Pretty much haha.

I have distinct memories of… actually having to look away when Alyx first gets sent through Kleiner’s teleport in the beginning of HL2…

Because my piece of crap eMachine could not handle the scene, when your view is centered on Alyx.

It would ctd every single time time, the 100% reliable work around was to look at the ground before the screen flashing/color inversion thing happens… I’m pretty sure my rig just could not handle that ‘negative’ effect on top of the … bloomy, glowing sparks/lightning from the teleporter, at the same time.

Other than only that scene in particular, the game ran well, lol.

Its Todd’s fault.

Fucking horse armor.

I remeber seeing my lifelong, die hard Nintendo fan brother, play BotW.

After watching for about 30 minutes, I said something like ‘oh neat, its like an open world, version of a Zelda game, with more voice acting, open world item durability mechanics, and Garry’s Mod style physics/build nonsense!’

I meant it in earnest. I did think this was neat, though maybe the item durabilty values or mechanics could have been tweaked a bit, seems like you often spend a bunch of time just re-grinding for good weapons that break too fast, with no straightforward repair mechanic.

But he thought this was entirely an insult.

He rarely played non Nintendo games, hated online multiplayer and never played an open world survival craft game, had never played GMod, and seemed to actually think these were all revolutionary game design concepts.

Meanwhile I’d been a mostly PC gamer since like 2003, played too much GMod, DayZ (back when it was an Arma 2 mod), and had even written some fairly comprehensive game modes (mods, basically?) for GMod, and had… just in general played a much wider variety of games.

When he decided to finally get a gaming laptop, he found Black Mesa when it formally, fully released for $$$, and he entirely did not believe me when I said that I had actually chatted with some of their dev team before, waaaay back when Black Mesa was just an insane dream of a bunch of HL2 adjacent dorks, many of whom talked and argued on ModDB and the old Facepunch forums before Garry nuked them.

… He also did not believe me when I told him I actually met, and took a picture with Ashley Burch at PAX, back when she was just Ash from ‘Hey Ash Watcha Playin?’, waaay before she became the voice of Aloy, and she and her brother did panels at PAX.

Same with Jonathan Coulton, the guy who wrote the ending songs for Portal and Portal 2, which my brother now finally discovered in like … 2022? When he finally got a gaming laptop.

I had the pictures, from a decade ago at that point, but he was so convinced I was lying he wouldn’t even look at them.

I mean, yes, but you need a … fairly out of comparable price range to a console, pc, to be able to emulate … most wiiU forward games? depending on specific game, your definition of a playable frame rate?

I was trying to mostly focus on the ‘console wars’ aspect of the whole thing, and how official releases that were console exclusives a decade ago on an Xbox or PS… basically those all just come out on PC a few years later now, though there are a few exceptions to this, I think.

Bringing emulation into the discussion makes the comparison exceptionally complicated, because PCs vary so much, in so many ways, and of course the legal … dark gray area, and how its often considerably more complicated than just plug and play.

Ah, my American is showing, assumed you were ‘one of us’ lol.

Apologies.

But uh yeah… we are completely fucked lol.

EDIT: I still can’t wrap my head around how basically every American Asmongold viewer right now must be tying themselves in even more mental pretzels to avoid comprehending how they voted for the guy that just made not only video games and hardware instantly 30% more expensive, but also basically everything else they need to buy/pay regularly to keep their ‘Being a Living Human Being’ battlepass going.

I just cannot grasp how stupid these idiots are, but there are somethingn like 100 million of them.

Genuine question: How is MarioKart 10 different from MarioKart 9? Or 7? Or 4?

You know the tariffs mean the Switch 2 may actually now cost $600, not $450, right?

You gotta pay the club membership fee before you can pay for event attendance.

The Nintendo fanboys/girls are the real, true, ‘winners’ of the console wars mindset, the last holdouts.

Almost nobody really gives a shit anymore to tie their personalities to Sony or MSFT… because basically, console exclusives don’t really exist, and almost everything is on PC as well.

But Nintendo? Nope. The company still holds a death grip on their inhouse titles being exclusive to their consoles, and the nostalgia/stolckhom syndrome is apparently the strongest with the Nintendo crowd.

It took almost a decade for people to finally be able to admit that GameFreak is basically incompetent. You could not say that even 5 years ago w/o a deluge of insults and arguments and special pleading.

The cope is strong with these ones, Nintendo would never hurt them without a good reason for doing so.

I suggest you check out Decky FrameGen.

The technicals are … very complex, but the upshot is: It basically injects FrameScaling/FrameGen modes into games that don’t officially support them on AMD hardware.

So… I’ve done this with CP2077, and if I understand this right, basically it injects FSR3, but under the DLSS settings under the game’s options menu… and it works better than the game’s current officially supported FSR 2 for the Deck.

Elden Ring may also be able to benefit from it.

Yep, I already said the Switch 2 makes sense if all you care about is playing Switch 2 games.

I am not trying to aruge that the Deck is just hands down, inherently superior in all cases, for everyone.

I hope there’s a way for you to put parental controls on your 12 yo’s Fortnite account’s ability to buy microtransactions, and that you have enough time to teach them how to identify and disregard all the dark patterns in the game that encourage irresponsible spending habits, as well as resist all the social peer pressure that comes with an MTX heavy game.

The offical dock is $80, but you can get the Baseus Dock for between $30 and $40.

Point by point:

1: I mean, I guess? I do not even have a mouse myself right now… but if I needed just a cheapo one for basic use… you can get something functional for $20 or under, a basic mouse you’d get for a work laptop type thing.

