These games should have been like maaaaybe $5 each on the 3DS a decade ago. Maybe $30 for a physical cartridge with all of them bundled.

Well I kind of alluded to it, but both of the games lack any clear solutions other than “play the game kill the bad guy”.

Which, to be fair, is probably the reason BioShock 1 at least got so popular. I would say this point is much more important to BioShock 1 than any commentary about Ayn Rand, or any commentary about how worker’s movements can get subverted by selfish actors like Atlas. It takes the usual tropes about videogames and turns them into a commentary on how easily our assumptions and expectations can deceive us. Players do what the game tells them to, they progress the way the game allows them to, without ever questioning whether that is the morally correct thing to do. I would say that’s a pretty reasonable thing to do considering the money these games cost, but BioShock at least shines a light on that and makes the player think about it.

There are plenty of other examples of games that DO engage with political ideologies, and use games as a mechanism to think about then. The most famous one is probably Monopoly, which was stolen from the original creator who called it “the landlords game” to show how capitalism eventually leads to one rich person and a bunch of broke people.

If you want a videogame, Disco Elysium is a fabulous, recent, and well-reviewed example. Personally it’s a bit dense for me to play for too long (sometimes it feels more like reading a textbook than playing a game).

I don’t think BioShock 1 or Infinite are terrible or that they shouldn’t have delved into politics at all. I think that they are overrated in part because they get credit for political commentary that ends up being pretty superficial. I think they could have executed the ideas better.

Fitzroy for example: either give us a better reason to fight her or don’t make us do it. Maybe she gets killed by Comstock and leaves a power vacuum, with the chaos of rebel leaders trying to promote solidarity, fight for their own power, hold off or even negotiate peace with Comstock. Or maybe someone like Lady Comstock or Fink could be a source of division within Comstock’s ranks. Or maybe Fitzroy gets convinced that she needs to kill Elizabeth because she’s some dimensional McGuffin protecting Comstock. Maybe get rid of the rebellion entirely and have another country attack Colombia. They already ceded from the US- surely Uncle Sam isn’t cool with losing this technological marvel, nor having this independent state potentially floating above US territories. It’s been a while since I replayed it but I remember the Boxer Rebellion being a key piece of the story: maybe some fallout from that cones to Colombia.

Ah I hadn’t - it’s still in my backlog. But it sounds like it just re-affirms what I had drawn from the main games.

From playing and replaying both BioShock and Infinite, and reading interviews from Ken Levine, my own conclusion is that both of the BioShock games simply use ideology as a narrative tool to create conflict, and the only thing he is condemning broadly is extremism.

In other words, Levine and the rest of the team didn’t make BioShock because they hated Ayn Rand and wanted to spread that message. They made BioShock because they wanted to make a first-person shooter similar to System Shock 2. They needed villains to create conflict, and the easiest way a sci-fi writer can create a villain is just to take any ideology to extremes and think of ways that could go wrong.

I think this is made pretty clear by the lack of any “good” characters in either game. I can’t think of anyone the player is expected to just like and agree with- they are all charicatures taking their ideologies to extremes. Andrew Ryan is clearly bad, but the only real representative of lower classes is Fontaine who is argaubly an even more evil antagonist.

In Infinite, Comstock is clearly the villain as a racist and religious dictator. Daisy Fitzroy is the leader of the rebellion, someone who has personally suffered at Comstock’s hands. She initially starts off as the player’s ally, but then shifts to become “too violent” and “too extreme” in her rebellion, so she and the rest of the rebellion become enemies of Booker. It was really ham-fisted and just kind of waived off as “well anything can happen with the infinite possibilities of dimension hopping!”. But the real reason was more simple: they needed to add additional enemy types to shake up the combat and escalate the difficulty. They wanted to add the chaos of having the player run between two factions fighting each other without the safety of making one of those an ally.

Those two games use ideology as set pieces, but when you combine the two games together the final message is “extremeism bad, centrism good”. I don’t think every game needs to be a doctorate-level poli-sci dissertation, but I do think these two games deserve criticism for being pretty weak there.

