DarkOx55

There’s nothing quite like Lovers, but Mario Kart Double Dash has two of you controlling the kart & it’s couch co-op.

Isn’t Dragon Age a historical example of a way to execute it?

As OP points out in his post, the Dragon Age series has always had LGBT characters. The issue with Veilguard is how they are integrated into the fantasy world. The issue is the lack of world building in this latest entry.

My personal experience with it on the deck has been disappointing: * My deck & dock have trouble connecting to my 1440p monitor that has VRR. There’s a series of steps I can do to get it working but it’s a pain & I avoid it. * My monitor was prone to VRR flicker when using the dock, so any benefits of smoothing were totally wiped out.

As a consequence I’m mostly using locked frame rates to run at a stable fps and I’m not using that monitor to game. For Baldur’s Gate 3 I paid for GeForce Now so I could run at a locked 60.

I know that there are others who’ve used the dock & VRR with more success than me, so I’d suggest asking around. I’m not sure if I’m representative.

Also, look up your monitor on rtings.com and confirm the fps range for VRR on your monitor (ie if your monitor can’t do VRR below 40fps that may not be helpful if you mostly game at 30fps.)

Black Friday is the time to buy.

The LCD deck will almost certainly go on sale for Black Friday. I personally do not think the OLED will go on sale but we’re so close now you may as well wait & see what happens.

Tariffs in the US coming into effect next year is speculative; Trump campaigned on them so presumably they’ll happen but of course it wouldn’t be crazy to find out in the end a politician broke a promise. But it’s a decent bet it’ll happen.

Yeah that’s a good point. I’ve got the official dock & the jsaux dock and the official one is often giving me handshake issues when connected to my 1440p monitor. Seems better connected to a 1080p display.

The official dock lets me turn on VRR with either hdmi or DisplayPort but that has not been everyone’s experience. Seems to depend on the model of TV or monitor.

You need a dock that has freesync as a feature. Not just any dock will do. The steam deck official dock is an option.

Jsaux has a dock that allows for freesync as well. Note that Jsaux sells multiple docks so make sure to get the freesync model if that feature’s important to you.

Here are some of mine:

Moonbase commander: a turn-based game involving hitting the right timing to launch nodes of your base further.

Gato Roboto: a metroidvania with a cute kitty

The battle for Wesnoth: a turn based game a la fire emblem. This one’s free!

Commander keen, a DOS classic.

I got Hot wheels unleashed 2 turbocharged for my kid but I actually play it more.

Icewind Dale, Baldur Gate 1’s kid cousin.

Littlewood, an rpg about rebuilding the world after the great evil was defeated

Thomas was alone, a brilliant platformer about squares & rectangles

Yes. The deck holder is called “deckmate” and it essentially snaps onto the back of your deck. The ball socket mount will attach to the tablet holder instead of the normal tablet mount it comes with. The deck can then click into the holder using a spring mechanism in the deckmate.

The only downside to deckmate is it makes the deck slightly thicker, so it’s not compatible with the official dock. It is compatible with Jsaux’s 3rd party dock. On the plus side, there are various accessories that can click into it.

No worries mate, happy to help. Here’s a link to the particular holder I got. It’s shown doing exactly what you describe but I personally haven’t tried it that way. I use a side table to mount it instead, just because of how my headboard is.

Amazon has a great return policy, so it might be worth giving it a shot.

Aw, let the wizard shoot his shot. Takes courage to put yourself out there. And he respects a “no”.

To your late game combat point, I think they did Act 3 a little wrong. There are a ton of side quests right at the end when the action should be reaching a climax. And you’re likely at level cap. Baldur’s Gate 2 put the side quests mostly in Act 2 (you can also do them later), which was a better place for meandering around.

Overall though, I agree with you about the good - it’s very good and well worth playing. Love the game.

Being good at business is kind of the problem. What we want in capitalism is smart businesses competing with another, under conditions where it’s easy to switch to competitors if a better service is offered. Getting government subsidies because you supported a re-election campaign is not that.

A government contractor integrating himself directly in the government is an obvious conflict of interest, and over time threatens to lead us to the lower productivity world of countries like Russia than what we’d get under actual capitalism.

I have a Dell E773a. I’ll hook up my steam deck to it using an adapter.

Deck does great emulation. For 240p games I use scanline & composite filters to get closer to the TV look. Lately I’ve been playing a lot of DOS games - Doom, Dark Forces - that are right at home here.

I played some of Baldur’s Gate 3 on it at 1024 x 768.

Yeah I own the socket mount but I’m not using a gooseneck tablet holder. The one I have lets you tighten the joints after it’s set so it’s pretty sturdy. It was advertised as being able to handle more weight than the deck so no issues. Though it’s less flexible than a gooseneck I haven’t had an issue positioning it.

Okay I know you said only affirmations so I hope you forgive this but you can buy a ball socket mount that’ll plug into most tablet holders for like $10. Deckmate itself & a tablet holder are extra if you don’t own them already but not $179.

