Ethereal87

I did see a tip about turning up the volume for sound cues when I was digging around trying to find if there was some kind of setting I could enable for a more visual cue (like you get for a Jump attack). I don't usually play games with headphones on but I find myself doing that with this one!

The Steam Deck experience is pretty good. The issues I've had with the characters' hairstyles catching the light weird seems to be more an issue of the lighting in general. I was in the Stone Wave Cliffs which has a lot of caves to explore and a lot of instances where there's a "light at the end of a tunnel". What I noticed was the light at the end was almost too bright/overpowering and it made it impossible to see the cave around me which, while maybe accurate to what you'd experience in real life with losing night vision and whatnot, makes it really hard to see/navigate. Similarly some of the menus are noticably darker as if I would need to turn the brightness up but not every menu is like that either. Just some weirdness there and I haven't tried that section on my PC to see if it's just how the game is or how the Steam Deck is handling it. Otherwise though, the Deck experience is pretty good and I'm getting into it for a couple hours a night without much issue. Definitely not the cleanest/fanciest graphics but in the "good enough" camp for me that aside from the lighting woes, I don't notice much of a problem.

All the Game Awards chatter and the current sale made me take the plunge on Clair Obscur" Expedition 33 and I'm so glad I did. Only ~8h in or so but it is such a vibrant, wild world to explore and it makes me think of the classic JRPGs I played growing up. The introduction of more active battling mechanics like parrying and dodging adds a level of complexity to the combat that I enjoy, even if I cannot for the life of me get the parry timing right.

Steam Deck took a couple minor tweaks to make it look good and the hair effects still are a bit janky (eg. Gustave's hair will light up from a light source making it look grey). The soundtrack is phenomenal and was the first time in a long time that I've wanted to buy a game soundtrack (this battle track in one of the early areas cemented this as something special to me).

Super worth it and excited to dive in deep on this one.

Interesting that I had a lot of these already set to False and I definitely haven't gone through this process before. Maybe there was a prompt somewhere that I said no to?

Appreciate the list though just to be extra sure!

Hey, just a super random follow up but this thread sparked me messing around with Bazzite again and I got some things figured out that originally did trip me up. Just set it up on a separate hard drive for dual booting to give it another chance.

Whenever I find a few minutes to sit down with the time to make the switch official, I'm probably going to install Bazzite properly over my Windows install!

Could I play something new? Sure.

Did I end up starting a new save in Stardew Valley for the umpteenth time? Yep.

I wrapped up Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown maybe a week ago and really enjoyed it, ending somewhere around 85% of completion and calling that good enough. Not sure why Stardew looked appealing but it did, I'm over the usual hurdle of Spring/early Summer Year One and just enjoying my time with it. I've already played for well over 500h across multiple saves and if hard pressed to pick one game as my favorite, it's probably Stardew. This time around is a modded playthrough primarily on the Steam Deck/with a controller instead of a mouse and keyboard, so some mods are a bit clunkier than I'd like (renaming chests and chest groups is a real pain) and settling into the end of my first year now.

Both were on my radar as well. I want to say I tried Bazzite before Pop but one of those workflows I could not solve was a problem on Bazzite (some virtual kvm switch software I've used forever). Nobara was almost where I went after Pop before retreating back to Windows :)

Looks like I'll be the negative one. I gave it a solid try dual booting for about 6 months before I went back to Windows.

I think I took for granted how much is abstracted away in Windows when it came to being my daily driver for my computer. Wrapping my head around things that "just worked" in Windows proved to be more difficult than I anticipated and I dealt with more friction. Trying to learn new concepts stood in my way of fully embracing it as well as not understanding what the "Windows equivalent" was for a given feature/function/action so I could wrap my head around it better. I also had a couple of workflows that I never got working in Linux despite all my attempts at searching for answers.

