The Steam Machine

So I have been absent a while but I have a good excuse! I have been super busy...oh, and I got a Steam Machine. Not just any machine, either: the 2TB version with Steam controller. Yes, that means an infinite number of PC master race guys who can build their own micro PC out of spare parts are agonized at my purchase.

My first comment on the Steam Machine after owning it for about a month now is that it makes gaming much easier by simply providing a very close facsimile to a console gaming experience, with the Valve touch. Having an extensive collection of Steam games in my library means I could immediately start testing it out, and I have tried out a lot of games on it now, and even finished a few. I sat for years on The Callisto Protocol, for example, and restarted that game in the "minimum security" mode (old dad with bad reflexes mode), and ploughed through the campaign over a weekend.

The main bugaboo I see about the Steam Machine online, besides proficient PC gamers who like to assemble their own machines arguing it has no merit on price, is the idea that Valve over-promised on its 4K resolution capabilities. I don't know if this is true or not; I didn't really expect it to be 4K ready for all games with the specs given at time of ordering, and the actual machine likes to default to 1920X1080 resolution, but I generally favor 2K resolution myself to optimize for performance even though my monitors are all 4K OLED beasts. I have pushed several games up to 2K resolution without needing to dampen down other stats and the net result is some great performance. On the other hand my eyes are old and tired, and in a couple cases I noticed that after playing a bit I'd go into a game's settings to mess around with it and realize some games would default to 720p resolution for no good reason. This thing runs most stuff just fine at 1080p or 2K resolution with plenty of high specs turned on.

My enjoyment of the Steam Machine is at least partially due to the new Steam Controller, which is now my preferred controller due to its comfortable design and the fact that virtually all games I have tried work just fine with it, no tweaking or modifying necessary. I love this controller, and I am keeping my preorder for a stand-alone so I can have two Steam Controllers hooked up for those rare couch co-op games out there.

Anyway, all the youtube videos on this that complain about the price to performance on the Steam Machine have been a wake up call to me that the target audience is not an enthusiast PC gamer who already has a beast of a machine and likes playing at his desk, and certainly not those guys who build their own machines. They are another market. Now, you may have other good hardware and maybe even a nice desktop (I do), and just enjoy technology for what it is; you might (like me) find the Steam Machine a cool device to get just to admire how tiny its form factor is relative to its output. If you are not the kind of gamer to run out and build your own machine then you are likely aware that despite the complaints about cost, if you go online there are a lot of much, much more expensive prebuilts out there these days due to the spike in RAM and GPU prices.....and if you want a machine in 2026, Steam Machine is a very competent gaming rig with a very nice Linux-based console polish. You could do a lot worse than to get this, and while yes you can probably find some cheaper gaming laptops out there with lower specs, or even an occasional low spec desktop, I would be surprised if those actually have competitive performance with what the Steam Machine has to offer. 

Another comparison that goes around is Steam Machine vs. PS5 Pro or Xbox Series X. I will only suggest that when you decide which one of these to go get, that you are electing to buy in to the gaming ecosystem of either Sony, Valve or Microsoft. If I had to pick the least anti-consumer of the three it is obviously Valve. Someone please be ready to cryo-freeze Gabe Newell! Yes, you can save some cash by buying an Xbox or a PS5, but I have both as well and I would take the Steam environment any day of the week over the other two. Long term savings include not having to pay into their passes to gain access to online play, as a good example....and if you want free games, you can go into the Linux desktop mode and use the Heroic Launcher to add storefronts like GOG and Epic, which loves to hand out free titles. If I had to suggest Xbox or PS5, I would lean to Xbox right now as having the better overall game pass option vs. PS5. You also still get the widest selection of games and the best overall pricing on the Steam storefront.

So what games have I tested and found run great on the Steam Machine so far? Well, games that ran well at 1080p and 2K resolution with medium or high settings, and older games maxed out, include: 

The Callisto Protocol (played and finished on the Steam Machine)

Beast of Reincarnation (I really like this game; at lower res it looked washed out, but I found it ran the game at 2K resolution on high just fine)

Stellar Blade (works great!)

