If you have younger children and want to get some family-friendly games for them, take a look at the Humble Humongous Back To School Bundle that's filled full. Quite a good bundle this one, and I can approve of multiple titles in this that my own mini-me played through years ago. Almost all of them have Linux builds available too.

The bundle includes 37 items across different tiers:

• Pajama Sam's Sock Works
• Pajama Sam 2
• Pajama Sam 3
• Pajama Sam 4
• Freddi Fish 3
• Freddi Fish 4
• Freddi Fish 5
• Freddi Fish Maze Madness
• Spy Fox 3
• Spy Fox 3
• Putt-Putt Joins the Circus
• Putt-Putt Enters the Race
• Putt-Putt Goes to the Moon
• And lots more!

See the full Humble Humongous Back To School Bundle if interested.

The big new release of Mass Effect Legendary Edition from BioWare and EA is only supported for Windows on PC, but with Proton GE you should now be able to play it on Linux. Should being the keyword, as Proton can be a little fiddly at times.

If you're not clear on what Proton and Steam Play are, be sure to check out our constantly updated dedicated page . It's a special compatibility layer for running Windows games and apps from Steam on Linux. Proton GE is the community-made version which has a number of extras.

Proton-6.8-GE-2 is officially out now with these changes:

• Mass Effect Legendary Edition Launcher and ME1 fixes added. All 3 games should be playable.
• DOOM Eternal should no longer hang and resolution change should work again
• Forza Horizon 4 frequency patch added, however this does not seem to improve the crashing :/
• RE8 REENGINE Logo audio is fixed and no longer plays static (game is still crashy)
• RE8 Display menu fixes ported from proton experimental
• Nioh 2 hang fixed (videos still don't play)
• Fallout: New Vegas audio looping fixed
• 2k Launcher fixes ported from proton experimental (fixes mafia, mafia II, and others)
• Yakuza 0 - fsync disabled (thanks tgurr!)
• Yakuza Kiwami - fsync disabled (thanks tgurr!)
• LEGO The Lord of the Rings d3dx9_41 override added (thanks alkazar and FigoFrago!)

Also of note is that you may need to remove your Wine/Proton prefix for Persona 4 Golden to work, see how to do that in our previous article .

To use it here's what you do:

1. Download the Proton-6.8-GE-2.tar.gz file from the release notes .
2. If this folder does not exist, create it: ~/.steam/root/compatibilitytools.d/
3. Extract the archive downloaded in Step 1, and place the contents into the above directory.
4. Restart Steam if it's open which refreshes the Steam Play list for Proton-6.8-GE-2 to show up.
5. Right click on your game, go to Properties, Compatibility and ensure the box is ticked named "Force the use of a specific Steam Play compatibility tool" then select it from the dropdown box that appears.

Want to see how Mass Effect Legendary Edition runs on Linux with Proton GE? See below:

Watch video on YouTube.com

Note: the stuttering you see is pretty common for running Windows games through Proton, as it needs to manually build up a cache to pull from. Usually not an issue on Windows, as games are directly made for it and build it themselves. Over time it becomes smoother and this is what the Steam Shader Pre-Caching system is supposed to be helping with.

Spoiler alert though for older players: apparently the face of Tali was changed from a stock photo you could see in-game to a unique and more appropriate image, it does make me laugh that such a small change has generated big headlines across the major gaming sites.

For me, Mass Effect is one series that holds an immensely special place. I played through the entire series back when I was a big console gaming fan (before truly diving fully into Linux) and I loved the story and the whole experience. Being able to do it again, enhanced and on Linux is just beautiful.

You can buy it on Steam , just remember though that running it in this way on Linux is not actually supported. The usual caveats apply: it can break any time and the developer doesn't need to ensure it continues working this way.

NeuroNet: Mendax Proxy is the upcoming title from Dream Harvest, an upcoming choose your own adventure styled cyberpunk visual novel and it looks brilliant.

While Dream Harvest are also working on the strategy game NeuroSlicers (which will also come to Linux ), NeuroNet: Mendax Proxy will be coming out first but they're not giving a date just yet. NeuroNet: Mendax Proxy is also confirmed to be launching with support for Linux.

"You are an artificial intelligence charged with managing a city-wide augmented reality network known as the "NeuroNet". Embark on a journey of self-discovery as you learn what it means to be human in a world losing itself to technology."

