Just get a Steam Deck, and add a hub and wireless controller.

Oh, but it won’t run full-detail AAA releases at 4K? Nothing cheap will. That is exclusively the domain of consoles, earned through direct-contact optimization with developers. That’s still enough horsepower for the thousands of great indie games on Steam, many of which are simple enough to run fine on a midsize TV on the small Deck CPU.

Basically, if someone is adamant about running high-detail games on their TV using Steam, they’re already a niche enough market that it really doesn’t make sense to build up a single SKU for them and hope for bulk manufacturing savings the same way you could for consoles.

It’s probably better off for developers to keep targeting the Deck as a general metric point anyway. The especially good news there is, once devs do that, Linux desktop gamers benefit anyway.

I still need to start this.

But I know the feel - games that expand their emotional range often get the best reactions because moving to an extreme of seriousness, sadness, or even humor, can shock the player.

I regret that after Ross’s stepping back, I didn’t give this issue much attention. I suppose we have to trust that it’s sifting through the slow gears of politics, but with so many “bull” responses to petitions it’s likely worth keeping public attention on it.

Yeah, I was able to play through most of AC: Odyssey on my deck, thanks to Lutris. I also use Heroic just because I’ve never wanted to install Epic’s launcher.

In support of the move in spirit, but: Any ideas to prevent a company from circumventing this via dummying up contractor firms? Eg, “We employ this software company started by our founder to write our code. Coincidentally, their pay is .1% of the pay at Microsoft”

My mouse escaped the window, so I changed the launch options:

gamescope --force-grab-cursor -w (monitorwidth) -h (monitorheight) %command%

I kinda wish gamescope had a good option to skip that w,h, but no one’s told me about one yet.

this just in sale of speedboat now illegal because they are drug

I’ve always been okay with keeping gaming libraries digital - but I think the larger console population might be okay with that too if we could disconnect digital games from account-based ownership - the kind where a company can go “Oh, whoops, we lost the license to this fart sound effect. We’re going to have to remove this game from your library.”

I can’t say I like how /Games often circles around negative attention rather than positive.

Activision spent billions on marketing so people will buy these stupid Ultra Editions. Even negative attention gets people thinking about and talking about the game.

Instead, post about the cool indie games out that you think deserve far more attention than this battle pass slop. Let Activision come check up on us and cry because for all their efforts no one even cares to hate on their game.

Theres an asymmetric game out as a demo, called Carnival Hunt. It has a really unique aesthetic, and isn’t all that fun yet, in part because of the formula being refined and players getting better at it. But I like the idea: Rather than TCM’s idea of unlocking doors towards an exit, the survivors, “bunnies”, are trying to climb the floors of a large building, with each method of ascending a floor requiring various tools and making noise. Some ways up are harder to set up but easier to repeat, others only work if the killer is ignoring them.

The only occasion I could buy that a “console makes the exclusives” is when the costs are so high that the investors decide a $60 price tag isn’t enough.

That can be alleviated with DLC, or live service bullshit; or it can become an incentive to buy a particular console.

Then, when someone is braindead and doesn’t want a big epic award winning adventure, they’ll use that same console to play Fortnite. Thus, God of War helps sell VBucks or whatever.

It’s a weird analysis, but even though we no longer see console exclusives and it’s seen as a pro consumer move, I also think it was just a way for managers to boost one quarter’s revenue, and it wasn’t really good for the console ecosystem as a whole, especially considering how it would fund future exclusive epics.

I think the limit for me was the articles about forced repatriation, where China had snatch squads sent into other countries to force people to return, even when they had broken no laws recognized by that country. Oh, and the Uyghur genocides, which multiple global newspapers have reported on.

I will accept “US Bad”. These days, any claim of a large empire being perfect should be treated with massive suspicion.

You can get quite a few options at Itch.io if you filter for games that have an HTML5 version, and click through - much faster than installing options from Steam Next Fest. Unity and other small game engines have been perfect for that.

“We are on the cusp of the next AI evolution, in which we, the tech company, can simply say the word ‘Money’ to our AI, and it will automatically transfer money directly from our investors into our wallets. Future versions won’t require us to say anything, permitting AIs to write their own next press release for budding, just-around-the-corner technology in an E-mail to investors.”

A little lesson about technical projects: You will quickly reach 95% completion and have something amazing to show off. Then, 95% of the work is completing that last 5% in order to make the prototype usable.

AI is good at making itself look ready. It is nowhere near ready.

I think this is why a certain scrolling shooter at the endgame of a certain game closely located to a tomato didn’t emotionally work for me. I can do the math - it can’t just throw that many other players at the problem to get me through the enemy ships, and the game needed to be playable off the internet since little else of it was online.

The above poster is likely to become a racist terrorist, given their history of comments getting downvoted.

/logic

FUNKYHEART: In which the people who wrote that bunny-hopping script for Half-Life 2 speedrunning made a video game, in which they’re also strange cyber demon lesbians.

For some of the cases where enemies are getting multiple turns in a row, using an S-Break (RT+D-pad) can be a good way to get yourself back on positive ground. If you get a turn, it also helps to give defensive buffs to the VIP before the enemy attacks them.

That said, I have heard that while Nightmare difficulty poses a great challenge to some masochists and optimizers, it’s not a difficulty level the developers really balanced around.

Just tried it out. I’m unfamiliar with the extraction shooter genre, but it was interesting, I’m not necessarily opposed to tactical complexity for its own sake. I died to a minefield, and then on the next go didn’t have a weapon; so some of the mechanics come across a little bit unclear.

I’m glad it has a demo because I know a lot of people don’t enjoy characters like that; there’s some great heartfelt conversations once you get to know the characters, but you have to be able to stand 20+ narmy and overly polite banter sequences to get to the moments where each of them surprises you. If you get that far, you usually get invested.

I REALLY like what they’ve done with the combat in this one. Even on normal, I was losing early boss fights for playing without consideration and using nothing but the enemy’s elemental weakness. I just finished Chapter 1, and I especially liked having moments where half the party was dead, and attacking was actually a good option to give my team a moment to revive each other, thanks to the stun/delay systems.