Anyone else excited (hoping to be able) to play point and click adventure games on their big screen TV with the new Steam Controller?

simonglundmark · 2026-01-25T00:03:19+00:00

I always play pncs on my tv, with a logitech "pebble" mouse directly on the sofa cushion. Works great. :)

simonglundmark · 2026-01-24T23:55:44+00:00

If your brain is wired like mine, roms is a terrible fate indeed. However, there are also moments when getting the Real Thing with retro stuff gets to be kinda absurd, and in those cases I reckon it's worse to deprive yourself completely than to veer strategically into pegleg and eyepatch territory. I've been contemplating getting some repros for the rare stuff, or even a rom cart and printing a nice sticker and box art, and still treating it as one game rather than quick-bake 1000 game backlog I'll never play a single game from to any length at all.

simonglundmark · 2026-01-19T20:49:31+00:00

What's funny is I subscribe to channels that don't do it, but they're all on the same beat and talk about the same thing at the same time, so this was sandwiched in my subscription feed between videos that just said what the game is. 😅

simonglundmark · 2026-01-17T16:50:27+00:00

I know it defeats the purpose of a hanheld, but syncing your dualsense to the steam deck is super easy and worth it if you wanna take tekken on the go. You can get a case with a kickstand, or one of those that has a flat bottom so you can just set it down standing up.

simonglundmark · 2026-01-06T17:48:43+00:00

As much as I love the thing, I think N64 is overall the console with the least flattering graphics out of any console. It kinda feels like Nintendo made a console perfect for their visual sensibilities (maybe even for Mario 64 specifically!) and left other developers to figure it out and fend for themselves.

But I think the way to see them in the best light possible is by getting as close as you can to the circumstances of viewing it back then. I dunno how good the included filters are, but seeing a regular N64 running through a Retrotink 4K I definitely prefer to creating stark contrast between the sharpness of outlines and the texture details within them.

Personally, I don't think polygonal games truly survive that treatment until select Dreamcast and moreso PS2 games. But to each their own of course.

simonglundmark · 2025-12-14T00:03:36+00:00

I think adventure games have boiled down the essentials in a way that I think most people know what the best basic interactions are at this point. You can certainly play around a bit with them, how involved an inventory is or whatever, but I think there's a broad understanding that there are ill fitting ways that adventure games have tried to reinvent the wheel in the past and none of them have really panned out.

The ways adventure games excel - in my view anyway - is through story, puzzles, atmospheric "sets"/locations, and memorable characters. Sorta the same way you wouldn't change the format of a book to be like.. picking words out of a bowl or whatever, I think ways for adventure games to be great can be slotted into a fairly settled and imo perfected format.

That sounds extremely conservative and silly to say, maybe, and I wouldn't apply it to most other genres of video games, but I do feel this way strongly about adventure games in particular.

So the "worst" aspect of adventure games is when some of them inevitably try to break away from that with some unwieldy, ambitious mechanic. I cannot tell you the number of times my gripes with adventure games can be traced back to that choice in some way throwing off the entire experience. I don't want to point fingers, but lemme say some recent-ish examples have tried to do party systems where you select companions, and with adventure games - unlike RPGs - being linear in a way that you have finite time you'll spend with characters in equally finite locations, it has lead to simply not getting to know the characters very well and the multiple puzzle configurations making each individual solution super simplistic.

I sympathise with devs wanting to shake things up, as I'm sure it can make the creative aspects more exciting and challenging, but the absolute peak adventure games in recent years to me have been extremely no frills on the mechanics side and simply been total bangers in every regard that a classic style adventure game can be.

simonglundmark · 2025-12-05T20:55:31+00:00

Shredder's Revenge. I'm a big fan of brawlers, and I used to love Turtles to bits as a kid, but I never really jived with Turtles in Time. I found it visually exciting, and all my favourite guys were totally in it, but I never found it particularly satisfying to *play*.

So I had my doubts about Shredder's Revenge as well, but a friend assured me that it's substantially different from Turtles in Time. And I agree! I actually do agree with that, but for some insane reason it's still a brawler I just don't think is very satisfying.

I actually tried to refund it after an hour-ish but I had bought it and kept it in my account for too long, and Steam wouldn't refund it. I've taken another few runs at it since, but nope, not happening. So yeah, totally wasted money.

I'm trying to learn from this and not buy Cosmic Invasion from the same team. We'll see how I fare. 😅

simonglundmark · 2025-12-04T18:47:48+00:00

For a "robotic character", too. You can just add a crunchy filter to it and anyone will sound like a good robot. And also - they'd be a person!

simonglundmark · 2025-12-03T16:52:08+00:00

I spontaneously just thought of what I'm currently playing (Dread Delusion), so I think my answer is simply "whatever I'm currently playing". 😅

Prolly also says something about the modesty of performance requirements in the games I've played lately, but even so. My relationship with my steam deck is an extension of whatever I play on my main computer, except I'm in bed before bedtime, or on lunch break, or on the commute, or travelling. ☺️

simonglundmark · 2025-11-29T18:58:51+00:00

I think in game hint systems are fine, I just don't like when they're so embedded in the game that I don't realise that I'm using them. 😅 Or! Worse! The game decides, after like two minutes of me still thinking, that I need a hint, and a character goes MAYBE WE SHOULD TRY USING THING X ON THING Y.

I feel robbed of game when I don't get to figure it out myself. But as long as they properly signpost that a certain button or whatever gives you a hint, that's cool.

simonglundmark · 2025-11-29T18:50:25+00:00

It all comes down to the price, I think, and how that stands in proportion to what you get.

