I’m almost half-way through Persona Strikers; enjoying it so far but it has some really weird difficulty spikes at odd places. I’ve fought mid-stage mini bosses that I lose to like 30 times and then wipe the area boss on the first try.
Other than that, chipping away at occasional hunts in Monster Hunter: Rise (which is currently crashing when I’m hooked up to my monitor, need to figure that out) and piddling about in Deep Rock Galactic Survivor and Snowrunner.
My prediction: this box is going to sell like gangbusters for the parents in the 40-some odd years old range who have kids under the age of 16.
I am one of those people. Could I build my own PC? Yes. But the reality is I just don’t have the time to dedicate to all the fringes of the PC gaming hobby. And space is precious these days as the house fills up with things you want/need for teenagers (including the teenagers themselves who are noticeably larger than when they were 8 years old about 3 weeks ago.
The Steam Deck was amazing in part, and I’ve heard this from multiple parents, because it allowed you to just get to playing your games in a way no PC had before. The Steam Machine offers that same experience but with more power. I won’t be hooking mine up to a TV, that’s already a disaster area owned by the kids. This will hook up to my 1440P HDR monitor in my office. This box will be plenty to power that. It’s tiny, it’s very quiet, and it offers an experience that, while I could hack together on a custom built PC, would be difficult for me to get the time together to do.
I dunno…the older I get, with more time pressures in life, the more I appreciate quality turnkey solutions over DIY. I’ll buy this as soon as I can, and I’m pretty confident that it’s going to deliver an experience that will fit into the “great” to “good enough” category for what I’m looking for, and that’s good enough for me. And I’m willing to be it’ll also be good enough for a lot of other parents in a similar life stage to me.
I’ll have to see if I want to go to the rigamarole of setting up Wallabag on my home server or if I just fall back to using GoodLinks on iOS exclusively and forgo articles on my e-reader.
Count me in the group of people sad to see it go because it made it very easy to get articles onto my Kobo e-reader. There are other ways, but they’re all too labour intensive to be practical. Probably should have seen the writing on the wall, though.
Sounds like a solid B game with a B-game price. I played the demo and really enjoyed it so I’ll probably pick this one up sometime. Assuming the final is similar to the demo, you can also run the game acceptably on the Steam Deck!
I honestly don’t see much comparison at all, to be honest. This doesn’t have a web of skills to unlock nor does it have the rapid-fire pace of a Diablo game. I guess a vaguely isometric 3rd person action game is automatically Diablo?
It’s 1,000% in the Soulsborne category, but with select systems from ARPGs mixed in, and the pains of figuring out how to adapt them are showing, but the potential is huge.
And maybe that’s the thing; coming at this from “I want an alternative to a Souls game” and it lands great. If I picked this up expecting Diablo or Torchlight (ha! I’m old!) or something, I’d be WTF-ing within 8 second of the game starting.
Personally, I picked up NRFTW after the first hotfix for The Breach and I haven’t run into pretty much anything most of the negative reviews are complaining about. There were 100% tuning issues with the original Breach update and they got pummelled for it in the reviews, but in less than a week they fixed 90% of the problems.
It’s an early access game, so no, of course it’s not perfect yet, but it’s a really solid product with a ton of potential that’s fun to play right now.
The problem is that reviews are rarely updated, so right now there’s a ton of reviews that capture a tiny snapshot of the game’s life that don’t reflect where the game is merely a couple weeks after they were left. I’m sure there was a bunch riding on this…they’d been locked up in legal proceedings getting the rights to the game and getting out from under a publisher, and I’m sure part of the hype train around The Breach was to spur a renewed round of funding.
As someone newer to its community, I’m really surprised at how much complaining there is about end game longevity and a bunch of other things that make me want to ask, “You…you know the game isn’t done yet, right?”
Moon Studios took a risk going independent which means two things: (a) they have strong faith that their project can stand on its own, and (b) they are far more sensitive to cash flow now than they were under a publisher. One thing I think they’ll need to work on is their community relations, and it’s a shame because it almost always means we hear less direct communication and more stuff filtered through PR people.
I’ll leave a positive review b/c I’ve played about 10 hours and I’m really enjoying the game in front of me and look forward to the updates coming through the rest of 2025.
Good to know; thanks for getting back to me!
Based on my experience with Shadow Tactics, I will be getting this month’s bundle for this game alone. Like ST, Shadow Gambit should play great on a controller and be a good fit for the Deck.
I’ve been on a Souls-like kick lately, so the two games I’ve been playing the most recently on my Deck are Blasphemous 2 and No Rest for the Wicked.
Blasphemous 2 I got as part of Humble Choice a bit ago and I’m really enjoying it. Not too difficult, but definitely gives its own unique feel to a metroidvania.
I just picked up No Rest for the Wicked after its recent Breach update and I’ve been loving the gameplay and loop they’ve built. Hope to see more performance improvements for the Deck…it really feels like a game that they should be able to get running much better on the Deck over time, but I am able to get a mostly stable 30 FPS so far.
Have you had a chance to play it since the recent update? They completely re-did the controls on the Deck, right? I’d love to hear how it plays now, I’ve been eying it for a while.
How have you felt about playing CO:E33 on the Deck? The game looks quite good, but I’m really unsure about playing it now on the Deck or waiting until I build a new mid-range PC in the fall/winter.
Do you feel the trade-offs for getting it working on the Deck are worth it?
I bought a M1 Mac Mini second-hand and it’s great for home server purposes. Like others have said, you’ll be using containers a bunch, so bare metal doesn’t matter quite as much as it used to. They’re power efficient and offer good performance. If you’re in the Apple ecosystem, there’s a bunch of other benefits to having a Mac set up as a server (e.g. content caching for updates/iCloud content).
No, this is an update of SteamOS while game recording is a Steam Client feature. It’s still in the beta channel.
I’ve been self-hosting Forgejo for a while now and I really quite like it.
I have a similar issue with RetroDeck; I can usually just pop over to the controller config and reorder so my controller is #1 rather than the Steam Deck. Bit annoying though.