Path of Exile II (really looks good and plays great on the Steam Machine)

Batman Arkham Knight (maxed out settings and resolution)

Wanted: Dead (ran at 1080p had fun, but a rather frustrating game even on easy mode)

Forsaken Realms: Vahrin's Call (indie gem ran great on 1080p high)

Fallout 4 (ran great at 1080p and 2K, and despite having the anniversary pack I had no issues no matter what all the Steam reviewers claim)

Total Chaos (ran great, still can't quite grok the vibe of this game. Is it survival horror, or Doom-like with fewer useful pickups?)

AI Limit (ran great, but I good example of a nice looking low graphical stress game)

Atomfall (ran extremely well at medium-high settings and up to 2K)

Burnout Paradise Remastered (cranked up to max as this is not a demanding game)

Need For Speed Hot Pursuit (maxed out settings)

Hunted: The Demon's Forge (cranked up to 4K max settings looked great; I love this obscure game btw)

Steel Seed (ran great on 1080p high)

Diablo IV (ran great! Blizzard knows how to optimize for everything)

The Division 2 (ran well at 1080p, forgot to test at 2K)

Dirt 5 (ran great!)

Lost Souls Aside (surprisingly ran very well, enough that I played far enough along to start appreciating the game)

Horizon Zero Dawn Forbidden West (this ran exceptionally well!)

Crimson Desert (looked fine at 1080p but I think this is an example of a current gen game that benefits from more performant machines)

Routine (ran great!)

Prodeus (maxed out ran great!)

So how about games that did not run so well? Well I have only encountered a few, as follows:

Avowed - this game looked bad and ran with a lot of stuttering, and while I tweaked it a bit to where the framerate was decent it still looked washed out and unpleasant. The experience was subpar. In defense of the Steam Machine I have had issues with this game on my bigger rig with a 5070TI card as well.

STALKER 2 Heart of Chornobyl - weird artficating made the game unpleasant to look at.  It seemed to run fine, but nothing I tweaked in the settings got rid of the sparkly haze over half the screen.

Call of Duty Black Ops (original one) - would not run, although it claims to be machine ready.

So! Pretty good overall so far. A lot of the games I am currently playing run great on the Steam Machine, and others I have not yet tried on it seem to work well per the many Youtubers out there. Overall I have to say, if you find any of these criteria meet your needs, you may want to consider a Steam Machine purchase:

--do not want to build your own machine

--love the tiny form factor

--love a console-like experience while still being a real PC

--Would like a easy way to explore Linux on a machine designed for it

--Prefer the long term benefit of the more consumer-friendly and lower cost Steam ecosystem over console ecosystems

--have shopped around for other prebuilts and realized they are damned expensive no matter what the PC builder guys says

--happen to already have or want an excuse to build up a steam game collection

Then the Steam Machine might fit you well! For me? Solid A, I am loving this machine and will get (hopefully) years of play out of it before I need to upgrade. 

A Couple Notes on storage and expansion:

1. Expanding the memory onboard with the MicroSD slot is easy. If you are worried about running games from a MicroSD, or load times, don't; for whatever reason these things work great in the Linux/SteamOS environment. I did drop a Micro Express SD card into the Machine, though that might be overkill.

2. All information I have read suggests that adding memory to this thing or upgrading the SSD is a royal pain in the ass due to the compact design. I have also watched videos suggesting it is probably not worth it. Given how good the performance has been, I do not feel the need to upgrade. And since I got the 2 TB model I feel pretty well set with it.

3. I also plugged an external 1TB SSD I had handy into the back USB C port, and it also runs games from the SSD just fine. I used to use it with my main desktop anyway before I upgraded the internal M.2 drive in that one to a 2TB and 6TB model (thankfully over a year ago before this stuff skyrocketed in price).

4. I am currently using a plugged in mouse and keyboard with it but I tried it with bluetooth mouse and keyboard and it worked great.

Too much Text in RPGs vs. Not Enough Text

 In 2026 I finally realized that the tabletop RPG market appears to be heavily weighted in two directions: those games of enormous page count, laden with a density of information; and on the other side of this curve is a veritable mountain of tiny, often zine-shaped games filled with what can only be described as a strangely minimalist approach to content. 

I feel like there's probably a line to be drawn from how RPGs used to be, and how for many people the barrier of entry was finding the time and energy to read hundreds of pages of material to get familiar with a game or setting to run it, and today, where you have games like Mork Borg where 90% of the game experience is interpreting the surreal art and parsing out tiny nuggets of rule or setting data. 

