Tag: Steam Deck

Gaming: Xbox Series X/Steam Deck

There’s nothing unusual about me playing different games and “at the same time,” like, I’m fighting with Borderlands 4 on the Xbox as well as having just completed the latest Expedition for No Man’s Sky – more on this in a moment. I’d started the Expedition on my Steam Deck and completed the latest Community Goals for Elite Dangerous: Odyssey and pocketed a cool 122,000,000 credits and getting me close to being back to having over 4,000,000,000 credits.

I do stuff like this because I can and it’s always an exercise in (1) remembering what I was doing in whatever games I’m playing, (2) being aware of the fact that the Steam Deck is not the Xbox Series X and (3) when any game I’m playing starts to piss me off, I can go play another that’ll hopefully let me decompress before jumping back into the gaming grinder.

“Breach” is the name of the latest Expedition that expands on creating a Corvette to galivant around the galaxy doing stuff – and some stuff that’s been done in past Expeditions, like, going fishing which, honestly, wasn’t something I expected to be doing but, spoiler alert, it was the next to the last task in the Expedition and probably the easiest thing I had to do. There are a couple of such “old” tasks and it had me wondering if the folks at Hello Games ran out of ideas of things to do for this Expedition and dragged out the old stuff, gussied it up a bit, and probably sat back and laughed their asses off.

The Expedition calls for a lot of space walking, which is pretty cool even if trying to get back into your Corvette can get interesting at times – but not as interesting as being on dry land or in the water and trying to get back aboard but the coolest thing I’ve done in No Man’s Sky is to… space walk into a black hole.

I’ll admit that I was… suspicious when I got to Rendezvous 4 and there’s a black hole right in front of me and, in other Expeditions, I didn’t remember ever seeing one upon emergence into a system but I kinda shrugged it off and went to the rendezvous point – but the black hole stuck in my mind and, as it turned out, for good reason. I get to this task and my first thought was, “Space walk into what? A black hole?” and now, seeing that black hole in the now-previous system is making sense and there’s that part of my brain that said, “I’m not doing that!” since, um, you know, light isn’t safe around one of those things but it’s a task and if it wasn’t going to be survivable, we would have to fly into it and as usual.

That was really and seriously cool. I emerged… somewhere else and without my ship, which I wasn’t thinking about until my suit mentioned that the temperature was dropping and now I’m having an “Oh, shit!” moment until, duh, just summon the Corvette – and it appeared before me and I jetted onboard, sighing a sigh of relief to hear that the temperature was stabilizing.

The fucked-up part is a “trap” that Hello Games has used before because once you finish this task, you’re supposed to head to the Rendezvous 5 system and the normal thing is to open the Galaxy Map and follow the Expedition Route which I actually did until I thought, “Wait a damned minute! This is like the old Living Ship task!” In this main story mission, you eventually have to get to the location of the living ship, and you’re so involved in the game at this point that you can easily miss the fact that you need to teleport to the living ship’s location and not warp to a location.

Yeah, I wasn’t falling for that, but I did go to a space station – and one of the deserted and partially destroyed stations that populated the Expedition – and teleported back to the Rendezvous 4 station and went on to Rendezvous 5 from there. Black holes in the game tend to drop you off thousands of light years from the point you entered the black hole and, in this Expedition, it’s no different.

I sighed and took a deep breath upon completing the Expedition and my next thought was, “Now I gotta finish it on my other two [Xbox] profiles and the Steam Deck…” and went back to playing Borderlands 4, only to pick up where I left off trying to kill a beast that was stomping a mudhole in my ass and pissing me off because I’d get the fucker down to his last bit of life and… then I get killed, respawn, and have to start killing it all over again and this time I said, “Fuck this…” and went to do something else while knowing that I’ll have to come back to this task at some point because there’s no way to cancel it.

The problem is typically Borderlands: I need better weapons to kill this fucker and the ones I have aren’t all that good and there’s no Gun machine at the respawn point and the little critters who are adding to my demise aren’t dropping anything helpful when I kill them. Even if there was a Gun machine, I’ve already learned that chances are very damned good that any weapon in that machine won’t be as good as the ones I currently have unless I get lucky and the daily offering happens to be a Legendary but, as you can imagine, that doesn’t happen very often and the last few Legendaries I’ve seen in the machines… were less than the weapon I currently had.

My brain was thinking that I’m stupid enough to play this game with all four characters across three Xbox profiles. The easiest thing I did gaming yesterday was collect my credits from the Elite Dangerous Community Goal that, honestly, I had forgotten I was a part of even though, the day before, I made a bunch of runs for the stuff the CG was asking for and that was pretty tame. One button click and I’m 122,000,000 credits richer. Borderlands 4 is being a pain in my ass but, again, I expected it to be since, duh, I have to learn how to play this game.

I see players posting stuff on Facebook and X and they’re Level 40 and above, talking about the Legendaries they’re finding and making it sound like doing the stuff in the game is a no-brainer and, I dunno, maybe for them it is but as I saw in a review of the game, the UI for the game isn’t all that intuitive and moving around the very large map can be a pain and mostly because you really can’t zoom in to look at a place you think you need to go to. I was looking for a particular safe house and while I knew where it was on the map, I was having a bitch of a time selecting its icon so I could fast travel to it because there were other icons piled up on top of it and they wanted to get all in my way and… who the fuck thought of this clusterfuck?

It kinda galls me to see stuff about the game from sources like Gamers Rant and they’ve got this “all you gotta do” thing about an aspect of the game that (a) I haven’t come across yet or (b) yeah, I wish I had known this when I had to do it. Apparently, there are some folks on Reddit who are having a field day playing the game and kicking it all in the ass and chances are they’re PC players… and there are probably mods for the game already and Microsoft doesn’t allow mods to be used on the consoles even though I’ve heard rumors of people being able to hack the console so they can download mods for whatever game they’re playing and… I don’t have the time nor the patience for such crap and if I did, I still wouldn’t use a mod because, as I’ve been learning, this version of the game makes you use any or all knowledge you’ve ever learned about playing Borderlands.

