Tag Archives: gaming

The Ayn Odin 2

The Ayn Odin 2 with some customisations

My Ayn Odin 2 with a few small customisations.
A higher right analog stick with Skull and Co thumb grip, and the 3D-printed grips that a friend of a friend gave to me.

In the past year or so, there have been one or two handhelds that have come out which have not only met that performance bar of upscaled GameCube and PS2, but can also come to the party for 3DS, Vita, and even Switch emulation. And between the Retroid Pocket 4 Pro and the Ayn Odin 2, the Odin 2 is the one to get because it runs everything flawlessly, has battery life appropriate for 2024, and very few faults overall. There’s no doubt in my mind that if you wanted a modern handheld console to emulate every system that’s possible to be emulated on Android, the Odin 2 should be your first and foremost choice unless you want something pocketable, or with an OLED screen, or you have a very specific budget.

So why haven’t I bought one?

Had I know about the Odin 2 this time last year, I probably would have. It ticks basically every box that I’m interested in, with perhaps the exception of running actual PC titles on it, even though streaming from my PC might be an acceptable compromise. But after looking into it, it just doesn’t make sense to buy one now, 9 months into its lifecycle. It’s like this: one year ago, there was nothing under $600 that could emulate Switch acceptably. But the handheld console landscape is moving so fast that who’s to say what options we’ll have in another 6-12 months? After all, technology moves at such a rapid pace these days that there’s always something better just around the corner. The fact that you can even consider installing and using fibre optics in your home network at something even close to resembling a reasonable cost — something previously unthinkable not that long ago — is proof of this.

Even if no better options appear by the end of the year, the thinking is I’ll still be able to pick up an Odin 2 and be happy. Hell, I could absolutely do that today. But at this late stage of the game, it would be better for me to exercise some patience and wait six months. I’ve been waiting 20 years to be able to play GameCube and PS2 portably, chances are I can absolutely wait another six months. While I’d love something to play GameCube and PS2 portably now, if I’ve waited this long, I can probably wait another year or two, especially if it’s going to be a significant and meaningful improvement over the Steam Deck/Odin 2. Of course, there’s always better tech just around the corner, but honestly, how much better can it get at the sub-$800 price point?

So my question is really: if I pick up an Odin 2 today, am I going to be missing out on something great that’s potentially just around the corner in the next 6/12/18 months? Because the Steam Deck was basically the precursor to this whole handheld renaissance that we seem to find ourselves in (maybe not for retro games specifically, but it seems to have affected retro games nonetheless), and the Steam Deck has only been around for two short years. Based on my own research, there hasn’t been anything that isn’t a handheld PC that had great GameCube, PS2, and Switch performance for under $800, until last year’s Odin 2 and to a similar degree, the Pocket 4 Pro. It just seems like prior to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC, there just wasn’t anything good available at a reasonable price.

Like, the Odin 2 is already powerful enough, with maybe the exception of some Switch titles (and even then with NCE it may not be as big of an issue as it was), so maybe a more powerful chip isn’t that big of a draw card. Where do they go from here, and what other significant hardware changes can they make? The only potential improvements I can think they can make are having an OLED display, with potentially a higher refresh rate. How good a higher refresh rate for retro gaming is questionable, since 8th-generation and consoles typically target 30fps, and it’s not like you can get Switch games to run at 120fps, but this just serves to prove my point that there’s very little Ayn can do to improve the Odin 2.

But thanks to the header image on this post, you already know I ended up buying an Odin 2. I figure if I can get a few solid months out of it, emulating the GameCube and PS2 classics I grew up with, then flip it for close to what I paid, then that’s probably good enough.

Something I didn’t realise is when people talk about upscaling retro games, they mean actual upscaling. It’s not the kind of upscaling you get when you, say, convert a video to play at a higher resolution, because in those cases you’re just attempting to make something from nothing, and often you don’t get anything meaningfully better than the original.

No, video game upscaling is much better than that. Because the video game has access to the source data (the vertices and polygons which dictate how shapes should be rendered on screen), when you upscale a video game it looks incredible. It’s not perfect, because textures might still show their age even though the underlying models are tack sharp, and any pre-rendered assets like photos or videos that aren’t generated from in-game assets will still look blocky, but for the most part, upscaling games from the GameCube and PS2 era to 1080p looks great, and if you add in a HD texture pack, that’s about as close to a remaster as you can get, barring any actual quality-of-life improvements that an actual remaster might give you.

