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  • 18 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: July 1st, 2023
  • The Octonaut@mander.xyztoGames@lemmy.world•Nintendo has lowered its Switch forecast after sales fell 31%English
    221·
    12 days ago

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

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

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

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

  • The Octonaut@mander.xyztomemes@lemmy.world•My Nose At Night When I'm Trying To Sleep
    20·
    25 days ago

    I think there’s some useful context, if not a good defence of this story.

    It’s one of the original stories told by Reverend Awdry told to his 2 year old, measles-ridden child in 1942 war-era England (Wait, is this making it worse?).

    Awdry would sing/recite old poems to Christopher, who then pressed him for further details that turned into a story.

    For example, the opening of that episode of Thomas features the Limerick that prompted the story, which was around at least since 1902:

    In the original story by Awdry, there is only a single tunnel, and the train is completely blocking the line and essentially ruining a business. So stubborn is the engine, that they have to dig a new tunnel beside the old one. The rails are removed and “a wall” are placed in front of the tunnel, for safety - to prevent trains literally running into the wrong tunnel and crashing. The Fat Director/Controller is also pretty unsympathetic deliberately - he commands people to push and pull the train out without success, but doesn’t himself help - “My doctor has forbidden me to push”. However the original books follow the realities of steam engine and railway operation far more closely than the TV series did (and as a result, the original series, closer to the books, were far more realistic than the later ones).

    As portrayed in the TV show it definitely comes off more villainous. But in the original telling we have to take away 70 years of Thomas trains having faces, personalities, relationships and familiarity. When originally told, the Henry story didn’t even take place in the same “universe” - there was just 3 abstract stories about trains, loosely based on old rhymes and news stories.