• 6 Posts
  • 663 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

help-circle







  • Another consideration is whether you’re a “patient gamer”. If you want to play the latest and greatest, then I have no idea. But, if you’re like me, then there are literally thousands of slightly older games you’d be happy to play.

    If that’s you, then you can’t beat the Steam Deck for value. With game bundles, I often get 8 games for $10 or less. Even if I only play one, that’s incredible value compared with $80 new titles.

    With a tiny bit of work, you can get Epic and GOG working on the Deck, too. If you’re a Prime subscriber, you’ll get 1-4 GOG/Epic games/week for free in addition to Epic’s weekly giveaways and GOG’s occasional giveaways. Some of those are AA/AAA games from a few years ago, too.

    If you’re tired of AAA games entirely (like me), then the Deck is also likely the best since there are so many incredible indie games. I’d much rather play 20 unique 1-10 hour games than a single 100-hour AAA repetitive slog. And most can be had for $10 or less if you wait for a sale or bundle.

    It’s also a great emulation machine for everything Nintendo that came before the Switch and everything else up to the PS2 generation, I guess? (Switch emulation is a bit of a pain to get working well, and for anything 360/PS3 or newer, they mostly have PC versions anyway, I think? I’ve never had a reason to emulate any of 'em so idk.)

    The OLED has a great screen and great battery life, so I have barely touched my smaller emulation devices since getting it. Why use a tiny device with cramped, limited controls when I can play on a great screen with Steam Input (so I can easily write my own game macros, or use the back buttons on twin stick games instead of the face buttons so I never need to take my thumbs off the joysticks, etc.)

    I guess if you actually want a device on the go, then something smaller might be better, but for longer trips the Deck works great in my laptop bag, and for short, mobile gaming breaks, I’ll just play Minion Masters or Space Cadet Pinball on my phone.



  • A similar strategy works great for me, but I frame it slightly differently based on my personal anxieties:

    • I’m procrastinating this important task because it’s overwhelming
    • But I can’t think about anything else because I’m worried I’m going to forget to do part of the task/some important detail
    • To be able to relax about this, I’ll just write down a list of things I need to get done/don’t want to forget

    Then, often, I’ll realize there’s a small part of the project that I am motivated to get done now so it’s not looming over my head anymore. Or, if not, I’ve given myself a Hemingway Bridge to starting the task whenever I do have motivation.


  • I loved this game back in the 90s…

    … But I’m not sure if it aged well for anyone without nostalgia for it.

    The combat has two options, but they aren’t balanced with each other: real time or automatic/calculated, but 8-directional movement with a tiny FOV with absurdly fast hero characters on massive maps don’t play well. Yet, depending on the matchup/combat system choice, you can have 1 hero defeat thousands of troops, or thousands of troops die to 20 archers in a tiny castle that was built between the end of your turn and the start of combat. It’s a bit silly, and very exploitable.

    Also, it can drag on for a long time after it’s patently obvious who’s going to win.

    The level up system is pretty cool, though, both in individual matches and with your commander. And the story/challenge missions can be proper hard, for those looking for a challenge.





  • Me too!

    I hate working with other people’s spreadsheets.

    Or my old spreadsheets.

    The worst is “can you just add a small feature” to a huge, sprawling, mission-critical, often reused spreadsheet.

    But I love how quick and powerful it is to spin up a new spreadsheet to analyze something or clean up messy data!


  • Hall effect joysticks would be great. The rest I don’t really count; obviously, better performance/bigger screen would be an incremental improvement, but I don’t need it. The OLED screen is plenty big enough.

    I (personally) would never use detachable controllers and wouldn’t want more moving parts that could break. Haptics and adaptive triggers I don’t care about improving. For sound, I prefer headphones for when I want “good” sound, too, so that wouldn’t make a difference for me.

    Even hall effect joysticks are only going to matter to me if my current joysticks break or develop play.

    I really do think the current OLED is amazing.



  • I’m not really sure what’s not perfect with the OLED already, lol. Maybe a second USB-C port would be nice, so we could charge it while using a non-hub device, or use a cheap hub to add even more controllers? That’s a minor, incremental improvement, though.

    It could always be smaller/thinner/quieter, I guess, but I can’t think of anything I’d really want to change with my Deck. I have lots of minor pain points with other tech, but I literally can’t think of anything with the Deck, so I’m curious if you have any specifics, or if you’re just trusting that Valve has put some real thought and research into this and will surprise us with design changes for the better that aren’t obvious.