buffaloseven

I never felt compelled to try out the “Survivor” genre until DRG: Survivor came out. I’ve played about 12 hours of it exclusively on the Steam Deck and I love it. Part of what I think makes it so compelling for me is that the goal is actually to mine, just like in DRG, and the survivor aspect of it comes into figuring out how to mine as much as you can before you’re forced to move on or die. I can see the structure being frustrating for some – the game mechanics force you to move on, sometimes before you’d like to – but at its core it’s an optimization puzzle: you only have so much time per floor, how do you maximize the balance between mining for resources (which feed into both the run and meta progression) and defeating enemies (which gives you XP to level up). It’s a great game and I’d highly recommend it to anyone who thinks it looks half-interesting.

Don’t buy games for what you’ll hope they are, but there was just enough systems in this one that it finally got me to jump in and try out the Survivor genre. I like the inclusion of secondary objectives, the tension between mining for upgrade materials versus the strengthening bug hordes, and the ability to mine through walls to create choke points or escape routes.

For what it is now, feel like it was $10 well spent and I’ll get plenty of hours of game out of it. The road map looks interesting, and if there’s enough community support I could see them adding and tweaking the game for a long while. It’s good fun and plays well on the Steam Deck too. Not to mention that, while it is just the theme on top of it all, I do enjoy another take on the Deep Rock Galactic experience.

I didn’t even think of MGS5 on the Deck! I’d bet it runs great and it’s easily one of the best stealth action games ever made. The story was a bit of a let down, but that gameplay made up for it.

Yakuza 0 is a great entry point to the series and runs really well on the Steam Deck. I recently finished Dredge and really enjoyed it on the Deck. Lonely Mountain Downhill is a enjoyable skill-based mountain biking game that’s a lot of fun to explore and has a ton of content. Snowrunner is a chill game that works well on the Deck too…it’s kinda like Dark Souls for trucks, but meditative. Hollow Knight is great and looks really good on the OLED screen. Pretty much any of the Fallout games are a good choice; New Vegas is probably the best overall but you’ll need to use Desktop Mode to get some community patches in there while Fallout 4 is not as good story-wise but has better moment-to-moment gameplay feel. Hades is a great run-based roguelike that looks and works great on the Deck. I played the entirety of Jedi Fallen Order on the Steam Deck and it was great. Dead Cells and Scourgebringer are great action roguelikes that feel great to play and run well on the Deck. And while Baldurs Gate 3 is Larian’s latest triumph, it can run into performance issues in the latter half of the game on the Deck; Divinity: Original Sin 2 was their prior game and it runs very well on the Deck and is a great game in its own right.

There’s probably a lot more, but that’s off the top of my head!

I think that with people constantly figuring out how to game the GPT chat bots, if we see a few more rulings like this where companies are liable for the chat bot’s responses, we’ll see a shift back towards “dumb bots” where there’s explicit control over the responses. If people realize you can get free stuff just by manipulating a chat bot, and a company is liable for what the chat bot says…I just don’t think it’s tenable for them.

I’m an Apple user, for the most part, and I’ve noticed lately that in the last 6-12 months Google Maps has deteriorated significantly for me while Apple Maps has gotten better and better. Even things you’d think would be similar, e.g. satellite imagery, for my area Google’s imagery is now a half-decade out of date while Apple’s is current.

It really does feel like most of Google’s consumer-facing products are languishing.