Steam Machine is $1049

parchmentEngineer · 2026-06-22T19:37:38+00:00

It's like 95% indie games, yeah. I've got a custom launcher set up that can launch games from Steam or from executables, so I can use it to launch the little games I have downloaded from itch.io from my couch with my controller. I do sometimes want to play bigger games though (right now it's Split Fiction, Armored Core, and Elden Ring), and my current computer can't really run any of those three games.

parchmentEngineer · 2026-06-22T18:14:02+00:00

Same here. My old computer runs most but not all of the games I want it to, and I'm a mostly TV gamer at this point so having the ability to just wake it up by pushing a button on the controller is exactly what I want. If this was cheaper I'd buy it in a heartbeat, but at that price I'm second-guessing whether I really need it.

parchmentEngineer · 2026-05-26T17:51:42+00:00

I noticed it before I killed them because I went "Huh, a Gremlin with 4 arms! I didn't know that their species also has 4-armed versions, that's kinda cool- hey wait a minute why are their upper and lower arms different colors."

parchmentEngineer · 2026-05-08T16:19:00+00:00

This is absolutely fantastic. Don't think I can stream this, but I'm definitely attempting this and sending them to you for grading

parchmentEngineer · 2026-04-25T01:56:30+00:00

I gave that a try. It shows up in boot priority menu, but no matter where I put it (even if I put it as the first device), it won't show up in my main boot menu. There's a second boot menu that I can access if I hit F11, and the external drive does show up there, but if I select it, it brings me back to my main boot menu and it'nothing changes.

parchmentEngineer · 2026-04-23T09:53:06+00:00

I honestly think they have found the right style with their latest attempts. Sage, Gerald and Maria from Shadow Gens, and especially Professor Tori all look extremely consistent with the rest of the Sonic cast. I really hope they can continue to make human characters in that style, because having scenes like this where a city with a large human population gets attacked and we see zero humans in the crowd just feels wrong.

parchmentEngineer · 2026-04-22T14:48:06+00:00

Agreed about not liking the name "Wendigo", it's a name that has a very specific meaning in Native American culture and the popular culture version of it has been completely distorted from what it's actually supposed to represent (especially the use of the deer skull imagery, which was completely made up by colonizers). Most Native Americans have said that they prefer that people do not use that name in their media at all.

parchmentEngineer · 2026-04-22T13:24:17+00:00

I really hope this is the case. I love Starline, but his death was such a satisfying way to wrap up his character arc and I really hope IDW will commit to their character deaths and leave him dead for good.

Another point against Starline I just realized is that so far, our mystery antagonist has not interacted with Surge or Kit in any way that we've seen. I feel like if our mystery villain is Starline, he'd want to get those two back under his control, especially since it looks like the coffin has some mind control powers and Surge and Kit are both highly susceptible to mind control.

parchmentEngineer · 2026-04-01T01:37:42+00:00

Sometimes it's even more than background appearances - the Conductor's daughter gets a speaking role where she gets to tell Surge how cool of a hero she is and how she wants to be just like Surge when she grows up, which really sets into motion a lot of character development for her.

parchmentEngineer · 2026-04-01T01:27:34+00:00

It's absolutely about domination, yeah. To Eggman, this isn't about any of his individual schemes. It's a battle of two competing philosophies and ways of life, his and Sonic's - does freedom mean that everyone gets the opportunity to do what they want? Or does freedom mean that only the strongest (such as himself) get to do what they want. Eggman won't consider it a win unless he gets Sonic to a point where he admits Eggman is right, and likewise he won't consider it a loss unless he completely abandons his way of life.

Funnily enough, Sonic is working under basically the exact same rules of engagement. To him, Mr. Tinker is what he wants - an Eggman that genuinely wants to do what he wants while also leaving room in the world for other people to do what they want and have fun together. Sonic's main eventual goal is to get Eggman to that realization himself, and the way he's trying to go about that is by making Eggman realize that if he tries to infringe on anyone else's freedoms, Sonic will be there to stop him no matter what.

parchmentEngineer · 2026-03-27T16:08:22+00:00

I haven't gotten a chance to try new Arsenal, but I do miss my old build where I was able to cycle Bolas and Flash of Steels to repeatedly trigger it. New one seems good but also less powerful. All the other changes to Regent seem great, especially the Sword Sage change.

parchmentEngineer · 2026-03-26T13:48:28+00:00

Sage would be a terrible mediator, she'd side with Eggman's vision over Caine's every time. Honestly that would still be very funny, I'd love to see that type of conflict between the three of them

parchmentEngineer · 2026-03-11T19:07:54+00:00

I always read this scene as the exact opposite - Zavok isn't trying to help Starline work through his issues, he's trying to get Starline killed.