The Souls games is another good example I considered bringing up. I’ve only played Bloodborne so far and while I did enjoy it one of my criticisms is that it’s pretty monotone. Even the few NPC’s there are tend to not be very likeable. Everything is dark. Everyone is bad. It’s not even clear whether anything the player experiences is “real” even within the game world, or whether anything the player does accomplishes anything. While I haven’t played the other games I get the impression that they are similar.

I can also think of games that only lean into one side or the others but they do it in a way that I dont mind. “Cozy” games have made an entire genre of this, like Animal Crossing.

Or games where the tone of the game is always dark, but the player and player character both know that there is an “outside” world they can escape to. Resident Evil, Portal, BioShock, etc.

You brought up Metal Gear Solid because it has moments of levity within a gritty military espionage setting, but I think it’s also helped by being set in the real world. If I remember correctly, the end of MGS2 has a boss fight on the roof of a building in Philadelphia and we are shown in cutscenes that the streets below are filled with normal people going about their business, completely unaware of the threat. It’s a reminder of what the player character is fighting for.

Uncharted is another series worth discussing. The first 3 games all kind of blur together in my memory so I could be mistaken, but I remember the first game felt too isolated. I don’t think you really spend much time in a non-hostile environment: it’s all either jungles or ruins or the enemy base. 2 and 3 did a better job of putting Nathan in more mundane and civilian settings: museums, tourists sites, cities, etc. There’s moments where you need to put away your fun and act like a normal person, and that contrast makes the action sequences hit that much harder.

A friend of mine wrote some lyrics for a contest, which includes the lines “if I alone remain, what would it mean to fail? Is there still a world to save…”. This comes into my head a lot whenever I’m playing certain games, especially post-apocalyptic games.

I’d say the Zelda series struggles with this. I put in ~40 hours into Breath of the Wild before I got bored and stopped playing. I never got around to defeating Gannon and I think I only did 3 divine beasts. I kept on looking around and asking myself… Why is Link bothering? It seems like the world is doing pretty well without him. The land of Hyrule is teaming with life. Sure, the people of Hyrule are no longer building megastructures or cities, their populations might be smaller than they used to be, but everyone seems pretty happy and unbothered. The evil forces of Gannon’s corruption mostly keep to themselves, so as long as people avoid the ruined Hyrule Castle or the ruined towers they are fine. Sure, there are monsters that spawn in the wild, but there are also just plain old evil humanoids out there too. There’s regular ass animals. It seems like nature, civilization, and even evil itself have achieved a harmonious equilibrium in Link’s absence. There are some minor problems in the settlements, but in the whole everyone seems pretty happy just living their lives. It’s like they asked the question “what if we give up and let entropy take over” and the answer was the most beautiful and vibrant state that we have ever seen Hyrule in.

By comparison, Majora’s Mask and Twilight Princess have a much broader range. TP does this very overtly by having the areas cycle through Twilight vs normal states. They establish Link’s relationships with everyone in Ordon Village first, then have Twilight fall and reduce them to cowering spirits. In other areas you see the Twilight version first and then clear it. Majora’s Mask does similar- everything is bright and sunny and cheerful on Day 1, while Day 3 is an active apocalypse. Which then gets reset over and over again.

I would say Skyrim does a decent job of balancing the two as well, though perhaps not as extreme as other examples. Moments in the main quests like the civil war battles and the journey to sovengard are serious and epic, with the fate of Skyrim (perhaps all of Mundus) resting on your shoulders. There’s deep, personal moments like the Dark Brotherhood quest to kill Narfi or talking the ghost of the child killed by a vampire in Morthal. But there’s fun moments like coming across copies of the Lusty Argonian Maid or getting drunk and carousing with Sanguine. The Sheogorath quest line starts out as “OMG so funny and random XD, cheese!” And then dives into the child abuse and subsequent mental illness suffered by one of Skyrim’s last high kings.