Watch video on YouTube.com

Features:

• A branching narrative that takes you across the city of Catena, exploring humanity's reliance on technology and its power to be both our saviour and downfall.
• Manage a variety of city resources tied to the state of affairs within Catena. Balance the city's financial prosperity, how the public perceives you, the axis of order, and your degree of power.
• Meet and build relationships with 23 diverse, fully voiced characters, each with their own wants and needs.
• 6+ hours of gameplay with over 5000 unique story cards.
• Discoverable mini-games and secrets.
• An expansive Codex packed with gorgeous character and environment art.
• A unique original soundtrack.

Definitely excited about this one. With some wonderful visuals backed up by what sounds like a thoroughly interesting story in a visual novel adventure style setting with a cyberpunk theme.

You can follow it on itch.io and Steam .

Paws and Claws, a pretty wholesome DLC for the fantastic and stylish Children of Morta has managed to raise a rather nice lump sum for charity.

"We have a piece of truly wonderful and heartwarming news for you today! The Paws and Claws charity DLC has proven to be a huge success and ever since its launch, we've been able to raise MORE than $130K for animals worldwide!" - Dead Mage & 11 bit studios

Not an essential DLC for the game by any measure, and it's a completely different experience to the main game overall. However, it's just so wonderful that you should probably buy it anyway. It adds in an animal shelter system, a herd of various animals to visit you, a new treats mechanic for animals, animal-related character boosts and quite a bit more. 100% of the proceeds of Paws and Claws goes to the Humane Society International (HSI) .

Watch video on YouTube.com

The developer confirmed the figure is PC platforms and Consoles combined for the total. Considering the low £2.99 / $3.99 / 3,99€ price - it means it's sold quite a number of copies.

You can buy Children of Morta from GOG , Humble Store and Steam . We can easily recommend it.

Excited for the huge Caves & Cliffs upgrade coming to Minecraft? Even though it's being split in half , we certainly are and you can get a little more behind the scenes info in a new video.

Caves are one of the most unloved areas in Minecraft, so to see Mojang put some effort into sprucing them up a bit is quite exciting. Digging deep for riches should be much more enticing than it currently is and there's a lot of new goodies coming. What about the mobs though? There's plenty of new there too.

Interested in knowing more? Watch the below video:

Watch video on YouTube.com

As a reminder the first part of Caves & Cliffs arrives "mid-2021" bringing with it the new blocks, mobs, copper and more with the second part due towards the end of the year to include the expanded world generation for new caves, increases to the height and depth world limits, new mountain generation, new biomes and so on. There's a seriously huge amount to look forward to for Minecraft this year.

After being available in some form since 2012, RUNNING WITH RIFLES (RWR) seems to be finally hitting it big with a sudden surge of thousands flocking to the top-down tactical shooter.

For Osumia Games, this has been a long-deserved moment in the spotlight. They've supported Linux with RWR since 2012 during the early Beta builds and it's a huge amount of fun to run around in. It's currently 80% off on Steam, which has probably helped the surge of players, however it's done the same discount multiple times in the past which did not cause much of a surge until now.

How big a change are we talking? Well, RWR usually only saw around 100-300 players. Now? It's been seeing multiple thousands with a new record set of 14,149 online on Sunday, May 16 2021.

Watch video on YouTube.com

What caused it then? Well, it wasn't Twitch livestreams like Among Us saw, instead it looks like it might have been YouTube and specifically the Asian market with multiple videos hitting 10s of thousands of views and some in the 100s of thousands ( like this one ). It shows once again, how powerful a market it is and translations can really help sell a game with RWR seeing text translations to Simplified Chinese, Korean and plenty more.

You can buy RUNNING WITH RIFLES on Steam with 80% off until May 21. Also on Humble Store but no discount.

Stadia has confirmed another few new announcements for their Linux-powered game streaming service that will be coming soon. Some out now, some have no release date yet.has confirmed another few new announcements for their Linux-powered game streaming service that will be coming soon, although neither has an actual release date.

Two recently we missed were Street Power Football and Hundred Days , both of which are out now and available on the Stadia store.

As for other titles coming up? Just this week they announced Super Animal Royale and Shantae and the Pirate's Curse will be coming over to Stadia. Super Animal Royale will be "Coming Soon" with no clearer date. It's going to be free to play too, so it gives people yet another chance to try out something on Stadia with no commitment to anything.

Watch video on YouTube.com

Meanwhile Shantae and the Pirate's Curse is said to be coming out on Stadia "Summer 2021".

If you missed it, Stadia claim the service is "alive and well" in a recent interview. Certainly will be interesting to see how long Stadia sticks around for, with ~100 games coming to it this year. Stadia still have a problem of getting their marketing right too - so many people still don't quite understand Stadia itself is free as Stadia Pro is an optional subscription to get free games and 4K support (varies between games). Stadia really need to be making all of it a lot clearer for potential people to sign up to it.

