Odyssey was the second entry in the new batch of games in the series, where they completely reinvented what that series is. There are a lot of us who find it to be a poor substitution for what came before.

Have you played 1, 2, or New Vegas?

How old were you when you played Sonic Unleashed? I thoroughly played and enjoyed Sonic Adventure 2 for the Gamecube when I was in middle school, but revisiting it as an adult, it was so hard to envision how I ever enjoyed the way that game controls. However, even though my muscle memory was totally gone, since all the levels I knew from SA2 were remixed, Sonic Generations was good even as an adult.

Yeah, instead it was quarter-munching arcade machines, obtuse puzzles to sell strategy guides, and individual games that could cost up to $90 in early 90s money.

If you haven’t played the demo, or couldn’t tell from the trailer, this game is almost exactly the same loop as This is the Police. I liked This is the Police, but it could certainly drag after a handful of hours. That’s probably more of a problem with the execution than the idea; already, Dispatch dresses up the day at the desk job by having very ever-present banter, and not annoying quips but dialogue that feels like it’s building characters or moving the story forward. I liked what I played of this game, but I wonder what they have to spruce up the gameplay after a few iterations through its loop that This is the Police couldn’t come up with.

Not one of my responses was intended to be hostile or patronizing, but tone can be hard to convey via text. I’m sorry if you took it that way. I was merely pointing out that you arrived at a conclusion that they didn’t state definitively in the article we both read.

That’s because, as I’ve been trying to tell you, they didn’t walk it back. You assumed it meant something that it didn’t.

Way ahead of other ARM chips doesn’t mean that they’re ahead of the best that x64 has to offer, so that’s why games are still built for x64. The transition to ARM may happen someday, but Apple jumped the gun from a gaming perspective. Solving the software problem isn’t just getting SteamOS to run on it, but to get games built for x64 to run on it, and that’s not an easy problem to remedy. Even if it was solved, it likely would not result in better performance than we can get out of AMD’s x64 chips for x64 games on handhelds.

“We are working on Steam Deck 2,” Aldehayyat chimed in. “There is going to be a successor.”

That was seven months ago, and it’s very clear. Successful gaming hardware usually starts prototyping the next one very quickly, even if it’s years away. If they didn’t, then they’d always lag far behind the latest technology. Valve don’t know the year. With tariffs alone, trying to set a release date for a new piece of hardware could be a nightmare.

Yes, I did. I also didn’t read between the lines and take that to mean that they’re not working on it, investing in it, etc. It just means that we can’t predict the future, and what makes sense now might not make sense in a few years when the technology does exist. The Outlook section was the author’s conjecture of what could come to pass, but he can’t predict the future either.

“…we aren’t thinking about new hardware until next year at least” doesn’t mean that they aren’t working on it now. And they seem to have low confidence that said new hardware will even make it out next year. Yes, we are likely years out from a new Steam Deck, and you shouldn’t plan on one being imminent. That’s not the same thing as them no longer working on it.

I’m imagining a lot of regression in compatibility and performance loss, as that’s what I’ve heard of the state of Apple’s new CPU architecture.

The point being that it will resume when the technology exists; it’s not that they lost interest in it.

Word from SkillUp is that you can still load the desktop experience the same way you can on Steam Deck, so that would make it neither locked down nor anti-mods.

Valve isn’t making their next Steam Deck anytime soon because the technology doesn’t exist yet. You can crank up the wattage and put in a bigger battery, but those things make the handheld larger, heavier, and hotter, so they’re not interested. This is a bottleneck from AMD and their R&D.

But especially due to live service anti cheat and Game Pass, I agree that there’s a potential market for this strategy. There’s certainly no way they compete with Sony by doing what consoles have always done.

And yet a number of these games did land for me on the first go.

I too was wondering about MGS4 in the midst of all of these Konami announcements, since Volume 1 was so long ago now. MGS4 is just about the only reason I still have a PS3.

My wife and I rolled credits on Blue Prince. It’s a great puzzle/adventure game, but I don’t think either of us have the patience to see everything it has to offer. It would have been nice if they doled out more ways to control the RNG earlier and more frequently, but they did not.

I’ve also been continuing on with Kingdom Come: Deliverance, the first one. I just had a night of debauchery with a priest in order to progress a main quest line, and then had to give a sermon hung over, which went surprisingly well.

Nothing new. Literally just confirming it was still in development. And of course it was.

SlayPtation

What a typo. But they’ll change their tune as soon as one line crosses another line. I’m willing to pay $70 or $80 for the right game, but my willingness to part with that much money drops precipitously as soon as you make me wade through spoiler-filled GOTY season without having access to the game. When you port the game to PC a year late, I’m probably content to keep waiting for half price.

You know, it’s funny, I’m about halfway through DMC4, and I’m loving it even more than 3 thus far, but even through cultural osmosis, I know a turn is coming. Other than that, I was surprised to find how much I agree with you, having not played 5 yet, but maybe I’m not as fond of the first game as you are; nothing seems to flow in that game compared to later entries, and I’d argue it often has more in common with Dark Souls. I went down this road playing this series because Hi-Fi Rush knocked my socks off, and I’m still expecting that game to have the most in common with DMC5. So far, I’d still say Hi-Fi Rush beats them all, but it got to learn from them, after all.