The interesting question is maybe not whether minimalist game systems are a response to the older style of dense, text- heavy games, but rather: is the market for more "information lite" game systems and text actually a sign of changing times? Even dense tomes like the newest 5.5 edition of D&D are actually rather information light; these books use less of the page with a bigger font to convey less information per page; just look at the D&D 2014 race write-ups to the 2024 ancestries for a fine example. Or take the 2014 DMG, which is packed with stuff (both to its betterment and its failure) compared to the briefer and lighter 2024 DMG. 

There are plenty of games where word density and system or setting depth is important; just witness Pathfinder 2E for proof this is still a thing. Cyberpunk Red, Shadowrun 6th, Coriolis, Call of cthulhu, Mythras, etc....there are plenty of these sorts of games, the "old guard" if you will out there and in circulation.

But then we have some games where the line is crossed: Shadowdark is what got me thinking about this notion in the first place. I mean, Shadowdark is a minimalist spectacle where you get the Big Fat Rulebook experience with a torrent of supplemental material, but the actual result is a shockingly low word count, a system that appears to be allergic to exposition or setting depth, and a paucity of rules content that borders on a sort of weird art. 

I was going to argue that Old-School Essentials is more of a middle ground here, given it is a precise retelling of the original B/X D&D system, and it really is....but all that demonstrates is that the idea of "rules with lite content in presentation" was also a thing in the early eighties. Indeed, one need only remember the myriad titles of Fantasy Games Unlimited to remember that this is actually a very old concept. So if oneis trying to ascribe the current wave of minimalist RPGs exclusively to short attention spans of modern crowds, I think that is probably not true, because we had plenty of games like this back in the day. What is true now is that the density of informtion in current rulesets is even skimpier and more graphically dependent than the many old FGU games ever were, though.

On the other hand OSE is a great example of how even a famously simple ruleset that has been presented in a somewhat minimalist fashion (B/X D&D editions) later evolves into something much more dense and complex (D&D Rules Cyclopedia). Indeed, for fun just read through the original Basic Set (Otus edition) D&D book, then contrast it with the OSE book (which is probably of the same word count, but manages to organize the information much more efficiently) then contrast the two with the much more elaborate and denser combat rules section of the Rules Cyclopedia. Same game....but just now with more density and more use cases being documented. 

Lately I have been a bit torn about the fact that I definitely fall in to a more old school camp when it comes to how I like my rulesets, dense and thick with too much information, vs. the fact that a game like OSE is so wonderful in its concise get-to-the-point approach of design, and then Shadowdark, which I love because it is designed to reduce complexity that could get in the way of jumping right to the part where you play the game, but perhaps at the expense of making its rules tomes and supplements anything more than utilitarian outlines that feel like a Cliff's Notes edition of D&D. 

This means that....if you are still in a corner of the hobby where part of the experience is reading and figuring out these rulebooks and their systems, then a game like Shadowdark really doesn't offer much to you.

Ah well....I guess while I mull that conundrum over I shall just resume reading the latest batch of Mythras books I just got (a Fioraccita supplement, Mythic Venice, and several third party modules I found on drivethru that I finally took the plunge on). Mythras is unquestionably in the old school camp of "there is no such thing as too much information." 

Or maybe I will read through some of my Mothership books....despite being definitely part of the zine scene where the "rules lite, informtion lite" era of gaming has been flourishing lately, a nontrivial number of Mothership books are actually super information dense (albeit for scenario and setting content), but in a tricky way where it disguises this density through the medium of contemporary short-form module design. 

I guess the one thing I can say for sure is: there's definitely something for almost everyone out there!

The B-List Character Problem (Supergirl Review and Post-Mortem)

 I saw Supergirl last week, a bit late but it was a fun movie. Not a great movie, mind you; I haven't thought much more about it beyond the fact that it was a fun romp and managed to hit a fair number of good storytelling beats while still being a fairly traditional story. The graphic novel it is based off of had more nuance and was less "action-y" than the movie, of course. But overall not bad. Milly Alcock does a good take on Supergirl, Jason Momoa makes a much better Lobo than he did Aquaman, and the smaller scale and feel of the story makes it a fun sort of one-and-done adventure.

