Fury is out in Early Access

  After a short delay, you can now jump into Foreskin Fury and have a cock fight. Yes this is a very real game. Made in Unreal Engine, the aptly named Stupid Industries said it started off as a joke and they ended up actually learning Blender and Unreal Engine to turn the joke into something a little more real. Here we are, Foreskin Fury was accepted onto Steam and it supports Linux.

• The currently free indie RTS 'The Fertile Crescent' should now work better at different resolutions

  The Fertile Crescent is an upcoming in-development indie RTS that feels like a retro Age of Empires and it's really quite good. A new update is out (and it's still free) fixing up the UI for different resolutions. I think more of you need to try this one, it's a wonderful little RTS game that I honestly can't wait to see expand. Hopefully now more of you actually will be able to try it, as they've made it so the interface properly scales with your resolution. Previously, there were problems if you had anything other than 1080p. Not only that, most of the interface was actually redesigned and it gives you more information.

• Chiaki, the open source and cross-platform PS4 Remote Play client now supports the PS4 7.0 update

  Sony recently upgraded the system software on the PlayStation 4 which broke compatibility with the open source Remote Play client Chiaki. The developer acted quickly and a new release is up. This is the software we tested out recently and came away pretty impressed with it. Allowing you to stream games from a PlayStation 4 to a Linux desktop, seriously handy stuff since Sony don't support it on Linux officially.

Android Leftovers

• iPhone vs. Android

• 10 best personal trainer apps for Android!

• Huawei Mate 20 Pro owners are receiving EMUI 10 update based on Android 10

• How to Increase Battery Life on Android Phone

• Canadian LG G6 Android Pie update will release 'soon', confirmed by carriers

Android Leftovers

• Google still fails to secure its Android store from malicious apps

• Two-day workshop on Android Application Development at Ajeenkya D Y Patil University

• Nokia 9 PureView running Android 10 showed up on GeekBench

• Huawei Mate 20 Pro EMUI 10 beta (Android 10) arrives in Europe

• Samsung announces Android 10-based One UI 2.0 beta for the Galaxy S10

My Linux story: I grew up on PC Magazine not candy

In 1998, the movie Titanic was released, mobile phones were just a luxury, and pagers were still in use. This was also the year I got my first computer. I can remember the details as if it were yesterday: Pentium 133MHz and just 16MB of memory. Back in that time (while running nothing less than Windows 95), this was a good machine. I can still hear in my mind the old spinning hard drive noise when I powered that computer on, and see the Windows 95 flag. It never crossed my mind, though (especially as an 8-year-old kid), that I would dedicate every minute of my life to Linux and open source. Being just a kid, I always asked my mom to buy me every issue of PC Magazine instead of candies. I never skipped a single issue, and all of those dusty old magazines are still there in Costa Rica. It was in these magazines that I discovered the essential technology that changed my life. An issue in the year 2000 talked extensively about Linux and the advantages of free and open-source software. That issue also included a review of one of the most popular Linux distributions back then: Corel Linux. Unfortunately, the disc was not included. Without internet at home, I was out of luck, but that issue still lit a spark within me.