Gaming

Dear reader, I recently had an experience so bizarre that I feel like sharing it with the world wide web for all the good that will do. Take it as my way of blowing off some steam. Without further pretext here goes… A while ago I bought Red Dead Redemption 2 (RDR2) on Steam. I own a Steam Deck and read many good things about the game and that it runs pretty well on the Deck. Also it was on sale for about 20 bucks so I figured I should go for it. It sat in my library for a while because I had other games I wanted to finish first. Recently I did so and proceeded to download and install RDR2. It quite a chonker so it took me a while. ...

It’s been a few months so I thought an update on my last post on the Steam Deck is in order. So let’s get to it, shall we? The Good First off, the things I liked about the Deck the first time around are still valid. I still think the experience of gaming mode is very cohesive, the option to choose and modify control schemes is extremely handy, I can run AAA games at quite decent frame rates and settings which makes for a beautiful experience on an 800p display. ...

I received my Steam Deck two weeks ago after a wait of roughly half a year. Thus, I wanted to write a blog entry to jot down my first impressions of the device. If you don’t know anything about it yet: the Steam Deck is a PC running a fork of Arch Linux with a read-only file system in the form factor of a handheld console. It’s tightly integrated with the Steam platform and offers a gaming mode in which you can seamlessly buy, install, manage and play games from your library. Furthermore, the Deck offers to possibility to enter desktop mode which boots up a regular KDE Plasma desktop which you can then use as you would a regular PC. Since the file system is read-only, package management works via Flatpaks. You can circumvent this but have to do so at your own peril. ...

So I have a bone to pick with how some games approach their world design. The concept of an open world is not new and often provides gamers with an immersive experience where you can go where you want and do as you please (within the game’s boundaries of course). There are so many great examples for this of which I have played only a small subset but the Assassin’s Creed franchise comes to mind here. I love the experience of a historic settings of real-world places to some of which I’ve been personally. Especially part two and Syndicate stood out to me in that department because both Renaissance Italy and Victorian London are beautiful environments on screen. ...

The Origin launcher is a blight upon the galaxy. Period. It just sucks. Unfortunately the company making it and forcing it on people happens to be the publisher of some of my favorite game franchises, namely all of the current Star Wars games, Mass Effect and Dragon Age. I’m not willing to refrain from playing any of them because of ideological reasons. An added difficulty is that Origin doesn’t play too nicely with Linux. I have difficulty entering my passwords and having them recognized properly, it’s fairly slow to load, it starts multiple Origin instances of processes when I start a game for some reason and it tries to force yet another overlay on me that results in stutter, window minimization and sometimes even crashes. I’m not a fan of overlays in general, they break my immersion, but Steam lets me disable theirs easily enough at least. ...