But! The film has done poorly at the box office, and it is easy to see why. For one thing, Supergirl has always been a B (maybe even C) tier lister in the DC roster of superheroes. Now sure, James Gunn has managed to take some seriously obscure characters from both DC and Marvel and elevate them, but those are usually characters working in an ensemble cast, or who collectively have a dynamic range going on. In Supergirl we have really only got three key characters (Supergirl, the young girl seeking revenge whose name escapes me, and the criminally under-utilized Lobo) and a villain so generally lame he is worthy of a Marvel casting. 

But that can't be the reason no one showed up to the movie, though. I think the reason is ultimately pretty basic: Supergirl is a B-tier character, one who is better used as a supporting cast for an A-lister like Superman. Her only other claim to fame is some TV show appearances and a 80's movie that is generally only looked upon fondly with very thick rose colored glasses. Her comic is never a hit, and often targeting the younger crowd in a way that only older comic writers and artists can fail to do so ("Hey, Kids," type Buscemi moment type stuff). DC does this a lot, in fact, and juggles between trying to produce hip anime-style feeling comics for the young crowd that generally doesn't read comics, and also pushing out comics for the aging fanbase doing geriatric callbacks to references from obscure fifties and sixties characters that no one but the most diehard obscure fans care about anymore. It's an ongoing DC problem. 

Still, even that can't fully explain the reason no one turned up. I have two more ideas on why this movie had no legs, and one of them is an unpleasant notion but I still think explains it:

First: The movie is dirty, dark and miserably brown and grey. It is a modern film with no vibrant color or life to it, and it feels like a deliberate style choice in the film's cinematography, which is a shame because Superman last year was a very colorful, vibrant and fun movie that felt like a comic book come to life. So people who saw the Supergirl trailer would notice this, and notice that it was advertising a dour, miserable and unhappy storyline in sharp contrast with the ambitiously fun and upbeat Superman film.

Second: Aside from Supergirl being a B-lister and the trailers advertising a darker take on a chaaracter that the comic books often depict as a teenage girl's superhero (just read some recent issues of her recent books), there's Milly Alcock herself. She is a good actress who portrays an angsty, stressed and unhappy character struggling to find her place in the DC universe, and this is conveyed in the advterising for the film. But she is also....and I feel bad even commenting on this....not the prettiest woman. She is hard-edged and has exactly the right face and demeanour for this character I feel, but she is not a "pretty" person by conventional pop culture blockbuster standards. For the generic large crowd of unwashed movie going masses I feel her presence and appearance is a hard sell. This is a shame because she really is good in the role, but when you contrast her with the way Supergirl is normally depicted in the comics, I'd suggest that the hard edge of Milly is not typical of this character's design, and that someone like Samara Weaving or Dakota Fanning would be more "popular" fits. And this sort of sucks, because I like Milly Alcock in the role, but I just don't feel like her style and appearance is something that the superficial masses could manage. And that also rather sucks, because I think it helps explain why a lot of people saw the poster or the trailer and just decided they can wait for streaming on this one.

There is also the fact that this movie is surprisingly violent for a character who in a lot of current comics is clearly marketed at a younger teen girl crowd. If I had a young daughter and took her to this movie I think it would be a serious shock if prior exposure to Supergirl was entirely based on TV and 80's film appearances, or the more juvenile comics currently out there. It's the same problem the Mandalorian and Grogu had, where you have some major carnage happening in a movie that has a happy golucky animatronic puppet as a main character in it.

Okay, rant off! I give Supergirl a solid B+ for the record and now look forward to the Clayface movie.

Odd Rulings That Become Rules (Mythras vs. BRP)

 I was recently weighing Mythras Imperative against Basic Roleplaying (spoiler - BRP wins by a modest margin, but I will convert a lot of Mythras stuff over to BRP) when I noticed this odd rule on skills, regarding situations where the PC can attempt the skill a second time: in essence (to paraphrase) the Mythras rules indicate you can do so at a increased step penalty, because per the writer of the rules (for I disagree that there is any universal agreement on what is stated here), the PC will be too shaken and off balance during the second attempt. They give two examples where this could happen: climbing and picking a lock.

