I like this analogy and generally avoid using GPS (admittedly it’s out of laziness lol). The most insane part to me is I live where everything is on a grid and somehow people are still impressed I can figure out how to get places, even without having been there. GPS brain is real.

Bad news except you can’t trust TV either. Or reading the news, lately. At least regardless of the medium, general advice carries-- double check sources, learn which are credible, etc.

I just hope people are following links and not just reading headlines, right? …Right?

Yes but wouldn’t you like to sign up for an outlook account? No? Sorry that wasn’t a question, this full screen window has no X and you will comply.

… unless you do the thing that skips it, but man that’s an awful experience.

I hadn’t even thought about it until you brought it up. Kind of disappointed in people jumping on this like flies on shit but like… it’s 2025, so bigger things to be upset about.

In any case, apples and oranges. And PSA, if you need a Switch 2, grab em on the rebound. There’ll be used ones, likely hackable in 6 months and none of that goes to Nintendo. Don’t forget what their legal department has done in the past few years.

Piracy and emulation is inevitable, although we’ll see if it’s months or years. I’m boycotting Nintendo over their legal practices, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to play their games. It’ll be extra juicy to be able to emulate it eventually, although buying used is technically an option too.

I’ve seen enough knew high sock posts to know these are not apropos of nothing.

Honestly their algorithm seems to mostly push low quality, South Asian, and/or AI generated content lately, when randomly playing off of something like Ms Rachel or Sesame Street. Nothing disgusting, although maybe a little trippy (in AI case). My daughter really digs the Bollywood inspired kids stuff though.

I’ve been using Launchbox, especially since I play emulator games. They’ve improved the efficiency of large libraries and added support for RetroAchievements, although I manually toggle completion status since I don’t always use it to launch my games so the time tracker isn’t accurate.

More importantly it let’s me hit randomize, so if I’m feeling adventurous it’ll pull a game from my backlog I might have got from anywhere.

I keep Java installed for one thing and one thing only… modded Minecraft.

In other words-- your sexting is safe, friends.

Same, but given the time sink I’d like an abridged experience. I heard they doing that with DQX so why not FFXI?

Couple other things to add to this beautiful list others have: meta gaming and chat.

They barely added achievements and only for a couple games, while steam has that, guides, community art, and even a newish notes feature in case you’re playing an OG game that makes you track stuff. Guides have kind of been better than more traditional sources.

Chat is… better on steam, although discord kind of supplanted it. Game based emoji, stickers, etc. It’s actually very good, though, with support for couch coop stream gaming, etc, with voice comms.

One could also point to the generous family sharing function, but I’m not sure what Epic does in that regard. DRM is DRM though. Do keep in mind, though, the philosophy behind Steam is to make DRM palatable by adding features. Epic philosophy (on paper) is to give devs a higher cut, although I’ve heard devs feel more supported by steam-- especially since they aren’t afraid to throw obscure indie games into a users discovery queue.

A steam deck lite would probably dominate, lol

At this point I want Switch 2 to flop so hard they go the way of the Sega and start licensing their IPs on other platforms, giving up on consoles. A shame, too, since their tech is little kid hand friendly and the PC market doesn’t seem keen on tiny screen handhelds.

Always have been, as I’ve seen during my UCLA days of people buying exam answers from previous weekends and paying for papers, etc… I’m glad I never bothered, mostly because of dignity but what because I was poor (although those correlate). Rich people have plenty of ways to game the system, though.

I find it funny Microsoft gave me a survey on my work PC asking about how I’m enjoying its products (I laughed in Linux, “how do you like windows customizablity” let me go off about KDE lol)

But back to the subject. Literally everything they work on seems to turn to shit — I wonder what kind of survey feedback are they usually getting? “Oh, Skypes cool but I really like Teams”

Reminds me that Nintendo had help lines you could call for stuff like Zelda secrets, and they may have intentionally added things like secret caves to incentivize that lucrative service.

You want the absolute “guide damn it” example? Try playing the OG Dragon Quest games. They’re nonlinear by nature and there’s a spot in 2 (or was it 3) where you need to literally check an unmarked floor for an item. No indicator, save maybe a vague NPC dialogue in another part of the planet that didn’t get adequately translated in English so you’re truly aimless.

Yup. Fussing around in Desktop mode (aka handheld Arch) got me into it. It was weirdly easy to get Phantasy Star Online Ephinea working with luteix, and that game was easily one of my favorite Deck experiences running on 3W of power lol.

Ugh. I hate this timeline.

My 8bitdo story, back when they’re we’re just starting to put joysticks on their SNES style controllers, I used mine to the point that the joysticks were falling apart. I sent them a support email, and even though it wasn’t covered by any warranty or anything, a very nice Chinese person working there sent me a spare set of joysticks in the mail, plus words of encouragement (in somewhat broken English) since I wasn’t shy about fixing the thing myself.

Can’t imagine that today, but it was a nice gesture and I’m glad they’re still making stuff today.