The trackpads on the deck are nice, it’s a great substitute for a mouse when you don’t have a mouse. But that’s all they are. Not a single game* has done anything to show off any greater potential. Binding ten keyboard keys into a dodgy ring menu is not a pleasant interface. I have never once wanted to use a trackpad as a redundant joystick input. I would like to freely pan around with one pad and point with the other - imagine that in a puzzle box game. Nothing can do this, the closest to an independent view control i’ve found is “bind mouse wheel up/down buttons to vertical swipes”.

Heck, I would like a water filled toy game where you just press the pads to squirt rings upwards, and it feels just a little bit haptically squooshy. Nobody has done even that much to make a game feel truly at home on the Deck with the deck’s controls.

The new controller looks nice, but I don’t see any reason for it to replace the lowest-common-denominator xbox style controller. Especially when there are some really good xbox clones with magnetic sticks being sold for super cheap.

*okay, there’s Aperture Desk Job. That hardly adds up to a game, it’s basically the manual that comes with the Deck controller. I’ve spent more time playing the PC Jr’s bios tutorial.

Artisan of Glimmith, and Under The Island. I always love me a Zeldou, but now I’m at a cooking-minigame boss and siiigh I don’t wanna do that I wanna stab things.

Is Valve’s update cycle really worse than what the typical Android device gets?

The future of gaming is this. Move the Memory Pak®️ around into whatever system you’re currently using.

The circular scrolling thing has never worked right for me. I set it to “vertical swipe”.

What I would really like is for the left pad to do panning, like a two-finger trackpad scroll. No notches, just a smooth scroll please.

Yeaah, who the heck wants to download a 20GB+ demo that gives you a 15 minute slice of a game? I’ll give a bunch of 1GB demos a shot first.

Here’s how I did it: take a can of electronic contact cleaner, dribble it in the switch. You have to open up the system to really get it in there (remove your SD card first). Just a drop or two, work it in, repeat.

Biden isn’t president anymore. The only function of government bodies such as the SEC is to punish anyone that this president doesn’t like. OpenAI is very much in favour, and even if they weren’t they could afford to bribe their way out.

As I’ve heard it, the AI industry is borrowing against their mountain of computers to get their next round of money. The problem is, computers depreciate fast - their hardware is on like a two year replacement cycle. The solution - pinch the supply to make the value of your depreciating assets go up. Now you have higher valued collateral to borrow against, so you can buy more of the supply, pinching more, which makes your collateral more valuable again, ad infinitum.

Congratulations! You have now won at Capitalism. Now stare at the Game Over screen forever.

It’s because “The Ides of March: Et Tu Edition” is on its way

Did you say you wanted “more agentic AI experiences”? Right away, my good sir!

My biggest regret is not getting a whole crate of 2TB intel SSDs when they were going for $70. “Surely, this is a sign that prices are just getting better and better!”

But you didn’t directly plug it in, there was always some sort of adapter involved (thanks for the generous ports, Valve). There must have been something wrong with the adapters. Sometimes, you just have to flip USB-C over for it to work (thanks, Intel).

You might be the first person to run the Linux build, including the developer. I have a few games where the Linux version is a mess, so I have to use the Windows ver. “Win32 is Linux’s stable gaming API”.

I think the problem is that the itch release is literally the same build as steam’s, but the dev didn’t do a very good job of neutering the “ask a steam api” bit. They accept “lol what is steam?” as a valid answer, but not “steam is responding, and says you own 0 copies of game 8675309”.

First, check protondb. Then put a comment up on itch.io. Is anybody else complaining? Is anybody else commenting on the game at all?

Add the game to heroic and let heroic add it to Steam? I recommend always using either the latest proton-ge, or the latest of the previous proton-ge (9.27).

Or remove the steamapi library from the game’s folder. Or add a steam_appid.txt.

Or a last resort would be Goldberg.

I rather like the Logitech MX 2. It’s comfortable (for a right hander), and is shockingly reliable for a bluetooth device.

My recc for a keyboard is “good god never an Epomaker”. They look like a discount Keychron, but are fucking useless. A stuttttering messs.

This is all assuming that the dollar is worth anything in the future. The way things are going, uh maybe not

Bear in mind that the speakers don’t work by default because they are being driven by an amp that can totally blow them up. The speakers need software protection that physically models how the waveform is turned into sound and heat, and vetoes signals that might damage them. If it’s wrong, your speakers can go pop.

You could try working a little deoxyit or contact cleaner into the switch. Considering that it didn’t have a period of being flaky before it died, I am not optimistic that this will help.

Isn’t it great that the most important button is soldered on the backside of the mainboard, and is also fragile af?

Tomb Raider Survival Trilogy for $7.19

Shadow of Mordor/War for $6.99

Prodigal for $1.49 - Zelda plus date sim

Toem for $3.99 - gotta photograph em all

Crosscode for $5.99 - SPMMOOTY

Saint’s Row 4 $2.99

Vampire Survivors for $3.74 - everybody is legally required to have a copy

20 Small Mazes for $0 Doronko Wanko $0

My main recommendation is “don’t put all of your money into a bunch of PS5 AAA games”. PS5-ish games fit “if we turn all of the settings down, and render in 1/4 rez, and then AI upscale, and still your battery only lasts an hour”. It often isn’t a great experience here.

A strength of the Deck is in delivering an endless back catalog of PS4 and prior styles of games. Another is in bringing forward a ton of indie games that can’t win at “marketing”, can’t afford to develop PS5-level visuals, so they fight like hell on “mixing up new and interesting gameplay” and “price”.