All Hands on Deck

image from Windows Central

We switched John's Switch Pro with a Steam Deck. Will he notice the difference? 

Here it is, folks... the high powered handheld everyone expected Nintendo to release this year. Since they didn't give us the goods, Valve stepped up to the plate instead, announcing this portable system with Steam compatibility, twin touchpads under the expected analog thumbsticks and buttons, and an AMD Zen 2 processor for the best performance you've ever seen in a handheld game system. PC Gamer reports that it's still likely to fall short of home consoles like the Xbox Series S, with less than half the compute units in its RDNA 2 graphics chip. Nevertheless, the Steam Deck has got a whole lot of muscle for a system weighing less than two pounds.

Better still is that if you already have a Steam account, you already have a library of games, making up for the Steam Deck's off-putting retail price of four hundred dollars. The base version of the system with 64GB of internal storage will be available at the end of the year, with more spacious premium versions offered in 2022. Color me cautiously optimistic... the number of games available on the Steam store is dizzyingly high, and if the Steam Deck can run at least 90% of them at acceptable speeds and without DRM making life miserable for the player, it's going to be more than worth the four C-notes.

In other news, someone is publishing a Super Smash Bros. like fighting game celebrating thirty years of Nicktoons! That's good! But that someone is Game Mill, which already released two disappointing go-kart racing games featuring Nickelodeon characters. That's bad. But they hired Ludosity, the creators of the well received arena fighter Slap City, to design the game for them! That's good! But we don't know who will be included in the cast aside from a handful of characters introduced in the trailer, and we don't know if any of these characters will have the voices from the original cartoons. That's bad, but at least the game probably won't have any potassium benzoate.

There's one other thing I should mention in this long overdue blog entry. That Super NES Classic I bought from ShopGoodwill a few weeks ago? It looks a little scruffy, but it's totally legit, and it runs like an ice cream dream... one without any potassium benzoate, of course. 

Mine at last! Bwa ha ha HAAA!
(image from Nintendo)

I'm not going to choose favorites between the Super NES Classic and my previously acquired Sega Genesis Mini... they serve different needs, but both have an equal place in my collection. What I will say is that the SNES Classic has the welcome touch of whimsy you'd expect from a Nintendo product. Leave a game in progress and you're given a save state, illustrated by a snapshot of the last screen you reached suspended in mid-air by a pair of tiny wings. Start a different game and the save state vanishes in a puff of smoke. Overwrite a previously existing file and the new save state muscles its way into that slot, forcing the old file out. 

The Genesis Mini opts for a colder, more futuristic motif, and while the angular text boxes and trails of light circling around selected games work perfectly well for that system, I'm glad Nintendo played to its strengths with its own throwback system. Like I said earlier, they're two very different machines, but they're both equally essential; two halves of a balanced whole. Genesis does what Nintendon't, and Super NES is what Genes-isn't*, but together, they're the total package.

* I don't know who came up with that retort. An EGM reader, most likely.