I still can’t imagine someone who never played any of the other games trying to figure this one out. Playing the game twelve times makes me have to be patient; it makes me have to focus while having fun killing Rippers and blowing up shit which is so relaxing that I’ve checked my pulse via my Apple watch when I’m in the middle of a massacre and… it’s 62 when, normally, my pulse is like 80. So, I’m going to finish scribbling this and go to the living room so I can begin my daily torture playing video games.

I still have to get back to No Man’s Sky on the Steam Deck and there shouldn’t be that many problems completing it since I’ve already done it – I’m just kinda not happy that this Expedition didn’t have any new ships other than having to build a Corvette. But doing so will keep me occupied and that just works. I’m debating with myself about whether or not I want to do the Expedition on my other two Xbox profiles and… I kinda don’t want to but the Expedition is running for three weeks so, yeah, I’ll get around to doing… because I can.

As far as I know, there’s no new CG for Elite Dangerous yet and I still have to work on my Federal and Imperial navy ranks so I can get the ships I already have on the forgotten Xbox version of the game… because I can.

Gaming: Steam Deck: Elite Dangerous: Odyssey

Since purchasing it, I don’t think I’ve spent as much time playing games on it as I have been playing ED:O during the last week.

Trying to pick up from my last Gaming post, I got into the Community Goals job to pick up “superconductors” from one place and take them to another and, as a result, I was raking in a lot of credits as the game wound the CG down to its end but before then, I happened to be at the delivery point and looking through their shipyard when I saw that they had… the Type-10 Defender! If I hadn’t been sitting down already, I would have gotten weak in the knees because, of course, this is the same ship that I fly in the disconnected Xbox version of the game!

It’s not that the Type-8 I had bought from Frontier turned out to be a bad ship but throughout the CG, I was learning things about it and literally on the fly and it caused some… awkward moments going from point A to point B. In fact, all of the ships I have in Odyssey are either ships I bought from Frontier when they were first introduced or a couple of ships I’d never owned in the Xbox version, let alone had flown. Ah, but the Type-10 is a ship I know very well.

It handles like a pig stuck in mud while being chained to a great weight. But this ship wasn’t designed to run: It was designed to fight, it bristles with weaponry, and I had to learn how to fly and fight the ship. I had originally thought that I’d have to wait until I got the permit I need to get to Jameson Memorial, one of the orbitals in the game that has every ship and every piece of gear you’d ever want for it not counting visits to the game’s various Engineers. So, I was delightfully surprised to see the Type-10 and here’s a picture of it (courtesy of frontierstore.net):

The one I have in the Xbox version is red and the one I have in the PC version is the color of the one in the picture. Frontier has released a new ship that makes the Type-10 look like the tiny “Sidewinder” beginner ship you get to start the game.

The Type-10 can fight. It can be equipped with a fighter bay and fighter. It can haul a lot of freight. I had originally bought this ship (Xbox) because… I needed a ship that could carry a lot of stuff and for a CG that had just started. I winced at the price shown at the Jameson Memorial shipyard but would find out that if another station had one, it would cost a lot more. So, I bought it, had an interesting time configuring it for what I needed to do then learned how to fly and fight it during a rather intense CG.

Anyway, I bought the ship and it knocked my credits down considerably. I spent millions of credits outfitting this Type-10 to match the configuration of my Xbox Type-10 and knowing that once I get to Jameson Memorial, I’ll be spending more credits to refine the configuration of the Odyssey ship to completely match the Xbox ship.

What I had forgotten, in my exuberance and glee, was that it would take a lot more jumps going from point B back to point A so I could load my new ship up with superconductors and “restock” my credits – but I wasn’t that worried about money because I knew that at the end of the CG, I stood to rake in 175 million credits. But I’m cussing myself out after plotting the course back to point A because I’d forgotten something about the Type-10 I had learned the hard way on the Xbox.

Flying the Type-8 back and forth, it took me three jumps to go from point A to point B to deliver the goods; it took five jumps to go back for more goods. Going back to load up took… seventeen jumps and for a good, long minute, I was thinking, “What the fuck happened?” – then I remembered, rolled my eyes, and seriously thought about switching back to the Type-8 but I muttered, “Fuck it…” to myself and clicked the “auto launch” button to begin the long trip back.

All throughout the CG, I was being attacked in the rear by the “Private Security Group” that, I learned, attacks anyone who isn’t associated with whatever faction they’re in. The Type-8 normally held up under the blistering attacks and a couple of times, my cockpit was destroyed and forced me, on the last occasion, to jump to another system and orbital to make repairs. Needless to say, I wasn’t just pissed – I was still pissed because I couldn’t fight back since I was being attacked inside the orbital’s no-fire zone, which this group obviously didn’t give a fuck about.

Deploying my weapons inside the no-fire zone could have the orbital shooting at me and I would have gotten blown out of space and heavily fined so all I could do was boost until I could FSD away. Now I’m in the Type-10 and it’s loaded for bear and I’m almost daring this pain in the ass group to attack me so I can open up a can of whup-ass on them. They only jumped me from behind once and the Type-10, named “Madoka” and like my other ship is named (and after a ship in one of my favorite book series) shrugged off the attacks and I jumped out of the system without a scratch.

I got interdicted on the way back to point A and, ooh, I wanted to let them catch me so I could whup that ass for having the nerve, but I easily avoided their attempt to stop me and jumped to the next system. I finished the CG and was happy with my performance and now, it was time to get back to Sol and my home at the Galileo orbital so I could also recall the other three ships I had out there – the Type-8, one of my Python Mk IIs, and my Corsair.

