A Game About Juan, Installed by Juan

I wanted Guacamelee! because it is about luchadores. Then I found out the luchador is called Juan Aguacate, which is my name, and wanting it turned into needing it.

It is a metroidvania built on lucha libre. You play an agave farmer who dies in the first few minutes, puts on a mask in the land of the dead, and comes back as a luchador to rescue El Presidente’s daughter from a charro skeleton named Carlos Calaca.

DrinkBox Studios did their homework. The two worlds you swap between are the living and the dead, and they are drawn the way Día de Muertos looks: marigolds, papel picado, sugar skulls, alebrije colours turned up past what any other game would dare. The bosses are folklore. The enemies are folklore. Even the map is a small Mexican town with a church, a plaza and a statue in the middle of it.

I have played plenty of games that borrow a skull and call it Mexican. This one feels like someone who has been to the cemetery on the second of November.

It runs on the handheld, it looks like that, and it took a detour to get there. If you have an Anbernic or something like it, the detour is the useful part.

Requirements

My handheld is an Anbernic RG40XX V running muOS. It plays old console games happily, but PC games need PortMaster, which packages them up for these little ARM machines. So the list is short:

• An Anbernic or similar handheld running muOS
• PortMaster installed on it
• A copy of Guacamelee! Gold Edition that you own

PortMaster ships with some muOS images and not others. If it is not under Applications, download muos.portmaster.zip from the PortMaster releases, drop it in the /ARCHIVE folder on your SD card, and install it from Applications → Archive Manager.

Say hello first

Before spending money, install something free and play it for a minute. PortMaster’s list has plenty that need nothing but the install: I used Apotris, a Tetris game that is about 7 MB.

This is worth the five minutes because it tests the whole chain at once, and because of something nobody tells you up front: a PortMaster entry might not contain a game at all. Some ports include everything. Others are only the engine, waiting for game files you own and supply yourself. In the menu the two look identical, and installing the second kind without the files gets you a black screen and a bounce back to the menu, with no error to explain why. Guacamelee is the second kind.

Check before you pay

PortMaster publishes its whole catalogue as a data file, so “will this work” is something you look up rather than ask on a forum. Three things to confirm:

1. Your handheld is on the port’s supported list.
2. It needs no extra runtime. A port that drags in a 250 MB runtime is a different proposition on a 1 GB device.
3. Whether it brings the game or expects you to supply it.

To check all three, open the catalogue in your browser: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/PortsMaster/PortMaster-Info/main/ports.json. Search the page for the game you want. In its entry, avail lists the supported devices (the Anbernic RG40XX V is rg40xx-v), you want runtime to be an empty [], and rtr (ready to run) tells you whether the game comes included. If the search finds nothing, try a shorter piece of the title before giving up.

Guacamelee’s entry, trimmed to the parts that matter:

{
  "arch": ["armhf"],
  "avail": ["rg40xx-h:ALL", "rg40xx-v:ALL", "rg35xx-plus:ALL"],
  "inst": "Add your Humble Bundle Linux Guacamelee\\_DRMFREE.sh, or GOGs gog\\_guacamelee\\_gold\\_edition\\_2.0.0.3.sh to the guacamelee folder and run the game.",
  "rtr": false,
  "runtime": [],
  "title": "Guacamelee"
}

Guacamelee passed the first two, and rtr: false plus the inst line say plainly that the game files are on you. The part I did not expect was that its age mattered most. These ports run x86 games on ARM hardware through a translation layer called Box86, and Box86 only handles 32-bit programs. Modern Linux games are 64-bit. Guacamelee’s Linux build shipped in 2014, when 32-bit was still normal, and that is the only reason any of this works.

The catalogue answers that too. Guacamelee’s entry lists its architecture as armhf, the 32-bit build, and names the exact file it wants: GOG’s gog_guacamelee_gold_edition_2.0.0.3.sh. A port built for 32-bit, asking for GOG’s installer by name, turned “probably” into “buy it”.

After buying, I checked anyway. I opened the installer on my laptop and looked for a folder called lib32. It was there.

GOG sells the game for Windows and Linux. Take the Linux one, a single self-extracting .sh file, not the Galaxy installer and not the Windows version. Its name has to match the one in the catalogue entry character for character. If it differs, setup fails with “Game installation file is missing”, and you rename the file to match.

It helped that it is cheap. I bought it on GOG at 75% off, well under the price of a coffee. A game that old goes on deep discount often, so if it is not on sale when you look, wait a week.

Five minutes

First launch unpacks everything. PortMaster says it takes about five minutes, and it is true.

Watching lib32 scroll past on the handheld, after checking for it on my laptop, was the most satisfying part of the afternoon.

It runs

Full speed, no stutter, an hour in.

I opened the options to raise the resolution and found 640×480. My first thought was that this seemed low for how good it looked. My second thought, after checking, was that the screen is 640×480. There was nothing to raise. The game was already drawing one pixel for every pixel the display has, which is the best it can do.

The screen is 4:3 and the game was made for widescreen, so you get black bars above and below rather than a squashed picture. In practice you stop noticing.

The language menu has several languages, Spanish and French among them. Playing a game built on Mexican folklore, in Spanish, on a handheld I can put in a jacket pocket, is better than I expected from something I nearly talked myself out of buying.

If you try this

• Check whether the port includes the game before you buy anything. In the catalogue, rtr: false means it is waiting for files you do not have.
• Check whether it needs a runtime. On a 1 GB device, a port that drags in a 250 MB runtime is a different proposition to one that does not.
• Take the Linux build, not the Galaxy installer, not the Windows one.
• Match the filename exactly. Most brittle step, easiest fix.
• Look up the port in PortMaster’s catalogue before paying. Your device on the list, no runtime, and a 32-bit build answer the only question that matters.

One last thing: GOG bundles Super Turbo Championship Edition with Gold Edition, and it looks like two games for one price. On the handheld it is one. Super Turbo is a separate 2014 release, Windows only, with no PortMaster port, so it sits in your library, playable on a Windows PC, invisible to the handheld.

Quitting the game takes a few minutes, which is the one rough edge. The save held, which is the part that matters.

A game about a man called Juan who keeps getting knocked down and coming back. Took a few false starts and one fussy filename to get there. Fitting enough.