Mr Party Hat

I played through Aperture Desk Job last night, which is just a tech demo for the Deck, but it has all of Portal 2's incredible charm and writing. It was nice just spending 30 minutes back with Cave, and a vaguely mad robot.

3200 layoffs at Xbox, then. They've managed to avoid complete cultural vandalism (Double Fine and a couple others are getting 'runway' payments and keeping their IP as they regain independence), but that's a whole lot of job losses.

And in the same breath, they've stated they want to achieve one billion daily active users. As in, they want one eighth of the planet's population playing Xbox. Every day.

Fuck, and I think I speak for everyone, off.

Play
All PC handheld, all the time. I need an annoyingly cute nickname for the Legion; I feel like half of the Steam Deck's appeal is that you can call it Decky. Let's go with Lenny.

I've set up a whole load of crap on Lenny (no that's awful, I'll keep thinking). Emulation Station, PS5 remote play, Epic Store, GOG Store, and more. The trouble now is trying to focus on one or two things. This week's main games are:

Castle of Illusion on the Mega Drive. I'd always heard good things about this, but never played it back in the day. It's great fun, and easy enough that I don't have to save-state scum.

The Excavation of Hob's Barrow. This might end up being one of my favourite games of the year (that was released about a decade ago). Wonderfully acted, beautifully written, suitably creepy… it's just great.

Yooka Replaylee. I've heard the first level is the best bit, but even if it's downhill from here it's earned the 17 quid I paid for it. A lovely homage to Rare's N64 era. Plus it has a snake called Trowzer. At what point does innuendo become actual smut?

Bioshock Infinite. I think this got a bit of a raw deal when it first launched. It's not as clever as Bioshock, but it's still got more about it than most other FPS games. And the shooty shooty bits are a lot more enjoyable than the original game.

Want
More time to play Lenny.

Bin
Gaming devices that aren't Lenny.

I'm co-opting this to talk about my new Legion Go thingy, which is brilliant. To be honest it just makes me wish I'd bought a Deck 3 years ago.

As I mentioned, it's the entry-level model, with the Z2 Go chip, but I'm thoroughly impressed. Aside from indies, the most intensive game I've thrown at it so far is Bioshock Infinite, but it's whisper quiet with all the settings turned up, and maxing out the panel's 120hz refresh rate with the fancy frame gen thing. I'll be using the Go to play a lot of 2010s stuff; I reckon that's when diminishing graphical returns really started to become apparent. Infinite still looks great, and it's mad that we need a 900W, £2000 powerhouse to run something that looks a bit, but certainly not enough, better. The days of N64 into GameCube Rogue Squadron are long gone.

The Go itself is slightly unwieldy, feels premium, and has lovely sticks and d-pads. But the real winner is Steam OS. It has such a perfect understanding of what one of these handheld PCs should be. Every time I think "I wonder if I can…", Valve got there before me. Even booting into Linux desktop is simple, and I've managed to install a few bits like Banjo Recompiled, plus the Epic and GOG stores. Which somehow run in Windows, again flawlessly, for reasons I don't care to understand.

99p on loaded.com if you're feeling particularly frugal.

How Northern.