Games

Balatro
I swear people talk about this as a quick “pick up and play a round” kind of game, but I played one run today and it took over half-an-hour, and I only made it about halfway before losing. Maybe it gets quicker when/if you know what you’re doing, I dunno…

Pilotwings Resort
This is my most recent acquisiton for the 3DS and, rather than add it to the bottom of the backlog, I've started it immediately. Kinda counterintuitive, but this was a launch title for the system, and is a relatively gentle experience designed to show off the system's stereoscopic capabilities. It's quite fun, though undermined by some daft decisions — why is Free Flight mode limited to 2 minutes?! It feels like it's enforced just to stop you flying around for a while and getting all the achievements (unlocking 75 locations) in one sitting. Apparently you can lengthen the flight time by completing challenges, etc, but it still maxes out at 5 minutes. Sucks.


Steam Deck
I was going to list this under the heading of the games involved, because I played a chunk of them to test things out... but I didn't really play them, because this was primarily about more fiddling with the tech. But for the last time (I think) — hurrah!

So, what happened was, today I finally got round to connecting my Steam Deck to my TV; and though that bit worked flawlessly, it annoyed me that one of my emulated GameCube games, 007: Everything or Nothing, was in 4:3 when it specifically has a widescreen mode. A bunch of Reddit-browsing later, I'd found the settings I needed to fiddle with to not only get widescreen working, but get the game running in 1080p HD. And it looks so much better for it! (But god knows how many times I've played through the first mission now as part of my testing. I've even completed it on the hardest difficulty with Platinum goals completed! Regular readers* will know how unlike me that is.)

And because I was fiddling with that, I also had a look into my other GC title, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. That was even more involved again, though I do now have it in HD and widescreen thanks to inputting a cheat code for the latter and installing a fan-made HD texture pack for the former — and now it looks so good too! And now, after many hours of faffing, these are finally nicely set up to play. Now I just need to actually play them...