Playback.dem

It’s that time of the month again! Where you can read about hot stuff in our corner of PC Gaming and where we seemingly predict the future.

Site News

New Game Pages

New game pages have been added! We’re joined by Test Drive Unlimited and GTR 2, two legendary racing games that have stood the test of time.

Review Incoming

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4 is here. We’ve been playing it and you will get a review in 2 days. Sorry the rest of the playback is so short.

Game News

Flash Games Archive News

As reported by Boing Boing the people of the world now can enjoy the Flashpoint Archive! Over 200k flash games have supposedly been preserved already. Time to re-run Stick RPG, that one Bumper Car game or those old Yeti Sports game hacks.

reTHAWed v4.3.1 goes POSTAL

RWS likes to collab these days, so here comes the new reTHAWed update which doesn’t just bring new classic levels and tweaks into the mod, but also adds new skaters based on models featured in POSTAL 2. Yes, you can even skate as the dog “Champ”.

Check out the announcement trailer on YouTube, our the release trailer on YouTube.

Marathon Delays September Date

Bungie has delayed Marathon away from its original September 23rd release date. This means you have more time to replay Marathon 1, then Maraton 2 and Marathon Infinity before that launches.

The new Marathon will be launching on Steam, sometime in the future.

Tech News

Warner Bros. Studios Restructure

Restructuring has taken place at Warner Bros. gaming division who is known for having recently beheaded Monolith Productions. Their roadmap is this: please fans of successful existing properties. This means they’ll be focusing solely on Mortal Kombat alongside non-gaming related franchises in their gaming studios.

Speaking of which, they already have a Trailer out for Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection which Digital Eclipse is developing. That is looking sweet. I still have the old collection developed by Code Mystics, but GFWL went AWOL.

Steam Enables SteamPlay By Default

As reported by GamingOnLinux - which has also turned 16 years old recently - Valve has now made it so any Windows game can be installed now without having to tick an extra check box.

Game compatibility very high these days, with only games using third-party anti-cheat solutions causing problems on the regular. They also collect usage metrics and probably determined that first thing people will do is interact with the switch, too.

Discord Stabs BotGhost

For 7.5 years the people at BotGhost had been serving the users of Discord, and made a nice living doing it too, until now.

There was much outcry, and people complained about how Discord is getting worse, once again. Most of that discourse was of course, on Discord.

Users have also noticed that perhaps a bit too much data was sent out to BotGhost. Oh, what could possibly happen if someone I don’t know has access to my data?!

Please, someone tell them about the third-party doctrine so they can all stop recommending worse options.

If you care about privacy and your rights, you self-host. If you too want to avoid getting burned over and over again, consider reading Chapter 6 of “Unix Without Words”: obtaining and maintaining a personal UNIX guru.

Xbox Handheld Revealed

Yes, the ROG Xbox Ally has been on our mind for a while. We actually have an Xbox Series X at frag-net.com’s beach house, and have quite the fondness for the original Xbox library of games. So what did we expect from a properly branded ‘Xbox’ handheld? A first-class Xbox, however this thing will ship with Windows 11 Home.

The device has not yet launched, so we don’t have a verdict yet at all.

You have the opportunity to create a polished experience with the Xbox library, make a solid device that stands on its own and doesn’t deal with that desktop jank. But instead they’re choosing to compete against the Steam Deck. Fair enough.

If you’re going to do this, listen to the complaints players have about the Deck. Expectations are high. But there’s also problems worth solving. We’re looking forward to the launch of these portables.

But this is a perfect opportunity to address issues not exclusive to the ROG Xbox Ally.

On Valve their Steam Deck with its native SteamOS, players will encounter the occasional jank with trying to force a PC game into being portable and controller oriented. That is by far the largest turn-off for anyone who has been hesistant to get one. There also aren’t any great solutions to it.

And although very rarely do you run into games that don’t work at all, it can happen. This is also not exclusive to Linux or playing via Wine/Proton - not all games were written with the hindsight of modern hardware performance. Then there’s also games that just don’t work on that form factor.

We believe that a more polished experience would be very successful.

It’s Over

That’s it! Shoo! Now go play something, or do something useful! We are back to playing THPS 3+4 to bring you our review, soon.