Conversely, “Verified” does not necessarily mean “runs at a consistent or pleasant framerate.”

I bought my Deck in part to start working through the massive mountain of unplayed games in my library because I spend enough of my day sitting at a computer as it is.

But a lot of the titles I had in mind, despite being Verified, can barely run at a consistent FPS in the mid-20s even at minimum settings. The Outer Worlds, Outer Wilds, Wolfenstein II to name a few. Baldur’s Gate runs okay, but chugs battery despite looking absolutely terrible with DSR turned to max performance.

I’ve tried streaming games from my PC but with mixed results. It’s great for performance and battery life but it’s not good at recovering from dropouts in connectivity.

I live in an apartment complex with pretty crowded airwaves so it’s hard to get a good connection sometimes, even just through the wall between my bedroom and living room.

Any hiccup in the connection leads to an immediate desync and I lose video completely, but it seems incapable of detecting and recovering from this. The only fix I’ve found is to restart the stream, either by restarting the game outright or putting the Deck to sleep so it disconnects and then waking it up and reconnecting to the running game.

I love the concept of the Deck and I realize that this is the kind of stuff to expect as an early adopter, but its performance and usability was definitely oversold.

Surprise surprise, a “live service” game is a lazy soulless cash grab.

Yeah it’s really weird. They have like, a ton of songs from a couple of bands I know, Alice Cooper and Bowling for Soup, one whole song from Amon Amarth, two from Ozzy Osborne, and then a ton of obscure artists.

It seems like they went for the cheapest songs to license just to pad the numbers with the least amount of capital investment. But then threw in a few big names just to make it seem like they might have more music you’d know.

The one thing a subscription kinda makes sense for, as opposed to paying for every song a la carte, and they don’t even have all the songs of the previous games. What a fucking embarrassment.

I imagine the licensing just doesn’t carry forward and it has to be re-negotiated, but if that’s the case then they’re hilariously slow at it. I check every six months or so and there’s still only a handful of bands I recognize.