Or a Switch port, if your game is lucky enough to be in that camp.

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But what about the Steam Deck?

The keen-eyed amongst you will have noticed I failed to mention the the technically-handheld, borderline-portable, Steam Deck in my last retro handheld post. And it’s a curious omission of the handheld that arguably kicked off the portable-computer-as-handheld-gaming-console era that we have today. What makes it downright weird is that I’m arguably part of the ideal target market for the Steam Deck. I have a large, expansive Steam library that’s a mix of triple-A titles (although there’s much less of that these days), some of the most popular indie games, and plenty of releases from years gone by, and yet somehow, I haven’t picked up a Steam Deck in the two and a half years that’s it’s been on sale.

And while there are a couple of reasons for that, including how the Steam Deck isn’t officially available in Australia, so I’d have to import it myself, and if I’m not importing it myself, I’m paying a markup tax to the Australian company that is importing them, which adds to the already significant cost of the Steam Deck, I’m just not sure about the Steam Deck as a product I’m really interested in. The other major reason I don’t own a Steam Deck is that it’s kind of expensive for what it is. It’s a fairly serious investment on the same level as buying a new home appliance, a new graphics card, or even an iPad, all of which you would probably get more use from. If you already have a good-to-great gaming PC, the only drawcard the Steam Deck has for you is being able to play titles portably, and even away from your home.

And the crazy thing is, the specs aren’t even that good. Phones from the same era have high refresh rates 1080p displays, but the Steam Deck is stuck with an (admittedly larger than normal phone size) 7.4-inch, 800p display at 90Hz. But if you compare the Steam Deck to what it can do, then yes, maybe the cost is justified. Being able to play triple-A titles without shelling out for a complete gaming PC is a pretty impressive drawcard indeed.

The problem with doing this, particularly when you already have a great gaming PC, is that playing games portably sounds like a good idea until you realise it’s a compromise in basically every way. Playing away from home sounds like a good idea, at least for the few hours of battery life that you get if you’re playing heavier titles. Sure, you can extend your battery life by turning down the graphics options, but then it becomes a question of how much of a trade-off between battery life and graphical fidelity you’re willing to make. And while you can get perfectly fine battery life if you’re playing lighter, easier-to-run games, you’re really telling me you forked out for an entire Steam Deck so you could play Stardew Valley outside your house? I’m not one to yuck someone else’s yum, but that seems like a pretty wild decision to me.

But none of this is new if you’re a member of the PC master race. There’s always been this dichotomy of what you can run acceptably on your current hardware, and in particular what settings you can tweak to make it run at an acceptable frame rate versus still having enough graphical bells and whistles to make you feel immersed. If there’s one thing Valve really accomplished with the Steam Deck, it was that they put this power of choice in the palm of your hand. Well, hands, given how large the Steam Deck is.

While consoles have mostly been immune from this, in the past few years we’ve definitely seen games that have started giving console gamers the choice between lower resolution, less graphical effects, and a higher frame rate, or a higher resolution, more graphical effects, and a lower frame rate. It’s becoming increasingly more common to see games offer the choice between 4K at 30 fps, or something like 1440p but at 60 fps or more.

What’s interesting about all of this is that if it’s retro emulation I’m interested in, the Steam Deck has been able to play GameCube and PS2 portably since it launched, and I hear battery life when playing retro consoles is even acceptable. Not great, mind you, but acceptable. But one of the major draw cards of the Steam Deck, and why it commands such a high price in the first place, is because it can play PC games. Again, you can do what you like, but buying a Steam Deck for retro emulation seems like a strange decision when there are other devices that can emulate retro consoles just as well as it can with better battery life. Well, one or two, and only since the last year.