Once back home, I learned of another CG that’s in progress and will run for the next three weeks and I thought, “Why the hell not?” and signed up for it then, fuck, shit, damn it, I again forgot that the Type-10 takes more jumps to get somewhere and going to the starting point of this CG was seventeen jumps and I had already chosen a supply point but I wouldn’t know how many jumps would be involved until I got to the starting point and, yeah, another 11 trips to get to the supply point, 17 jumps to get back to the delivery point and I realize that I’m not going to be making “fast trips” but I stand to not only make more credits than I have at the moment but to also advance another step toward becoming a trading Expert and a rank I already have on the Xbox.

You’re all caught up on my gaming stuff for now!

Gaming: Xbox X and Steam Deck – Elite Dangerous: Horizons and Odyssey

So, after writing about my quest to get the Imperial Cutter, I am happy to report that I now have it. I got the required rank of Duke, and the message hadn’t been cleared for five seconds before I opened the Shipyard and bought the Cutter – then tricked it out enough so that I could fly it home to Jameson where I’d really trick it the fuck out.

Then I found out that the version of the Imperial Cutter at Jameson was better outfitted than the one I had bought! Which, honestly, I should have known this, but I also admit to being really excited to reach this rather lofty goal and more so when I don’t play the game like some other gamers do – that PvP stuff isn’t my cup of coffee. So, I sell the Cutter I arrived in, bought the better Cutter, tricked it out with all of the high-end gear I could stuff in there and… sat in the ship, in the hanger, and asked myself, “Now what?”

I still haven’t figured out what I’m going to do with this ship. I’m not done with Horizons but I need to give Odyssey, which lives on my Steam Deck, some attention and as luck would have it, when I brought the game up and looked at transportation missions, there was a Federal Navy mission that I could do; it surprised me because I hadn’t given a single thought to being that close to ranking up in Odyssey but, yeah, here’s my chance and I’m all over it like a bad habit.

I make the information run the job required and… promoted to Petty Officer which also gives me the Sol permit and I didn’t waste a single moment charting a course to Sol and the Galileo orbital and during the seven-jump trip there, I’m already thinking about the grinding I’ll have to do so I can get the permit that will allow me to fly to Jameson Memorial as well as give me better access to Imperial space and I happen to know a grinding run that’ll work well to getting me ranked up (wink, wink).

But as I check out the available jobs at Galileo, I’m looking at Facebook on my laptop and I see something from the Elite Dangerous group that’s talking about a Community Goals (CG) action taking place that’s supposed to help a shipbuilder build the new ship that Frontier has added to game and, as I recall, won’t be available until the end of this month but this CG has some bonus awards in the form of gear for the new ship if/when one purchases it from Frontier for ARX.

I look at the CG and it’s doable and not unlike some of the CGs done in Horizons. I had to wait for all of my ships to transfer to Galileo before flying to the CG location I needed to be in and, in my Type-8, it’s off to the CG grind and, as I tend to do, wondering if I’m going to be able to contribute enough to earn the prizes and whatever credits I can. I pick “superconductors” as the item I’ll transport and sell for “the cause” and I started with 1.5 million credits and after a few runs in the Type-8, I’m in the tens of millions – but I need to increase the 8’s cargo capacity and I need to do something about its shielding because I’ve been getting attacked from behind by a “Private Security Group” that I knew nothing about but presumed that Frontier put them in the game at the last update and, fuck, it’s bad enough that these fuckers are trying to blast me out of the sky as I exit the station and in its no-fire zone, but I can’t deploy my weapons in this zone and I’m too close to the station to safely maneuver the Type-8 without hitting the station, all of which could have station security trying to destroy me…

…so I have no choice but to run for it. I have to quickly redline my speed and start boosting to get out of the no-fire zone and, hopefully, out of the range of the ships and their weapons that are beating the shit out of my shields and I’m pissed because I can’t fight them but, cool, I can out-run them. Now I’m making repeated runs and “paranoid” because I don’t and can’t know where or when I will be attacked during the CG grinding run. The Type-8 is tough, not all that able to fly like a hawk but its got a few moves to it; I upgraded the shielding to “bi-weave shields” that, honestly, I don’t think they’re as good as I’ve heard some players talk about but they do seem to be able to take a bit of pounding but quickly recovering where normal shield aren’t that quick to recover.

When I had upgraded the shields, I also upgraded key components to the 8, including its life support module and it was a good thing I did because when I left to deliver my load of superconductors, the NPC bad guys lit me up before I even cleared the station’s exit, destroying my shields and, fuck me, the cockpit shatters and breaks and I see the dreaded warning saying that I have 25 minutes of oxygen left. I can’t go back to the place I just got my ass shot off but… can I make the delivery before my oxygen runs out?

I think that I can and get to heading in that direction and patting myself on the ass for upgrading the life support the way I did. The bad part is that… I can’t see where I’m going! Apparently, the nav information that’s displayed right in front of me is projected onto that part of the cockpit glass so I can’t see the destination marker and can now only fly on “instruments” – and that would be the crosshair gizmo used to line destinations up the right way. It’s five jumps back to the delivery site and I’m jumping, bypassing fuel scooping because this run hasn’t been using a lot of fuel to begin with, and with one eye on the bright blue clock that’s counting down the real-time minutes I have left before I run out of oxygen.

It was some hair-raising good fun. Can I make it? Will I make it? Will I get jumped again and my ship damaged even more? Will it blow up? All of this is going through my mind as I get to the delivery point and land without further issues. I repair the ship, wincing at how much it was going to cost but it’s better than paying the re-buy if the ship got destroyed… and like I had to do in one game instance because unbeknownst to me, the pickup system… is a binary star system and my frame shift drive (FSD) dropped me right in the middle of the two stars!

Heat warnings are sounding; I’m trying to get the fuck out of there, but I can’t see a clear spot to navigate to – everywhere I turn, I’m seeing one of the stars while damned near every module in the ship is being obliterated. Fuck me… I gotta get away from here and, miraculously, I see a clear spot and boost my way through it before the boost module dies and I try to jump away to a neighboring system, and I barely managed to do that because the FSD had suffered major damage.

