I have had a lot....like, a huge plate lot, of stuff going on in the work environment. My work/life/play balance has been severely weighted in the work corner for the last two months now. So it is with lots of excitement that I am at last through a major work hurdle which has reduced my workload down from 12 hours days to 8 hours days again (mostly). Yay for projects having conclusions!
Last time I found time to post I was commenting on how badly the chip price increases had impacted the manufacturers of handheld gaming PCs. One month later its even worse, and the Lenovo handhelds (Legion Go 2 and Legion Go S series) are effectively unaffordable, and not worth the asking price proportionate to the value you get from owning one. So Yeah, despite me quite liking the Legion Go series handhelds I think the window for these products has closed.
The Xbox Rog Ally X and plain-vanilla versions continue to be affordable, and I suspect its because Asus made a lot of these things before prices spiked, so their strategy was to have a large volume ready to go rather than manufacture and replace as needed. Valve, for example, ran out of Steam Decks and has been out for a while now....I am sure the skyrocketing chip prices are preventing them from making more Steam Decks right now. Rumor has it Sony is now reconsidering its current timeline and plans for a Playstation 6, as well.....the market for consumer electronics is tanking due to these unaffordable and unreasonable prices. The best we can hope for right now is that the Tech Giants have some sort of massive financial crisis at some point and put them our of our misery, then maybe we can get back to a more stable consumer-friendly environment. The worst case scenario, I worry, is a future in which we really do no longer own any of our stuff and devices are only as powerful as needed to connect so some godawful AI system in the cloud that we are forced to interact with.
As for gaming handheld reccommendations these days.....I have pretty conclusively decided that the only device I need is the MSI Claw 8 AI+ and if you can find it for a reasonable price I suggest grabbing it. Otherwise, the real no-brainer is a Switch 2. Even it is going up in price soon, so maybe grab one now if you are interested while its still $450. The Switch 2 selection of games is now robust enough that you should find no shortage of fun and portable content to play.
In the meantime, I managed to resume gaming on Wednesdays and Fridays again, its always fun after an absence to return! We picked up where we left off with a D&D 5.5 game, although I am conspiring to get the group to formally move to Tales of the Valiant after this. My son is running Fallout RPG on Friday, but I will soon return to at least biweekly Starfinder, as the new edition is both fun and popular, and it better embraces its science-fantasy thematics.
During my long gaming hiatus I did realize I, as both a player of games and a collector of games, have created a sort of quagmire for myself. I continue to, for the most part, gravitate to the same main game systems--D&D and Pathfinder first, then Traveller, Call of Cthulhu, OSE, Shadowdark, BRP, Starfinder, Cypher System and Mothership second, with occasional forays into other systems. This is never for lack of interest, but instead lack of time and energy to branch out from the known and familiar.
A particularly vexing problem is just how many fantaasy RPG variants I have on the shelf. For D&D-likes alone I have:
D&D 5.5
D&D 2014 version
D&D 3.5
D&D 3.0
AD&D 2nd
AD&D 1st
B/X D&D
Labyrinth Lord
OSRIC
Swords & Wizardry Complete
S&W White Box
Old-School Essentials
Labyrinth Lord
Tales of the Valiant
Then it spins out into the more distant cousins and unrelated neighbors:
Pathfinder 1E
Pathfinder 2E
Starfinder*
13th Age 2nd Edition
Shadowdark
Savage Worlds Fantasy and Savage Worlds Pathfinder
Cypher System Godforsaken
Outcast Silver Raiders
Dungeon Crawl Classics
Ruination Pilgrimage
Forbidden Lands
BRP with the Creatures book
BRP Vikings
Dragonbane
Runequest
Mythras
Open Quest
Beyond the Wall
Through Sunken Lands
Dolmenwood
Ultraviolet Grasslands
Into the Odd
Cairn 1E and 2E
Against the Darklord
Hero Quest
Lands of Eem
Gordinaak
Not to mention the Mork Borgs:
Mork Borg
Pirate Borg
Death in Space*
Cy-Borg*
Vast Grimm*
Orc Borg
Qvake Borg*
Forbidden Psalms
Many others I can't even think of at the moment.
So, as you might deduce, I am a collector of far too many games and without the common sense to stick my money into a more practical scenario such as a retirement account (okay yeah I do sock money away for retirement, but I mean....I could be socking a lot more away if I didn't buy all these RPGs, obviously!) All good enough as a collector....lots and lots to collect. And heck, plenty as a reader too, although I would argue that maybe half of all game books are good reading, and of that group maybe half are actually fun reading on their own merits. But as a player? As a player having this many games is a problem. Especially if you aren't just a player, but a GM.
It's the Paradox of Choice problem, but sitting on my bookshelves, and a problem made of my own devising. This is complicated by the fact that while I am not a hoarder as such, I am definitely a book hoarder, a related phenomenon that means I am running out of space already in my new two year old house. I manage to read around 4-5 books per month. But I buy, on average, between 20 and 40 books per month (both RPGs and regular books).
I guess this blog post today is me acknowledging that 1: I have a handheld PC problem and 2: I am a tsundoku, and need to cut down my book purchasing by around 80% to align it more closely to my reading rate and finally 3: I probably have never needed access to more than 10 RPG systems on my shelf at any time, ever, and really don't need 46 discreetly different yet similar fantasy RPGs clogging my shelves right now, neveer mind the dozens and dozens of other non fantasy RPGs also on those shelves. Maybe I can...shudder....figure out how to downsize.....before I reach old age and become the bane of my family's existence!
*These are Mork Borg powered games with a scifi shell, but they are 100% weird fantasy and not really actual scifi. Likewise for Starfinder!
