blindsight
@blindsight@beehaw.org
- Comment on New rumor suggests Valve's Steam Deck 2 is much further away than we thought 3 days ago:
I mean using the Track Pads, often for things like radial menus. A lot of PC games need more inputs than exist on a controller.
- Comment on New rumor suggests Valve's Steam Deck 2 is much further away than we thought 3 days ago:
Hall effect joysticks would be great. The rest I don’t really count; obviously, better performance/bigger screen would be an incremental improvement, but I don’t need it. The OLED screen is plenty big enough.
I (personally) would never use detachable controllers and wouldn’t want more moving parts that could break. Haptics and adaptive triggers I don’t care about improving. For sound, I prefer headphones for when I want “good” sound, too, so that wouldn’t make a difference for me.
Even hall effect joysticks are only going to matter to me if my current joysticks break or develop play.
I really do think the current OLED is amazing.
- Comment on New rumor suggests Valve's Steam Deck 2 is much further away than we thought 4 days ago:
This one I’m excited for. A Steam Machine would be great, and my biggest gripe with controller play on my desktop is the missing trackpads mean Steam Input didn’t work. There are games that I choose to stream to/play on my Deck over using my 1440p 32" screen on my gaming rig because I don’t have Steam Input on my desktop.
- Comment on New rumor suggests Valve's Steam Deck 2 is much further away than we thought 4 days ago:
I’m not really sure what’s not perfect with the OLED already, lol. Maybe a second USB-C port would be nice, so we could charge it while using a non-hub device, or use a cheap hub to add even more controllers? That’s a minor, incremental improvement, though.
It could always be smaller/thinner/quieter, I guess, but I can’t think of anything I’d really want to change with my Deck. I have lots of minor pain points with other tech, but I literally can’t think of anything with the Deck, so I’m curious if you have any specifics, or if you’re just trusting that Valve has put some real thought and research into this and will surprise us with design changes for the better that aren’t obvious.
- Comment on 1 week ago:
Sure, fair enough. But the OLED Steam Deck will also still be a great system in 10 years, especially for anyone who has a gaming desktop. With local game streaming, even with aging hardware the Deck will still be able to play the latest AAA games, and it will still be able to play hundreds of thousands of older games natively.
As a patient gamer, it’s a no brainer.
- Comment on Nintendo bans Switch 2 owner after they played used Switch 1 games — decision eventually reversed after 'proving innocence’ 1 month ago:
The Wii U is fantastic. Lots of great games that run smooth as butter on the Steam Deck without any fancy setup required.
Oh, that’s not how it was marketed? Weird. That’s the first I heard of it…
/s but not really.
- Comment on A note about the security of your Steam account 3 months ago:
Nah. The need to regularly change passwords is unnecessary. If you use a sufficiently long password, unique passwords for every site, and 2FA/MFA for “important” logins, then you’re good.
Businesses requiring their staff to regularly cycle passwords is outdated and makes their systems less resilient, since it opens more angles for social engineering attacks or password security carelessness.
- Comment on Steam Winter Sale 2024 Has Begun! 8 months ago:
I think about the 5 games for $5 bundles with amazing indie games whenever this comes up.
You can still get deals like that from Humble, Fanatical, and a few others, but nothing like that on Steam anymore. I don’t really understand why people buy so many games on Steam, tbh. 90% of my game purchases are bundles.
Then again, I’m a very patient gamer who prefers short and targeted indie games to AAA games, so that’s probably most of the answer. I’m cool waiting 5 years for a game to be cheap. I have literally thousands of games I would be interested in playing someone soon, so it’s only the very rare game that I’ll buy the year it’s released.
- Comment on Steam Replay for 2024 is live, includes Steam Deck specific stats 8 months ago:
I was wondering, lol. My numbers are very inflated, too.
What’s funny about mine is that almost all of my “Windows” playtime is actually from streaming to my Deck, too.
- Comment on Balatro Dev Calls Out PEGI For "Real Gambling" Rating Hypocrisy Vs. EA Sports FC 8 months ago:
I would expect this kind of Puritanical pearl clutching in the US, not Europe.
Apparently, any game that uses straights, flushes, and full houses gets an adults-only rating, but games with addictive psychological dark patterns designed to maximize microtransaction revenue are fine for children. What a world we live in.
- Comment on Decksight, an OLED screen replacement for LCD decks, is now in crowdfunding 8 months ago:
1080p would also be great for streaming from a desktop.
