There’s definitely a learning curve to it but if you put the time and effort into it the trackpads can become second nature. I don’t really care for gyro but your mileage may vary. Take some time playing with the different setting adjustments to figure out what works best and then try to stick with those settings across different gamesto build up your muscle memory. Personally I find 175% sensitivity, trackball friction high, haptics off to be most comfortable. I started practicing with Amid Evil since its controls are quite basic, and moved up from there. Now I don’t even think about the controls and I recently enjoyed a full playthrough of Doom 2016 with no gyro or aim assist. Another approach that might help your coordination and fluency could be to spend time playing something highly mouse-centric like Torchlight, Titan Quest, FTL, etc. It’ll feel really clumsy trying to click around at first but after several hours it’ll probably start to feel more natural. As for the rest of your movement, I recommend setting up the back buttons for jump/crouch/walk/sprint so you don’t have to take your thumbs off the sticks/pads.

Perhaps you may or may not enjoy Space Asshole Red Faction: Guerilla. It’s a 2009 game that got a solid enough PC port that may run on weaker systems. There’s a remastered version but if you’re aiming for low-spec the original might be a better bet.

Anyway, it’s an open world set on Mars and you go around wreaking havoc and blowing up buildings with ahead-of-its-time physics/destruction mechanics. The combat is more like a shooter and you play with lots of explosives. It’s not a huge map by standards today but is a big enough playground to keep one occupied.

I had looked into it but given this response it’s not looking likely.

I test drove Heliboard the past week and I quite liked it, especially the customization options. I’ve been trying to escape Gboard for years but viable options with swipe typing support are few and far between.

Unfortunately, the lack of Japanese input makes it a total non-starter for my use case so I had to go crawling back.

I hate to be “that guy”, but have you not been keeping up with what they’ve been doing to Gazan hospitals? I’m sure they’d be happy to try chucking some of those jars with their artillery.

I think it’s pretty hard to go wrong with any of the 8BitDo stuff and there are so many variations to suit different tastes and hands. I’ve been using an SN30 (modernized SNES style) across PC, Switch, and Deck and it’s the best controller I’ve ever owned. Outlasted my now-drifty Switch Pro controller and two pairs of Nintendo’s inexcusably shitty OEM joycons. Small, light, comfortable, gets good battery life, and connects reliably. Has everything a person needs for modern games, unless you need analog triggers for something.

The US would rather try to pin mass shootings on social media platforms than address the core issues that might destabilize their status quo sociopolitical puppet show, which could set an incredibly dangerous precedent. I wouldn’t be surprised if some money happened to find its way into the right pockets to try the same thing on behalf of the poor poor megacorps’ “lost sales” in the near future.

It’s not all bad; as far as I’m concerned Nier Automata had one of the greatest and most compelling soundtracks of all time. I still listen to it on a regular basis and am floored every single time.

Sorry, I must have missed the “no fun allowed” sign, but I’ll bite. WB has now shitcanned 3 fully completed or nearly completed films. Then they claim the films are literally worse than worthless, and report all expenses incurred as loss, which lowers their tax burden. This is obviously a system designed to protect business when struggling, but it’s a pretty clear example of abuse. The film/media industry in particular has a long and storied history of manipulative, abusive accounting, and there is essentially an entire cottage industry of legal experts who specialize in the art of bending the laws and threading the loopholes for maximum exploitation. There are enough legal smoke and mirrors that film productions can and do fudge absolutely everything remotely financial, often drastically inflating or deflating officially stated costs.

Another part of the problem is how damaging this kind of behavior is to the creators and production staff themselves. When a studio bins something like this everybody loses, except for the corpo leeches moving the beans around. Movie production can have a lot hanging on royalties. Imagine you do a job on a film for a token amount with a royalty component. Then a suit decides he can get a bigger bonus literally burning your movie instead, and suddenly you’re out all that time invested and never receive proper or fair compensation for your work. The accountants can say, “Oh, this movie needed effects work, we only paid them with a few pizzas and a promised 1% royalty, now let’s project ourselves some massive sales and extrapolate to claim 20 million spent on effects!” and suddenly it’s money for nothing (and the chicks for free?) when the taxman comes around and listens to the sob story of burdensome expenses. Again, this kind of shenaniganry has decades of experience weaseling out of nearly all significant oversight or regulation and the corruption is systemic.

This also really sucks for everyone involved, even if they actually do get fully paid, because even a single movie can be several years of work that suddenly became a worthless, unverifieable void on a resume. Truth is, it’s easy to rant for hours about the shady stuff going on.

