The BEST Sonic Fan Games of 2022 (Top 10 SAGE '22 Games)

Thoughts on the Steam Deck (& How to Install a Virtual Machine on the Steam Deck)

What I Want to Play on the Steam Deck

Games to play on the Steam Deck

Q3.  The wait is so hard. But while I’m waiting for July-September, all I can do is think about all the games I actually do want to play when I finally get my hands on the Steam Deck later this year.

Mirror's Edge: Catalyst

There are a lot of open world games I’m excited to play on it, and, surprisingly, Mirror’s Edge Catalyst is the first one that comes to mind.  This game got a lot of flack when it first came out for being a downgrade from the first game, with not as tight level design and I guess needlessly going open world, but I dunno, I really like it.  I’ve already played through the story, but then I stopped because I viewed everything after that as just extra content to play through when I had free time. Well, the problem with that is, when I do have free time, I usually don’t have that much of it.  It takes a while to boot up Windows, wait for Steam to start up, make sure my controller’s all set up, scroll down the list and launch the game.

I feel like open world games with these quick missions you can jump in and out of are perfect for the Steam Deck, and now when I get back into Mirror’s Edge Catalyst, I don’t have to sit at my computer and spend a lot of time in long play sessions trying to get 100% completion, I can just boot up the game, complete a mission or two, put it to sleep mode and play again later.

Outer Wilds

Outer Wilds, another open world game, or open worlds I guess, I’ve been almost everywhere in this game, but I’ve never gotten 100% of the journal entries, and I don’t have all of the achievements, but I’m really tempted to go for it on the Steam Deck, because I love Outer Wilds, and why not?  I can play it whenever now!

Omori

Omori is a game I’ve been meaning to try out for a while now, it doesn’t look very complex, so I was actually planning on playing it on my GPD, but for some reason it runs at like 10 frames per second on the thing, I dunno, maybe it’s just really poorly optimized, but yeah, that should be fully playable on the Steam Deck so looking forward to that.

Sonic Adventure 2: Battle

Sonic… I’m excited to play basically every Sonic game on the Steam Deck.  But especially SA2.  Portable Chao Garden…!

Just Cause 3

Just Cause 3 and 4.  I’m still sort of undecided on which of these I really liked more, but maybe if I play them both on the Steam Deck, I can finally decide.  Again, these are open world games, perfect for playing in short busts, I’ve finished the main campaign in both of them but haven’t gotten anywhere near 100% completion on the console versions, so maybe I can finally do that with the ability to play them whenever and wherever I want. I’d add Just Cause 2 to the list because I love that game too, but unfortunately it’s currently listed as unplayable.  Which leads me to my next topic.

Unverified/Unplayable games

These are games that either haven’t been tested or currently aren’t playable on the Deck, but I’m really hoping they add support to in the future, or, in some cases, I might even dual-boot Windows on it when that option is available, I dunno, we’ll see.

Bugsnax

Bugsnax.   For those who haven’t played this game, it’s sort of like Pokemon Snap mixed with Pokemon Legends Arceus and a little bit of Viva Pinata and almost some like… Telltale-ish elements?   If that sounds like a weird combination, it is. But it works so well.   You’re given the freedom to explore different biomes on this big island full of these cool little creatures, and there’s different methods of catching them, like catching each of the Bugsnax is a puzzle in and of itself, and then there’s an overarching narrative of figuring out exactly what’s going on the island, and there’s all these different muppet guys you can talk to with full voice acting and they all have different personalities and funny and interesting things to say, but the best part is the sounds the Bugsnax make.

So yeah, Bugnax is basically a better version of Pokemon, and Pokemon is already perfect for handheld systems, so, needless to say, I think Bugsnax would be perfect too.

Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2

Dragon Ball Z Kakarot and Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2.  I already talked about Kakarot in my last video and why I want to playthrough that again on PC, but Xenoverse would be fun too.  It looks like the first one is playable on the Deck, but as of right now the second game isn’t verified. If it is playable, I hope it’s well optimized, because I realized recently that the long loading screens in that game really detract from my enjoyment of it, and if I can just jump in and out of battles in Xenoverse 2 quickly on the Steam Deck, that would improve my experience with the game tenfold.

Huniepop 2

Huniepop 1 and 2

Forza Horizon 4

There are few racing games that have been sitting in my Steam library for a while that I think would be perfect to play on the Deck. Forza Horizon 4 and Team Sonic Racing, neither of these are verified for some reason, but they would be cool on the go.

