God damn. If you haven’t held an original NES controller since back in the day when you were a kid, lemme tell you: They are already fucking small. This thing would definitely suck to use unless you are under the age of 10 or have dwarfism (or possibly Donald Trump).
Yeah, I could see that for kids or just like in that screenshot, as macro pad.
Even the SN30 Pro was bit too small and uncomfortable for me, and I don’t even have big hands. The 8BitDo Pro 2 on the other hand, is a solid and affordable controller.
I like what 8BitDo has been doing over the years, good quality products under affordable price range, and sometimes quirky / out of the box designs. I do wish they’d make more PS5 compatible controllers, because PS5 is definitely lacking affordable 3rd party controllers.
Their pic of somebody using it for graphic design is something I hadn't even considered. I've seen other artists use JoyCons but these would connect to PC a lot more seamlessly.
My son would love this when he was 3yo. Now he is 7yo where DualSense is a bit too big while the his hori switch wired controller is getting worse.(buttons become a bit sticky) there should be official controllers for the 4-9yo range.
I did check and does have a target in mind if his current controller not up to the task. But is seems hard to get a ps5 compatible one, so I will just settle with the switch variation.
Kids are sticky. lol.
Crack that hori open and clean it. The top shell and button caps can be washed in the sink if they’re just plastic. That’s probably where most of the sticky is.
I don’t play online games anymore, but this makes me sadly nostalgic for playing Halo 2 on the Xbox at launch back in my late teens and other games on that console. There was shit talking galore and it was amazing.
Problem is I guess now gaming is open to more people, there’s vastly more chance of those who would take it way too far
I haven’t played online since the 360 days so who knows what the experience is like now. Only have time for single player titles nowadays.
it turned from a bunch of 12-18 year olds screaming “I fucked your mom last night” to a bunch of mid-late 20-30s saying “you stupid n*****” every other sentence…
I have turned off game chat in every game since modern warfare 2019
I miss the 360 era myself, but as someone who enjoys playing competitively in every game, it’s hard to play unless you have a bunch of like minded individuals with you… and I even find that challenging some days
Wow classic was a PERFECT experience for me. Everyone was nice, mild RP on a non RP (but very PvP) server, orderly queues, met some awesome friends, jokes from the mid-2000s. 10/10
Then they did updates and put in MTX and it’s not the same, fuck you WoW classic. It was magical for a year.
The point I think is that a “console” is from a certain PoV a locked down piece of hardware only able to run certain software in certain ways. So eg. Stadia was a console, while AWS virtual desktops are not, despite both being just VMs running on some cloud service.
Point is, it’s the software that makes a console, not the hardware.
A console is a closed off system. The Deck is literally just a Linux PC in handheld format. You can do everything with it, Valve even explicitly encourages you to do that.
The Steam Deck really blurs the lines between PC and console. Modern consoles use AMD64/Radeon hardware and at least the Xbox consoles use a modified Windows OS. The Steam Deck uses AMD64/Radeon hardware and a modified Linux OS. Both feature a controller-focused user interface centered around gaming.
If you exclude the Steam Deck from the definition of “console” then a console is defined by its restrictive nature and limited selection of games.
If you include the Steam Deck in the definition of “console” then a console is defined by its controller-friendly and gaming-first design (as opposed to a general purpose PC).
It really doesn't. Consoles are a completely closed off system, to the point where modifying it can get you banned from online services. The Deck is the complete opposite to that, with Valve even explicitly encouraging you to tinker with it. It always has been advertised as being a full PC, because you can do all the things you can do on a PC. You can literally go into desktop mode and have your regular KDE Plasma screen.
By your definition every gaming PC would count as being a console. That's just nonsense.
I feel like this is a modernized definition of “console”. The earliest consoles distinguished themselves from the computers of the time by being gaming-first, not by being restrictive and closed off. Things that defined a console were not coming with a keyboard or mouse, connecting primarily to a television rather than a monitor, and using a joystick or gamepad for input.
