Love it! Demo runs great on Steam Deck, also.

Will definitely keep an eye out for the full release.

That’s a good point. Also with it being a PC, you can keep a library of DRM free games on an sd card or something and kind of get the same thing. Limited on what games you can do this with officially though. DRM is the worst

Battery life definitely depends on what you are playing. In BG3 I get around 2 ish hours. But I can play older games like Morrowind, or newer retro style games like Skald against the black priory (10/10, do recommend) for 6-8 hours, maybe more.

You also have a lot of control to improve battery life like clock speed, frame rate limiting, etc.

But yeah it has a huge screen and if you play newer games with good 3d graphics it drains fast. Switch doesn’t really have those kinds of games so it’s not a 1:1 comparison.

EDIT: I also agree with your points on it being very bulky and not well suited to a 10 minute session. Launching games is slower on the deck and most PC games have more loading screens before gameplay.

I love the steam deck. I haven’t used my switch for anything other than family Mario kart since I got it. I really like having access to PC games, especially at steam sale prices, which makes the deck a lot cheaper in the long run vs Nintendo games that never go on sale. Even Pokémon games that are years old are still full price when they’re 2 or 3 releases behind in the series.

The only thing I prefer about the switch is physical cartridges. The deck wins in every other category for me.

You could get one of those Bluetooth keyboard/ trackpad combos and a case with a kickstand for desktop use. Small screen but usable. I personally wouldn’t replace a laptop with it, but if you didn’t have a laptop it could be useful to buy one device that does handheld gaming and other stuff too instead of buying two devices

True, but Steam deck lets you boot into the Linux desktop environment of the os and you can do whatever you want with it. I have installed games and emulators outside of steam on mine pretty easily.

You could probably even put a different Linux OS on it entirely if you wanted to.

That control over the platform was the biggest selling point for me. More control even than the windows based handhelds.

Only issue I’ve had with mine is double sided printing not working by default in Debian, just had to install the brother driver, which was easy enough

I definitely should pick up an inflatable one

Ah, true. I have several of the foam self inflating pads but I don’t really think of those as mattresses. They are very nice tho. I have seen the ones without foam that are even more portable too.

If you are bringing an air mattress, you’re probably car camping and may be able to leave the food / cooler in the trunk.

Once in Missouri I went camping with my parents and they love to cook at camp Tons of chopping boards, utensils, etc were left out overnight, which attracted dozens of raccoons. They had the coolers secure but it was still wild to see. Rookie mistake from people who actually have a lot of experience.

Also, hammock camping can be very comfortable if you have an under quilt and tarp

Putting stuff away is the worst part, especially if you have to air out wet tarps

I love camping, and have had some great trips in the rain. Can be very comfy even with a backpack setup if you know what you’re doing.

That being said, this is hilarious.

And at least you have enough unsolicited advice to make it more comfortable if you want to go again 😅

Morrowind is the best. Oblivion remaster is better than skyrim (in my Morrowboomer opinion) and that was just refreshing a 20 year old game. I feel like there is a lot of hype for TES6 that it may not live up to, but surpassing skyrim is definitely doable.

My first thought was FTL as well. Great game

I recently got Moonrakers, and it is 10/10 in my opinion. It can be competitive, and the rules certainly support backstabbing and sabotage, but it can be played very cooperatively. There is a winner, but you could even modify the rules to “try to get everyone to 10 prestige in x number of rounds” instead of first to 10 wins.

Yeah there is likely still a ways to go before we can run high end modern games plus a local model, but newer nvidia cards are pretty crazy. It’s probably closer than I think

AI could also generate dialogie options for players, though. It could operate as traditional dialogue, with AI generating responses and possible doalogue paths ahead of time so you get a “normal” experience that just changes every time

I think so. New GPUs will be able to handle AI models running locally before too long. I think this will be used for NPC behavior as a replacement for procedural quest / dialogue generation. I have seen a lot of mobile games leveraging this but they don’t seem very good yet. Models need to be trained more specifically for each game I think

Ahh, the maps were so good. I remember using the extremely detailed hand drawn map to help me locate the Cavern of the Incarnate, and other cool locations. I am sad that I didn’t keep them.

I loved reading through the manual for Morrowind with the copy we got on the original XBox. I read all the class descriptions, details about the schools of magic, and had a whole character planned out before starting the game. I didn’t get into tabletop gaming until much later, but looking back, that manual really captured the same feeling of reading through the D&D players handbook and picking out a race, class, background, etc.

I think that feeling is why it’s still my favorite PC game.