The Octonaut

I love my Steam Deck. It’s literally beside my hotel bed right now, while the Switch is at home with two kids under 10. But:

• the docking and detaching experience is frustrating as hell
• it is significantly heavier and yet feels more fragile.
• it has profiles but not comparably to the Switch in terms of use and UX
• and the controller experience is very hit and miss.
• • It spent 2 months just literally randomly shutting off bluetooth - you had to go into desktop mode and re-enable with a Linux command until they patched it - but that’s not even it - whenever it did that, it also disabled the sticks!.
• • I have multiple entries in the controllers screen - none of which can be renamed or show indicators as to which controller they are - where every now and again the Deck decides sorry, I don’t recognise that controller anymore. Please come walk across the living room and awkwardly stand in front of the telly pressing buttons on the Steam Deck’s face to re-pair things.
• • Oh and controller layout schemes are a cool and powerful feature but way too complicated for me to explain to an 8 year old.

If “I just want to pick up a controller after work and forget what Philip in Marketing said he thought the project was going to look like”, or “I want to buy games once and share them with my kids” or even “I’ll throw this in my bag to kill 20 minutes at the waiting room” are factors, the Steam Deck is very much not superior in every way.

Again. Love my Deck. Almost exclusively buy “Verified” games now. Halfway through a Nintendo game that somehow is easier for me, a software dev to find ajd emulate on Deck than on a Nintendo console. But the Switch has been a remarkable console to have in my living room. The first console I bought (actually now that I think of it, that my wife bought for me) since Wii and before that since PlayStation 2. I’m not really a console player. I have 1000+ games on Steam. Still Switch excels at many things and the sales figures should make that obvious.

I do not wish to enjoinder with your Game Launcher and anonymous telephony

One of the good things about living in Ireland is that I’m 99% our government is neither competent enough to perpetrate elaborate crimes against its people without being exposed almost instantly, nor powerful enough that even fascists getting into government would have a meaningful impact bar providing a colourful humorous segment of the inevitable documentary on Europe’s second fall to the Axis.

I work for a telecom. In my country there is well regulated legislation that specifies how and when the police can ask the telecoms for cell location data, usually used for missing people.

They also provide large scale, anonymised data for crowd movement analysis. For example it was used to demonstrate how 60,000 people moved into and out of a stadium located for historical reasons in an old-fashioned, dense residential area, in preparation for the arrival of English football fans.

They were observed finding one ROM on the Internet, ever. They do have their own emulator(s).

Nintendo is a bunch of humans. If my boss asks me to see if I can find the installer for an old version of our software, you can bet I’ll check anywhere before volunteering to go scrape old hard drives.

They are not “banning” emulators. They take action against two sorts of problems: leaking, and distribution of copyrighted material. Yuzu was taken down because they stupidly started charging for help with playing Tears of the Kingdom before its release. Other emulators have been threatened because they included binary console OS software (rather than actually fully emulating the console itself) or actually distributed game ROMs.

Dolphin has been around for about 20 years now. Why? Because they don’t distribute copyrighted material, recommend against doing so, and don’t require to include any binaries from the console.

Here’s all they had to both say and adhere to, to “survive” the supposedly blood-hungry Nintendo for longer than some of the people reading this have been alive:

Where can I download game ISOs/ROMs?¶

Short answer: You don’t. Buy games and dump them with a Wii.

Long answer: Downloading commercial games is illegal and thus strongly frowned upon by the Dolphin developers. To prevent legal issues, this includes gray areas like downloading games which you purchased earlier. You don’t necessarily need to own a gaming console by yourself because you can buy a game disc and dump them with a friend’s console. On the other hand, copying a friend’s game dump is considered illegal again.

https://dolphin-emu.org/

Also, lol @ the idea that it’s hypocrisy for them to use their own game files. You understand that’s what a ROM is, right? It isn’t magic. It’s just a binary file.

…

“Ripping” ROMs, or dumping them, takes almost no effort. If you have the cartridge reader its about as much work as taking photos off an SD card. Certainly nothing at all like cracking a game, which is pretty much software development.

Please consider informing yourself before forming strong opinions.

Just so we’re clear, are you under the impression that “ROMs acquired from the Internet” represent something other than Nintendo’s work?

1. What, lol. China doesn’t kidnap foreign businessmen.
2. “Their” equipment was 51% (at least) owned by a Chinese company. Of course they can’t literally steal it.
3. “They considered crime”
4. They were going to buy the equipment again… from China anyway? lol

Tell your boss get off the Trump juice.

It is usually also followed by “but I can download my installers and then I can have them whenever I like” as if it’s a sane idea to store terabytes of offline installers for the day that GOG goes out of business.

I mean, I also have terabytes of offline installers for the day that Steam or GOG go down. On other people’s computers. In a, uh, distributed distribution system.

GOG themselves literally said that you do not, even very recently. You own a license like every other customer, and it can be revoked at their discretion.

GOG choose to exclusively sell games for which they can sell DRM-free versions, which is a great option for consumers. It is not a straightforward decision however as this is, whether it is a priority or not, a tradeoff for the things that Steam integration provides - cloud backup, mod workshops, multiplayer functionality etc.

Steam also sells plenty of DRM-free games, and offer customers the informed choice when selling Steam DRM and Third-Party DRM controlled game licenses.

This is not an argument that Steam or GOG are objectively better. But it is a straightforward lie to state that the license you buy from GOG is legally different from the one you buy from Steam. What is different is the possibility or otherwise of DRM software being used to control your adherence to the license.

The idea is to change your passwords on other sites if they shared the same password (which is why you shouldn’t do this).

As an Irish person it kind of serves them right? Halloween is supposed to be this special, singular, liminal night when the barriers between the mundane and the supernatural are weakest, when dinner is laid out for the spirits of those that died as if you can speak to them there and then. Then the next day it’s gone, and new year starts, cold and bleak at first then warming in temperature and tones.

Turning it into a month+ of commercialised spooky/sexy stuff just makes it less unique, less Halloween in every way.

I propose that a new costume night be created, in summer so people can actually wear them, and return Halloween to the darkness it belongs to.

The problem is that you don’t know what a pronoun is. You should try writing a sentence with common pronouns first and see if your sentence makes any grammatical sense. For instance “is <name> to understand that…” doesn’t work, because “is me/I to understand” doesn’t work. You would instead say “Am drag to understand”, which while sounding a bit odd is at least actually writing in English.

Your gimmick doesn’t work, Drag. You’re even having tk say “Drag’s”, which is literally how third person possessive plurals work. Find another thing to draw attention.

This guy’s gimmick is to speak about himself in the third person. You can safely block him.

Delisting it just means it isn’t being sold to new customers.

Do one maleshep run. I promise he has some great deliveries too.

lol.

What in the history of electronic entertainment makes you think that they’re done with doing the shitty thing now that they stopped doing it once?

Can I ask what I’m sure everyone is thinking, how are any of those things improved by being tiny?