Brütal...

These past few days, I've been playing more and more of Brütal Legend and while I have enjoyed the action bits immensely, I am starting to see more and more flaws on this game.  When the game focuses on Eddie alone, things are fine.  When I got those idiot hair bangers, things get a bit more management heavy and overbearing with the constant use of guitar solos and troop management while being there in the battlefield with them.  After some failures, I got a bit of experience and pressed on.  Then... stage battles.

Boy, these blasted stage battles.  Now, instead of being an action game, I have resource management, commanding hordes of idiots, use the guitar solos and then figure out which of those fan geysers to get.  I absolutely did not enjoy them.  I thought they were a chore.  Guess what?  I play to have fun.  When it becomes an absolute drudgery to play?  I quit.  That Tim Schafer has to write an open letter to explain how this game is supposed to be played just underscores how out of place it is in this game.

Shame because the soundtrack is awesome.  The writing is silly and awesome as well.  I cannot tolerate the stage battles.  I just can't.  Uninstalled.

Brütal Legend and Steam

So, after going through some really disappointing Indie games, I get to Brütal Legend which was a great surprise.  It works on Linux and it plays really well.  I had minor problems figuring out the controller support but this Steam thread should be helpful.  First thing is first though, you should configure the gamepad on Big Picture.  The shell script needs some Linux reworking to get rid of the dos \r stuff, but once you've cleaned it up, it will grab the SDL configuration for you.  The script is modified for Costume Quest (which funnily enough is modified from The Cave), but it's easy to change the paths for your install of Brütal Legend.

Good luck and save that SDL config file!