Bringing it back around, the WB games arm hasn’t been very good for people either. They’ve been shoehorning in predatory microtransactions and forcing battlepass style games-as-a-service mechanics in numerous games lately. I realize the devs themselves have no control over these kinds of additions forced from above. However, the catch-22 is that success for these games would only reward and reinforce the MBAs interjecting buzzwords and pulling the strings. So either the devs lose, and their game gets tossed, or the players lose, since management smells blood in the water and doubles down on profiteering mechanics in the next game. Unfortunately, rather than apply critical thinking and conclude that these toxic elements relate to the game’s unpopularity, they took to the media playing the world’s tiniest violin, vaguely gesturing that the poor devs worked so hard to make good games but the consumers are bad for not supporting them.

This also sucks, which feels bad. Therefore, I leveraged a sarcastic inference relating two morally dubious, greed-driven examples of poor behavior by a wealthy international megacorp trying to paint itself as a victim. Such attempts at humor are sometimes used to make bad feelings turn into slightly less bad feelings, lightening a mood or delivering some modicum of mirth. In some cultures, it might be called a “joke”.

If anybody actually knew they probably wouldn’t be allowed to do it in the first place.

Hollywood accounting, where everything is made up and the points don’t matter!

Yes, how generous of WB to allow it to be released slightly before binning the whole thing for a tax writeoff. How dare we not properly consume and obey!

Seconding this, at first I thought it was obtuse and overly difficult. But once you get a feel for how the synergies work it’s amazing. Despite the simple structure it’s a much deeper and more mechanically complex game than Vampire Survivors, and you have a lot more control over your builds.

On the other hand it’s a positively insidious timewaster. (But isn’t that the point?) I certainly never expected to get 100 hours of fun out of it, but that’s what happened.

As for FPS, visually simpler stuff is perhaps easier to enjoy on the small screen. I highly recommend Amid Evil if you enjoy classic Quake style shooters. I used it to teach myself how to effectively play shooters with the touchpads, which can be a tough hill to climb but definitely pays off. Don’t be afraid to play with the control settings through Steam; personally I run 175% sensitivity, no accel or haptics, with high friction trackball to help quickly change directions. It took a few hours to figure out what worked but once you get a feel for what’s comfortable for you personally it only takes a couple minutes per game to dial in the control settings.

The low quality parts thing can’t be overstated. The original DS was really the last “Nintendium” quality hardware in my book. The DS Lite had a ton of issues people tend to forget about. Extremely flaky shoulder buttons, yellowed screens, and cracked hinges were not a question of if, but when. Mine lasted about 6 months before the R button stopped working reliably. The first generation 3DS was a step back in the right direction, and mine is still going strong, but the circle pad longevity is dubious and the bottom screen plastic scratches if you look at it wrong. Then came the New 3DS, which looked good on paper but the New 3DS LL was a huge disappointment. The backplate cracks around the screws, the hinge has tons of flop in it, and within a year the paint and coating was flaking off of the top shell leaving a ~2cm patch of bare metal. Then came the Switch, with the lowest quality sticks I’ve ever seen. Even my Switch Pro Controller drifts like crazy.

Knowing Nintendo the Switch 2 will already be obsolete at launch and power users will get better performance emulating the damn thing on modern hardware instead. Fool me twice, I, uh, won’t get fooled again, or something.

I’m about 8 hours into it, and I would say try it again, and once you get the launch ability rely on that as your primary weapon. I only really use the gun in a pinch or against enemies that can dodge launches.

I haven’t tried it on Deck, but personally I’m a bit skeptical you’d get much tangible benefit over just setting lower package TDP limits as necessary, considering how much of a pain in the ass stable undervolting can be. TDP also has the advantage of per-game settings so you can just crank down undemanding games automatically instead of trying to juggle voltage/stability across the board.

Yet they don’t seem willing to put forth any effort for Linux support. I’ve been a gamepass subscriber for years but I’m on the edge of canceling it because it’s useless on my Steam Deck.

At least it’s nice to see them sticking with George Carlin’s nomenclature.

Here’s a phrase that apparently the airlines simply made up: near miss. They say that if 2 planes almost collide, it’s a near miss. Bullshit, my friend. It’s a near hit! A collision is a near miss. [WHAM! CRUNCH!] “Look, they nearly missed!” “Yes, but not quite.”

I hope the additional usefulness of bandages brings a very welcome uptick in support players looking for resupply points. Most classes can only carry a few and they’ll run out even faster now. At least, I hope so. I was having a hard time successfully playing as anything other than medic, and found myself frequently completely empty without a single ammo box for miles.

It’s a personal preference and your mileage may vary, but I found a silicone skin to make a huge improvement in handling comfort.

I’m in central Japan and this summer has been by far the worst in the 9 years I’ve been here. Energy prices are also through the roof right now since TEPCO chose to slander and FUD nuclear energy instead of admitting that their chain of penny-pinching, engineer-ignoring poor decisions was ultimately responsible for the Fukushima meltdown. I suspect a lot of people, particularly the elderly, are going to be squeezed past the breaking point as electric bills are doubling and tripling and air conditioning becomes an unaffordable luxury.