Everything Else

Audiosurf might be fun to get back into. Road 96 I’ve played the first chapter of, that was pretty fun.  I might get back into that on the Deck. Some of the Worms games might be fun to play portably. If I’m feeling really adventurous and they add support for Tales of Berseria to the Steam Deck I might play that finally.

Oh, and I dunno if it’s even feasible, but I’d love to give Mabinogi or Guild Wars 2 or maybe even Ragnarok Online a try on the Steam Deck. Of course none of these are currently playable as they have pretty heavy anticheat measures integrated into them, but again, if I’m dual booting windows then… maybe?

But yeah, I think that’s everything for me personally!   What are you looking forward to playing on the Deck or what would you play on it if you had one?   Let me know in the comments.   Thanks for reading!

Eroblast

 

Back when the first HuniePop game came out, I wished for a mobile port. Now there’s a game on the Google Play store that sort of scratches that itch. It’s called Eroblast.

It’s not quite as good as HuniePop. There’s no voice acting, and there’s not as much strategy involved with the puzzles, but until Huniepop gets an actual mobile port, this is probably the next best thing.

Download here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vividgames.right.swipes.hot.dates&hl=en_US&gl=US

Mega Man 7's Final Boss is Annoying

 I know all of the Mega Man games are difficult, especially the final bosses, but this is the one I'll be complaining about because I'm working my way through the legacy collections chronologically and this it the first one with the rewind function.

Yeah, I guess I'm a casual when it comes to Mega Man games, but this fight is seriously rough. Once you memorize his attack patterns and figure out which abilities make the fight easier you still have to have lightning fast reflexes. Or an E Tank I guess

So the new Harry Potter game looks pretty good

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It’s pretty crazy that the developers of Disney Infinity and Cars 2 the game are making something this ambitious. I don’t know if they can pull it off, but it sure looks promising.

One thing I’m a little disappointed in is that, other than playing it in the background, they didn’t spend any time mentioning the game’s soundtrack. Jeremy Soule’s music was integral to the very early games in the Harry Potter franchise, and I’m not surprised that they wouldn’t get him back for this, but it sure would be nice if they found a composer with a similar style. Then again, who can compete with this?

How to Create a PivotTable from Groups of Rows in Excel

 I'm going to post something a little different today.  I came across a challenge at work a few days ago that got me thinking about Excel.

So say you have a bunch of data that looks like this:

How would you organize this data so that rather than looking at 30+ lines of data, you only have to look at 4 lines to determine how many hours each division worked at each job?  If you try to create a pivot table from this data, you get this:

Well, that doesn't help.  We have how many hours each division worked, but the jobs are completely separate.  So how do we organize this by groups rather than by row/column?  It looks like the solution lies in some sort of if/and/vlookup function/formula.  But I don't have much time today, I'll look into this more later.  If you have an idea of how to solve this, let me know!

Happy Saint Patty's Day!

I hope you're all wearing green today.  Or perhaps you're green with envy?  Apparently parts of that expression can be traced all the way back to the ancient Greeks. Back then, the color green was associated with paleness, fear, illness, and poor humor.  I guess overtime people started associating it with other frowned-upon emotions like envy?  Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.  Happy Saint Patrick's Day Errybody

WHOA HEY I'M BACK AGAIN

Hi. Long time to talk. I'm back from the dead to talk about the Steam Deck.

This thing looks supes cool, but even though I reserved mine within two hours of pre-orders becoming available, I won't be getting mine til Q3 of this year :( I've been doing a lot of research on the Deck and I have one question that I've yet to find an answer to: Can it run a virtual machine? Obviously there aren't any virtual machine apps within Steam, but what about Desktop mode?

It's just Linux, right? There are virtual machines on Linux. I know there are a lot of Windows Games that the Steam Deck can't currently run, but what if some older games were playable inside of a virtual machine on the Deck? It could open a new world of possibilities. If anyone's still here, let me know your thoughts or if this is even possible. I'm getting excited thinking about it.

Quick update: From what I've read, it looks like it should be possible, but it wouldn't be able to access the GPU.  That shouldn't be too much of a problem for older games that don't use many resources, right?  I just want a portable retro pc in the palm of my hands (not a laptop).  I have the original GPD Win but it's so slow.