Play Stadia on Linux on Stadia.com with a Chromium browser.

Terraria, the 2D pixel-art sandbox survival adventure has now officially turned 10 years old and it's going as strong as ever. Seriously impressive from developer Re-Logic!

I remember seeing it on PC for the first time almost 10 years ago while a friend was playing it, thinking it looked interesting and never thought it would go on to be as popular as it is. Frankly, I sort-of dismissed it entirely back then and went back to Minecraft. I was seriously wrong about it because it's an incredible game that deserves to be played.

Anyway, a fresh update went out to mark the occasion. Re-Logic mentions that "this update may not contain any new content (we were serious when we said 1.4.2 was it ;) ) - it does contain a very special celebratory world seed that is unlike any other that we have made previously". The wink face being an obvious nod to this really not being the end of Terraria.

Here's what's new in Terraria 1.4.2.3:

• Added Celebratory Seed
• Corrected the damage on Frost Armor's set bonus debuff from 20 to 25 DPS.
• Fixed Vulkan and Metal rendering issues that lead to crash, on FNA builds.
• Fixed a certain exploit.
• Fixed missing tooltip in Queen Slime's treasure bag.
• Fixed every vine type except Normal/Flower vines from passing on paint as they grow longer.
• Fixed King Slime's spiked minions being able to pick up money and despawn with it, similar to Queen Slime's minions previously.

The celebration world seeds are:

Across both GOG and Steam it's currently 50% off for about 8 hours, so the sale ends around 4PM UTC. Be quick if you wish to get it with such a nice discount although it's not the highest it's been discounted but still a fantastic game to get so cheap right now.

You can buy it on GOG , Steam and Humble Store .

Another week will be starting soon, so it's time to catch up on a few missing pieces for Linux and Linux Gaming that we didn't get around to covering this week.

Firstly let's start with the open source news!

AMD has released Radeon Rays v4.1 , a "high-efficiency, high-performance ray intersection acceleration library for DirectX12 and Vulkan". This release actually puts it under an open source license now (MIT) and so it's all up on GitHub . Nice to see AMD do more open source.

KDE Plasma 5.22 Beta has been released, as the KDE camp continue to advance their flashy flagship Linux desktop environment. The aim of this release is to further "stability and usability" fixing up bugs, solving annoying paper-cuts and there's a number of big improvements for Wayland support again too which is quite exciting to see! 2021 looks truly set to be the Year of Wayland on the Linux desktop.

Developer Luke Jones who has been hacking away (with a number of others) on getting ASUS ROG laptops better support on Linux, has written up a blog post going over the current status of a number of patches. A number have already been merged and available in current Kernel versions, with more merged and on the way for future Kernel versions. Excellent to see more hardware seeing better support.

The Linux App Summit has been in full swing once again, with a number of interesting topics. You can catch up on the official YouTube Channel .

OpenLoco , the free and open source game engine reimplementation for Chris Sawyer's Locomotion saw release v21.05. Here's what's new in the release:

• Feature: Implement cheats window with financial, company, vehicle, and town cheats.
• Feature: Remember last save directory in configuration variable.
• Feature: Tween (linear interpolate) entities when frame limiter is uncapped for smoother movement.
• Fix: Boats get stuck in approaching dock mode when water is above a certain height. This was incorrectly fixed in 21.04.1.
• Fix: Decouple viewport updates from game ticks for smoother panning and zooming.
• Fix: Some available industries are missing in the 'Fund new industries' tab.
• Fix: Station construction preview image is using wrong colours.
• Fix: Element name is not shown when inspecting track elements using the Tile Inspector.
• Change: The multiplayer toggle button on the title screen has been hidden, as multiplayer has not been reimplemented yet.

Oh and Vulkan, the high-performance open and modern graphics API got a website facelift .

We also finally changed our own YouTube Channel introduction video, which was going on 7 years old! It's now showing off me getting scared in VR - a bit more modern. We also started uploading VOD from our Twitch ( follow us on Twitch !) livestreams so you can keep up with it all.

Paradox Interactive seem to be in a bit of hot water with fans right now, as the botched roll-out of the latest Europa Universalis 4 expansion has caused a lot of issues. It's now one of the most negatively reviewed item on Steam , leading to Johan the Studio Manager of Paradox Tinto to put up an apology .

Unrailed, the frantic co-op railtrack building game from Indoor Astronaut and Daedalic had a big update recently with a whole new game mode. This mode sees you race against the clock, with randomized biomes. They also added a new auto-save feature to the checkpoint system. Unrailed! is available from the Humble Store and Steam .

Hope you all have a good weekend, see you next week for more news!