Video Game News and Miscellany
- Thread starter figmentPez
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figmentPez
Staff member
Oh god, Nintendo is getting into the Critical Race Theory game!
New machine learning-based cheating may threaten competitive play
Despite being illicit in games, and even illegal in some countries, the cheating industry has developed immensely, creating multi-million dollar businesses. You may think cheating is lame,...
www.techspot.com
Uses a video capture card to feed a computer which analyzes the screen and handles aiming the weapon for you. You still have to run and jump and turn to face the enemy, though.
Here's the tweet/video that's embedded in the article, if you want to see it in action:
--Patrick
New machine learning-based cheating may threaten competitive play
Despite being illicit in games, and even illegal in some countries, the cheating industry has developed immensely, creating multi-million dollar businesses. You may think cheating is lame,...
Auto-aim cheatmaker halts development at Activision’s request
Developer says, "My intent was never to do anything illegal."
arstechnica.com
Well that didn't take long.
--Patrick
Valve announces the Steam Deck.
I haven't looked into the specs or anything, but honestly, the thing looks like an ergonomic nightmare. It does not look like it'll be comfortable to hold and play with for long periods of time.
I haven't looked into the specs or anything, but honestly, the thing looks like an ergonomic nightmare. It does not look like it'll be comfortable to hold and play with for long periods of time.
figmentPez
Staff member
$650 for the highest end model is pretty reasonable. This thing might be more powerful than my aging desktop.
figmentPez
Staff member
I'm thinking about how Valve could really screw up this Steam Deck thing by failing to advertise it. Like they failed to advertise the Steam Controller, and Index, and Half-Life: Alyx, and....
Like, holy shit, Valve, needs to advertise. I don't just mean putting their products on the front page of Steam. I don't mean sending out a press release. I mean they need to be running ads showing people playing on the Steam Deck in movie theaters during the pre-show. They need to be running ads on YouTube, Twitch, Instagram, Twitter, etc. They need to partner with streamers to play on the Steam Deck on Twitch, YouTube, etc. They need a social media account to share out tips and tricks for using Steam Input to improve your gaming experience. (If this were a post-COVID world, I'd say they should have a pop-up restaurant serving some trendy beverage and offering hands-on demos with the Steam Deck.)
Like, holy shit, Valve, needs to advertise. I don't just mean putting their products on the front page of Steam. I don't mean sending out a press release. I mean they need to be running ads showing people playing on the Steam Deck in movie theaters during the pre-show. They need to be running ads on YouTube, Twitch, Instagram, Twitter, etc. They need to partner with streamers to play on the Steam Deck on Twitch, YouTube, etc. They need a social media account to share out tips and tricks for using Steam Input to improve your gaming experience. (If this were a post-COVID world, I'd say they should have a pop-up restaurant serving some trendy beverage and offering hands-on demos with the Steam Deck.)
figmentPez
Staff member
Anyone know how SD cards are doing for read/write speeds these days? It's been like a decade since I last read an article on flash memory performance, and way back then mechanical hard drives were often better than SD cards, despite SD being solid state. This is mainly regarding storage in Valve's new Steam Deck. Is someone buying the base model and relying on expanding the storage with an SD card going to be severely hampering their load times? Or can you get good performance out of an SD card if you buy the right make/model?
It looks interesting, and I'm definitely tempted, but when I think about it I'm not sure when I'd play it and what games I'll be playing on it. I already have a gaming PC (and a sort-of gaming laptop) for stuff like my FPS games and open-world shenanigan games. A portable system like this seems more suited to playing casual games during my commute. Maybe stuff like Stardew Valley?
Yeah, that's kind of my thing: what exactly am I going to play on this that wouldn't demand a mouse?
figmentPez
Staff member
It's got a touchscreen, touchpads, and a gyro. Between the three you'll have an impressive amount of control without a mouse. Depending on how much time you're willing to spend getting used to it, there's not a lot of game genres that you can't control.
I own a steam controller. I still prefer a mouse.
I'm sure this device is for someone, but it's not for me. If I want to game on a handheld I'll play on my switch.
