Russ

I can’t speak for Epic Launcher games (I know that Heroic Games Launcher exists but I’ve not personally tried it with Epic games) however Blizzard games absolutely can be played in SteamOS - you can utilize something like Bottles or Lutris to install the Blizzard launcher, and then download the games from it as normal and run them. It is how I originally played Diablo 4 on my Deck before I picked it up again on Steam. I swear I remember both Bottles and Lutris even having an “Add to Steam” option to integrate shortcuts directly into Steam (and thus, coming up in the Gaming Mode UI) but don’t quote me on that one.

Blizzard games are actually some of the earliest non-Linux-native games that I remember running very well back in the days where we just had Wine (before Proton, DXVK, etc) which is something that always impressed me.

I’m not sure if this is a Pixel feature or if its available across all of Android, but there is an option when you connect over USB to connect your phone as a webcam - but that is of course tethered instead of being wireless.

I’m a bit upset at my GI’s office, I was supposed to have a follow up appointment with them on May, then they rescheduled it for August due to a conflict with the doctor’s schedule, and now they’ve called me again to say they need to reschedule it again for the same reason…

I would love to switch doctors, but there aren’t many GIs in the area that I live (that I haven’t already been to, its been a horrendous battle) - missed their call so I’m not sure how far out the scheduling is now, but I wouldn’t be surprised if its nothing sooner than October…

So, I’m off to a great start today. Hopefully that is the only negative thing that occurs today.

No problem! I’ve really enjoyed Runemaster so far since I’ve always been someone who favored magic based classes. With Runic Invocation there are so many different spell combinations that you can pull off (I can’t possibly memorize them all, I think there’s around 50 of them?) which is really fun!

I need to try out Spellblade at some point, that’ll probably be my next class that I try out. Their new season (“Cycles”) launches at the beginning of next month (July 9th IIRC), so I haven’t decided if I’ll try to wait till then or if I’ll try to give it a go before then.

I’ve really enjoyed the ARPGs that I’ve played (D3, a bit of Grim Dawn, Last Epoch, and hell as of the recent update even D4) but I find that I am terrible at build crafting - and the really bad brain fog that I’ve had for over a year now doesn’t help that at all.

I find that I just constantly hit a wall that I can’t push past, and then run into the “Now what?” - every now and then I’ll play with some build guides online and tinker with them, but for me that isn’t as fun as coming up with something completely on my own.

That all being said, LE has been my favorite as of recently - it’s definitely still a light on content (1.0 just released this year), but over time I think it’ll be very high up there on everyone’s list.

I feel like I had a much easier time understanding the systems in LE than the other games (except for maybe D4 which was a bit too simple, though they’re starting to change it up a bit with the recent patches) but LE’s item and skill systems also clearly have a very high ceiling of what you can do with them.

I guess for me, what I really liked about it is that even with all the brain fog I could still get into the systems and pick it up quickly, yet also still see where it can certainly get more and more complex as you push your builds higher and higher, even if I’m not completely at that point yet.

I hope some of my ramblings made at least a little bit of sense 😅

Yeah, that’s more than fair! There’s zero chance I’d have considered it if it weren’t for it being on sale (for $20 USD which I don’t see Activision dropping the price any further than that).

Thankfully it seems after playing around with the settings and ensuring that the video settings wasn’t set to ultra, which I somehow missed on my first pass of the settings, it seems to be playing much better and I can easily see getting my $20 out of it.

Call me crazy, but I just picked up Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare today.

I haven’t been interested in playing the Call of Duty multiplayer modes for a very long time ago (I don’t even think the servers are still available), but in the past I did enjoy some of the campaigns. Infinite Warfare’s campaign seems very sci-fi “ish” which actually kinda scratches an itch I’ve had for a while. Another game that looked similarish to this was the Crysis games which I’d never actually gotten a chance to play, but when they were last on sale I found out they didn’t have cloud saves and I like to bounce between my Deck and PC a lot so that was a deal breaker for me.

I’m thinking about picking up Advanced Warfare too, since I had it when it came out on Xbox One and liked the campaign for very similar reasons. In general I’d love to find more games that have the same style to them, which reminds me I’m overdue for a replay of the Titanfall 2 campaign…

They happen to be on sale right now till the 8th, I’d absolutely never pick them up at full price.

Edit: The game definitely seems to have some rough points when playing on the Steam Deck. It plays fine on my desktop via Proton with no problem, but some of the in-game scenes just absolutely tank the frame rate till I’m pretty much forced to hard reset the deck because it goes completely unresponsive. Hmm. In addition, all of the config settings seem to get synced via cloud saves, however when you launch the game on a different device before it actually starts it asks if you want to reset the settings to be tailored to the device you’re on.

Gotcha, no worries I’ll see what I can track down - thank you!

but I did set up OBS already and managed to get HW encoding to work on an AMD GPU.

Did you by chance use any resources for this, such as any guides or any of the OBS docs? I’m looking to do the same thing and it seems I’m only running into outdated information, as well as debates on whether its even worth doing GPU encoding vs CPU encoding.

This is exactly where I’ve been for the last week, it’s insane just the sheer difference the changes they made have had on the overall gameplay.

It feels as if I went from playing the technical demo (season 3) of the game to the actual launch version (season 4) - which sounds dramatic but it’s the second time I’ve made it to WT4 (I usually can’t slog through this much) and never this early!

I’m in a similar boat, however I was very disappointed to see that in order to enable developer mode you have to make/sign in with a Meta account and “register” as a developer with them.

I just picked up “Turbo Golf Racing” last night, and am so far having a good time with it. Seems to be a really interesting take on Rocket League thus far. From what I can tell, all of the rewards in the “shop” are based off of in-game rewards and no premium currency, though there are some cosmetics that you can get in the form of supporter pack purchases (which are quite cheap). There is also a “season pass”, but there’s no premium tier of it. Performs at a nice 90FPS on my OLED Deck.

There are two modes, a “Race” mode which is similar-ish to Rocket League, but everyone has their own ball that they’re trying to race into the goal as quickly as possible, while navigating around the tracks. The “Golf” mode is pretty much traditional golf where everyone has a turn hitting their ball to advance it closer and closer to the goal each turn.

Fair warning, like Rocket League it is primarily an online multiplayer game, the only single player offline mode is the time trials mode.

I was a bit skeptical since the reviews mentioned that the online is dead / long queue times, but I’ve only had to wait a little over a minute at max for a match, in either game mode. Can’t say anything about the “Ranked” mode however.

For what is normally $10 USD (on sale for $7.49 right now) I’m having a very good time!

I’ve also picked up Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor, and No Man’s Sky, but I haven’t had the time to give them a proper shot yet.

Yep, same here. Wouldn’t want to use eSIMs at all if they were any more hassle than this. But their process to me is good enough to outweigh the physical SIM swapping process.

It’s all good, I appreciated the advice and tips! Funnily enough, I have that exact reputation at work, to be honest I’d rather be too descriptive than not descriptive enough 😅

There’s certainly a balancing act to be played of course, but if that balance ends up being impossible for me, then more information (in my opinion) is better!

That’s good to know, thanks! I might actually have to look into giving it a go one day, maybe for an old phone at first just for some practice so to speak.

That looks awesome! I can’t imagine myself being able to apply a skin, I can’t even get a screen protector to go on correctly 😅