The only downside is that the participants need to be familiar enough with their chosen game to do a randomizer which means roping in casual players is difficult.

Casual players can be fine with some games. Some actually become easier with Archipelago (e.g. Noita, Risk of Rain 2) since you’re getting meta-progression between runs that normally wouldn’t be there. Others though are especially punishing for new players (Doom comes to mind - you have to be pretty intimately familiar with the levels. There’s keys hidden in secret areas sometimes, for example, and ammo can be very scarce.)

I use the default config with the sensitivity turned up to 225% (which makes the touchpad’s left-right width equate to a bit more than the full screen width); that works fine for me. I play a lot of deckbuilders, point-and-click style games, isometric RPGs, tactics games, or just generally older / indie titles that don’t have good native controller support, and it’s been a lifesaver for those.

It doesn’t feel as good as a mouse, I won’t claim that it does, but it makes those games go from “unplayable” to “playable” and that’s the jump I was looking for.

The omission of the thumb touchpad the Deck has is a huge blow. A lot of PC games aren’t built for gamepads, and being restricted only to things that are (or to using an analog stick as a pointing device) is really limiting.

Also, that price point, holy shit. That’s like, high-end desktop PC price range. I guess there’s got to be people who are looking for this, but it’s like… the crowd who would be choosing between a $1500 gaming laptop or this; that’s not really the demographic I’d expect to be in the market for a handheld, but maybe I’m just wrong on that.

I like this, because it can be seen as either a left-wing or right-wing meme depending on the reader’s views. Firmly in the 'Fuck ‘em’ crowd, myself.

One brother is on an Xbox One is on a PC One is on a steam deck with WiFi hotspot.

That’s going to be the limiting factor.

Are you specifically looking for something to play against each other? There’s some pretty good options for co-op games with crossplay, and that might make for a more friendly experience, but if you’re in the mood for something competitive, options are a little more limited.

Some potential options:

• Destiny 2
• Monster Hunter Rise
• The Ascent
• Borderlands 3
• Warframe
• Remnant 2

If you all had a PC, you’d have a lot more options. Maybe two of you should consider going in on a Steam Deck for Brother #3 for Christmas!

The user is able to enter the rewind mode from the live game play using one or more controller inputs to view recent game play (e.g. rewinding, fast-forwarding, playing, etc.) and returning to live game play afterwards.

(Emphasis mine)

This doesn’t sound like it’s actually rewinding gameplay (as in like, Prince of Persia Sands of TIme style rewinding), which is what they seem to be trying to imply, but rather it sounds like it will just let you watch a replay of your gameplay to review it and see what you did wrong, which you can already do. I think all modern consoles (and Steam, etc.) have a ‘Save last 30 seconds of gameplay’ style feature. This is just adding a button to the controller to view that recording, from the sound of it.

Take it up with Steam, I guess. Ten seconds on Google could have answered the question before you bought the game. If you feel this strongly about it, maybe you should be checking for each game you buy before you buy them.

Pick Your Path: Character creation is just the beginning. The Nameless One can change his class, alignment, and even gain new abilities based on your choices.

It says nothing about Gender, and it specifically refers to ‘his’. This perfectly describes what you can do, so it certainly belongs in the ‘Features’ section. It also doesn’t mention Race or Species; I’d much rather play as a non-human, but I’m not winging about it, because nowhere did the game tell me I could play as a non-human. I’m not going to keep arguing with you about it, because clearly neither of us are making any headway.

Drag is angry about false advertising.

It would only be false advertising if Steam said you could choose your gender when you can’t, which they don’t.

The games clearly aren’t the same, but the premise of Planescape: Torment is that the game is telling you a predefined story about a specific character. That character happens to have lived many, many unique lives. You aren’t deciding who he is on a fundamental level, just what his skillset is right now, similar to spending ability points in Witcher. Unlike e.g. Baldur’s Gate, where you are a Bhaalspawn but you get to decide the specifics, Torment’s protagonist is largely predefined.