I have a gaming laptop, because my life is such that it's truly difficult for me to carve out a couple of hours to sit by myself and enjoy a game. Making it portable made it easier to take to kids appointments where I sit in the lobby for an hour. Something like this would have been far more efficient, and would come with the hundreds of games I already own, so I could totally see wanting one.
That said, like any gaming device (or game for that matter), I wouldn't want to be first gen to buy one. Let someone else work out the bugs.
That said, like any gaming device (or game for that matter), I wouldn't want to be first gen to buy one. Let someone else work out the bugs.
figmentPez
Staff member
It's the first gen for Valve, but it's far from the first gen for a handheld x86/x64 gaming PC*. It's possible Valve has managed to learn from the mistakes of others. I get why you're worried. It'll be interesting to see if the Steam Deck is merely quirky, or if it's outright trouble.
* There have been several generations of GPD Win (even if you don't count the GPD Win Max as being in the same category). There was the mostly-a-scam Kickstarter of the SMACH Z (which still produced some final working hardware and, before that, many semi-public examples of how not to engineer things). And most recently the powerful, expensive, but fairly capable Aya Neo and OneXPlayer. If you're interested in how these handheld gaming computers run in the real world, I'd check out the LowSpecGamer's YouTube channel.
figmentPez
Staff member
One thing that baffles me about the buzz around the Steam Deck is the amount of people who are already planning to load Windows on it. Aside from the fact that Windows would barely fit in the base model's 64GB of storage, no one knows how well Windows will even run on this thing. I'm going to laugh so hard if a whole bunch of idiots buy this to run Windows only to find there are no WiFi or Bluetooth drivers for Windows at launch, or that there are other hardware features that don't work in Windows like the ambient light sensor to control the screen brightness, or the volume buttons not working.
I dunno, I don't currently have a laptop, so a Steam Deck with Windows might be an attractive proposition if I were in the market for a mobile PC. From what I'm reading it's basically a PC in a box and one of the hardware developers has said you can install whatever you want on it, so I'd expect generic drivers for things like WiFi and Bluetooth would work okay.
figmentPez
Staff member
figmentPez
Staff member
A thought just occurred to me. Chrome OS is going to get a native version of Steam in the future, possibly this year, and I've been wondering what made Google open up it's OS to a competing storefront. Today someone was talking about putting Windows 11 on the Steam Deck to get Android app support, and it dawned on me that SteamOS might get it's own Android App store. That might be the trade-off the two companies made, each agreeing to the other's app store in return for cooperating on making gaming better on both platforms.
Assuming perfect Windows driver support, to the point where even the ambient light sensor is correctly adjusting the screen brightness in Windows.... Why swap out the OS? You'd lose the fast-suspend and resume capabilities, eat up a few dozen more GBs of storage because Windows installs are much larger than SteamOS, most likely have worse battery life, and get... What in return? Is it Game Pass?
Much wider game support. Linux gaming is better than it was but still not universal.
Edit: looking up numbers online, it looks like only about 15% of the steam library supports steam os
figmentPez
Staff member
That number is going to jump up a lot when the new version of Steam OS comes out. (And I'd question it even now, given what ProtonDB says about game compatibility.) Valve seems very confident that they'll support the majority of the Steam library with the new improvements they've been working on. If it will be enough to satisfy any given gamer remains to be seen, but I wouldn't look at current numbers to decide if Windows is going to be better than SteamOS on the Steam Deck.
I understand being skeptical about Valve's promises on this, but people were skeptical about their claims when they first introduced Proton, and everything Valve promised in that announcement was true. The games they said would work, did work, and they got performance to be very close, and in some cases better, than on Windows. It was limited to a select number of games, but that's what they promised, and the number of whitelisted games has slowly grown (and a lot more games that aren't offically whitelisted still run well). Now they're promising much wider support, and I don't see any reason to doubt them. (Though it still remains to be seen if they'll actually get the anti-cheat support on Linux that they're promising to make games like Fortnite, Apex Legends, etc. run.)
EDIT: A quote from Valve, "Most games already just work... Our goal is for every game to work by the time we ship Steam Deck." - the source is this video on the Steamworks Development YouTube channel.
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The flexibility to use it however I would want.
figmentPez
Staff member
I look forward to them following in the footsteps of Ubisoft and doing jack shit about the situation because they're only a giant corporation driven by profit.