Garwoofoo

I watched Fantastic Four: First Steps and thought it was just very silly. I probably need to stop watching comic book movies, I can't remember the last one I genuinely enjoyed. Shang-Chi maybe.

Additional Play: Vampire Crawlers, the first-person card-based spin-off of Vampire Survivors.

I'm not sure quite what to make of this yet. It's got a clever design and does a good job of keeping all the VS-related stuff in it while being completely different in play. I have fond memories of playing Dungeon Master on the Amiga and I love deckbuilding games so I'm pre-disposed to like this kind of thing. And it's really quite compulsive in play, time flies by and you're always unlocking new stuff to play with. It's definitely got that "just one more go" quality to it.

But it feels a bit empty too, it's like a meal that's all sugar and no nutrition. 95% of what you're doing is just playing cards in an obvious order, there isn't (so far) a lot of clever strategy there. And it suffers from the problem of the whole roguelike genre: it doesn't really matter how good you are at it, you just need to play it enough to unlock things that will make you good at it. It feels like it's playing you, rather than you playing it.

But I do want to carry on playing it, and maybe it gets better later on (VS definitely did); I'll report back in a couple of days.

FF7 Remake runs really really well on the Deck so I’d be surprised if you couldn’t get similarly great results on the Claw. There’s a tiny little mod you can do that turns off the overly aggressive dynamic resolution and after that it looks amazing and runs really well. Out of the box it easily hits a consistent 40fps but I used Lossless Scaling to get it to 60 and had no issues with it at all after that.

Rebirth is a slightly different matter, but I’m still enjoying my Deck playthrough. It’s a bit more compromised though.

I’m not a highly monied contractor any more, I burned out and jacked it all in to do something worthwhile. I’m now a much poorer but much happier employee of a charitable housing trust.

I can still afford three quid though, so thanks for flagging that up. Appreciated.

When you said Portal 1 and 2 were cheap, I didn’t think you meant they were three quid for the pair. Bought.