I had to mull this over a bit in my head. Climbing I could imagine a scenario for being more difficult a second time after a first failure; you may be rattled, shaken by a near-fall event or even just fatigued from the first try. But lock picking? It's almost certain that after a first failure you will actually go in to it a second time even more certain of the action because you have already tried and failed a certain approach, which thus narrows your range of options down to more likely vectors of success. Many skills might fall into this category. 

A lot of what is written in Mythras has a semi-unspoken rule of "decide on what makes sense, realistically," and that could hold true here. But the very two examples given are such that I feel the rule could have been written to say, "If common sense says the second try will be harder, then make the difficulty harder. But if trying a second time is informed and improved by the first failure, then don't penalize it." And the two examples given would support such a notion, I feel. 

Anyway, it just struck me as odd.....the certainty of the author in the rule that a second try will always be at penalty due to the character being rattled by the first failure seems inherently contradictory to so many scenarios where that simply is the opposite of reality that I was surprised at the boldness with which the statement was made.

Just a thought! Sometimes maybe a specific notion on how something works may not be the ideal arbiter of a standard rule. This leans slightly into my main pet peeve about Mythras, which is that the specials in combat come as a happenstance after an attack, rather than being a goal of the attack. That, however, is perhaps a gripe for a different post!

Increasing Appreciation for Old-School Essentials

 Laat night I managed to get our Friday group to start a classic B/X D&D campaign using a blend of the Erol Otus edition Basic and Expert rulebooks, with a few extra resources, including the BX Blackrazor Companion and Adventurer books, and some material (the skill sytem) from the D&D Cyclopedia. It was fun! I think we'll be playing this game for at least the length of the adventure I have set up, which has enough content for several sessions.

We did run into some interesting hiccups, though. I learned, for example, that the Basic and Expert books are awfully vague about things like: fighting in darkness, what blindness means mechanically, how darkness the spell works when used to cause blindness, and what those penalties look like. In looking through later editions (Mentzer era books, the D&D Cyclopedia, and then the OSE rules) it became clear that a creature with the blindness condition can't attack at all. If you're in the darkness area, does that mean you are considered blind? Also, if you are shooting into the darkness, what sort of cover penalty is that?

Little questions like this....as well as movement rules during combat, are a little difficult to parse out in the older B/X books. The clarifications get better in the later versions of the ruleset, and then the complexity magically starts to ramp up in the D&D Cyclopedia, which I noticed manages to take an inherently straight forward ruleset and make it more complex (but hey, that is supposed to be the definitive edition of the BECMI rules so that is to be expected). 

Where I found the best clarity, and developed a strong appreciation for what it is doing, is in the Old-School Essential rules. The deliberate clarity that the OSE rules focus on is excellent, and I suspect that the ease with which I could find answers to these questions (or at least guidance) is probably because the author's goal was to address exactly these issues of needed clarity. And the OSE rules succeed to great effect in this manner.

Moreover, it's been long enough since I last messed around with B/X D&D that reading through and running it again, then reading through OSE for comparison has really hammered home to me that the OSE rules are a shockingly exact translation of the classic rules in almost every possible way. There are little oddities; I notice an absence of electrum pieces, for example; and devil swine are recategorized as proper lycanthropes with associated traits in OSE, while their original counterparts were more like "lycanthrope adjacent," as examples. I am looking only at tbe B/X component of OSE, too; I am much more familiar with AD&D and so realize that the Advanced elements introduced in OSE are a bit more fluid in their reinterpretations of those rules elements, more a blend of B/X with AD&D elements wedded to them....which honestly is a bit closer to how I ran the game in the early eighties. 

Anway.... I let the group know that going forward I will be keeping the OSE rules handy for quick reference as they are just so much easier to find clarity in, and that PCs can be built from original rules or OSE rules and both are accepted in the game. 

EDIT: As an afterthought, I realize that had this rule been presented in a more, shall we say, "mechanics and ruleplay vs. reality-based rules and roleplay," then I would probably just accept it. So, for example, game systems like D&D and Pathfinder often have rules that have no functional basis in reality, but are grounded in the mechanical contrivances of the game system. It is possible this Mythras rule is intended to dissuade players from just trying over and over on a task....a rule attached to a stick with a soft, suishy rationale for the GM to lean on when the player argues with them over it. But that's technically not how its presented...it is trying to make the case that trying a task twice in a row increases the odds of failure, but that just doesn't mesh well with real life, which is what systems like Mythras are trying harder to emulate. So....yeah. Hmmm.