But as someone from the Game Boy Pocket generation (I never owned one personally, but friends did), the Steam Deck is huge and ungainly by comparison. Yes, all that gaming goodness has to go somewhere, not to mention the battery to power it all AND get acceptable battery life for what is essentially a smaller laptop, and a lot of the size is dictated by the screen size of the device. But there’s just no getting around just how cumbersome the Steam Deck, and most other PC-based handhelds including the ASUS ROG Ally, the Lenovo Legion Go, or the MSI Claw, really are. I don’t think handheld gaming consoles have to be pocketable, necessarily, but I don’t to want to draw attention unnecessarily in public by pulling out a Steam Deck and gaming on the bus/train/plane. It’d be like taking an iMac to a Starbucks. Sure you can, but do you really want to? Do you really want to be that guy?

So when you ask me “what about the Steam Deck?” I say that while it’s may be a reasonable product at a reasonable price, it’s not for me. It’s not even that I prefer playing most games with a keyboard and mouse, or that I don’t have any games that wouldn’t be suitable for playing on it, or even the fact that it’s large, bulky, and kind of pricey. It’s really all of those things, which make it unsuitable for what I’m looking for in a portable handheld console.

Now if and when Valve decide to release something like a Steam Deck mini, I would definitely be interested depending on the compromises that they decide to make for a smaller form factor. But for the time being, the search continues for my perfect handheld console.

The best worst keyboard

A Dell QuietKey keyboard from roughly 2010.

The Dell 0T347F QuietKey Keyboard — The Best Worst Keyboard

It’s a fine morning in 2010. I’m sitting in one of the tutorial rooms at uni, in a computer lab setup with rows of computers for students to use. The desk is terribly setup; the screen sits on top of the computer, which takes up so much depth on the desk that there’s basically only room for the keyboard in front of the computer and absolutely nothing else. Even the keyboard is almost hanging off the front edge of the desk. Ergonomics weren’t a thing in those days, it seems, but this was par for the course in this kind of ancient history.

Strangely, the keyboard grabs my attention. It’s a standard Dell keyboard, the kind that comes free with your new Dell computer and if you don’t know any better, the one that you start using with your new Dell computer. It feels surprisingly good to type on. It’s not mechanical, but the half-height keys are responsive in a way that I wouldn’t expect from an OEM keyboard – certainly not any OEM keyboard I’ve used up until that point, not even the white plastic Apple keyboards I used back in high school. The keys don’t have the same solid action or tactile bump that mechanical ones do, but they still feel great to type on, with a bouncy springiness that puts the typing experience leaps and bounds ahead of the lethargic key feel of any other rubber-domed keyboard of its time.

I like the keyboard so much that I end up buying one for the princely sum of $22, or about $30 in today’s money. It’s the cheap and cheerful nature of it that appeals to my frugal sensibilities, back in the days where I was a poor uni student that didn’t have a hundred dollars to spend on a mechanical keyboard, much less two hundred. I don’t end up using it as my daily driver keyboard — that privilege is reserved for the aluminium Apple keyboards of the time, but it’s far better than the rubberised, spill-proof, roll-up keyboard I’m using for my gaming PC at the time, as evidenced by this blurry photo.

The best worst keyboard with my two other keyboards of the time

I’ve had a bit of a storied keyboard history. On the one hand, I’ve been using a mechanical keyboard since about May 2012 or so, with the Das Keyboard being my very first mechanical keyboard. Before that, my setups often featured the standard Apple keyboard, with its instantly recognisable, if divisive, low profile, laptop-style chiclet keys. When I started my first corporate job and had my own desk, I specifically went and purchased a nice mechanical keyboard with macro buttons and RGB so I could have an excellent typing experience at work. That’s not really a thing these days, thanks to workplaces moving to mostly hotdesks in light of Covid and people appreciating the flexibility of working from home, but you can still do it if you’re willing to lug around a keyboard with you, or keep it in a locker or something at work. As much as I enjoy using nice mechanical keyboards, I’ve used plenty of less-than-stellar keyboards as well. There are photos of me with those rubberised, roll-up keyboards at LANs, where all I needed was something that made it possible to WASD around, no matter how mushy it felt, or how awful it was for any typing.

