A few tips I haven’t seen anyone bring up yet:

– If you see a game on sale, it will be on sale again. Don’t get baited into buying something you won’t actually play for years.

– Please oh please learn to use the Deck’s quick menu performance options. When people complain about the Deck’s battery life, what they forget is that unlike a Nintendo Switch, it’ll just treat everything like it’s “docked” unless you tell it otherwise. It’ll munch through that battery as quick as you let it, so extending it is your responsibility. The easiest way to do that is to just set a power limit (even the max of 15 watts will help) if a game is running fine. A lot of basic 2d games get by just fine on 3 or 5. Half-rate shading is the other major option. Basically it’ll render some things at half of their normal resolution, sometimes it’s obvious, sometimes it isn’t noticable on the Deck’s screen. With 3D stuff, get the performance overlay up and start dropping the the wattage if the framerate is high enough, or the game’s video settings if it’s not. Ideally just drop both, that’s how you’ll really save the battery. I just drop a lot of games right to “low” settings unless it looks really awful and go from there.

– In a similar vein, framerate limits!! Console games are nearly always locked to 30 or 60 frames per second for all sorts of reasons. In the Deck’s case you’re again thinking about battery life. While you can sometimes argue for framerates higher than a screen’s refresh rate, on the Deck it’s not really justifiable, there’s no good reason to pass 60. Some games play just fine at 30 so lock it to 30 if you can tolerate it. Or, the Deck’s secret weapon… 40fps. Normally you’d never do that, because it doesn’t line up with the screen and things get weird, but the Deck’s screen can actually just drop to 40hz to compensate. Due to some odd math 40fps is actually much closer to 60 than 30 in practice while still saving a lot of battery life.
BUT… BUT BUT BUT, the Deck’s system-wide framerate limiter has problems. Input lag problems. Hopefully you don’t notice and don’t give a shit but if you do, oh god, so much input lag. Thankfully the vast majority of games have their own 60fps locks that don’t have this problem (to the same extent) but for the 40hz thing you need to just deal with it.

I mean… Phillips heads are hood for what they’re actually designed for, which is, uh, to strip really easily so they don’t get over-tightened. Which is irrelevant if your manufacturing is precise enough.

I do wonder what an indie equivalent to these games would look like. I worry that I’d feel like they were just imitating Remedy.

I wanted to counter this but I can’t. Most of the mascot platformer-esque games now are imitating some other, older mascot platformer. A Hat In Time just doesn’t have any real gimmicks. IDK if Pumpkin Jack does (I really need to try it at some point). Maybe Froggun but I imagine it has even less of a story and it’s more of a puzzle game?

Hmm… While it’s nothing like Outer Wilds and infamous for probably being the most obtuse video game ever created, I wonder if you’d like La Mulana? Metroidvania about being an archeologist where you sort of need to actually peice together the culture and history of the civilization you’re studying to move forward sometimes. It’s style of storytelling is closer to FromSoft (hence the obtuseness) but still.

While it’s probably not quite what you’re looking for, have you seen Carrier Command 2? Because it’s pretty damn cool (and overpriced unfortunately)

I really wish Blur actually did well back when it was around. By far the coolest take on a Mario Kart-like game I’ve ever played.

Whatever the hell Burnout was, too. Please god just give me classic Burnout again.

You… you do realize MW5 is single-player and definitely not a “gatcha game” right? And has a pretty robust modding scene? And has a clan-based sequel coming up in a new engine?

…Also Goddamn how is ot that no one has managed to make something like Theif again outside of Gloomwood (which is admittedly rad as hell?) I only managed to play Theif recently and it’s still one of the best stealth games ever. Modern games need to learn how to leave the player alone for a while and let them cook.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Immersive Sims because, like, in theory they’re a lot of people’s dream games, right? Yet their actual audiences are small. Part of that has to be down to setting, for the same reason Blade Runner was never big, but… that can’t be it, right?

And why did people start calling Tears of the Kingdom an Immersive Sim? Is… Are classic Roguelikes immersive sims? Is Dwarf Fortress an Immersive Sim? Obviously not, but the definition we’ve given ourselves is too broad and what we actually consider a “reall immersive sim” seems too limited.

Well, there’s another Quake 3 clone attempt every few years and every time no one cares. Diabotical made me especially sad because it shook the forumula up in some very smart ways and the Wipeout game mode needs to be stolen by pretty much everyone (and won’t be).

Is it weird that I think of Halo 3: ODST as one of the real detective games? Not because it’s particularly dedicated to being that, but because the default ending of the game is that you don’t solve the mystery and leave unsatisfied. You’re just some grunt and what’s actually going on is above your paygrade. Learning the truth is a bit of a pain in this ass but it’s also basically half of the game’s story. I think it was a really ballsy move for what it’s worth.

“It feels like there’s thousands of us competing for a handful of jobs,”

Isn’t that pretty much it? Everyone wants to make video games. All of the sudden everyone wants to invest in video game development because they realized there’s money in it. But video games are a big commitment for consumers (compared to most consumables), we literally only have so much time to dedicate them and there’s SO MANY GODDAMN GAMES. Like, an Eldritch horror inducing amount of video games if you have FOMO. And that’s still a drop in the ocean compared to all the people who want to make video games. Hundreds if not thousands of cool games go completely unnoticed by basically everyone every month, seemingly.

There’s a bizarre sort of supply / demand triangle going on.

Oh that’s absolutely why. If they dumped everything at once people would play what they wanted to play and drop the subscription. By doing this people come back.

If Nintendo doesn’t keep NSO as-is for their “Switch 2” people will be EXTREMELY pissed, but it’s Nintendo, they’re fine with that.

Sounds to me like you just don’t want to think that hard, which is fine, I usually don’t either. Half of the time I just play Doom .wads

BG3 specifically: It’s D&D 5e, so… yeah It’s gonna be complex.

Complex systems more generally:

The best way to learn about any complex system is to bite tiny chunks out of it and ignore the rest, even if you know stuff is interconnected. You’ll never learn everything at once, so don’t try. Eventually you get bored with the little bubble you’ve carved out for yourself so you move over and learn about some other bit. You don’t even need to care about whether you’ll understand everything eventually.

And guess what? It won’t break like your over-complex Arch desktop because it doesn’t need to be.

Good article, I’ve been wondering why people are calling it populism…

Is this not all kinda well-known information?

Oh no!! BallisticNG is a wonderful game, shame that Switch players won’t be getting it.