I wound up ordering a self-destruct. I couldn’t “reboot and repair” the ship; the supercruise module is destroyed as well as the flight module, meaning that I can’t lock onto the station I can see, let alone fly to it because supercruise is gone and so are the thrusters so limping to the station and in the three real-time hours that would take would be a waste of time since, fuck, I won’t be able to fly the ship to manually land it. My best and only option is to self-destruct and as I’m doing that, I was glad that I didn’t have any cargo to lose as the ship blew up and my insurance paid for the whole ship to be replaced as I’m at the station I couldn’t get to in the neighboring system.

I still have to make the CG run. I plot the course and with my Type-8 all fresh and brand new, I jump to the pickup system and… I’m good to go and I do not want to go through that again – and now I know that the FSD will do something like that again.

The CG ends in about three days from now and as my memory serves me at the moment since I’m in one room and the Steam Deck is in the living room. I’m close to making 100,000,000 credits and I laugh because, again, I got there with a measly 1.5 million credits to start with and, indeed, purchasing my first load of superconductors practically left me broke.

Gaming: Power Wash Simulator

So, I’m in VR and I see the Quest+ ‘tab’ in my library and thought, “Ah, what the fuck – I don’t have to pay for it yet so lemme see if they have anything else I’d be interested in.”

I had seen Power Wash Simulator for Steam and I think I recalled seeing it Xbox Game Pass but since it was “free” for me on Met’s Quest+ – and I didn’t have anything else to do in VRs – sure, let’s download it and see what the deal is. As I’m waiting for the game to download and install, I’m recalling the day that, for some reason, I had rented a power washer and I’m smiling at the memory of spending a whole Saturday power washing the shit out of my house and I mean everywhere the spray, hose, or both could reach. Oh, and I just remembered why I rented it – I needed to clean the siding.

By the time I got maybe a quarter of the way through the siding, I was soaking wet and having the time of my life power washing shit that didn’t even need power washing; the science nerd that lives in my head is in awe at the power of water under pressure and more so when I got to the rental place, all they had were the industrial-level washers and I remember the guy telling me, “No matter what you do, do not aim this at anyone or put your hand in the spray!”

Not that stupid and especially a couple of weeks prior, I’d gone to one of the manufacturers of our railroad tank cars to check on some new cars we were having built and I was watching some steel being cleaned and cut by a water jet cutter so, nope, not that stupid.

I’m thinking that this game isn’t going to be any real fun but it’s free and why the hell not. I get the game up and running and it’s still pretty cool to be totally immersed in the game I’m playing and, most of the time, only being able to see my VR hand but this time, I’ve got a power wash gun in my hand. In the tutorial, I have to clean my van and, my, wasn’t that interesting? It took me a while to get it clean because I had a heck of a time getting used to the VR sprayer and since I didn’t have a time limit, I was just taking my time spraying the shit out of everything I could think of on the van until, finally, I’d gotten it fully clean.

I found the game to be oddly relaxing and I had to focus on and scrutinize everything I had to clean and figured out how to go back and get the places I missed when I was doing a backyard that looked like a gigantic soot bomb hand landed on it – I had figured it wouldn’t be easy to clean and it wasn’t but, hey, I’m actually having fun. The only downside was… the VR headset. After a while, it gets heavy and more so when I can look around and peek under certain things and I don’t remember offhand how much the Meta Quest 3S’s headset weighs but after a couple of hours working on a playground that was so dirty it needed to be condemned more than it needed cleaning and, well, I haven’t finished cleaning it yet.

I recalled seeing the game on Steam but, oh, no – I’m not paying $27 for it and I’m thinking, “If only they had the game on Game Pass but they probably don’t…” but I looked anyway and, oh, snap – it’s on Game Pass! It plays a little different than in VR – and it’s the controls – but at least I can get my power washing on without putting a lot of strain on my head and neck.

The funny part is that I like the VR version better because I can look around and move my hands around and like I could do for real. I’m at the point in both versions of the game where I can buy cleaners like multi-purpose, glass, stone, etc., and at $10 a pop, well, it’s not cheap and the cleaners run out of stock too fast for my liking, like, in the Xbox version, I’m cleaning a firehouse and I could use a lot of the metal cleaner to take care of the rust… except the store is out of it.

I did think, as I was working inside the training tower, that the stupid fire company could have done this themselves because they have better pressure equipment and ladders as well as a slew of firemen so why am I doing it for them? I have no idea how I’m going to clean the upper part of the tower’s outside because nothing I have can reach that high so I’m leaving it alone for now and went back to the playground and a place that I’m glad I don’t run out of water.

And I don’t die when I do something dumb like fall off the roof of the house I was cleaning. One thing I realized and at the point I am in the Xbox version is that… I’m not getting paid enough…

Xbox X Gaming: No Man’s Sky – The Final Solutions

So, I got the last iteration of NMS up to date and the only thing I’m waiting on now is for Hello Games to release the Xbox version of the newest update, which is now about a week after PC, Steam, and Playstation all got the current update, leaving all Xbox users wondering, “What the fuck?”

I’ve been seeing a few things that speculate why Xbox hasn’t received the update up to and including some kind of back room deal between Sony and Hello Games that’s aimed at giving Xbox a bloody nose; other bits of speculation have to do with the game’s coding and Microsoft wanting to be 100% sure that this new update will meet its rather exacting standards and…

I just want to be able to play the new update on my Xbox; there’s a new Expedition coming and, historically for me, I have played them first on my Xbox before taking them for a spin on Steam and my PC version. So, all I can do at this point is to make sure that all of the games I have on my devices are current with the stuff I earned from the last Expedition – the Iron Vulture ship is a beast – and some of the other things earned from the last Expedition has my Travellers looking rather spiffy. Hopefully, the new Expedition won’t start until the update gets pushed out to Xboxes all over the world.