I gave my opinion and you have not changed it: I would still say that the Deck’s triggers are better than the Dualsense’s.

I mean, that’s just diving into the classic Console vs PC arguments that have been going on for years. My point is that it’s gotten worse for both. We can argue all day over which is the best way to go in 2025.

What I think we CAN say for sure is that buying any sort of gaming device in 2019 is better than any option in 2025. I’m using 2019 because that was the year I built my PC for $1k total, and that holiday season I bought my PS4 - a slim model that came bundled with Horizon Zero Dawn, God of War, and The Last of Us 2 all for $199.99. Either of those deals blow pretty much anything today out of the water.

I guess profits are up, the PS5 is selling well so far, and it looks like the Switch 2 is tentatively on place to be one of the better-selling units of all time. Maybe the average consumer just doesn’t care about the bang for their buck- they just want the new shiny thing.

I can’t name a single PS5 game I’d want to play that doesn’t already look and run better on my PC

The keyword here is “my”.

It’s not just the console generation that is suffering. PC gaming is dying too. Crypto dealer the first blow, now AI. I’m still running an RX580 that I bought for $180 back in 2019. I was planning on buying a 9700XT at launch this year. Still not a great value- an MSRP of $600. Adjusted for inflation that’s still ~2.6x the price and it’s not going to give me 2.6x the performance. But even then it was impossible to find a card for $600 - even months later the cheapest one on nowinstock is $700, and those are hard to find. That’s JUST the GPU - you still need another grand or more to build a decent PC around it. Even with this price increase, the base PS5 is $550.

I’m not trying to make this a console vs PC thing. They all suck right now. The only good values for gaming is on the fringes. The Steam Deck was an incredible value when it launched, and only looks better today. Other cheap, low-powered solutions like Chinese handhelds and android TV boxes loaded with pirated old ROM’s. Mini-PC’s that are good enough to handle 5-10 year old PC games… At 1080p or less with the settings turned down bit. Maybe an Xbox Series S might be a decent short-term value, especially if you are a person who loves game pass or just wants to play free games like Fortnight.

It’s looking bleak. Not just videogames but everything. Food, medicine, clothing, housing.

I’m not sure what you mean? The Steam Deck, and a TON of other controllers have analog triggers. Sony has been using them since the PS3. The GameCube used them, though Nintendo has gone back-and-forth on analog vs digital triggers. Every Xbox controller has had analog triggers. Most VR systems have analog triggers. It’s hard to speak for an entire industry, but I think most 3rd party controllers have analog triggers unless they are soecifically intended to replace a Nintendo one that doesn’t have it (like the JoyCons).

For the ADAPTIVE part… Yeah the Dualsense has it and nothing else does. I suppose where you and I disagree is in judging how important that is. To me, that was a fun little gimmick in Astro’s Play Room and Ratchet & Clank, but I can’t even remember any other games supporting it. Even in those games I thought it was a bit tiring on my fingers after prolonged periods of use. If we could knock $10 off the price of the Dualsense by removing it I would totally do that. It’s also worth noting that 3rd parties like 8Bitdo have similar hair-trigger features that physically reduce the travel distance and turn them into digital inputs.

When it comes to all the other aspects- the material, the springs, the radius, the shape, the texture, the ability to customize in software - in my opinion the Deck is better than the Dualsense in all of those areas.

I don’t mean to come across as hating on the Dualsense. It’s a great controller and my 2nd favorite behind the Deck for most games. I actually bought a Dualsense for PC use more than a year before I bought my PS5. For triggers specifically,

For me personally, I would compare adaptive triggers to other gimmicks like analog face buttons, the light bar on the Dualshock 4 (which was ironically way better on PC than PlayStation), the built in speaker and microphone on the Dualshock 4 and Dualsense, the WiiU, the 3 prongs of the N64 controller, the VMU of the Dreamcast, the IR camera on the Right JoyCon, NFC readers, etc.

