I was talking about the hardcore gamerz being on top of things like the Rog Ally and Steam Deck, but the rllmuk thread really shows that not to be true. The thread consists of two people who understand it and are quite enthusiastic, three people determined to hate it for the Xbox branding, and everyone else failing to get their heads around what it is. My favorite is when someone has the machine explained to them and they say something like, "Oh I see, it's just a streaming device for Xbox that can play a few other things."
I'm also seeing threads on Reddit where people are laughing at it's pitiful capabilities compared to the PS Portal. I mean, what? That literally is just a streaming device.
Xbox have got their work cut out here.
Releasing this is an interesting move by Microsoft, and potentially a very clever one. I reckon handheld PCs might be the next big thing. The Steam Deck pushed them into the minds of gamers like ourselves, but it didn't really break through into the mainstream. Meanwhile the ROG Ally is gaming's best kept secret, a device with surprisingly few compromises, and a huge amount of power for something you can play in your hand. I've gone on record on this very forum (to an audience of upwards of seven) as saying that it might be the best gaming device ever made.
Handheld gaming is on the rise, in the wake of the Switch, and if Xbox can market this into the mainstream, people will be blown away by the idea of playing stuff that looks like their PS5 games on a handheld. There's also the other great strength of PC gaming - an incredibly wide library with many great games available for incredibly cheap. You can get Xcom 2, a game that has never been surpassed in its genre, with all the DLC, for £4.29 right now.
On the other hand, to those of us in the know, it is striking that it is just a ROG Ally with Xbox branding. You can just play your Steam, GOG, and Epic libraries on it. You can't play the Xbox console library on it except via streaming. Obviously 90% of the Xbox library is on PC Game pass, but there are the odd games that are locked to the console. Like, I'd play Lost Odyssey if I could, but even if I bought it on the Xbox store, it's not available for cloud streaming so I can't play it on PC at all. I could emulate it, of course, as the ROG Ally can emulate Xbox 360, and I actually still have a copy and an Xbox 360, but it's always a bit frustrating that I can't just buy it and play it through Game Pass somehow. I wonder if that sort of thing might get confusing for some people. I'm personally struggling to see if there is any advantage to buying an Xbox ROG Ally over an X or a Z1 Extreme model. Is the Xbox branding going to make this stand out above the crowd of handheld PCs? It does seem to be purely an exercise in branding, especially as you could set your handheld PC up to boot straight into Game Pass if you wanted to.
That spoiler sounds so wild
Have you read the earlier one about the motorbike? That was an all-timer gaming moment for me, realising "Oh wait, the game wants me to do THIS???"
The side stories are a real highlight generally. Some of them are really quite hard though. We played one where you have to go through a series of increasingly-difficult obstacle courses while throwing a bomb back and forth to each other. If anyone holds the bomb for too long it explodes. We spontaniously high-fived after doing that one. It was a nice moment.
I'm consistently the weak link in our team, as is to be expected.
He's 12.
Obviously it depends on the kid, but there's a bit of swearing - characters say "shit" several times. There's some guns and swords, but the enemies are all robots I think, so no blood or death generally, certainly nothing gratuitous. We're not all that far into the game, though. The second section has seen us both get eaten by piranhas and impaled on thorns, albeit in a fairly cartoonish manner.
However, there is one section that you'll have to judge for yourself because it is pretty messed-up, and your kid will either find it upsetting or hilarious. I urge you to read the following spoiler, but I'm putting it in spoiler tags to keep from spoiling it for everyone else.
Spoiler - click to show In the section in question, you both play as pigs. You make your way through a colourful farmyard in the style of a kid's game (one of the pigs propels themselves through the air by farting rainbows). This is all fine until you come across a group of pigs barbecueing another pig. So you ignore that and carry on, and the climax of the level involves both pigs leaping into a meat grinder, complete with a huge splatter of blood. You then end the level playing as sausages, cooking yourselves, jumping into hot dog buns, and being eaten. Posting a video will break the spoiler tags, but searching YouTube for "Split Fiction Pig Level" will allow you to see for yourself.
Edit - I'm assuming you're talking about Split Fiction, and not Space Marine 2. Obviously children should be introduced to WH40K as young as possible, in order to prepare them for the dystopian future that awaits them.
feltmonkey