I’ve had a few moments doing this and mostly wondering what I was doing at the point where I left the game to, presumably, do other stuff. Or, upon opening the last game to be taken care of, asking myself, “How the fuck did I get here… and what was I doing?” I saw what mission I was supposed to do and finish and I’m scratching my head and thinking, “Huh… I thought I finished this…” but, nah, I sure didn’t but now it’s off to the Anomaly to get the new ship and gear – and especially the Personal Refiner 2.0. Working the last game showed that I had stopped playing while in the middle of doing the tasks to acquire an abandoned Sentry ship – and there are either four or five versions of this ship (but I’m almost sure it’s four different ships) and, oh, yeah, now I remember why I stopped playing it.

That would be getting frustrated at not being able to find a key component to bring the Sentinel ship back to life and make it my own – and it’s not the first time I’ve run into this particular problem and, as I noticed, on the same planet and where looking through my scope, the component I need is… nowhere to be found so that means I have to go looking for it and I do remember spending almost two hours searching for the component on this iteration of the game before I said, “Fuck this shit…” and exited the game.

It took me ten minutes to find the part I needed and even then, it was probably “dumb luck” that allowed me to find it and when, um, when I messed up and landed my ship somewhere that I hadn’t intended to land but even in video games, sometimes, you don’t have to be good – you just gotta be lucky. I take the part back to the Sentinel ship – and after a stop to activate its new brain – and I’m looking at a version of the ship that I’m almost sure I don’t have… in any iteration of the game. The ship looks… dinky and compared to the one that looks menacing and powerful, and I thought, “I went through all of this shit… for this?”

Yes, yes, I did, because I needed to get this last game iteration caught up with the other iterations and, again, before the new Expedition comes out. With this task done, I’m sitting there looking at my stuff and… now what? Oh, I know! I’m going to wake up my Steam Deck and play a game that I haven’t played since 1993 called “Kid Chameleon” and a game that I saw, purchased, and played on my new 16-bit Sega Genesis console… and a game that took me a year to finish it. My youngest son wanted to play it and I was cool with it and… he walked through that game like there was nothing to it and I will admit that seeing how easily he kicked the game’s ass kinda pissed me off but I was determined to beat this very vexing game and, yeah, I wasn’t too proud to not get some hints and tips from him to get through the parts of the game that I thought were difficult.

But this is 2024. I have a lot of gaming experience under my belt and since my venerable 16-bit Sega console when tits up and was replaced with… a PS2. Steam has a Sega collection that has almost all of the games for the 16-bit Sega console that were ported to work on Steam and I saw it, bought it, and was tickled to see games like Golden Axe, Altered Beast and, oh, shit: Kid Chameleon. I was excited to see it even as felt my soul slide out of my body and through the floor. I’ve played hundreds of games, maybe even close to a thousand games and no game has frustrated me like Kid Chameleon did except for Ninja Gaiden but, yeah, experienced gamer over here and let’s revisit Kid Chameleon!

And immediately got reminded why I hated this game so much and why it took me a year to beat it. In my defense, I did have to figure out the controls and stuff but that really didn’t take that long to do and doesn’t excuse the fact that, last night, I barely made it to the third board… and after five tries to get there. I shut that fucker down as I relived the frustration, I felt 31 years ago and, yeah, it took me a moment to calm down and to remember that it’s just a game and it’s not that serious.

Yes, yes, it is that serious. If you never played Kid Chameleon, you have no idea how serious this can be and if you played it and kicked its ass before I did, well, I’m not liking you a whole lot at this point. I thought to mention this particular game because Xbox has some of the older Sega games, like Sonic (mostly) and when there’s been a “vintage 16-bit Sega collection,” there have been games like Vectorman 1 and 2 – which was a damned good game – and various versions of Sonic… but not Kid Chameleon and I believed that no one thought this game to be that important to go through what it takes to port an old-style game into the newer console standards. Well, Xbox didn’t do it… but my old nemesis is on Steam and I am once again determined to kick this game’s ass and it had better not take a year for me to do it!

Steam Gaming: The Steam Deck

I’ve had my Steam Deck for a while now and… I’m still not 100% used to it. As a handheld gaming device, it’s pretty powerful and not unlike my Asus Ally, which is a handheld Windows 11 computer that’s great at running a lot of games.

One of the downsides to the Steam Deck is the very short battery life when you want – need – to unplug it and be “close to the action” on the screen, which is a decent size but when I’m playing a game like Elite Dangerous: Odyssey, I’m forever squinting and moving things around so that I can see critical information like, um, where am I supposed to dock this thing again? Or ready to dock but I have to be 7.5 km or less away from the station and even approaching at a slow speed so I can wiggle things around so I can hit the request to dock at 7.49 km makes my eyes hurt.

I know some folks who have a Steam Deck connect it to their TV or a dedicated monitor and that’s fine, but one of the selling points of the device is its portability but with that short battery life and it’s not as robust when on battery, yeah, that’s a problem and more so when that puppy gets pretty hot on battery or plugged in and I have a dock that has fans to provide extra cooling.

The other thing that I’ve not gotten used to is… it’s got a lot of buttons and other “touch points” that I can’t seem to stop pressing or hitting while playing a game and there’s a set of triggers right where you can hold the device in your hands and I get that there are some games that makes use of these extra control points, I would say that my Xbox controllers have me spoiled because they don’t have those extra buttons.

Those extra triggers/touch points give me grief when I’m playing No Man’s Sky at times and what gets me is that the Steam Deck knows to only activate the “usual controls” and, yes, in the configuration that you’d be familiar with an Xbox or Playstation controller so you’d think that the other control stuff would be deactivated and… nope. Nothing tends to raise your BP as being in a dogfight with pirates who are trying to steal your loot and you hit one of those triggers that are right by where you’re holding the device, and your ship does something you weren’t expecting, or you definitely didn’t need the distraction.

