Welcome to another YvoCaro Plays!
As always, these blurbs are mainly about the video games I’m currently playing. Unedited thoughts spring up in my mind, mostly game-related, sometimes not. Or a random train of thoughts starting with the game and ending somewhere completely different!
If you like these bits of gaming thoughts, you can find the previous ones here.
Mac – Steam Deck – Switch
Of course, I may be biased, having been a handheld gamer ever since I started gaming. I seriously love my Nintendo Switch and the 3DS and DS before that. Ever since we added Steam games to cover on the site, I have a Steam game to review once in a while. Thinking I’d stay strictly handheld, I bought myself a Steam Deck, but I’ve found that many of the newly released games, or early access games, can’t handle Steam Deck yet. And being a Mac user, I find that most games don’t run on Mac, either.
The thing is, a lot of indie games land on Steam first and on consoles later. For example, BunHouse and Garden In! are both lovely games that have ‘lived’ on Steam for months before making the jump to console in the future. Another good example is No Place Like Home, a game that Mina gave Two Thumbs Up. It’s actually a game I double-dipped for, as I’d already bought it on Steam, thinking of playing it on the Deck. However, I found it so difficult to handle on the Deck that I gave up and instead bought it on release day for the Switch. Glad I did, as I absolutely love it. Just the kind of combination of exploring, farming and crafting that I love, with a little bit of fighting involved.
Stuck Reviewing a Game
Anyway, back to the topic. I have another game to review this week, a little game on Steam. Sadly, it didn’t run on my Steam Deck, so I asked my daughter if I could borrow her gaming PC. Not the newest one and not a high-performance one, but it’s only a couple of years old, and her Sims game and numerous expansions run fine on it. Surprisingly, this relatively simple game had the hardest time running. The cursor performed sluggishly, making it hit or miss whether or not I had pressed the button. Soldering on, the game crashed too. The thing is, I couldn’t be sure if it were due to the computer or due to the game itself.
eMailing with the developer brought me no solution. Though he was very forthcoming, he hadn’t had any complaints from reviewers. So then it came down to me trying to figure out if the PC had what it took to make the game run. My daughter’s boyfriend came to the rescue and showed me where to look to see what the PC was doing in the background and find the specs like the DirectX version. Ultimately, it didn’t help; the game still handles very difficult. And the game still needs reviewing!
Console Gaming For Me
It did get me thinking. PC gaming is hard; gaming on a console is just so, so much easier. It can be caused by so many little things, whether or not you can play a game you downloaded in anticipation. I do recognize, hearing how enthusiastically Paula is about Cities: Skylines and the numerous mods and content creator packs she uses, that PC gaming is much more flexible. But when you don’t have the expertise, and you’re not willing to invest huge amounts of cash every few years to get the latest specs, I feel console gaming is so much more fun.
One last story to make my point. We had quite some stress here in our home when my daughter enthusiastically bought Hogwarts Legacy on Steam. She’s a huge Harry Potter fan and couldn’t wait to enter the magical world…..it didn’t work. We (as in, mainly her boyfriend) tried everything, cleaning the PC and putting everything she didn’t need anymore in the bin. Making sure it was updated and had the latest drivers. Putting the game on portable SSD memory (I’m writing this as if I know exactly what he tried out, but much of it is beyond me).
But the game didn’t go any further than the seizure warning and crashed. Time and time again. After a lot of tears and angry outbursts later, she found that she had a known error that happened randomly but hadn’t been fixed yet by EA Games (we just checked, and it’s still not fixed). Fortunately, she could get her money back from Steam, but her anticipation and happiness at the prospect of the game were gone…..she’s gonna wait for the console version.