- Comment on Steam Families is here 11 months ago:
I’m excited for this. I just got my wife a Deck used to play Escape Simulator together, but this will make it a lot easier for her to play most of my other games, now, too.
Sadly Dragon Age 3 can’t be shared, which I should have added to her account, not mine… But we only had 1 Deck at the time! (On the other hand, I’ll be able to play most of my library on her device while she’s playing, so not a big deal!)
- Comment on Steam Deck gets stuck on "connecting" to WiFi among other weirdness, persists after factory reset. Basically a paperweight at this point, please help. 1 year ago:
You could also try booting something from MicroSD so it’s easier to revert.
Seconding contacting Valve support, too.
- Comment on Steam Deck Now Cheaper Than A Switch During Valve's Big Summer Sale 1 year ago:
Downloading content is almost definitely legal in Canada, and non-commercial digital distribution has never gone to court, so its legality hasn’t been established.
I can’t find the source, but I recall reading speculation that sharing backup copies between owners of the media is likely legal in Canada but, again, it hasn’t been tried by courts, so its legality hasn’t been firmly established.
Anyway, with non-commercial digital distribution not having any legal teeth in Canada, it’s effectively legal and its literal legality is unknown.
- Comment on Steam Deck Now Cheaper Than A Switch During Valve's Big Summer Sale 1 year ago:
Depends on your jurisdiction.
As far as I know, that’s never been tried in court in Canada, and there’s reason to suspect that may not be the case here. (Although I’m not a lawyer, so I may be mistaken.)
- Comment on Researchers upend AI status quo by eliminating matrix multiplication in LLMs 1 year ago:
This could be huge, but we’ll need to wait and see. The economic and ecological footprint of LLMs is problematic.
That said, will this actually help, or will they just use 3T parameter models to outcompete competitors 1T parameter models using GPUs? Really, this is more about small-scale models competing with midsize models. Like, this could bring a model as big as GPT 3.5 down to be something you could run on affordable hardware, right?
That would be really compelling for my sector (education) where there’s a lot of concern about student data privacy. I could definitely pitch building a local $5K-cost LLM server that could handle a dozen or so simultaneous users. That would be enough for a small school district.
- Comment on Steam Deck Now Cheaper Than A Switch During Valve's Big Summer Sale 1 year ago:
You can if you own the Mario game…
… but I just downloaded a 1TB Batocera Switch image to run from MicroSD.
- Comment on Shovel Knight is getting online co-op as part of a new Shovel Of Hope DX edition for its 10th anniversary 1 year ago:
lol, this isn’t the first time I waited so long to play a game that a remastered version is announced. I guess I’ll wait for the remastered version to be released and go on sale… And maybe they’ll make a remaster of the remastered version before I play it!
Seriously, though, that rewind feature makes me excited to try this version. I ain’t got time for too much challenge in my games, but I usually get bored of easy modes. Unlimited attempts at reasonably hard content sounds perfect for me!
- Comment on What do you use the back buttons for? 1 year ago:
I’ve been playing a lot of Ziggurat 2 which is a roguelite fantasy-themed FPS with 4 categories of weapons. Instead of spamming Y to cycle through weapons, I can select my weapon directly with the back buttons.
- Comment on Do you still use your Steam Deck much? 1 year ago:
Yeah, I don’t blame them.
I looked into this after posting, and it seems like getting Android emulating working on the Deck isn’t too hard. I haven’t checked FTL’s compatibility with the emulator, though.
- Comment on Do you still use your Steam Deck much? 1 year ago:
It’s a shame FTL has such terrible touch controls on PC. I wonder about emulating the Android version of the game; I haven’t looked into it at all, but that might work well if possible.
- Comment on Do you still use your Steam Deck much? 1 year ago:
Same with me. 90% of my gaming time is in bed after my kiddos have gone down to sleep, so there’s no substitute. I’ve used it almost every day since I got it in December.
I do want to set up game streaming from my desktop, but I just haven’t got around to it yet, mostly since it means I need to set up my WiFi mesh which I’ve been procrastinating.
- Comment on Valve has little to worry about as new Steam Deck rival arrives 1 year ago:
Yeah, I’m not sure how to actually use this keyboard. You can’t type with two hands and hold it up with two hands at the same time, and it’ll be easy too wife to thumb type while holding it.
I’m skeptical. The dual-trackpad typing on the Deck is pretty slick, too. With each thing controlling half the keyboard, it feels very similar to “real” typing, and it’s fast enough for the light use that’s needed for most gaming-related tasks. So, this is a very big (and therefore expensive) component to be including fire very limited value.