Practice, practice, practice. Dealing with this aspect of the Steam Deck has gotten better from my initial days trying to figure out how to use it. Depending on the game you’re playing, if/when you need to enter some text, a virtual keyboard can appear, which is fun for someone who has big fingers like I do but, eh, I’m kinda use to that messing with my phone but in some games, you’ll need to enter some text and no keyboard pops up so you have to find that little recessed “button” on the right side of the Deck, push it, then select the keyboard and enter your text and, yeah, why the button is (a) recessed and (b) black like the rest of the Deck is beyond me but it’s a bitch trying to find it, press it, and use a somewhat smaller keyboard.

At best, it’s annoying and I don’t always “instantly” remember to find and try to get my fingertip on the button. None of these things makes me wish I hadn’t bought the Steam Deck because I really do like it – I’m just mentioning these things because I ran into them playing Planet Creator yesterday. I found something in a storage chest that said for me to right-click on it to use it… and there’s no way to right-click on anything since, um, the Steam Deck doesn’t have a mouse. Oh, I don’t doubt that you could connect a Bluetooth mouse… but why would you? So, I have this important-looking item that, for now, I can’t use because I can’t right-click on it.

As you might recall, I was going to restart my game and use the things I learned playing in creative mode and things were going well until I was hustling back to my home base – and with one eye on my oxygen levels – and… I had shifted the Deck in my hands and hit one of the triggers on the backside and it made my character stop running and had opened up the backpack menu and I’m like, “Shit!” because I’m standing still and if I don’t get moving, I’m going to run out of air and die and I’m clicking those backside triggers until the menu disappeared (and, no, hitting the B button didn’t help like it should have) and I barely made it back – and it was close and too close for comfort.

If you’re used to holding an Xbox or Playstation controller, holding the Steam Deck isn’t that different but, then again, it is due to its length and its weight; by comparison, my Asus Ally is a tad bit lighter and about the same length and, yes, it has trigger buttons on the underside, too – but I don’t play a lot of games on it and it has the same battery life issues and temperature stuff that the Steam Deck has; it’s just better to play either device when it’s plugged in and preferably in a dock that has fans to provide extra cooling and, honestly, that can get to be a bit uncomfortable depending on how you have stuff set up.

And watch where you put your fingers! I can use it when it’s in its dock and it’s taken me a little bit to get used to doing it that way but, again, battery life issues almost makes it impractical as a true hand-held device or, um, you won’t be playing whatever you’re playing for very long when it tells you that the battery’s low and you’ve only been playing for five or ten minutes. I would suppose that an external battery pack might come in handy but that could make the Deck even more cumbersome, but I could be wrong about that.

I just have to remember that if I take my Steam Deck – or even my Ally – on the road with me, I’d better make sure to pack its dock if I plan on playing something for an extended period of time…

Steam Gaming: Planet Crafter

The food situation in my primary game is so critical that I’m thinking about deleting it and starting over. Messing around in creative mode has been teaching me about building the primary base up high and not where my capsule landed (that underwater thing I mentioned last time) and building “shelters” so that as I move toward the places I wanted to explore and plunder – and places that do have stockpiles of the food that I need.

Except, at the low level my food health is, I don’t dare leave my home base and, sad to say, I have died just moving around inside my home – just going from one part to the other. I’m… unhappy at this turn of events but I’ve learned some important stuff about surviving the opening acts to the game. So, yeah, I’ll delete the existing game and start over but armed with knowledge gained from (1) screwing up the first time and (2) testing things in creative mode.

I’d been playing Minecraft one day and my [now late] son-in-law pops into my game and it takes him just a few seconds to see that I’m in creative mode… and he’s giving me grief about it, goes on a mini rant about how creative mode is really cheating and I’m citing “my world, my rules” and keep right on doing what I was doing, which was trying to figure out if the area I spawned in was one that I could survive in. I had copied the survival mode game I’d started and put it in creative mode and, good thing, too, because where I had planned to dig my mine – and collect the cobblestone and other stuff I needed – I would get maybe a third of the way down when I broke into an internal ravine and fell to the bottom of it.

Yeah, ouch. In creative mode, I didn’t die but I made the immediate note to not start my mine where I had planned to and more so when, even if, by chance, I survived the fall, I wouldn’t have had enough… stuff to find my way out of the ravine. The kicker to this part of the story was that he started checking out worlds in creative mode as well… while still ranting about it being cheating.

Being in creative mode in Planet Crafter reveals a lot of stuff that can be made in the game and some of it, at this point in time, I have no idea what it’s for and, really, at this point, I don’t really care about that because I just want to survive the opening parts of the game – building additional shelters along the route to wrecked ships and outfitting them with bare necessity stuff – and being more miserly with the food I have in the opening moments.

I still think it sucks that my oxygen refreshes when I go into my home but water and food keeps being consumed which, I guess, makes sense “in reality” but it’s still a pain in the ass and one that is going to keep me on my toes and not spend a whole lot of time standing around trying to figure out what I’m going to do next.

The real problem is going after materials to build stuff. There’s iron, ice, silicone, magnesium, and titanium lying around all over the place and iron – one of the main minerals needed to build stuff – isn’t that easy to find so you wind up running around trying to get what you need and using up resources and, yeah, this game takes some planning and you’d do well not to wander too far away from your home base unless you’ve got food, water, and air in your backpack. There are storage chests “scattered” in places and you might hit a gold mine and find some materials you need, maybe a bottle of water or air and, yeah, mon, sometimes, there’s food in them there chests!

But you have to balance the stuff you can pick up with the space you have that’s not being used for food, air, and water and in the opening moments, the initial T1 backpack isn’t all that roomy; the T1 oxygen tank doesn’t hold a lot of oxygen – and it takes two cobalt to make one oxygen – but only one ice to make water and I’ve been amazed to find that if I’m not looking for cobalt, it’s damned near everywhere but when I am looking for it? Yeah, I’m sure you can figure out how that goes.

I probably wouldn’t be all that worried about stuff if I didn’t need some iridium so I can build a T1 heater and the only place I know where to find some is in the wrecked ship that can be seen from my crash site… but it takes a lot of resources to get there and then you need to have and equip the tool that disassembles things as well as the torch/flashlight in order to find the chests that have the iridium and your food, air, and water supplies are dwindling and, hopefully, you don’t overload your meager backpack and become unable to carry anything else.

