Ep. 373 - Switch Boy Advance

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I think this is a large part of it for me, too. I learned how to do a lot of the (non-hardware) fiddly nonsense on our old family computers and that’s knowledge I’ve carried forward to today in getting PC games to work properly. But that was never the fun part to me: the games were!

As an added wrinkle, modern Windows PCs have extra layers of obfuscation (to “protect” less competent users from breaking things) that honestly make this work more annoying for someone with that level of fluency. So, in some ways I find things more frustrating today than I did on say, Windows 98 or Windows XP (may she rest in peace)

Compounding this is that most “big” games are console-forward in the modern era, with PC ports often being shoddy in some unique mess of ways every time, and at a certain point, I often find myself wondering why I would bother! The main thing I use my PC for as far as gaming goes are MMOs (for easy keyboard use), games with controller-hostile interfaces (like your average isometric RPG), and more generally games I intend to play online, since paying a surcharge for console internet has always rubbed me the wrong way

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I think there is something to this.

For me, my job became a lot more about being good at using a computer. So I can definitely manage a PC, but after 8 hours of working on a computer I honestly just love opening a game on a console and getting right into it.

When I was younger I was much more happy to fiddle with settings and my PC itself. I also have a work laptop too, so buying a PC is purely a leisure expense and therefore harder to justify.

The Steam Deck is the only thing that has swayed me, but mainly just for indie games and emulation. If the Switch 2 had come out in 2023, I probably would not have bought a Steam Deck. But I do also like being able to play itch.io games and indies that haven’t been ported yet, but don’t require amazing graphics performance.

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Well you were a natural! Okay I did a quick google for the right adversity quote, and the immortal Dean Koontz nailed it when he wrote, “Adversity breeds toughness, and the tough succeed. And survive.” So yeah, right there from the ole DK