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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • I love my Steam Deck. It’s literally beside my hotel bed right now, while the Switch is at home with two kids under 10. But:

    • the docking and detaching experience is frustrating as hell
    • it is significantly heavier and yet feels more fragile.
    • it has profiles but not comparably to the Switch in terms of use and UX
    • and the controller experience is very hit and miss.
      • It spent 2 months just literally randomly shutting off bluetooth - you had to go into desktop mode and re-enable with a Linux command until they patched it - but that’s not even it - whenever it did that, it also disabled the sticks!.
      • I have multiple entries in the controllers screen - none of which can be renamed or show indicators as to which controller they are - where every now and again the Deck decides sorry, I don’t recognise that controller anymore. Please come walk across the living room and awkwardly stand in front of the telly pressing buttons on the Steam Deck’s face to re-pair things.
      • Oh and controller layout schemes are a cool and powerful feature but way too complicated for me to explain to an 8 year old.

    If “I just want to pick up a controller after work and forget what Philip in Marketing said he thought the project was going to look like”, or “I want to buy games once and share them with my kids” or even “I’ll throw this in my bag to kill 20 minutes at the waiting room” are factors, the Steam Deck is very much not superior in every way.

    Again. Love my Deck. Almost exclusively buy “Verified” games now. Halfway through a Nintendo game that somehow is easier for me, a software dev to find ajd emulate on Deck than on a Nintendo console. But the Switch has been a remarkable console to have in my living room. The first console I bought (actually now that I think of it, that my wife bought for me) since Wii and before that since PlayStation 2. I’m not really a console player. I have 1000+ games on Steam. Still Switch excels at many things and the sales figures should make that obvious.














  • Stop making violence the only thing you’ll react to in any way? Or indeed, stop responding to peaceful resistance with violence (eg the civil rights marches in Northern Ireland).

    It might seem like Palestine has been a hopeless mire forever, but there was a point in the 90s where the last reasonable leaders of both sides were coming together for a peaceful solution. Hamas and the Israeli right wing - the “both sides” of today - were on the fringe.

    Then Yitzhak Rabin was killed by an Israeli right-winger, Israel inexplicably responded by killing a Hamas leader, Arab civilians were massacred at the Cave of Patriarchs by an American Israeli, and Hamas responded with more bombings, Yassar Arafat died under siege by the IDF, Hamas took control of Gaza, and well, here we are.

    The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin is probably as impactful to history of that of Archduke Ferdinand, but seems to be being forgotten.





  • They are not “banning” emulators. They take action against two sorts of problems: leaking, and distribution of copyrighted material. Yuzu was taken down because they stupidly started charging for help with playing Tears of the Kingdom before its release. Other emulators have been threatened because they included binary console OS software (rather than actually fully emulating the console itself) or actually distributed game ROMs.

    Dolphin has been around for about 20 years now. Why? Because they don’t distribute copyrighted material, recommend against doing so, and don’t require to include any binaries from the console.

    Here’s all they had to both say and adhere to, to “survive” the supposedly blood-hungry Nintendo for longer than some of the people reading this have been alive:


    Where can I download game ISOs/ROMs?¶

    Short answer: You don’t. Buy games and dump them with a Wii.

    Long answer: Downloading commercial games is illegal and thus strongly frowned upon by the Dolphin developers. To prevent legal issues, this includes gray areas like downloading games which you purchased earlier. You don’t necessarily need to own a gaming console by yourself because you can buy a game disc and dump them with a friend’s console. On the other hand, copying a friend’s game dump is considered illegal again.

    https://dolphin-emu.org/


    Also, lol @ the idea that it’s hypocrisy for them to use their own game files. You understand that’s what a ROM is, right? It isn’t magic. It’s just a binary file.