Well, since you’ve invited us to argue…

Drag is absolutely fine if a game has a male protagonist you can’t customise. The Master Chief is fine. Geralt is fine. But when drag is supposed to create a character and put part of dragself into the character, drag doesn’t want to do that with a man.

The Nameless One is not much different from The Master Chief or Geralt. The game is telling the story of a specific character. In this case, that character is a man. The fact that it’s based on D&D is kind of irrelevant; it sounds like you made an assumption that wasn’t stated anywhere, and are now trying to finagle a refund far outside of the refund window as a result.

While I certainly understand and sympathize with not wanting to play a character that doesn’t match your gender, it strikes me as kind of hypocritical to be okay with doing so for some games but not others. Personally I’d say, don’t play it if you feel strongly about it, but it’s not grounds for a refund.

Refund policy is pretty clear. They make exceptions sometimes but certainly not after 8 months. Maybe just accept that you shouldn’t have sat on it for 8 months before installing it if you weren’t sure you were going to like it and were going to want a refund otherwise?

Not only WoW, but most old MMOs were built around being social experiences. The really old ones (Everquest, most notably) were basically chat rooms with games attached. The gameplay was very slow, and you relied heavily on other players to progress, so you spent a lot of time just chatting with people, either in zone chat or in groups or in guilds. Over time, you started to recognize the same names showing up in the same places, or as you progressed, the same players would be progressing at the same pace so you’d keep seeing them as you moved from zone to zone.

It was also a lot easier to build friendships for otherwise socially awkward people. You had an immediate common interest and common goal (advancing in the game), so you had common ground to talk about, and a common activity to enjoy together, but during the downtime, conversation would often shift to other things - where you lived, how old you were, what your hobbies were… so you’d get to know people ‘outside the game’, too.

Nowadays, WoW and other MMOs are much more fast-paced, and much more solo play oriented. There’s still group-required content, but it’s very action-heavy; you don’t have a lot of time that you’re just sitting around chatting, and groups are much more short-term things. 15 or 20 minutes, whereas once upon a time, it was 3+ hours as standard.

I met my oldest friend in an MMO about 24 or 25 years ago… we accompanied each other to a few different games over the years, and now we aren’t playing anything together, but we still talk. I flew across the country to attend his wedding a couple years ago. Similarly, I met my wife in WoW. Our first “date” was killing bugs in Silithus together. We’ve been together for about 18 years.

Old (as in, early-late 2000s) MMOs generated a lot of friendships; this isn’t at all an uncommon story to hear from people who played them at that time.

I really hope they do complain, because that’d be great confirmation for anyone considering adding this shit that it does in fact impact sales.

Same reason as why Bethesda slapped Prey on Arcane’s spooky space station imsim

This was the weirdest choice. I actually dismissed the new Prey entirely for a very long time because I didn’t enjoy the old one, when the new one was actually a very different, very good game.

Which begs the question, why use the IP in the first place?

It’s especially weird because they just recently gave the green light for the Aleph One developers to release the originals on Steam, so it’s probably more well-known now than ever before. Even though it’s still relatively obscure, why do that now? It just doesn’t make sense.

Every time you look at the app, they share the time you’re seeing with every other user, it’s a privacy nightmare!

Vampire Survivors’ genre has been coined ‘Bullet Heaven’, literally the opposite of bullet hell. The fact that it has the tag on Steam is kind of meaningless. Monster Hunter: Wilds’ Steam Page has the Dating Sim tag, but I’m willing to bet I won’t get to romance a Rathalos.

“[Horse Armor] must have been [sold] in the millions, it had to be millions,” Nesmith said. “I don’t know the actual number, I probably did at one point, I just no longer remember that. And that was kind of a head shaker for us: you’re all making fun of it and yet you buy it.”

And that right there is the reason why the industry is absolutely saturated with this shit now. If people had just chilled the fuck out when this shit was first introduced, made sure it was an absolute flop from a sales perspective (not only for this one, but for others that were released back then, too), we might be in a better place now.

She mistakenly thought they were snake people. Easy error to make.