There were a lot of instances of third party published games for consoles in the past, whether officially licensed or unofficial, approved or unapproved. The online service definition ignores half of the console generations in video gaming history. There were a lot of unlicensed/3rd party games published for the 8-bit and 16-bit era consoles (and yes, some of those had to bypass security chips, but I don’t think all of them did).
I think in some ways the Steam Deck is a return to form of these earlier machines, but in a modern way (and handheld). Valve’s openness isn’t a good reason to not consider the Steam Deck a console. I fully agree that it is a PC, but I feel like it fits both definitions in the best way possible.
They weren't gaming first, they were gaming only. You didn't load up an office program on an atari or snes. That didn't really change until they combined them for media purposes, like playing CDs, DVDs & BDs, and even that was extremely limited and without consistency.
No idea what your homebrew / piracy paragraph is supposed to be in regards to this topic though. That's not just not official, but straight up "illegal" in the minds of their creators. As a kid I personally owned one of those SNES adapters where you'd plug in a floppy disk and would rip the game from the cardridge into a rom. If we were caught with that we might've even got into legal trouble. On a Deck you can copy & paste all the files you want. You can download and run all the programs you want, albeit a tiny bit more restricted than your regular desktop distro. But in essence, it's still a full fledged PC, with everything that comes with it, and you could use it just for non gaming purposes if you so wish.
It's simply that. A Linux PC in a handheld format.
This is admittedly REALLY pedantic, but there were some non-game cartridges released for the NES and SNES, such as Taboo: The Sixth Sense (a tarot card reading program), Miracle Piano (a program for teaching how to play the piano), Mario Paint (a basic music composition and drawing program), and a modem add-on for the Famicom that supported banking, stock trading, and horse race betting.
I wasn’t referring to piracy, I was referring to unofficial releases. Think Wisdom Tree and their line of Bible Games for the NES/SNES (these are pretty well covered by YouTube creators which is why I mention them as an example). Also, some of the early consoles did have non-gaming uses. I believe there was a version of BASIC for the Atari 2600. There were several planned online communication systems for various early consoles. There was the “Work Boy” accessory for the Game Boy that turned it into a digital assistant/organizer. There were officially licensed cooking “games” for the Nintendo DS that were more of recipe collections than actual games. And you touched on media, which was another thing consoles did outside of gaming since CD drives became used on consoles. Wii Fit was more of a fitness accessory than it was a game.
Pretty much the only thing that separates PC from console in your definition is whether you can run your own code on it. I don’t disagree that being able to run your own code on a machine is a huge benefit, but do you consider the iPhone a console? What about the Amazon Echo Show? Smart fridge? These have the locked down ecosystems of consoles but aren’t gaming-first. I would say no, they are not consoles and I’m sure you would agree.
Of course yeah. But more often than not PC isn’t factored in when something is called exclusive or not because honestly PC and Consoles aren’t in competition in the same way consoles are with each other.
Ghost of Tsushima is a PlayStation exclusive game (so far at least, fingers crossed it’ll come to PC soon), but God of War 2018 is a PlayStation console exclusive, small but important distinction
I’m playing it on the Steam Deck, but it definitely has issues. Have to occasionally restart the game because it starts lagging or being able to interact.
I have like 70 hours on it only on the deck. Zero issues. I think you need to stop saying it has issues just because you have issues. It seems to just be a you thing.
I noticed this while shopping for something last night and also immediately noticed a huge, glaring flaw in it. It doesn’t account for products with multiple different listings under the same product page. So for example you are looking at a page that has one option for pants and a second option for trucks (just an example) where the product reviews mix reviews for both, the AI bot will think they’re all for one product. You’ll see something like “Most customers feel they fit just right, while others think they don’t get enough gas mileage.”
Yes, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the AI review summary bot combining reviews for different products into a single breakdown summary.
The issue of people abusing the combined reviews is a different issue entirely and not what I’m commenting on.
Oh great… I’m sure this will work perfectly with no issues at all. Like for example a word “French” being censored as a bad word in Age of Empires IV where you can play French so if you want to communicate with people you get censored for no reason…
Why would the word French be censored? Are Americans so afraid of our superior culture and healthcare that they want to suppress any discussion about it?
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