I listened to an episode last night and it tickles the same absurd funny bone, loved it! I feel like there’s a touch of the absurd or whimsy in the British humor that I respond to, even though not being British I often don’t understand some references. Case in point, I love the podcast Three Bean Salad.
That’s what I have and I love it because it feels solid to use. I bought an expensive Backbone because it was marketed pretty well, but it just felt so flimsy that it had to be returned.
All fighting games (or anything that runs deterministically on all players’ machines, like fighting games do) should always have a performance test requirement before you hop online. We figured this out over a decade ago, and plenty still don’t do it, resulting in people with weak computers causing matches to appear laggy.
As a society, we should agree on which menu subtitles belong in. Is it language? Audio? Display? Game Settings? Sometimes I’ve seen games put them in multiple menus so that we always find them where we’re looking for them.
I’m no expert on colorblind settings, but I tried playing Monaco with someone who’s red/green colorblind, and that game was nearly impossible for him.
If your game runs online, I should be able to host the server myself, and launching a listen server from within the game ought to be present, too. It might be nice to surface port forward information there as well. LAN is nice; Direct IP connections are better. (Thanks, Larian, for including both!)
I’ve seen games with either a totally separate “accessibility” section or tab, or the settings in related tabs and those settings also all in the accessibility menu.
I really really like this modern gaming thing where accessibility settings are now standard.
Cutscenes that can’t be paused, especially if they’re longer than 10 seconds.
Do you have the slightest idea how frustrating it is to be mid-cutscene, something else requires my attention, and I cannot fucking pause it? Singlehandedly my biggest gripe with gaming.
Same with unskippable cutscenes, especially before a difficult boss. It’s no fun to have to sit through it over and over if I’m struggling with said boss, or have to sit through a cutscene I’ve seen several times in previous playthroughs. This also applies to the game’s credits.
Multiple un-skippable product and company credits at the start. Show a blinking “Loading…” if that is what is going on but let me skip this stuff on the second start onward.
I bought Cyberpunk on Stadia on release day, since I couldn’t play it anywhere else, and it was actually great for me. The technical issues I ran into were all because the game was buggy, not because the service was bad. The biggest issue was the self self-fulfilling prophecy that Google was going to kill it, and not worth subscribing to (which they eventually did kill because of low usage). I think that if Google had spun out Stadia as it’s own company, it may have succeeded.
Same here, Stadia was great the entire time it lasted. But I have good internet, so that helped. But yeah the killing factor of it ended up being google as you said. Very unfortunate.
I was betting on Stadia being the future of gaming. Without having to mess with hardware or software it was an amazing product. Their service was great, but we all know how it turned out. At least they refunded me all my purchases.
Hah I actually made a profit on their shutting down. Or at least, on Cyberpunk 2077. Bought CP77 and got a free controller + Chromecast bundle, sold the Chromecast for 45 bucks and got Cyberpunk refunded in full. After buying it again on sale through Steam, I had a profit of 15€.
And I still have the controller! The Stadia controllers are awesome.
Even non techie people don’t trust them to keep any new service going, so they have to force people to use their new services, which of course comes with a ton of bad will, and then when people inevitably don’t like this and don’t spend as google has envisioned, they shutter it, continuing the cycle of failing more and more and probably reinforcing internally the idea that the only way to make more money is through enshitification rather than innovation, because they can’t admit to themselves they’ve destroyed their brand image.
Chants of Sennaar was great! Had an absolute blast trying to work my way through it. I probably sounded like I was playing Baba Is You when trying to wrap my head around the glyphs (?) and the messages they try to convey.
Figuring out the symbols, their meaning and then using them properly to translate between different people was surprisingly rewarding and fun. I wouldn’t have minded if the game had a bit more gameplay, but at least it didn’t overstay it’s welcome.
I loved the grammar differences between the languages. Like where the negation glyphs go, or pluralisation. It always made me happy when I struggled with the translations, and then renumbered stuff like “Bards place the subject before the verb!”
Chants of Sennaar is by far one of the best games I’ve played. I had an absolute blast getting it to 100% and wish it had just a little bit more to do or vocalisations of the various languages.
I also really liked Heaven’s Vault, really recommend that as well. Tunic is probably one of my favourite recent games, genre wise very different but still in that translation category.
Chants was probably in my top I played last year, absolutely loved the soundtrack too.
I‘m always amazed at the amount of people believing the Steam Machine will be sold for the same or less than the most expensive version of the Steam Deck while being six times as powerful.
The other problem is that the tariffs could be totally different by the time it releases. I fully suspect that the tariffs are the reason that we haven’t got a price yet.
It would be funny if it is noticeably more expensive in the US though like with the Switch 2.
Just playing devil’s advocate here. I don’t necessarily disagree with you, but there are some interesting factors at play.
The Steam Machine won’t need a screen or battery, two of the most expensive components on the Deck. So that can go into better CPU/GPU/RAM instead.
Valve proved they can make a successful physical hardware product with the deck. That gives them a lot of negotiating power with AMD to get the best deal they can.
Unlike with the Deck, they’re releasing three new gadgets in almost all major countries simultaneously. That means they may have already started manufacturing months ago, and are benefiting from economy of scale at an entirely new level.
Sure, I should have clarified not surprised by the power or the price.
It makes sense that as more and more power becomes available, the price doesn’t necessarily have to increase.
Computers (especially CPUs/GPUs/SOCs etc) are becoming more and more powerful all the time, and more and more efficient all the time. It doesn’t mean that the price of them has to rise.
The fact that it’s 6 times as powerful doesn’t mean it should be more expensive than the most expensive version of the Steam Deck. The fact that it’s 6 times as powerful should be entirely expected, given the fact that it’s newer with a larger form factor (meaning that it may not be as limited in terms of heat etc)
Hopefully this is a detailed enough comment to clearly explain my thoughts on this.
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