I have a plan to build two shelters along the route to the first wrecked ship. I tested this in creative mode to find the right place to set them up so that I can get back to home base without buying the farm. Yesterday, I discovered another wreck – making it the third wreck in the area – and it took making three shelters in addition to the one I had already placed along the route to wreck #2 and, sheesh, that’s a lot of work and materials to be able to get at wreck #3’s measly offerings – but going there is going to have to be one of those down the road projects. It’s like the first wreck is “easy” to get to; the second wreck, well, you gotta go on a hike to get to it and, I’m rethinking that it needs two shelters to get there instead of the one I plan to build. Number 3… well, I might get it and I might not and there’s a fourth area that I discovered yesterday that’s going to be another down the road project considering the distance that has to be covered to get there.

I am determined to figure this game out. I’m thinking that if I can get past the opening stuff, I have a good chance of being able to terraform the planet so, we’ll see…

Steam Gaming: Planet Crafter

I saw this game being advertised on X (formerly known as Twitter) and I watched the demo video and thought, “Hmm, this is different – might be fun!”

$7.49 later I’m sitting and staring at my Steam Deck because I’m stuck and I’m stuck because I didn’t manage what little food I had to start the game with and it didn’t occur to me until today that I should have scrounged up enough materials like iron and titanium to build “shelters” between my main base and the two areas I found with wrecked ships that have storage trunks in them that have… stuff in them including food.

My problem is that I won’t live long enough to be able to scrounge for the materials I need to build and set up a mid-point shelter and I’m also miffed and scratching my head because the game wants me to build a progress screen… and there’s no formula to build it. So, let me back up a little.

Planet Crafter opens with your capsule deorbiting and crashing. When the dust clears, your capsule is sitting in a place that if you open the settings as you create the game, you can pick where your capsule’s going to land and the area that you will start your effort to terraform the planet. Simple, right? Nope. You have to run around and collect minerals and stuff that are lying around all over the place – and you’d do well to be able to remember, upon sight, which mineral is which, so you don’t wind up using up your limited space with too much of the wrong stuff.

The moment you land, you’re using water and food – and your capsule has a storage container that has a little food in it and a construction terminal where, after you run around and collect cobalt and ice, you can create air with the cobalt and water with the ice and the game will tell you what you need to build next – and a message that you open and read informs you that you have to terraform this place to 175000 ti… and whatever that means.

I don’t want to talk about how many times I died because I was so busy looking for iron that I wasn’t paying attention to my food, air, and water and… I awaken in my capsule and being told that some of the inventory I was carrying is “lost,” which it really isn’t but just like in Minecraft, I have x-amount of time to get back to where I died to find the storage chest with my “lost” items. Lucky for me, I was able to get back to get my stuff and… the game continues.

I created a game that runs in Creative mode so I could scope out some of the things that are buildable and available and to get a feel for building without having to worry about dying and I learned something about the place I landed at and when the landing area goes from desert to blue sky and raining: It’ll put my whole base underwater!

I had been exploring a wider area than I can playing normally right now and I’m finding – and taking note – of things that I’m going to need in my regular game, and I’d done all that I felt like doing and returned to my base and… fuck, me – it’s almost totally submerged! No big deal playing in Creative – it’s a throwaway game but now that I know what’s going to happen when it starts to rain, I need to have a base that’s not sitting at the bottom of the valley I landed in. So, I deleted my original game and started a new one and abandoned my landing spot in favor of an area of higher ground that’s also not that far from a wrecked ship and one that I know has stuff in it that I’m going to need.

I chose to keep the default landing spot since it was the one I knew a little bit about already. This game isn’t easy; I found a wiki for it but it’s not a lot of help and I didn’t see anything that looked like a walkthrough and, no, I don’t have a problem consulting a wiki and walkthrough when, admittedly, I have no idea what I’m supposed to be doing or how to do it..

I think it sucks that I continue to use air and water from my suit when I’m inside my shelter and not using oxygen. There’s plenty of cobalt lying around to make air and there’s lots of ice for water… but iron is in short supply and to make things interesting, I have to build a heater that requires a mineral that’s not on the ground in my area – but it’s in the wrecked ship that I can scrounge up enough supplies to get there… but I might not make it back. Which is why, in my new game, I built my home base (a) on high ground and (b) close to the wrecked ship and while (c) guarding what little food I have closely.

If I had hair, I’d be pulling it out right about now – and this game is going to be fun!

Steam Gaming: Steam Deck Update

What’s been going on with my plunge into gaming with Valve’s Steam Deck?

Why, I’m glad you asked! I’m looking forward to playing a Ratchet and Clank game that isn’t on a PlayStation, which should be good to go in a little while. I’ve found, purchased, and played some familiar games, like Elite Dangerous with the Odyssey DLC but I’m having a tiny bit of trouble figuring a couple of things out with the controls – they don’t quite behave like they do with my Xbox controller, but I’ll figure it out.

The biggest thing I’ve seen that’s not to my liking is that the Steam Deck gets pretty hot after, oh, maybe twenty minutes of playing and is prone to locking up or going through a series of shutting down and rebooting, which I’m finding a bit strange since it has a fan; to compare, I’m almost always doing something on my iPad and if it gets hot, I never notice it and likewise for my Samsung Pro tablet, neither of which have an internal fan.

I added a 1TB SD card to it – and to my lady’s Steam Deck and after she inexplicably ran out of space loading the games she wanted to play. I’m a bit surprised at the open SD slot itself – I’m used to devices with a covered SD card slot that makes it easy to get at the slot and can keep dirt and stuff out – and it just trips me out having to install one because I have big fingers, those cards are real tiny, and because I keep my fingernails short, installing the card into the Deck got interesting.