And I know people will come out of the woodwork with all sorts of questions or input on how if I just tried it again I'll get it. For the record, I tried out Pop OS since it bills itself as a dead simple. I know the problems for me were more around my knowledge, years of built up muscle memory with Windows, and limited time to game so messing with whatever my current problem was made it more frustrating and soured me on the experience.

Definitely good to know. I don't think I'd call it one of the best I've ever played but it was certainly awesome as pieces started clicking into place and I could see the outline of how it would go. I'm curious to see what else is really in there (I've spoiled some bits and pieces to it) and may go down that path. Thank you!

Called it quits on Blue Prince last week. 20-30h in and I hit the main goal of the game of reaching the 46th room. I started scratching at some of the deeper puzzles and mysteries to solve but I think the combination of some frustrating mechanics (drafting the right rooms, running out of resources, etc...) along with time being a premium, I had to stop myself. I just realized my excitement for "one more run" just wasn't there and rather than sour my opinion on it, it was better to move on and appreciate the depth that's there for people getting into it. Super impressed by everything that I've seen in it and definitely recommended if you're a fan of puzzles and taking notes to piece a lot of things together.

And on what feels like the other end of the spectrum, I started Skin Deep and am having a blast. It's such a weird, stylistic immersive sim where you're rescuing these low-polygon cats from pirates taking over their spaceship. The humor is good and the systems interact really well. Everything telegraphs what it can do, how it can be used, and the game seems to reward experimentation. I'm trying to be stealthy but there's no penalty to breaking stealth, and some rewarding per-mission objectives that encourage you to check everything out.

You also get to flush heads down toilets which is pretty cool (and definitely something missing from Blue Prince)

"But a dog isn't allowed to play basketball!" protests Democrats as golden retriever scores another two points.

I think it's fair to say that those "with power" are the ones that ought to be blamed, so I lay that on Harris and the DNC vs. the voters. I don't think anyone had illusions that Trump would be good for Gaza and the Palestinians, but neither party was willing to show a difference of opinion except to the speed of Gaza getting leveled.

I would also argue that Gaza was an important point, but not the whole point (or a symptom, not the cause). Democrats continue to think that if they just run the same playbook, clearly the "evil" of Donald Trump will speak for itself and they'll win. It clearly doesn't when he's not in power. The Democrats are spending this time hemming and hawing about bipartisanship. I couldn't find the article I saw recently on Hakeem Jeffries basically saying they have all three branches so we're going to find middle ground between us and them, but I think this from CNN is a great encapsulation. "Don't shut it down, we might get blamed. Don't make a big fuss over everything."

It's the toothlessness that gets to me. Why play nice with the Trump administration? Why not just go for the throat if the Democratic party believes that Trump is the existential threat to democracy they say? The Republicans sure love to whenever there's some opportunistic grift for them and maintain that the Democrats either haven't figured it out or are willingly choosing to ignore it. If there's a strategy to their approach, I cannot wrap my head around it.

So w/r/t the uncommitted movement (and others who looked at Harris v. Trump and just didn't bother turning out), I don't know how else you force the DNC to listen and doubly so if they choose not to collect the necessary data. You shouldn't back a candidate because the party says this is the person we're running or because the other candidate is so much worse. The candidate should listen to the voters and run a campaign that brings people in. If a key voting group isn't on board, it's on the candidate/party to figure out WHY and HOW to include them.

a smart campaign would have at least tracked this data.

even if the campaign steadfastly maintains their “we are entitled to your vote either way, so shut the fuck up and stop complaining” stance, you would want to gather the data about how many people on these contact lists responded and mentioned Gaza.

Thank you! It's one thing to philosophically not view what's happening in Gaza as a genocide or not want to upset the Israel lobby, but you have to know where the people are at. The amount of people in this world who cannot reflect on their failures and grow from them is astonishing. I have people on my team that I tell them that it's OK to make mistakes, just please make new mistakes each time.

It leads me to think the Democratic Party, those in charge, either are fine with what's happening now or are too stupid to reflect on why they lost, and neither of those are good options.