ampersandrew

I liked it a lot. It's engrossing enough to make you just want to keep going to the next episode, and it's beautifully animated. Other than the story stuff, the gameplay loop is just This is the Police, and I think this improves both the Telltale design and the design of This is the Police by way of pacing. It did still leave me wanting more as a video game, but as a story and a comedy, I loved it.

The correct lesson to take away from it, that they won't ever do, is to release multiplayer games in a way where they can live on without constant updates or a central server.

Going from YouTube comments on gaming channels that don't focus on PC gaming or Linux, I don't think many people remember the first Steam Machines from 10 years ago.

That was a conscious decision they made at the time so that you could browse the web and such with no driver downloads. The full functionality of it is kind of locked behind Steam itself (without community made software), which is its worst quality, for sure.

So, funny story, I bought it as the Windows variant, because it was $50 cheaper for some reason. Bloatware subsidies, maybe? My roommate and I tried it for a little while, but using Windows from the couch sucked so much that I put SteamOS on it. My roommate only booted back to Windows to play Hearthstone. I just rocked whatever SteamOS would let me play local, since streaming games from my desktop in the other room wasn't cutting it for me. I played through KOTOR2 on that machine, on SteamOS, and had a great time.

Why would you spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on a PC that used a brand-new operating system and had a gaming library a fraction of the size of that of Windows machines?

I had one of the old Alienware Steam Machines. I know it wasn't a popular answer, but my answer to this was that Windows was atrocious for the living room just like it's atrocious for handhelds today, and I had easily and cheaply amassed a large library of Linux-compatible games even back then by way of Steam sales. But this wasn't even the only problem. We only had OpenGL ports rather than lower level and more performant APIs like Vulkan. Running a marquis Linux title like Shadow of Mordor would come with a sizable performance hit compared to the Windows version, even when run on exactly the same hardware, and that would also require a machine that cost $200 more than a PS4 that could run the same game just as well.

Console gamers who don’t know what Steam is

How common do you believe this is in 2025? It's on every big game's launch trailer, and Steam dwarfs any console player base. Network effects alone should make just about every console player (who's old enough to read) aware of what Steam is.

I've got a bit of a VR library, but the new ease of setup with this one does have me considering how I'd use the virtual display features. Even with trackpads, a lot of mouse-driven games aren't great on Steam Deck, but I'm replaying Baldur's Gate 2 right now and wondering how the mouse controls might work out in VR.

Thank you. Didn't notice I screwed that up.

friends/chat was offline for literally months

Friends lists didn't work reliably for years.

I'm sure there are vast swaths of older games that will hit 4k60 though. Me, personally, my TV is still 1080p, so I'm confident I'll hit my full resolution without breaking a sweat, haha.

Digital Foundry's guess is somewhere between $400 and $500, and they think it will be a harder sell at $500 for the power it's offering.