Stuck it in and getting it formatted was pretty easy and fast – but now I had a question: How to install games on the SD card? Well, after installing the SD card in my lady’s Deck and picked an uninstalled game to install, yay – it gave me a choice of where to install the game! Question answered! Let the gaming begin!

The overheating thing is going to be a problem for me since, when I get to playing a game, I’m at it for hours on end so if this thing is going to get hot, lock up, shut down and reboot in a loop, well, you pay your money, you take your chances, which will likely result in me not taking it with me on the road as well as its battery… can’t hang with me. As you might recall, I was playing “No Man’s Sky” and I had the Deck unplugged and after about twenty minutes of playing, the Deck alerted me that the battery was low and, what the fuck?

Which is, in a way, hilarious because with my iPhone and iPad, I can leave them unplugged for hours and beat and bang on them without a problem – and these devices have been notorious for their shitty battery performance… but my Steam Deck’s battery seems to be suffering from diarrhea.

The graphics are top-notch; there are a lot of games that are way cheaper than the $59.99 or $69.99 I’m used to seeing in the Xbox store – but that’s why I have Ultimate GamePass so I can play a lot of games – and for as long as I want or until it goes away – for $14.99. I’m not suggesting that Valve get into something like this but I do like that they have a lot of games under $20.00, you know, if they can get me interested in playing them.

I’m gonna have to spend some time prowling the Steam store to get a better feel of what games they have to offer and… I’ll let y’all know how things are going with the Steam Deck.

Steam Gaming: Valve’s Steam Deck

I remember getting Sony’s PSP portable for gaming and it was cool to be able to play games without being tied down to my PS2 console.

Portables have come a long way since the PSP came on the scene and the latest thing is Valve’s Steam Deck. I’ve been seeing and reading things about it since it first came out but I was happy with my Xbox consoles and the PS3 I had but since then, well, my lady wanted something portable to play games on (even though I got her an Xbox Series X console); we looked at the Nintendo Switch which, to me, came in “too many flavors” and, worse, didn’t have any games she was interested in playing.

And games that Steam has and when we said, “Okay, let’s see what this Steam thing is all about.” I wound up getting her a Steam Deck – and let me tell you how much of a pain in the ass that was because when I went to pay for it, the Steam website not only rejected my card but triggered an alert from my bank asking me if I had made this payment. Once I said, “Yeah, it was me!” paying for her Steam Deck went through without a problem although I’ll admit to fucking up: She had picked out the games she wanted and I paid for them and only later finding out that… they were now my games.

Shit. She had to get the games again and once she created her Steam account but the good thing was that they didn’t cost that much. I ordered my own Steam Deck a few days later and, yep, went through the same shit I experienced buying her device – and then again when I found familiar games – and games that I have on my Xbox – available on Steam and I had to go through some shit with Valve/Steam to prove that, yes, I’m the one trying to pay for this stuff and stop telling me that my bank is the one rejecting it because I know that if they have a question about a purchase I’m making, I’ll immediately get a text from them asking, “You da one paying for dis?”

But now I have to figure out how it works because I know she’s going to have a gazillion questions that I’m gonna need the answers to. I kinda screwed up because I didn’t get her the unit with the most available space because she doesn’t play games like I do so I wound up getting both of us 1TB SD cards so that she now has room to download all of her games… and I have space available for the games I’m sure I’ll be dowloading.

So. The Steam Deck ain’t little and like the old PSP was. It has a good-sized screen and the familiar joysticks, D-pad, and the A, B, X, and Y buttons that my Xbox controllers have. It also has two sets of “levers” on the underside of the unit that, at first, I didn’t know were there (and because I hadn’t bothered to look at the underside of it) but, okay, they’re probably needed for some games and like the two pads that I’m not sure, at this moment, what they’re for and what they do – but I did find that I can sometimes move a cursor with them.

This thing is kinda heavy but that makes sense – I think. It gets hot, too, and I appreciate that it has fans in it to keep it cool but I have to be careful about how I set it down because I’ll wind up blocking the bottom vent and it’ll heat up until I pick it up again and I’m still trying to figure out the best way to hold it when I’m not playing a game.

Its menu system took me a few to figure out but that was to be expected but I found out the other day that if I’m installing a game that required me to type in some information, um, okay, why doesn’t the keyboard automatically show up? Found that I have to click a button that has three dots on it to bring up a menu so I can select the keyboard which is kind of a pain in the ass – but I’ll get used to it and it’s something I know I’m gonna have to show my lady, too.

I started out playing a game that, when I had a PlayStation, I loved playing: God of War. It’s also the game that made me not like games that have puzzles in them and this version of it is no different – but that’s not the point of things but what is the point is how the Steam Deck’s battery… sucks. I was playing God of War with it unplugged and I got a message saying that the battery was low – and I’d only been playing for maybe an hour and in that time, the battery went from 94% to 4%! Okay, not only is that not cool but explains why the deck came with a bag for its power cord.

The case for the Steam Deck is nice but even my lady wanted to know why there isn’t room inside for the power cord; it’s better to lug around one thing than it is to lug around two things in this case. It downloads games rather quickly, which is a good thing; it’s not like when I download a game on my Xbox and how I wind up starting the download and walking away from it because despite being connected to our high-speed internet connection, the vaunted Xbox Series X takes its own sweet time downloading stuff.

I saw that it has a place to plug in a headset and… it’s Bluetooth enabled, which is cool since I have Bluetooth earbuds and a Bluetooth headset – and a plug-in headset for my Xbox and it just might work on the Steam Deck, too. So far, I haven’t experienced any lagging when playing games although I was in the middle of playing God of War and the whole deck locked up on me and I had a bitch of a time powering it off since, again, the whole thing shot itself in the head.

Is it worth the $500+ plus that I paid for it? Eh, yeah, so far it is but the jury remains out as far as a final verdict is concerned. Right now, I’m playing No Man’s Sky, a game I’ve been playing on my Xbox for a few years now and… it’s not different at all playing it on the Steam Deck.

I’ll let you know how it goes…