If I really need to type a lot or quickly, I can grab my cheap Bluetooth keyboard (that would cost way less than the marginal cost of including a sliding keyboard like this one!)
- Comment on [Discussion] New month, new games. What are you playing on your Steam Deck? - May 2024 1 year ago:
I’ve mostly been playing a F2P game called Minion Masters. It’s a card game, but the cards come alive in 2-lane combat like a tiny auto-battle MOBA. It has short game lengths (6-10 min are typical), is generous with F2P players (I’ve paid $0 so far), and has enough strategic (deck building) and tactical (card playing) depth to stay interesting throughout.
It plays great on the Deck without any configuration, even though it’s “unsupported”. I suppose some of the card text might be a bit small for some, but that’s only relevant in the deck building screen where you can easily zoom in on cards. There’s a UI option to read your partner’s cards in 2v2, but I’ve never felt the need to. By the time you’re good enough at the game to react to your partner’s hand, you’ll already know the cards well enough that you don’t need to read them.
I should maybe add that I got a bunch of free cards when they had free DLC to celebrate the release of the game on Android, so idk if my F2P experience is typical.
- Comment on Cops can force suspect to unlock phone with thumbprint, US court rules 1 year ago:
I might have changed that setting. I don’t like Google Assistant on my phone since it interferes with my Google Home devices.
- Comment on Cops can force suspect to unlock phone with thumbprint, US court rules 1 year ago:
On my Sony phone, holding power with the screen on brings up the power menu, which includes Lockdown mode.
- Comment on Disney reportedly wants to bring always-on channels to Disney Plus 1 year ago:
This is fascinating to watch happening. As numbers-must-go-up businesses chase profits in a world where subscribership has peaked, they cannibalize their own value proposition to increase profits. This encourages more users to shift to piracy, accelerating profit losses.
Will we ever reach an equilibrium? My understanding is that total entertainment spending doesn’t decline or grow much, so it’s all just trying to compete with rivals for a bigger slice of the pie. I wonder if the major TV and film producers are just going to have less total money heading their way, and we’ll have less high-budget content created.
I don’t really care either way; lots of lower-budget content is amaze balls. I barely ever play AAA games or watch blockbuster movies, and I think it might be better for everyone to get more diversity in content creators (that lower budgets will likely enable.)
It will be very interesting seeing how this all plays out over the next few decades.
Now excuse my while I go pirate low-budget UK panel shows (that are region-locked internationally) while playing Final Fantasy 5 on an emulator modded with several fan-made romhacks.
- Comment on Meta's 'consent or pay' tactic must not prevail over privacy, EU rights groups warn 1 year ago:
I really hope they make the right decision!
- Comment on Schools Were Just Supposed To Block Porn. Instead They Sabotaged Homework and Censored Suicide Prevention Sites 1 year ago:
This article goes against what I’ve noticed in schools, as a teacher.
In schools I’ve worked in that block sites students want to reach (games or video streaming, almost exclusively), one kid in the school figures out how to sign up for a free VPN, and it spreads quickly until everyone in the school is using a crappy (likely unsafe) VPN. They don’t have the knowledge to seek out a reputable VPN; they just get whatever spyware they find first that works.
There’s no point filtering school Internet, except for known porn sites. Block PornHub, obviously, but as soon as you block YouTube or Cool Math Games, then every student in the school will be using a shitty VPN by the end of the month.
That said, students aren’t going to put the effort in to get around blocks for schoolwork. Obviously. They aren’t going to open the VPN for that!
- Comment on Battlefield V now broken on Steam Deck / Linux with EA anticheat live 1 year ago:
EA has published some absolute bangers:
SimCity (1989)
SimCity 2000 (1993)
Dungeon Keeper (1997)
Lots of Ultima games (90s)
The Sims (2000)
Medal of Honor (2000)
Command & Conquer games (early 2000s)
SSX (2000)… Was Battlefield 2142 (2006) good? They didn’t make the first two games.
Does Spore (2008) count? The game was shit, and had DRM that only let you install it 3 times ever per license, and didn’t do what it said it would with massive over promise and under deliver. But it was ambitious and different, at least?
Dead Space (2008)
Mirror’s Edge (2008)
Dragon Age: Origins (2009)
Mad Effect 2 (2010) (they didn’t make 1)
Plants vs. Zombies (2011)I’m tired of going through this list, lol. There are a zillion “next sportsball version” games and mobile games to sift through. Also, turns out some of the best EA games I remember were only published by them but made by another developer… Until EA bought them out, lol.