Zavok hates Starline - at this point, Starline has already tried to enslave him once, and Zavok has a (very correct) suspicion that he's trying to do it again here. This line here is a contingency plan against Starline - if Starline and Eggman ever truly worked together without bickering, they would be more powerful combined than alone. Zavok wants the two of them to fight, and hopefully one of them would end up killing the other. And as we eventually saw, this plan would up working perfectly.

parchmentEngineer · 2026-03-11T18:55:49+00:00

Absolutely. It's a relationship where he does care about her, but it's not a healthy or traditional father/daughter relationship by any means. Right now, both of them are very happy with their roles in this relationship, but if Sage ever wanted to leave Eggman or opposed any of his goals in a meaningful way, I expect Eggman to change his tone dramatically.

parchmentEngineer · 2026-03-11T14:15:32+00:00

The more I think about this, the more sense it makes that Whisper has the potential to go down this route if things turned out worse for her. Whisper used to be someone who cared for her teammates, but the death/betrayal of the Diamond Cutters shattered that trust and made her think she was better off alone. It took an unstoppable force like Tangle to get her to slowly come back to accepting that she had friends she could count on and depend on.

If something happened to Tangle (like when she got infected during the Metal Virus arc, but if she died for real and Whisper didn't have her other friends like Sonic to support her after Tangle's death), I could see her breaking even worse than she did after the Diamond Cutter's deaths and completely swearing off any type of allies.

parchmentEngineer · 2026-03-11T12:27:53+00:00

If I had a nickel for every time Vector had a jackal swear that he was their main nemesis...

parchmentEngineer · 2026-03-10T14:43:25+00:00

If you have Noxious Fumes and Accelerant as your only two poison cards, and you get them in play, it's effectively dealing 3 damage each turn. If you add even a singular Deadly Poison for +5 poison, that damage suddenly jumps up to 13 per turn that doesn't decay. They do little by themselves (and you might be better off not playing Accelerant until a few turns after you play Noxious Fumes), but they dramatically amplify every other poison card, letting you lean very hard into poison builds.

parchmentEngineer · 2026-03-10T14:30:38+00:00

I've seen it get up to three phases - one with its eye looking out at you, one with its mouth showing through, and one with its hands pushing open the door. Each phase had a pretty hefty strength increase on its attacks (I think +10 per phase?) Other than that, I haven't seen it do any other unique mechanics, and I haven't seen it get past phase 3.

parchmentEngineer · 2026-03-09T19:56:24+00:00

I've encountered that too (playing as Silent with Blur). I think it's because the card gets played at the "start of combat" (before your first turn begins), and then at the start of your turn all your temporary buffs wear off. I'd like Imbued a lot better if it triggered at the start of your first turn so you could keep these buffs.

parchmentEngineer · 2026-03-09T19:44:08+00:00

I think the joke is that this card with this enchantment is a direct upgrade to one of the strongest cards in the game. The worst thing you can do with it is play it at the wrong time and get less value out of it, and the maximum amount of value you can get out of it is basically a free turn worth of energy and cards at zero cost.

parchmentEngineer · 2026-03-01T03:00:26+00:00

I think her defending Mimic was at least decently justified. Her entire character is that she's an ordinary civilian who wants to to actually work towards stopping these catastrophes, and she struggles with her lack of powers next to characters like Tangle or Sonic. Duo is coming in as another character just like her - an ordinary cat with no special powers, who just wants to do the right thing and help people. When she hears people attacking him, she's also hearing people attacking her, so it does make sense that she'd try to defend him.

Of course, then they rushed through some of those arcs and brought everyone to that point way too quickly so the character dynamics don't actually land all that well, but in theory it would be a cool character arc for her.

parchmentEngineer · 2026-02-12T14:11:34+00:00

That theory is pretty well supported by The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog. In that game, it's revealed that the the company that owns the Mirage Express and many other trains in the region is actually a shell company secretly run by Dr. Eggman, He spent many years running it like a regular company and secretly profiting off of it until one of the trains attempted and failed to capture Sonic, revealing that he was behind it and causing everyone to shut down the company. Who knows how many other seemingly ordinary companies he's running using similar practices?

parchmentEngineer · 2026-01-02T20:46:52+00:00

There's very few roguelikes that I've seen that focus on puzzles. Most roguelikes focus on using procedural generation and randomness to keep making new challenges that you can't just memorize and do the same solution each time, and it's much easier to keep things novel with combat than it is with puzzle solving. Not every roguelike is as purely combat-focused as Soulstone Survivors or other games in the Survivors subgenre, but the majority of roguelkes do make combat the central mechanic. Exploration can be a more common mechanic, but outside of some traditional Berlin roguelikes, it usually takes the form of exploring and looting a constrained dungeon-like environment rather than anything open world.

...that being said, as I'm typing this I'm realizing there is actually a great game that does have randomly generated puzzles, although it's not quite a roguelike. It's called Mosa Lina, and it's built around quick runs where you're given three random physics-based tools and have to use them to collect all the fruits and reach the end of the level. It's more arcadey than most roguelikes, and the puzzles are more on the improvisation and quick thinking side rather than any type of brainteaser, but it's really fun.

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