foggenbooty

Gamers have become total suckers as well, and on the whole are not very good with their money. From always pre-ordering to season passes to oceans of memorabilia.

Hardware has especially suffered. There used to be a time when gaming attracted technical people and there were brilliant forums and in depth review sites for hardware. Now most of those are dead with only a couple good ones left because everyone figured out you can just slap RGB lights on your product and call it a day. Gamers will buy it.

Prices go up and up, quality goes down, control over the product goes down, improvements per generation go down. But man there's never been more flashy marketing and lights.

It's also not even a violin.

I'm surprised you even thought this needed to be said. Of course external solutions aren't the same as internal. I never said they were. I simply said that just like dongles are the workaround to no internal headphone jack, they are for storage as well. The compromise is obvious and internal would always be better.

I mean, the workarounds for SD cards is just USB-C drives, or USB-C microSD card readers. But I agree, just as headphone dongles are dumb and don't suit all needs, so is external storage.

You're right, it was called the Steam Machine, my mistake. I honestly don't think it was very influential in pushing Linux gaming forward, it was a first attempt that was ahead of it's time and Valve kept after it.

The market is flooded with various controllers, but they're all basically the same. I think what Valve is going for here is not really a new controller to take the world by storm, but a companion controller to help sell the Steam Deck. In order for it to be a true companion it must match all the inputs the SD had so people don't have to change their bindings. I play the SD docked and I have to say switching between an Xbox and SC depending on the game and adapting my bindings is annoying when it all just works on the native controls.

When Valve made the SC they were starting from scratch and went with an ambitious design, and let's be frank, no one but a small niche of people liked it because they had grown up with thumbsticks and were unwilling to relearn. With the SD they compromised with both input schemes, which I have to say we need to be grateful for. Look at all the SD competitors and they all ditched trackpads to appeal to the general market. Valve could have done this too.

So largely I agree with you, it would be nice to have a SC 2.0, but I honestly don't think this new leaked one will sell all that well. It's just a companion to sell Decks and I'm grateful they are willing to try that.

I can understand where you're coming from, but this is realistically a better option for Valve and most consumers right now.

When Valve made the original Steam Controller they were trying to kickstart the Steam Box, which at the time played PC games that were not optimized for controller input on a TV. They needed to have a very outside the box contoller to accomplish this, and so they gave the Steam Controller a try. The touchpad inputs with enough custom mapping really were revolutionary, but only for a small crowd that wanted to play Sim City on their TV.

Nowadays, every game has standard controller input. Trying to get people who are used to the joysticks to switch to virtual trackpads is a non starter, even if it could be technically superior in some circumstances. The compromise is what we have now, a full controller layout with touchpads as extras, to maintain that backward compatibility with old PC games. I think it's the right decision, and this is personally the controller I've been waiting for.

I'd love to see Steam re-make the old Steam Controller to give old fans a replacement, and I hope they do someday, but they have to pick their battles as they certainly wouldn't sell in any volume. In a previous quest for a perfect controller I came across an open source 3D printed one called the Alpakka. Maybe DIY or a startup indie company will pick up the torch where Valve left off to give a true replacement? I hope so because the right controller for the right job is a wonderful thing.

I know I shouldn't feed the troll, but you're going to have to expand on that last statement.

It looks like Mitch McConnell, and he is.

Raise the military spend now. Stop kicking the can. We've helped, sure, but we need to do more.

I'm really hoping the NDP can flip Calgary next election and we can climb out of the mess the rural vote has put us in. It's getting bad.

Nothing is 100% the same, sure, but some vegan alternatives come really damn close and nuggets are one of them.

I've never tried the brand listed in the article, but I've had about a half dozen different brands over the years from my grocery store and most of them have been awesome. The prices are ridiculous though, that's the only reason I don't get them more often. I will only buy on sale.

It's unfortunate that we are at this point where economies of scale have not yet kicked in, because once they do these things should be substantially cheaper to produce than actual chicken nuggets.

How will that advice have any effect on the environment? That's what this article is about.