The B/X D&D Tipping Point

 I spent a fair amount of time accruing both Old-School Essentials books and Shadowdark books over the last couple years, and vascillating between which system I generally preferred. OSE because it is more of an emulator? Shadowdark because it is more of a focused modern experienced in retro sheep's clothing? OSE because it's got a blend of B/X D&D and AD&D mechanical elements, or Shadowdark which is brutally honest in its desire to focus on dungeon crawling and loot acquisition? OSE for its quaint retro-graphical aesthetic that suggests artists influenced by Erol Otus, or Shadowdark with its stark black.white/silver design ethos that reminds me of those full-page black and white splash images in the AD&D manuals?

Of course, in the midst of this I managed to almost completely rekindle my AD&D 1E collection, thanks to a lucky find at a game store out in Roswell. That alone was enough to get me mulling over pulling off a classic AD&D style campgin, but also somehow not quite as motivating as I might have imagined. There was a piece of the puzzle missing for me....and last month Wizard of the Coast finally completed that puzzle with a print on demand edition of the Basic D&D book, with the Erol Otus cover. They Expert set was already available, but hard to use that without the Basic set, you know? And finding halfway decent copies of either book for less than an arm and a leg on Ebay is hard to do these days.

So now I have the proper B/X D&D set, and this is what I was missing. While I did favor AD&D 1E back in the day for the more flexible character options, I actually consulted with the B/X rulesets, a lot....like, all the time, because when the DMG or PHB was proving to be inscrutible to my young gamer mind (this is specifically the time when I was around 10 years old to about 14) the B/X rules allowed for simple clarity. My favorite recollection on this was combat, starting with initiative and surprise. Clearly and simply explained in B/X, a sharp contrast from the nightmare exposition that Gygax laid like a trap for the unwary in the DMG. 

Sure, we noticed all the differences in the two systems, but back then chalked that up to being "here's the basic/expert version of the rules....there's the advanced version of the rules....mix and match until you get something that works and everyone understands." One thing I did not do back then was run either B/X or AD&D in pure form, at least not until I was high school age (around 15 and up) when I by that time was familiar with more complex systems, and began to study AD&D and B/X for what they were as unique games rather than complimentary sets. By that time I was playing Palladium Fantasy, Runequest, Tunnels & Trolls and even eventually GURPS 1E with more regularity. In my fanzine publishing days I had a spurt of interest in treating B/X D&D similarly to T&T, concocting material for the game as written, including solo adventures. It was a fun exercise in working within the boundaries of a system rather than finding ways to break it. During this time and right up through my college years I continued to buy B/X (and later bECMI) sourcebooks and modules, even if I mostly used them with AD&D 2E by then.

Anyway, fast forward 35 or so years to the present, and my interest in B/X D&D is rekindled with the new print on demand edition. It's a compelling third contender in the arena where the young whippersnappers OSE and Shadowdark have been duking it out. For one thing, a lot of the material I have on my shelves aimed at either OSE, Labyrinth Lord or other B/X retroclones is pretty compatible with original B/X. For another thing, a shocking amount of classic B/X material has made its way back into POD, meaning I have also managed to begin restoring my collection of modules, including many I never managed to snag back in the day.

This is not an unusual thing for me; I have a habit of "rediscovering" B/X every few years and looking at it on its own merits, a sort of "what could have been" had I not dived into AD&D instead of B/X early on. My entire Pergerron, the River Kingdoms of Anansis campaign setting actually started as a creative exercise in desiging a campaign which assumed only the character options, magic and monsters of B/X and source books were available for the world design.* Now I am feeling that creative urge to do something new within the boundaries of B/X again....but this time I am older, have less time, and am growing more fussy with overly rules-laden systems which is leading me to appreciate the more streamlined qualities of B/X even more. We shall see! I have ideas.....I will likely post them as they come here. This new venture may or may not cannibalize from OSE and Shadowdark. 

