Garwoofoo

I've been playing a bit of New Vegas too but it's not really grabbing me, like you say it is very much like Starfield and I'm not sure I've got the patience for another Bethesda potato people jank fest right now. I'm not really a Fallout fan to be honest, but I am enjoying the TV show at least.

Yeah, part of the problem is I'm trying to test out control configurations and I'm stuck somewhere deep in Moria with a full list of "collect 7 caveclaw gizzards" quests, everything looks the same and I've no real idea where I'm supposed to be going. Might have to warp out to the Shire or something just so I can run around and test stuff without constantly falling off bridges.

I managed to get LOTRO running on the Steam Deck! Just to see if I could, really. It runs pretty well but it's a challenge to come up with a decent control scheme, and even when you do cobble together something that works, it's like your brain has to filter everything through an additional layer to work out the buttons to press. The game's not even designed for controller input, let alone a portable device.

That said, there are two community layouts that I think kind of have half the right ideas each, I think if I took the best bits of each and combined them I could actually come up with something that would work. Might be a fun little project for a rainy afternoon.

It does have that exact graphical style beloved of cheap mobile games, all exaggerated facial features and long limbs like some sort of Dreamworks knock-off. I can see why you'd mistake it at a glance.

The turn-based tactics genre seems cursed, sadly. They keep making them and they're almost always decent but none of them seem to ever come close to achieving the success that XCOM did. Even the games with the biggest licenses (Persona, Gears, MARVEL ferchrissake) seem to tank. Hard to imagine a brand new IP with zero publisher support ever achieving any traction.

Play - The Lamplighters League

An educational tale as to the stupidity and shortsightedness of the games industry. This game was declared a commercial failure less than a week after release, publishers Paradox "parted ways" with the developers Harebrained Schemes (of Shadowrun and Battletech fame), layoffs ensued, and support for the game was ended a couple of months later. The fact that the game was only released on two platforms (PC and Xbox), had very little hype and was on Game Pass on day one might you think have had something to do with low initial sales but who said logic has to come into this? Additionally it was clearly kicked out of the door too soon and initially had some quite severe bugs which can't have helped. I think we can chalk this one up to publisher stupidity, guys.

Which is a shame because this game, even as it stands, is absolutely superb. A kind of hybrid of stealth game and turn-based XCOM-alike (with the balance weighted toward the latter) set in the 1930s with a team of rogues and scoundrels globe-trotting and trying to take down some nefarious bad guys called the Banished Court. It has absolutely bags of character, a great sense of style, and lots of things to keep track of which makes it incredibly engaging to play. It really does have "lost classic" written all over it and I hope people continue to discover this for years to come.

Sadly - although most of the game's crash bugs have apparently been fixed - performance is still poor on every platform, I think PC owners have the better of this one though as it's turn-based it's still playable if slightly janky on Series X. We also got one small piece of free DLC and that's it, though the game was clearly set up for more. It's a real pity, because a slick and finished version of Lamplighters League would have been a superb game, but even in its more-or-less-finished form it is still worth checking out.