I played PC games since the early 90s, so I am well familiar with how things used to be before steam. And it was fine. I was hesitant to use steam at first, because like you say, I simply didn’t understand the point of it. Sometime after Valve released the orange box, that ended up being the first thing I bought on steam. And back then, some of the first things that I noticed about it was the ease of installing games, and the friends list that let me talk to and play games with my friends. I ended up getting really into team fortress 2, largely because I could play with people I knew, and we could even chat outside the game easily. It was easy to buy other games that these same friends were playing, and then enjoy a different game with them.

I got used to steam and it began to feel convenient, and at the same time, physical media started dying off. Steam let me easily install and uninstall any of my games whenever I wanted. I didn’t have to keep track of any physical media. I don’t have any of my old PC games from the 90s anymore. I have no idea where there went or how I lost them. But they are just gone. However, I still have every game I’ve ever bought on steam.

I’m not a heavy gamer anymore. If I see something I want, it’s easy to just put it on my wishlist and wait until it goes on sale at a price I think is reasonable. If I feel bored, I might open up my full list of games and browse for something to install. My game saves get backed up to the cloud. My controllers just work. Everything related to the gaming experience is integrated into one place, and I like that, it makes it easy. And for the most part, steam kind of just stays out of my way.

NPR reviews games now?

I tried out Linux a few months back, and one of the things I could never get working was my Bluetooth Xbox controller. The controller would just blink and never connect to the Bluetooth. Any idea what needs to be done to get it working? I was kind of annoyed that it didn’t just work since it’s such a popular controller.

I might pick up monster train and doom eternal. Yeah, I still haven’t played doom eternal.

That looks really interesting, but I’m just left wondering what the objective is, or what kind of gameplay is actually there.

A ship sounds a lot less exciting than a city.

It looks like I can go to a local repair shop to get the battery changed out. Anyone have experience with that option?

I’ve had my eye on this for a bit, as the concept of it catches my interest. I got a little confused when I tried the demo though, so I’ve held off on it. I might give it a serious try if it ever comes out of early access.

Exactly this. Yoshi’s Story was a follow up to Yoshi’s Island, often considered one of the greatest 2d platformers of all time. I spent weeks if not months completing Yoshi’s Island. Then when Yoshi’s Story came out, I rented it and completed it over the weekend.

I think tomb raider let you swim underwater.

I’m a little younger, I grew up playing the NES. I had so much fun and some of my best memories are from playing those games with friends and stuff. But I find it really hard to revisit most of those games based on their own merit.

There is definitely a thing about playing games together with another person that can be magical. And that isn’t gone. You can still do that today with modern games. So in that regard, I don’t think there is anything particularly special about 80s games. Heck, it wasn’t until the N64 that it was common for more than 2 people to be able to play together. A bunch of guys hanging out and all playing a game together was great.

I think losing that is just a factor of growing up. You move on from your friends, maybe you don’t make any new ones, you start mainly playing against faceless strangers online… It’s not a problem with the games, it’s a problem with the players.

It’s fun because you never know what will happen. It’s not totally random, the more skilled players will tend to win more often than not, just not every time. Also there are other game modes than just racing. Back when me and my friends played on SNES and N64, it was almost always battle mode.

I bought the first Nickelodeon game a couple months after it released, and the online was already dead, I literally couldn’t find a match. Just went ahead and got a refund on it.

It really sucked because Smash Bros is basically the only other big platform fighter on the market. Multiversus was set up to actually be a viable alternative to smash, it was massively popular at first, and they had such an amazing library of characters to pull from. The game had everything going for it. And they just blew it. So badly.

Well, you could play the original Sega Genesis games, since that’s where it all started. You can either download the roms to play on an emulator, or you could probably buy an official release too. The first one is skippable since the sequels basically improve on it in every way. I would at least recommend Sonic 3 and knuckles (it’s a combination of sonic 3 and sonic and knuckles, they were originally going to be one game but got split into 2 games, but through some weird lock on cartridge technology at the time, they could be combined back into one game).

https://archive.gamehistory.org/

The only fishing game I’ve ever played was The Black Bass on the NES. Being an older game, it has fairly simplistic gameplay that’s actually very similar to the fishing mini games that you see today.

I don’t really feel like going down the rabbit hole of trying a hundred different distros to maybe find one that works. My experiences with those two were that things were completely broken, randomly. Like just trying to boot the USB installer would lock up half the time, the installer itself would fail partway through most of the time, when things got fully installed, trying to update or install new things would just fail randomly. The kde desktop would crash just from me changing settings in the kde menus.

They are ranked number 3 and 13 on distro watch, so they are hardly unknown. And lots on Linux YouTubers were talking about how great they were.

My priorities are being able to run Davinci resolve and Steam games. Nobara ticks those boxes while advertising itself as user friendly. I have heard too many stories of people having trouble getting this stuff running on something like Linux mint, so I didn’t go in that direction. I need to do more with my computer than just view web sites or write code.