*Technically the first shot of Pergerron started in Magic World, but then became the basis for the B/X iteration. Now Pergerron is a weird D&D 5E/Cthulhu hybrid mashup, so is distinctly its own thing.

Cozy Gaming - Obojima, Land of Eem and Other Curiosities

 The idea of Cozy Gaming is a phenomenon which I have seen crop up in the domain of video games, and can cover games ranging from Stardew Valley to Animal Crossing. They originally sprang out of what I think was arguably a more child-age focused genre of game, designed to provide a game experience to kids which wouldn't horrify parents by focusing on crafting, farming, talking to NPCs and solving non-violent quests and stuff. Over the last twenty years this genre has sprung whole cloth into its own sort of thing. 

Where once video games were informed by tabletop RPGs, now the reverse is true. Cozy gaming experiences in the tabletop scene are springing up, and while I have as a rule of thumb mostly ignored this genre (being that one who likes Call of Cthulhu, Mork Borg and other skittery nightmares on my shelf) I have made an exception for two games of note: Land of Eem and Obojima.

Land of Eem is based on some juvenile graphic novels about a skeleton bard trying to make his way through the eponymous Lands of Eem; beyond the graphic novels you can use the game to explore a rather fabulous setting that reminds me of that Adventure Time cartoon (a show which seemed rather fun, albeit coming out waaaay too many years too late for me to enjoy it meaningfully). Obojima is a slightly different take on cozy gaming, instead being a sort of world/universe inspired heavily by Studo Jibli anime, movies which I know a lot of people really love (and which I have seen none of except for Nausicaa Valley of the Wind). It presents a land far in the future, where relic technology of a bygone age is scattered about in a pastoral land overlapping the spirit world. It's many denizens are a blend of natural and supernatural, and there aren't too many high stakes problems going on.

I have one or two other games that may or may not count as "cozy gaming" depending on how you stretch the definition. For example, one might look at Tales from the Loop and The Electric State to be somewhat cozy gaming adjacent, insofar as they both depict semi-post-apocalyptic lands where bad things happened, then as a side effect of this great and troubling collapse things got a lot calmer, and then also a lot more interesting. 

A key element of these games seems to be an emphasis on exploration and low stakes. Exploration in that you have weird locales and people/creatures/robots/things to meet and talk to (having more, rather than fewer opportunities to talk to things is pretty key), and that even if the atmosphere is eerie and weird, it is also simultaneously relaxing or at least not nerve wracking (so nothing like Alien RPG or Call of Cthulhu, the diametric opposite the cozy gaming genre). Likewise, low stakes in that you are not likely ever going to need to save the universe, fight a monstrous demon horde, or protect the town from certain doom.....although I suppose creative use of the genre can allow for anything, with he right context; but the point being that you are far more likely in a cozy game setting to be protecting a local fishing pond, finding new ingredients for a potion, making friends with strange spirits or having a wild adventure with the legendary Mister Toad than anything else.

Anyway.....this is a long way of saying I picked up Obojima and while I am currently reading through it I may write more soon, especially if I can convince my old group to give it a try.  

Quick Review: Armor Guy and Goblin Boy (The Mandalorian and Grogu)

 I actually watched and enjoyed all three seasons of The Mandalorian on Disney+ so I am probably the target audience for this movie. I am not going to elaborate too deeply on what is a quintessential popcorn action flick, other than to point out that at its core this movie feels to me like what Star Wars is actually about - fun world building, light but exciting action, some fun characters, lots of exotic set pieces and a story that just keeps on chugging along. It is not about deep inner meaning, philosophical elaboration or complex, nuanced plots, and yeah that means I think something like Andor may be good science ficiton but maybe not good Star Wars. 

Anyway, This movie showcases what feels a bit like a truncated mini season of the Mandalorian, focusing on a relatively tight and low-stakes skirmish between the Mandalorian and his pokemon Grogu vs. a series of renegade imperial warlords and a Hutt clan. Along the way we get a secondary cast of characters that includes the super buff son of Jabba the Hutt and a funky alien guy I am told is from the cartoons that acts both as Mando's getaway driver and Alfred Pennyworth. The movie is well paced and very fast, and the incredibly lush visual world building of Hutt space is a pleasure to watch. 