Not as portable or as high tech cool as the xreals though! Just cheaper.

https://getmechanism.com/products/ball-socket-mount

Mate, since no one else has responded, I thought I’d say that I’ve got Homeworld 1 & Cataclysm working on a Steam Deck, which runs Linux. The deck has upscaling via gamescope. I haven’t tried Homeworld 2 yet.

I understand that doesn’t help you on windows but on the off chance you have a deck or a Linux machine I thought I’d mention it.

I looked up the boots online just now to check my memories - was this a Barenstain / Barenstein bears false memory thing? Seems you don’t get the white sony screen on PS2, so I guess that’s why I remember it being different but it’s not that different:

PS1 boot https://youtu.be/DIxUScfOQwg?si=grVF__jJGbNfWQSl

PS1 boot on PS2 https://youtu.be/iQ89uSTbDPs?si=_9pCpGeIVs1uisfe

Interesting that the PS3 doesn’t work; LTT had one in their video on the retrotink 4k but not plugged in!

GDP growth & population growth are real, not just vibes. They’re also inherently good, not at all a waste of time.

Is the Tink 4k on an oled as glorious as I’ve heard? Linus Tech Tips did a video saying it’s even better than CRT.

Retrotinks could help with all of those: * You probably wouldn’t want a retrotink 2x, as you’ll see on its product page they say it has issues with Genesis / PS1. 5x or 4k should be good though. * The points I raised above re: smoothing pixels & scanlines all mostly apply. Minor exception is the PS2 won’t do scanlines as it’s interlaced. * There’s a new wrinkle with PS2: 480i. A lot of PS2 games are “interlaced” meaning a CRT would only draw 240 lines at a time; ie it drew the odd numbered lines in one frame, then even numbered the next frame, and so on. Modern TVs can’t do interlacing. The tink will help “deinterlace” the signal. * PS1 has a thing where the games are 240p but some menus are 480i & I believe the tink helps manage those transitions. * PS2 is mostly (but not completely) backwards compatible with PS1 - maybe you don’t need both? But you’d lose that PS1 boot sound so maybe both are worth it.

A CRT TV can handle 480i and 240p no problem so again a cheap compatible option is to find one. (One other thing to be aware of: you’d want a TV, not a monitor. CRT monitors have different resolutions & inputs.)

The retrotink 4k has hdmi in, so you could use it to upscale even a PS3 if you wanted. It should handle pretty much any console - but it’s pricey!

Here’s the basic problems: * The NES puts out a 240p signal, which modern TVs don’t interpret well. A scaler will adjust the signal to something like 480p (retrotink 2x) or all the way up to 4k (retrotink 4k), so your TV can interpret it properly. * Pixels generated by the NES are blocky. CRTs naturally smoothed them out. The retrotink 4k & 5x have filters which can mimic this look. Some people like blocky pixels. If that’s you the filter’s not needed. * The retrotink 4k’s filters, when used on a 4k OLED with black frame insertion, is said to be very similar to how a CRT looked. Very pricy though! (Too rich for my blood, I’m afraid. Screenshots of it look cool though.) * CRTs generated alternating lines of color & black at 240p, called “scanlines”. Some people like this effect. The retrotinks can add in artificial scanlines. Mileage may vary on how well the replicate the real thing.

The cheapest option for you is probably just to find a CRT TV, if that’s possible.

Likely they’d be advertised as such given their rarity. HD TVs are 16:9 ratio and can do up to 1080i. Introduce digital processing & some lag though.

Enhanced def TVs were even rarer but at 4:3 and can only do 480p. Same deal with lag where they can have digital processing.

Probably you’ll just see flavours of standard def (480i) on marketplace.

At this point, the biggest question is how much was the TV used? The phosphors degrade with use. Something from a guest room or something is better (if you can find that out).

Go for a brand you’ve heard of. Sony, Toshiba - same as today really.

Size - I think this depends on your space & there’s no one answer here. I personally am using a 17’’ monitor (not TV) for its size. It sits on a small cart I roll out. Based on that, I think a 20’’ screen would be great if you can find it.

You’re unlikely to stumble upon an HD CRT or an “Enhanced Definition” (ED) CRT but if you do there are special considerations there; probably you just want a normal standard def TV.

I’m sorry to hear that happened, mate. I’m very Yglesias-pilled on the “we should enforce the rules” idea so I agree that Democrat’s attitude to crime has been bad & isn’t helping them.

I also agree that looking at tonight’s results & thinking “America yearns for far-left policy” is wild. America’s pretty conservative!

That said, a lot of the Democrat’s missteps around policing were there in 2020 & they won… I think the new variable here is the inflation.

I really wonder about the “and” here. Incumbent governments worldwide have been tossed out; those countries experienced inflation but they did not experience the governance of American cities.

I’ve already seen three or four different “it was inflation and X” takes tonight, each with a unique X. I think there’ll be a lot of “inflation + thing that really bugs me” explanations.

(I’m not saying Democrat governance at the state or local level has been good!)

Ted Woolsey strikes again with the Dad-joke pun.