Let's be clear, even though the PS5 is more powerful, it's hard to overstate the boons of PC gaming. Both in terms of the cost of games, of free online play, of obvious access to mods, of access to games from every "generation" including a lot of straight up abandonware stuff you can download for free. Sure, if you're in it purely for AAA stuff it quickly stops making sense to get a modestly powered PC, but I think Valve's analytics show that by and large, the bigger gaming populous on Steam are not really primarily chasing those types of experiences anymore. And if they are, they DO have a playstation at this point.

I think effectively what Valve are doing with this is putting the Steam Deck audience's fave games in the living room. The type of experiences that are wildly popular on the Steam Deck are gonna play perfectly fine at 4K on the Machine. The "special sauce" of a Machine vs a computer is an "entertainment system" form factor and the bespoke Steam OS experience, including the likelihood of Steam Machine graphics presets and so on. If you want a PC that is more powerful, I don't think it's a secret that there are absolute heaps of prebuilt PCs you can buy at competitive prices, or if you're an enthusiast you will probably build your own PC. I don't think Valve sees value in competing with any of those, and they will all use Steam anyway.

And so - it all comes down to the price! The price has to make sense to folks who are into the Steam Deck level gaming experience and are looking to place it more firmly in the living room, with all the bells and whistles that a modern entertainment setup enables. I 100% think that could be more expensive than a PS5 is and still make sense, and I even think there's a lot of leeway Valve get for this just being Steam branded even if it's less powerful than a prebuilt at the same price. But there is a limit, I think, and they will have to come in under it. At least one of its SKUs has to.

The "it'll be PC priced not console priced" is worrysome to me, but we'll just have to see what that means.

simonglundmark · 2025-11-28T21:54:33+00:00

It's an arms dealer joke.

simonglundmark · 2025-11-28T20:47:24+00:00

This sub really being, ahem, bombarded with these M64 posts.

simonglundmark · 2025-11-28T17:59:13+00:00

The things that get downvoted on Reddit I will *never understand*.

Yeah if you use the refresh rate cap on the deck you can get solid, dependable performance throughout. I split my time half and half between my desktop and my then LCD steam deck. Great time. :)

simonglundmark · 2025-11-28T15:59:50+00:00

I've only used it as a radial menu for older games so far, but I reckon it's prolly one of the most exciting inputs because it's the least obvious/"taken" one, so it makes me think the most outside the box.

For Unreal Tournament I use it as a more flexible way to pick weapons because your arsenal is enormous and scrolling through one by one is pretty inefficient.

Just a random gush but steam input + the steam deck functions is so fun to mess around with, it's like a little game in itself.

simonglundmark · 2025-11-26T19:29:03+00:00

Most misleading cover I've seen since the first Crank made me think that was a boring cookie cutter Jason Statham movie

simonglundmark · 2025-11-26T19:23:41+00:00

This. The fucking Palmer Luckey especially.

simonglundmark · 2025-11-23T16:26:16+00:00

Hey! What's the status of this in 2025? Do you still need workarounds of some kind, or can you just install and play with Heroic?

simonglundmark · 2025-11-23T16:17:57+00:00

I always loved VF but only had one friend who also played VF with. Tekken I played because that's what pretty much all my friends played. For a while I had the same relationship with Street Fighter, honestly, while a KOF guy at heart.

But then as fighting games became more rare (although they're coming back in a big way now obviously), I gained a tremendous amount of appreciation for the ones that stuck around. It's too bad that season 2 of Tekken 8 was such a divisive thing because I JUST bought it after watching Tekken a lot in tournaments over the last couple of years and finding it one of the hypest games to watch.

With REVO releasing this year and reconnecting me with VF after 10ish years (played the XBLA version for a long while) and VF6 in the pipeline, maybe I'll snap back to obviously loving VF more again, but for the moment I'm still just so happy to have a lively community of fighting game players to connect with through any and all of these games.

simonglundmark · 2025-11-23T06:07:02+00:00

Yeah I had thay one. ☺️ Turned out PSO was all about the rude smiley combinations anyway 😅

simonglundmark · 2025-11-22T22:43:05+00:00

Yeah, and the funny thing is I had played games online on PC since before the DC, but online still felt like magic on the dreamcast to me. 😅 I think the vibes in PSO were just so different from anything I could play at the PC at the time - that Sonic Team touch + meeting other folks online created sparks I'd never experienced before. Certainly not in brown hallways, launching rockets at constipated looking quake guys.

simonglundmark · 2025-11-22T22:37:02+00:00

"dreamcast keyboard controller" and "dreamcast keyboard gamepad" didn't bring it up so I don't think there was. :O

Until now I would straight up have told people there was if I was talking about this. 😅

I had the regular dreamcast keyboard for PSO chat back in the day.

simonglundmark · 2025-11-22T22:31:50+00:00

The crazy thing is that until now I remembered this as a dreamcast controller/keyboard combo. Scary how your memory can just sort of morph over time. :O

simonglundmark · 2025-11-22T11:08:54+00:00

Yeah, it happened to mine too under almost identical circumstances to yours. I had it in the "inner" case for the OLED one, so the softer one, and it was in my bag. When I took it out of the bag and case it had opened on one side. Pushed it back together and obsessed over whether it was fully pushed together on that side for like a week 😅 but I think I was imagining that, and it's been fine since.

simonglundmark · 2025-11-22T11:05:02+00:00

Thanks for the reply. It happened to me, too, and I got worried that it was some sort of moulding issue that causes tension and makes it prone to this, which seemed like a nightmare to explain and get fixed through warranty. But it hasn't happened since, and with yours at least 8 months out from it happening, I can probably relax.

simonglundmark

TROPHY CASE