The bulk of the action in this movie is essentially "John Wick, but in Space" and even feels filmed in similar manner to those films. It works well for me, but it isn't maybe as zingy and frenetic as some other directors have done for the Star Wars films. It's also a very low-key story told primarily through a guy who's emotionally deadpan, hidden behind a mask and surrounded by puppet monsters for most of the movie, so the fact that this has any emotional resonance at all is a bit of a miracle.

I felt this movie fit a few specialized genres really well. First and most prominent is what I call the "Compenent Male" subgenre, of a suitably male figure who is confronted with a cycle of violence and he unerringly --and very comptently-- manages to wade his way through. This is the genre occupied by John Wick and other movies, many of which contain Bruce Willis, Jason Statham or Keannu Reeves in which the point of the movie is to watch our hero brute force his way through an endless wave of opposition with incredible style and panache. The Mandalorian does this repeatedly, murdering hundreds of stormtroopers, killer droids and lizard men with mesmerising efficiency. 

The second subgenre this movie hits marks on is the dominion of Competency Porn, which has been characterized as the genre of films about people who do their jobs really, really well and who demonstrate great knowledge and profiency at their tasks. Mandalorian's proficiency is combat and getting out of tight places....and he does this repeatedly very well, and when luck finally runs out for him it kicks in for his tiny buddy Grogu.

Finally this film is a member of the "Dad Movie" genre, which is the less dour companion to the "Sad Dad" genre which usually is reflected in certain video games. In this movie Mandalorian is the dad, and Grogu is the wayward adopted son he has decided to teach a lifestyle of murder and bounty hunting to. It's a fun romp watching this happen, and while my son was in a theater full of Gen alphas and Gen Zs waching The Backrooms I was in a theater with men in their fifties and sixties watch The Mandalorian raise Grogu in the arts of murder and subterfuge.

The movie is also, thanks to having a cast that is almost 90% faceless protagonst surrounded by mechanical puppets, animatronics and stop-motion robots and monsters (and no doubt plenty of CGI in the mix) a spiritual successor to the likes of The Muppets, Dark Crystal, Fraggle Rock and other wayward films of the eighties and nineties that had Jim Henson connected to them. The sheer number of actual real monster props that were animated and not just CGI in this movie is amazing. The sequences involving Babu Freek's gang of tiny engineers (are they all Babu Freek? I don't know) and Grogu, who meets other eerie puppets in the swamp immediately had me thinking "Best Fraggle Rock sequel, ever," but honestly, it was fun....a lot of fun.

So yeah, I liked this movie, it felt like a roller coaster and had no pretense of being anything more than that (unlike say The Last Jedi, for example). For me this may be my fourth favorite Star Wars film, behind the original (A New Hope), TESB and ROTS in that order. Solid A! 

Oh! I do have a gripe: the number of times that Mando loses his signature pistol then mysteriously recovers it later on despite the fact that there was no way he could have found it so easily was bordering on a running gag. I can only assume he had a 3-D Printer Holster that quickly regenerates the gun each time he loses it.

Bonus Spoiler Alert!

I very much enjoyed the James Bondian end sequence when the New Republic fighter squadron comes to the rescue, as they laconically....as if bored out of their minds....managed to systematically annihilate the entire air/space defense grid of the Hutts in one fell swoop and with no losses of their own. 

It's Been a Hot Minute! On Too Many RPGs, Handheld Gaming, The real AI Apocalypse and Getting some Time Back

 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!

Handheld Gaming Gets Worse!!!

 128KB is a great channel of two brits who like to talk handhelds and they keep pretty up to date on news in this niche industry. Unfortunately it looks like not only is the Legion Go 2 pricing at $2,000 or more now, but the Legion Go S series has exploded in price, too.

So, as an addendum to my last post, I want to declare that you should, if you are keen on handheld gaming, restrict your consideration to the Nintendo Switch 2  or one of the ASUS ROG Xbox Ally models (before they go up in price, too!) 

I do still stand by my MSI Claw 8 AI+ purchase, but concede even it is both going up a bit in price (not as badly as the Legion Gos are, though) and also somewhat hard to find. So as such....I declare victory as a tie between the Switch 2 and the Xbox Ally X (and base model), which I suspect are only remaining cheap right now because ASUS produced a very large number of them before the RAM and chip prices skyrocketed.