TheRealKuni
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Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved and later Geometry Wars 2 were some of my favorites one the Xbox 360. Dual-stick shooters with awesome, simple, crisp graphics that, during the transition from CRT to LCD TVs, made LCDs look GORGEOUS.
3 is a phenomenal addition to the series (if relatively old now). It has all the modes from the previous two, and an “adventure” mode. Fantastic pick-up-and-put-down title to play when you have a bit of time or need something to distract the ADHD brain. And it’s cheap!
Cyberpunk 2077
Stardew Valley
Hades 2
Diablo 4
These are the ones I’m rotating between most right now. I’ve also got Doom (2016) and BG3 on rotation, but haven’t hit them in a while.
The Steam Deck has been such a great addition. Especially being able to stream titles like CP2077 from the PC for better graphical fidelity and battery life.
Edit: Oh! And Geometry Wars 3! It’s so good on the Steam Deck! It says “Playable” but I genuinely don’t know why, it seems completely supported as far as I can tell.
I finally got my wife hooked on Stardew Valley.
For years I’ve been trying to get her to game with me, never pushing too hard because I didn’t want to put her off the entire thing.
Recently she got laid off and picked up a part time job, so she’s had more free time. I asked her to consider playing Stardew Valley, and she said she would, but kept putting it off.
Finally one Saturday we had some free time and she agreed to give it a shot. I made popcorn, set her up with a Switch on our TV, gave her an hour or so to get started (I was willing to answer questions about controls, but wanted her to learn the game herself because I genuinely believe that’s part of the charm), then joined her with my Steam Deck (not multiplayer, just both of us playing single player).
She enjoyed it, but after that day she didn’t touch it for a while. Then I reminded her the Switch doesn’t need to be on the TV, and suddenly she was playing it every day. She’s fallen deeply into the Stardew Valley rabbit hole and I am so happy. 😁
She broke her foot recently, and when we were at the urgent care center she had the Switch and I had my Steam Deck as we were waiting. The doctor who finally saw us said we were geniuses for being so well prepared for the packed waiting room. 🤣
using Steam remote play to the deck
I’m going to pass on some advice that a friend of mine gave me: get Apollo (a fork of Sunshine) on your computer and Moonlight on your Steam Deck. You can install Moonlight in Desktop Mode and add it to your Steam Library so you can access it in Steam mode.
It’s far better at streaming than Steam’s own streaming system. Apollo treats it like a monitor on your desktop. I have it set up so that the Steam Deck is the ONLY monitor when I’m streaming to it. You can also specify resolution in Moonlight, so I tell it to give me 2560x1440 or 2560x1600. Because of the way chroma subsampling works, this looks much better when downscaled on the Deck’s screen than simply streaming the Deck’s resolution. Cyberpunk 2077 looks GORGEOUS on the Deck like this.
(Note this is best if your PC is on a wired connection to a router with WiFi 6/6E/7 support.)
I forced myself to complete the Diablo 4 campaign because of them.
That would be a lot easier now. The game improved enormously around season 4 I think. Whatever the Loot Reborn season was. And nearly every season has included some QoL improvements.
I honestly love Diablo 4. It’s a great podcast/audiobook companion.
Important thing to remember about the “console wars.”
Other than the Nintendo Wii (iirc), most consoles sell at a loss at the beginning of the generation. They eventually turn a profit on console sales, but console sales aren’t the point.
Game sales are.
When each console was its own very specific architecture and games needed to be designed specifically for them, console sales matter a lot because that’s how you’d sell games.
But now that architectures are similar (if not the same), cross-compilation has become easier than ever. It’s why you see Sony finally releasing first party titles on PC.
Microsoft knows full well that their console sales aren’t great, but that’s okay for them. Their PC sales are. Many of their titles sell on Steam. And they sell some of their titles on PlayStation.
They’ll continue to make some form of console because without it they lose out on millions of Game Pass subscriptions from people who don’t want to make the initial investment in a gaming PC, or deal with the complexity, but their goal of making that next console more and more like a PC fits perfectly in their model.
It’s a shame the Series X has sold so poorly, it’s a great console, but I doubt Microsoft is too worried about “losing” the console wars to Sony. The game has changed.
Themes like “incest” and “rape” were pulled from Steam.
While distasteful to most, these are not illegal in pornography (local laws may differ). Hell, even snuff films are legal as long as they’re simulated (and not real video of actual murder). However, because of payment processors mainstream porn sites won’t host them.
Plus if you hold out long enough for the tech to come down in price, you can grab the OLED version that I’m expecting to be announced in a couple of years.