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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: February 18th, 2024

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  • I love my Steam deck, and bounce between how heavily I use it vs the switch* or PS5 depending on the games I’m into at the moment. But misrepresenting its utility as a modern living room PC (like the OP) doesn’t help anyone and is just going to leave people disappointed.

    The PS5 is probably my smallest library (and mostly PS4 games, a lot of which were before I had a PC), but it’s definitely plenty capable and I don’t regret the purchase at all. (The controller is also the coolest non graphics addition to gaming I’ve experienced in a long time).

    *The switch desperately needs a 3rd party replacement for the controllers, though, because the joycons are bad brand new.





  • If I’m playing modern games on a TV? PS5 easy. But still the pro over the deck.

    I love my deck. As the handheld it’s intended to be. It’s not powerful enough for an acceptable experience running a AAA 3D game on a TV screen. You can ignore the resolution and artifacts and just generally low visual quality and poor frame rate on a small screen, because playing the games portably at all is a huge step up. You can’t ignore any part of it on a TV. It’s fine for indie games, older games, 2D stuff, etc.

    But it doesn’t have the performance for a good living room experience if you’re looking to play modern AAA games. (Ignoring all their bullshit rootkits on PC that block a lot of multiplayer games out completely, which are the games you have to pay for on PS. You just can’t play most of them on Linux at all.)


  • I could pretty easily see how such a bug could happen if the description in the article is accurate.

    The right way to do it is to have the entire transaction in some pending state, and nothing is permanently saved anywhere until the transaction is completed. (This is called an atomic operation. It usually applies to distributed databases, but the same concept applies here, where the transaction takes a long time to succeed or fail.)

    If, instead, you add it to the “reimbursement list” while putting the actual “make the pill” and billing part in the pending state, then forget to remove it when the transaction isn’t completed, you get the outcome described in the article.





  • I’m not downvoting, but the fact that kernel malware games don’t work is a feature to me. It would be a full time job to keep from installing anything that demands obscene access for no legitimate reason on Windows. “It doesn’t work” is way easier.

    Pretty much everything else on Steam works without effort.



  • I would say the defining characteristic that sets Breath of the Wild apart from its contemporaries is its “chemistry engine”, as they call it.

    It’s traversal. The interactions were cool, but mostly about the puzzles.

    What BOTW changed was how exploration works. You see a landmark in the distance, start moving towards it, and figure out how to get there. There’s nothing you see that isn’t part of the traversal system. There are no invisible walls. Some things are absurdly high to climb, some things are slippery, etc, but everything you struggle to traverse is clearly a product of the systems the game uses and makes sense.

    (The problem was none of that exploration got you anywhere interesting, but the core element of “everything you see is a destination” is the thing about BOTW that was groundbreaking.)