Somewhat related was that I did not mention haptics in my original comment. I’d say the Dualsense has the best haptics, but the Steam Deck is a close second. This is another feature where it’s cool when the Dualsense uses it like in Astro’s Playroom, but it’s so rare for games to actually use it in interesting ways that it doesn’t matter much. With the Deck, it’s quintessential to how the track pads work, and the operating system itself makes great use of it. It can’t do all of the spectacular haptic details, but the Deck has a nice subtle approach that makes the whole thing just feel more substantial. The Dualsense uses haptics for immersion while the Deck uses it more for feedback and feel.

The Steam Deck, in all its variants, has sold under 4 million units as of February .

The PS5 has sold over 80 million units. Even the miserable Xbox Series has over 28 million units sold.

All use custom AMD APU’s. Valve is more than an order of magnitude away from even competing with Sony. And we haven’t even touched on laptops yet.

But also compared to desktops… I can’t find how much AMD in particular did, but I can see that 251 million desktop GPU’s were sold in 2024. I don’t know how many Deck’s were sold in 2024 by comparison, but given that the total fron the 2021 launch to early 2025 is estimated at 4 million units on the high side, it’s not even blip on the radar. It’s not a statistically significant amount. The Deck is absolutely miniscule in comparison.

What gives you this idea?

AMD just launched the 9700 and 9700XT earlier this year, with MSRP’s of $550 and $600. They’ve faced a ton of consumer backlash because MSRP cards were virtually nonexistent. Most of the graphics cards actually produced were retailed for hundreds of dollars more, and many were then scalped on top of that.

NVIDIA has been even worse, just cranking up their prices with very little performance improvement. Tons of issues with their power connectors damaging cards. Most of the company’s focus has been on AI, and gamers have been left out to dry.

So yeah I think now would be a terrible time for a steam machine. Unless Valve can somehow get their hands on some unreasonably cheap silicon.

I hear you, but I’m not willing to trust the charger in there even with a 3D printed insert. Give me a proper pocket with a snap, Velcro, zipper, clip, etc.

1. Changing the SSD was easy and a big cost savings. I bought the cheapest model and upgraded to 512GB because at the time it was a huge price spike to go up to 1TB. My understanding now is that 1TB, or even 1.5TB, makes a lot more sense. Maybe even 2TB, though they are still a lot.

2. This applies to PC gaming in general, but even moreso for the Deck. The question is not “will it run?”- it is incredibly rare to find any game that simply will not run at all. The questiona are: how well does it run, and how much am I willing to sacrifice to get there? If you want, you can download Aperture Desk Job for free and play through the whole thing in one sitting. It’s incredibly easy to install on a stock Deck with just a couple of button presses, all the controls are mapped perfectly, and it’s designed to look and run great on a Deck. Other games will be more complicated.

I recently went to play Baldur’s Gate 3 with a friend. It’s Verified, but the experience just sucks. It installed just fine, and since it knows it’s on Deck it handles the annoying Larian launcher thing fine. But even when I cranked all of the visual settings to their lowest and limited the Deck to 30FPS, it was still playing the game with the fan on max, loudly blasting hit air out. I think the battery life was less than an hour. The 720p screen really does the game poorly, and the controller UI is… Impressive, but still nowhere near as good as M&KB.

Skyrim is another example. Runs pretty well once you’re in there, but there’s an annoying splash screen first. So you need to either go into the launch options to turn it off (but that’s the only way to adjust the visual settings to make sure you do that first), or just leave a track pad as a mouse (including press-to-click) for that game so you can click past the splash screen and go back to controller mode. Or just use the touch screen if you prefer.

Everything is a balance. Battery life, fan noise, heat, resolution, visual post-processing, frame rate. It’s subjective, and you may want to play a game differently when you’re on your couch vs when you’re on a plane, for example.

