Maybe the Steam Link and Controller weren’t as popular as Valve hoped they would be, but damn everyone who still has them seems to love them. Maybe I’m biased because I still have my controller and love it, and I gave away my Steam link because my Deck can do that too, but my friend who received the link is loving it.
Oh absolutely. The PvP was really about outsmarting (just like the rest of the game, nice cohesion) and sometimes boiled down to tense gun fights. Even then you could rely more on the slabs than the guns if you wanted.
The banter also really adds to the game. Reminds me of Evolve and how the varied character conversations and banter helped keep the matches from feeling extremely repetitive.
Deathloop. I put it off for so long because so many people said “if you’re coming here looking for another Dishonored or Prey, you’ll be disappointed because the story and immersive sim elements are far more shallow” BUT HOLY HELL Deathloop is the most unique AAA game on the market. The metagame is amazing in that while the moment-to-moment gameplay is FPS/action-style, the game as a whole is really a puzzle for the player to solve through exploration and discovery. Fuck me it works so damn well.
Who the hell am I? How did I wake up on this island? Who’s yelling in my ear all the time? Why do I wake up on this beach every morning even if I die? The game makes you ask questions and doesn’t let you leave them unanswered.
The icing on the cake is the amazing combat with cool guns and amazingly fun supernatural powers. I may be in the minority but I also love the way that the invasion PvP mode works. It adds a really nice difficulty jump when the game might start feeling too easy. The only two complaints I have are that the multiplayer networking experience is definitely subpar with a lot of lag, and that the game holds your hand too much at the end. It shouldn’t give you objective markers telling you how to actually go about solving the puzzle, it should force you to figure it out and implement it on your own.
Lol I can respect that. Everyone’s got their preferences.
I do think it’s funny that at first I was like “eh, it’s cool” then I bought into the hype, got one, and touched it maybe a dozen times the first year I had it. But now the more I use it the more I fall in love lol
I still use my Steam Controller fairly regularly. It’s so handy and I love the dual track pads.
I really want a 2.0 because as much as I love the trackpads, having only one stick for something like a driving game just doesn’t work well. I also can’t get over how nice it is being able to have a full 16-button controller PLUS buttons that can invoke keyboard shortcuts like alt-tab or move the mouse if focus gets lost or something.
I’m surprised you don’t like the feel of the Deck. It’s honestly the most comfortable any controller has felt sitting in my hands. It beats the ergonomics of the Switch by a mile too
If you ask me, the Steam Deck’s battery is its biggest weakness, however it completely depends on what you’re playing. I can play Cyberpunk 2077 on the Steam Deck graphics preset for roughly 90 minutes but I played Arkham Knight for 30 minutes and lost only 10% of the battery. Dead Cells takes only 5% in 30 minutes. That is to say battery life is completely dependent on the game you choose to play, but at least you have the choice, whereas many crossplatform AAA games just aren’t on the Switch.
The portability difference is also notable. The Deck is a chonky boi, though imo it’s not as big a difference as some people would say. They both fit well in a backpack.
However, I completely disagree with you saying that the Deck isn’t a new platform. Nothing has existed like the Deck before because yes, it’s a gaming laptop that’s dramatically more portable and more gaming-oriented than any gaming laptop ever before. The control options alone make it the best controller ever invented (here’s hoping for a Steam Controller 2.0) and the flexibility to plug anything in via that USB C connector is fabulous.
Sharing my Steam library between my PC and my Steam Deck is just the icing on the gravy.
They listed reasons why the PS5 and XboS were not the platform of the year, but nothing about the Steam Deck. It seems like the reason they claimed the Switch was the platform of the year was due to exclusives, so I suppose if that’s their only metric I guess the Switch wins out by a longshot. But I gotta say in any other metric except maybe raw usability (due to some UI bugs) the Deck wins against all other current platforms.
I only played the NDS version of this game which definitely included Yoshi, Luigi, and Wario as playable characters. And a multiplayer mode where each character was Yoshi and could put on hats to play as Mario, Luigi, or Wario. Was any of that in the N64 version of the game?
Yeah, if the game is fun then ignore the cosmetics. If you like the cosmetics enough, then buy the cosmetics. As long as gameplay elements aren’t locked behind a paywall, I see no problem.
I’m not convinced any online-only games are worth anyone’s time if they’re planned as a live service game from the get-go. When Halo: Infinite F2P multiplayer dropped, so many people on the Halo subreddit were like “yeah, it’s fun but the battlepass is so slow to progress that I feel like I don’t have a reason to keep playing.” Uhhhhh maybe keep playing because you’re having fun? Or do you need some artificial number to tell you to keep going?
Seems like a confusing shift in the target demographic where battlepasses and constant new updates are required in order to consider a game “worth your time.”
squeaky old man voice back in my day my brothers and I would play CoD: Zombies using the exact same strategies every day after school for years with no updates to the gameplay AND WE LIKED IT
I loved the Finals when it was in beta. It legitimately was the most fun I had in a multiplayer game since Titanfall 2 and Lawbreakers. It just had that raw chaos feeling that I was craving.
Then I heard the announcers were AI voices, and that was disheartening. Then I heard that they slowed the movement down for the release to a point that it felt really sluggish so I just haven’t been motivated to try it post-release.
I played the shit out of Borderlands 2 until I realized it really wasn’t fun. The guns and stuff are cool, but the shooting feedback wasn’t satisfying enough to justify continuing. Then Borderlands 3 came out and improved in every way on the core mechanics and I was too tired of Borderlands 2 to care. I really wish BL3 came out like 5 years sooner.