I’ve been replaying Dragon Quest 8 (PS2) on my Steam Deck, and it just fills me with joy. Except for the absolutely bonkers choices they hardcoded for buttons and camera movement. Ah, good times.
I’ve been suspicious that newer production lines for joysticks have been cutting costs in cheaper materials for a while now. I usually replace the joysticks when they drift, but I’m also quite comfortable to taking things apart and fixing them.
I remember my old PS2 controllers never drifted and that was back when I played hard on them every day after school. These days I hardly have time to play during the week, and they regularly go bad within a year or two.
It was even better before they ditched streaming through GeForce Experience or whatever. Moonlight + Sunshine work, but I’ve never felt like there was a good Sunshine configuration tool, and adding games manually has always been too much of a pain for me to bother with.
As long as the younger generation taking over are well versed in the history of the series and in touch with what people have loved over the years to not run off into another FF13 or FF15 (before they started damage control before release to shoehorn in a single “moogle”)?
That said, I think what I really want is a game run by someone at the top with an epic vision for the experience who can make sure everything from combat to mini games are feeding into the grand scheme of the game.
I think once I accidentally made a microblog when I meant to start a thread in a magazine? It felt super vague and I basically haven’t bothered making too-level posts since. I just lurk and post snark.
I don’t think a game engine needs feature parity with Unreal, it just needs to be easier to get in and make something. The learning curve with Unreal is very steep and Unity’s has historically been… well, less steep (arguably?).
Unity has other problems to solve for though. Like undoing the damage from their ex-CEO.
I’m considering an Asus ROG Ally. Already have a Steam Deck, but using my GoG library and EGS freebies is awkward, and Xbox GamePass as well. The Ally seems like a good way to get all that natively via Windows, plus a better looking screen than the Deck…