3. Streaming. You can use the Deck similar to how devices like the PS Portal or Logitech G-Cloud are supposed to work. If you have a gaming desktop, you can install Valve’s Steam Link app (it’s not in Steam though - you need to go to desktop mode, go to the Discover repository to find and install it, then add it to Steam as a non-Steam game). Then after some setup, you can stream from your desktop to the Deck. This is a great workaround for heavy modern AAA games. Gigantic games that are hundreds of gigabytes can live on cheaper 2.5"SSD’s this way. If your desktop runs windows this gets around anh OS comparability issues Proton can’t handle, and it might get around some anticheat too. The computation is shifted of the deck, so the fan stays quiet, the unit stays cool, and battery life is great. The downside is a bit of lag.

I’ve heard of NVIDIA’s Moonlight and the community-made AMD version Sunshine as well. But I think Nvidia has stopped their support, and personally I never even got Sunshine to install on my desktop. Steam Remote Play has dramatically improved over the years and is say it’s pretty good now.

Sony has their official PS Remote Play app for Windows and Android that allows those devices to steam from PS4’s and PS5’s. I assume this is what the PS Portal uses too. There is no official app for Linux, but there is a 3rd party one called Chiaki. You can also install this as a non-Steam game and stream. I’m playing Bloodborne on the Deck on my porch right now as I’m taking this.

4. Advanced Savings. I have a ton of emulators and a library of ROMs. I also have my desktop and like to use it to stream to a variety of different screens, and unfortunately you can’t use Steam Cloud Saves with non-Steam games, or even with some Steam games like Retroarch. Even some of my Steam games don’t have cloud save support- I was shocked to open up Sonic Adventure 2: Battle on the Deck and see an empty save.

The solution? Syncthing. Install this app on your Deck as a non-Steam game. Install it on your desktop, your android TV box, your phone, your old laptop, your NAS. Whether it’s backups or synchronization, it’s great. I’ll catch a Pokemon on my Deck in an emulator, save, move to my desktop, open the save using PKHex, make the pokemon Shiny, then go back to the Deck and enjoy my new shiny pokemon.

5. File Sharing. Assuming you have a desktop, set up an SMB shared folder there. On the Deck in Desktop mode, you might need to install an app with more advanced file browsing features than the default (I like one called Nautilus). This one I only use in Desktop mode, so no need to add it to the Steam Library. It’s just great to be able to offload storage for my Deck onto my desktop, especially for larger disc-based ROM’s. PS2, GameCube, PS3, Wii, WiiU, and Switch games all fall into this category because I either have large libraries or the games themselves are just huge. A 512GB card is probably enough for the entire library of ROM’s for every pre-2000 videogame. Heck, you could probably get away with 256GB if you use good compression formats. Once we start using DVD’s and Blue-Rays those sizes increase fast. My library is already on mechanical drives on my desktop (one of these days I’ll build a proper server) so it’s nice to be able to copy over the handful of games I feel like I’m going to want to play soon over the network, no messing with cables or flash drives or SD cards or anything.

My right one worked great to start, and my left knee still does. Over the past year I could feel it slowly get worse. It feels like normal wear and tear to me, just that I used it hard with a few mouse-centric games.

I did look on iFixit but they don’t have replacements. I’m not too surprised, and I’m not really upset with Valve, because it’s a pretty new thing and they are still way better than their competition. I just hope that eventually they release an improved version.

I think not having room for the charger is a valid complaint. Not enough for me to buy a 3rd party case, but I can see why people would want one.

I tend to put mine in its case, but put that case in a backpack with all of its accessories. Which kinda sucks, but also even if I didn’t have the deck I typically have enough other electronics to justify a dedicated backpack anyways- battery banks, chargers, my wife’s laptop and kindle, maybe our portable projector to throw things up on random spots. While I wish the Deck case had more space, unless it was badkpack-sized I would probably end up throwing it in a backpack anyways.

Eh, I’d say it’s a mixed bag.

The Triggers? Yes, I’d say they are tied for the best option right now.

