Honestly - lack of large trackpads aside (it does have a tiny one on the right side) - the Legion Go S looks like a good deal. Price should be equal to the OLED Deck for the 512 GB variant, for that you get a device with a more modern CPU architecture and 50% more GPU cores. The display is quite a bit larger (8.1" vs 7.4", which is a larger difference than it might seem), it’s higher resolution 120 Hz and - most importantly - it has VRR, which the Steam Deck OLED lacks. Sure, it’s not OLED and some people are seemingly allergic to higher resolution displays (“think about the battery life!!!” or “not powerful enough to play games at this res” (upscaling exists)), but 2D games like Hollow Knight or Cuphead should look amazing on this display and font rendering should be a lot better.
Also, Lenovo might sell this in countries where the Steam Deck isn’t officially available.
The feature itself is great. It records the last two hours by default and lets you easily create clips from that. The editor is right there in the Steam overlay, it’s pretty great.
I only used it under Linux, and that’s where I’d say it is still very much a beta experience. I have an AMD Radeon 7800 XT. Most of the time, Steam picks up on its hardware acceleration - sometimes it doesn’t. When it doesn’t, it falls back to CPU encoding (obviously) which occupies around 3-4 cores on my 7950X3D to record 3440x1440 at the highest quality setting. GPU encodes are H.264 even though the GPU is perfectly capable of encoding AV1. Performance impact ranges from almost zero to as much as 30%, which seems a bit excessive. On some games that have a splash screen (Sea of Thieves for example), all it will record is said splash screen, even when it’s not shown anymore: you get gameplay sounds, but the video is just a static image with mouse cursor artifacts. It didn’t record sound from one of the microphones I tried. After swapping it out for a different one, my voice is being recorded. At least one session the shortcut for saving a clip just resulted in an error sound instead of a clip being saved.
So it’s a bit disappointing so far. Yeah, Linux shenanigans and relatively small user base, but Valve out of all companies should treat Linux as a first-class platform. Yes, they do a lot for Linux, with Proton and whatnot. But ironically Steam itself is only in an “okay, it kind of works” state. No official packages for anything but apt-based distributions and Wayland (scaling) support is meh at best.
It did seem to work a lot better on the Steam Deck with very little performance impact in my short testing, so there’s that.
I’m no expert here, but I’m pretty sure branch prediction logic is not part of the instruction set, so I don’t see how RISC alone would “fix” these types of issues.
I think you have to go back 20-30 years to get CPUs without branch prediction logic. And VSCodium is quite the resource hog (as is the modern web), so good luck with that.
While I mostly agree with your first paragraph, I don’t see Nintendo as the innocent and awesome third player. They are certainly doing well in terms of sales numbers right now, but they’ve proven time and time again that they’re hostile towards their fanbase (and I’m not talking about pirated games here).
I also don’t see how the Switch brought a “fresh, intuitive control scheme” to the table. The hybrid console concept was the first well implemented take and quite a few people certainly like that flexibility, but in my opinion the best way to play Switch is on a TV with a bunch of “Pro” controllers.
And in terms of games, I think Nintendo makes consistently good games (for the most part), but most of them are also very safe bets. You have your 2D platformer Mario games, 3D platformer Mario games, some fighting and sports Mario game spin-offs (again, nothing new), and a bunch of games set in the Zelda universe. Splatoon was something else, but we’re at Splatoon 3 by now as well. I personally thought Mario Maker was the most “revolutionary” title in somewhat recent times. I enjoyed some of these games especially for their coop (or pvp) experiences, but there wasn’t much in there that truly surprised me.
YMMV of course, I know a lot of people absolutely loved the Zelda games for the Switch for example. Nintendo games are also pretty much feature-complete out of the box, which isn’t something you can say for a lot of these live service games popping up everywhere.
I personally think indie games or games from “large-but-based” studios are more important than ever and that’s where I got the most original and memorable experiences from in recent years.
Probably Tetris Gym?
EDIT: The “kill screen” in NES Tetris is just the game getting too fast for most people to keep up. Then there’s some bugs that can crash the game in later levels, but Tetris Gym fixes these bugs. So you “just” have to be good enough to play Tetris for long enough at insane speeds.
In theory “Verified” includes this:
But you’re correct, that doesn’t even imply locked 30 FPS sadly (Baldur’s Gate 3 Act 3 comes to mind).