Amazing. One of the best purchases I’ve ever made.
It’s rare for me to see games in my library that are not supported, although there are a few. But there is a difference between running and running well. Demanding games will get maybe an hour of battery life and the fans will be pretty loud the whole time. Some games (especially strategy games) really work better with a full keyboard and a higher resolution screen. Some games I just would not want to play on a handheld. But most of the time the games that I want to play work well.
One trick I use to get better battery life and performance is streaming. I use Chiaki to stream from my PS4, and Steam Link (as a non-steam app lol) to stream from my desktop. It’s often worth it for the fan noise reduction alone.
It’s even better at emulation. It’s a great machine for PS2 and GameCube games- I have the back buttons and track pads mapped to speed up, pause, slow, and rewind gameplay and to control save states. I have not dialed it in yet, but I think with some tweaking you could probably use the gyro and/or track pads to do some good Wii emulation. 3DS and DS are great too, mostly because of the track pads. Anything older emulates fine, but isn’t as impressive.
I have gotten PS3 and Switch emulation to work, but the fans go on and the battery life goes down, so I don’t really use it for that. Plus storage is a bit tight and PS3 games are huge.
It does feel like Valve was just a little too early. I wish the screen was 1080p.
The 2230 SSD’s that it uses were kind of uncommon when it released. The weird size made them more expensive and they had lower capacities. I managed to get a 512GB one, but I wish I could have gotten like 2TB. It seems like that’s changing now though. Similarly, I wish microSD cards came in larger capacities. Storage just seems to get used up so fast these days.
First, in old games that actually use pixels, everything has to snap to the grid. For these pixel art games running at 1080p or maybe higher, what is supposed to look like a pixel is actually a square made up of multiple pixels. In 16-bit games, a sprite can only move distances the same size as a pixel, but in these modern ones the “pixels” can move by fractions of their own size. It loses all the neat, discreet, visual appeal and becomes messy looking in my opinion.
Second, the color pallet is too large. Old games had a limited selection of colors, and often in order to make the most of them the colors used would be significantly different from each other, while still all being part of a cohesive pallet. We are used to millions of colors, but consoles like the GameBoy Color and SNES only had ~32,000 to pick from total. The GameBoy Color also has a software limitation to only have 56 colors on-screen at once. Using a full, modern color pallet without those limitations allows for colors that are close to each other to be used. That’s great for 3D models where we are thing to mimic reality, but for pixel art it just makes everything look messy and sloppy. There needs to be a sharp, distinct contrast for pixels to be satisfying.
Third, there’s just too much stuff happening. This I could probably adapt to, but I just have this expectation that pixel games should just be a few moving sprites and maybe a couple of background layers.
The name “Arco” tells me absolutely nothing. It’s not memorable. It’s a complete blank slate that gets washed away. I’m not even certain if that’s just a proper noun from the game or if that’s just a different language word.
A hybrid turn-based/real time strategy game? My instinct is that sounds like the worst of both worlds. It has been successful before- Transistor and Paper Mario come to mind. But in general, if in playing a turn-based game it’s because I want the chill, low-pressure experience. I probably want to be less than sober. And introducing real-time elements means that those games get pushed into the real-time category when I choose what I want to play and when. And if in playing a tacts game, 99% of the time in going to choose a turn-based one and get lit.
As many others here have said, I’ve never heard of this game. I think this is a legitimate problem facing a lot industries, especially digital products. Doing some quick searching I found someone estimating that Spotify sees about 55 days worth of new audio uploaded every day. Everyone is creating and we don’t have enough to line to consume.
Personally, I suspect that if I went through the exercise of looking at my Steam library and trying to project when I would be able to play through all of the games I currently own, it would probably exceed my life expectancy. Definitely if you add in all of my console game collection.
There’s not a great solution. Corporations try to punch through the noise with marketing. One of the most important pieces of Steam as a platform is their ability to promote games. There are whole networks of influencers- streamers, video creators, podcasters, bloggers, magazine writers, etc all trying to help sort out the games worth playing.
But the problem persists - there are too many games being made. And I don’t want to just say to put up more barriers to entry, because indie development is important for getting fresh new talent and ideas into the industry. Some of the best experiences I’ve had have been indie games, and some of the worst offenders for cranking out banal, mediocre time sucks have been huge corporations with giant marketing budgets.
The only solution I can think of is more “platforms” rather than games. Minecraft, GTA V, Skyrim. Especially with mods, you can get a unique and interesting experience without having to invest into learning and understanding a whole new game.