2: People have all kinds of ‘unusual’ Deck set ups.

The mouse dongle you just mentioned wouldn’t… really make that much sense, as … you can just hold it… and use the touch pads… or the touch sensitive screen itself…

But its actually not uncommon for people to dock their deck, sync it to a controller or M+K, and then stream it to a smart tv, or a dumb one via a dongle or direct connection to the dock. No, you’re not gonna get true 4k on any non retro game, but a good number of people do something like this.

3: … As compared to…? Your minimum 3x more expensive PC you can upgrade with even more money? Another console/handheld you… can’t upgrade?

Unless the Switch 2 can play Cyberpunk 2077 at better than 45 fps, with graphics basically medium/high, I don’t see how the Deck is ‘showing its age’ compared to other similarly priced handhelds.

Decky FrameGen is pretty neat. I think I managed to tweak mine up to an avg of almost 55 on the benchmark, and thats without mucking around in CET to squeeze out even more.

4: I absolutely understand buying a Switch 2 is your best option if you want a very straightforward, doubleplus legal, and expensive way to play Switch 2 games.

Like, if you’re super dedicated to current era Nintendo games, sure, fine, yep, get a Switch 2.

But if you just like games in general…

5: Pretty much yeah, I agree. Its possible to get it working with a Deck, but its gonna be a lot more hassle, and you’ll need peripherals, yep.

wait wait wait.

Fucking… what?

… Are they trying to preempt the expected ‘GTA 6 MSRPs for $120, base edition and breaks all video game pricing’ thing?

I’m seeing $80 for Mario Kart World.

puts on eyepatch and peg leg

So… its $50 more than an LCD, 256 GB Steam Deck (the Switch 2 is also LCD).

A Deck has two touchpads that work as mice.

And you can buy a real mouse with those $50 bucks you saved.

Oh right and it has a bigger screen, can run almost every modern to ancient PC game, and basically every retro game if you can handle an EmuDeck or RetroDeck guided installer, oh and it also just is a computer that does everything a mid tier linux laptop can do.

It can even run Switch games, and probably will be able to run Switch 2 games in… what, 2 years? 3 years?

I’m really not trying to rain on the parade here, but uh… yeah I do not understand the cost benefit analysis on a Switch 2 vs a Deck unless:

You really, really want to play Switch 2 games soon

OR

The Switch 2 somehow has vastly superior performance to a Steam Deck

… I kinda doubt that last one being the case, but the specs aren’t out yet (afaik) so I guess it is possible.

EDIT: Ok, so uh… tariffs just happened.

Switch 2 may now be $600.

https://www.tweaktown.com/news/104409/nintendo-switch-2-price-may-jump-from-449-to-600-following-trumps-tariffs/index.html

Preorders have been delayed.

Steam Decks are manufactured in Taiwan… so they’ll likely jump in price too… but that could possibly be delayed for at least a bit…

I think Valve has warehouses in the US full of them, and they are also a private company with absurdly deep pockets, and thus don’t have the ‘maximize shareholder profit in current/next quarter’ mandate… so they may be able to keep their costs to consumers from raising, by just internally subsidizing them…

But I really have no idea.

It always sucks to have to cut off or go no contact/ghost absurd family members… but after a long pattern of concerning, manipulative and/or abusive behavior… that’d you really only put up with because they’re family… after a while, that reason/excuse becomes worthless.

Everything Mel Brooks.

Airplane!

The Producers

Blazing Saddles… etc.

So many of his movies have such memorable lines and jokes that still hold up today.

Hope that lake doesn’t have any breezes or gusts.

… Also, assuming you just did the calc for neutralizing the weight of said person…

Even if there was no wind… they could not walk.

Walking requires weight to work.

A surface you can push off of.

It seems like the picture shows one guy with walking sticks, which I guess might kinda work if the lake is less than about 2 or 3 feet, or under a meter deep… not too many lakes like that.

Maybe something like stilts… or … huge snowshoe/flipper type things… might work?

Reading the main post and other comments you’ve made giving more context, IMO you are correct, your aunt is a narcissistic sociopath.

Honestly, this takes more effort and is more creative than making a profile on a dating app.

It is also pretty honest.

… I don’t think this is likely to actually work, due to the obvious red flags, but it is probably more likely to actually work than doing this same thing on an app.

I think I agree with you but maybe didn’t explain my stance so well.

Putin and his immediate orbit are … largely, but not entirely, successfully creating a hyperreality for everyone else to live in and experience, they purposefully engage in it as an intentional tactic, to sow confusion and chaos around everything, and then at least project into that chaos that they are stability.

Trump and his immediate circle… are too fucking incompotent to engage in creating a hyperreality as an intentional tactic… in the sense that they actually believe in half of the insane bullshit they throw out into the world, and they are not actually capable of projecting themselves as that island of stability.

Putin and co largely do not live in the hyperreality they create, at least not anywhere near to the extent Trump and co do.

Putin usually knows when he’s lying or promoting an utterly dubious notion.

Of course there are some utter nonsense ideas that Putin seems to truly believe, what with his personal idea of how Russo/Slavic history, and identity actually work, and his initial vast overestimation of the capability of the Russian military.

But Trump… doesn’t even know enough, in most instances, to even know if he is intentionally lying or not.

Trump himself is to a much greater extent, completely lost in the hyperreality he initially created, and can no longer wield it as a political/psychological weapon/tactic with intentionality.

To torture a metaphor:

Trump is lost in the sauce, utterly drowning in it, Putin just has a daily foot bath in the sauce.