The sticks? Also yes. They are positioned great, feel great, work great. As someone who likes both the Dualsense and Xbox sticks a lot, the Steam Deck is even better. It’s worth mentioning that even after 2 years I still haven’t found a use for the capacitive touch pads. They’re a neat idea I suppose, but it seems like you need a VERY specific scenario to make it work. Even the one I see most often- gyro - I’d rather just use a button to toggle it than use the capacitive sensor on the right stick.

The face buttons? They’re okay. Not the worst I’ve used, but too rounded for me. They can really wear on your thumbs in games where you mash. I’d prefer the Dualsense, but this is better than the Xbox.

The Shoulder Buttons? Pretty garage actually. They work, but feel really mush and awkward to use. Give me a Dualsense, or most other controllers instead.

Start/Select? Fine, but placed in places that are difficult to reach without actively stretching. Like they often are on controllers anyways, so not a big deal.

D-Pad? Serviceable. It feels similar to the PS Vita of all things. It’s nowhere near the crisp, precise, harsh microswitches of JoyCons. It’s also nowhere near the fluid, smooth motion of the Sony style D-Pad. It’s somewhere in-between. It’s also more precise than traditional Nintendo d-pads. I’d say it’s fine, but I prefer Sony’s. My thumb gets tired easily from D-Pad heavy games on the Deck.

Back buttons are a nice bonus, but they don’t feel super great. They all feel more like toggles than buttons you are expected to constantly be actuating.

The track pass are great at first, but my right track pad wore out VERY quickly and it feels terrible. Clicking on it now is very unpleasant, to the point where in some games I map R2 or R4 to click just so I don’t have to use the track pad for it anymore. Hopefully Valve improves that. I’d absolutely love to see those track pads on standalone controllers.

So Mario Kart World was the big launch title with bundles, and they already released a new Fast game, the series that seems to have basically replaced F-Zero.

Seems like a lot of racing games early on from Nintendo.

I think the Switch 2 will do well, as it’s already had a better launch than the WiiU or 3DS. But it’s kind of in an awkward spot. The community reaction seems to be “yeah Mario Kart World is great, but it’s still just a Mario Kart game at the end of the day, and it will need some DLC to catch up to the level of content of MK8”. Donkey Kong was received well but doesn’t seem to have the staying power of a game like Super Mario Odyssey or Breath of the Wild did. Pokemon Legends Z-A is probably going to do well, but I don’t think these kind of spinoff games are going to drive console sales like the main games do (especially when there is a Switch version coming out too).

My point is that a few months after launch I still don’t see a game where I say “wow that’s worth grabbing a Switch 2 for!”. It almost feels more like the “Switch Pro” that was rumored for years rather than a true sequel- the main reason to upgrade right now is that Switch 1 games run better. That is enough to launch, but I’m looking through the list of announced games and trying to find what the big system seller is going to be. What’s going to release this holiday season that makes parents stand in line to buy the latest Nintendo for their children?

Maybe this is by design? Maybe Nintendo has purposefully left a bit of a drought to avoid having a ton of cross-gen games, and plans to start announcing more projects in 2026?

I keep seeing this same website posted on Lemmy and it’s always the same thing. A click bait title that makes unnecessary connections between two things attached to an article that just regurgitates basic concepts without adding anything. All the paragraphs are one, maybe two sentences so the whole thing feels like reading a series of tweets instead of an actual article.

Maybe it would bother me less if this was poised less as the opinion of the authors and instead was just objective reporting on SKG. SKG has press materials available for that purpose that The Conversation is choosing not to use. Heck, they could even include some statements from game publishers or government officials. It’s still a good thing that they are spreading awareness of the movement, but I’m really confused as to what kind of person consumes and enjoys this website.

It’s frustrating because I largely agree with their sentiments. I support Stop Killing Games, and I support worker’s rights, but this article is just… Bad. It doesn’t even make a connection between SKG and the working environemt- it just makes a claim that such a connection exists and leaves that claim unsubstantiated. Such a connection DOES exist, these authors just fail to communicate that.

Is Microsoft’s new strategy just to cancel every other game so everyone has nothing left to buy but Call of Duty?