GNOME Games 3.22 Beta 2 is now available for download

Sep 1, 2016 00:15 GMT  ·  By

We've told you earlier about the new features coming to the Nautilus, Polari, and Mutter components of the forthcoming GNOME 3.22 desktop environment, and now Adrien Plazas informs us about the availability of the second Beta release of GNOME Games 3.22.

GNOME Games is a recent addition to the GNOME 3 Stack, and it has been engineered as a library manager for your video games, allowing hardcore Linux gamers to effortlessly pick and play a game directly from the beautiful and dark user interface of the open-source application.

The current stable release of GNOME Games is already great and loved by many, but it looks like there's room for improvement, as lots of new features are coming to it this fall, as part of the launch of the GNOME 3.22 desktop environment on September 21, 2016.

The first major new feature will be support for using GNOME Games as a Flatpak on any GNU/Linux distribution that supports this universal binary standard. That right there is amazing news because you will be able to install a new version of the app as soon as it's out upstream, without having to wait for your distro's maintainers to release it in the repos.

The list of improvements continues with full-screen support (finally), which can be toggled using the F11 or CTRL+F keyboard shortcuts, along with the ability to use the ESC (Escape) key to exit full-screen mode, support for covers that have the same name as the game, and support for pausing and resuming a game when its window loses focus.

Moreover, it will be possible for users to hide the search bar from the Collection view. The development team has also managed to revamp the resume dialog, improve support for MAME games, as well as to implement a prompt dialog asking users to choose an action if game resuming fails. Support for gamepads has been improved as well in GNOME Games 3.22.

PlayStation support improved, new gaming consoles added

But wait, that's not all, as GNOME Games 3.22 also adds support for many retro gaming consoles, including Game Boy Color, Game Gear, Mega-CD/Sega CD, Mega-CD 32X/Sega CD 32X, Mega Drive 32X/Sega 32X, PC-Engine CD-ROM, Sega Pico, SG-1000, and PlayStation, which received support for known games with multiple discs, and the ability to display the correct title for known games.

Of course, numerous bugs have been squashed since GNOME Games 3.20, and a full list of them is attached at the end of the article for the tech-savvy ones. In the meantime, you can download GNOME Games 3.22 Beta 2 (technical version numbers is 3.21.91) right now via our website and take it for a test drive. Please note that this is a pre-release version, not to be used in stable environments.

Games 3.22 Beta 2 Changelog