These days, my setup is generally two keyboards on my desk. The further back keyboard is currently a CODE Keyboard which is always connected to my Mac, while the keyboard directly in front of it is whatever keyboard I’m using with my gaming PC. For the last few years, that’s been a Corsair mechanical gaming keyboard with Cherry Red switches. This setup works pretty well. I don’t do that much typing on my Mac anymore, at least nothing like I used to do, but when I do need to type out the odd phrase, sentence, or even paragraph, the CODE Keyboard with its Cherry Green switches provides such a sublime typing experience that I find myself wishing I did. And when I’m in leisure mode and carrying games with Muerta in Dota 2, it’s nice to have a keyboard that I know I can rely on to give me the exact keys that I press, safe in the knowledge that if I accidentally hit a key, or fat-finger a skill in a teamfight, that’s on me.

Unless my keys flat-out doesn’t work, of course.

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Return of the Obra Dinn

I’ve played a lot of video games in 2018. I got a taste of the grind in Destiny 2 when it was free, fought in the frontlines in Battlefield 5, taken down other drivers in the Burnout Paradise remaster, constructed mining ships of my own design in Space Engineers, explored a vast universe in No Man’s Sky, and even tried out the DayZ 1.0, alongside my usual staple of Dota 2. But besides all the well-known games that I’ve played, there have been exactly two indie games which have been great enough to capture my attention, and this post is about one of them.

Return of the Obra Dinn is from Lucas Pope, who you might better know from the immigration paperwork game Papers, Please. Return of the Obra Dinn is slightly different, in that it’s still about paperwork, but this time around you play the part of a insurance investigator. Officially, your job is to determine how much should be paid out to the crew of the good ship Obra Dinn, which in turn means figuring out all 60 crewmembers, and their fates.

To aid you in doing so, you have a magic pocket watch. And a notebook, but we’ll get to that later. One of Return of the Obra Dinn’s core gameplay loops involves finding a dead body, standing over it, and then using your magic pocket watch to go back to the moment of that person’s death. These death scene freeze frames don’t allow you to interact with anyone or anything, with the idea being that you can walk around, observe, inspect, gather clues, and hopefully identify who was present and what was happening, all from a few voice lines and a still frame of the exact time they died. Sometimes, one death scene will lead to the discovery of another body, which is another scene, and so on, until you have a little series of events.

These events, in turn, make up “chapters” within your notebook, which describes itself as the catalogue of adventure and tragedy that befell the Obra Dinn. By going around the ship, discovering more and more bodies, and more and more scenes, you’ll start to build up a depiction of the characters so you can start putting names to faces — no easy task, given the one-bit graphics and often obscure clues and hints that you’ll need to pick up on.

Make no mistake, Return of the Obra Dinn is hard. The game warns you fairly early on that in your quest to identify all 60 passengers and crew and their fates, definitive information that will let you decisively identify someone and their fate is rare. While you’ll usually have some idea of how a person died thanks to your magic pocket watch, working out who they are based only on contextual clues — what they’re doing in any given scene, what they’re saying, what they’re wearing, who they appear with — is challenging in the extreme. The game helps by blurring faces in the notebook until it thinks it has revealed all the information you’ll need to positively identify someone, but you’ll still need all of your powers of observation to do so. At times, you’ll need to jump between different scenes in order to work out who someone is, taking a look at where they are, what they’re doing, and so on.

It’s all very murder-mystery. Only instead of trying to work out who (or in some cases, what) did the deed, the real challenge is putting names to faces.

Unfortunately, that’s also where Return of the Obra Dinn falls short. There’s basically no replayability, given that once you’ve figured everything out, that’s how it is for the rest of time. It’s for this reason that I don’t recommend doing what I did and looking up a guide, no matter how stuck you are. The problem with this kind of game is that it’s hard for a guide to point you in the right direction, and they may end up just spoiling a few characters or two. Instead, I recommend using all the available clues; the game provides you with all of the details that you need to identify someone, even if they’re obscure as all hell. Once you’ve unlocked every scene, go through and review all of the scenes an individual appears in and try to work out who they are based on what they’re doing, who they’re with. In any scene, there’s usually something that gives away who someone is, even if you have to use a different scene to know what that is.

Return of the Obra Dinn is currently $28.95 (that’s Australian dollars to you, pal) on Steam, and you should absolutely buy it if you’re at all a fan of putting your observational skills to the test, feeling like a right Sherlock Holmes when one of your inferences pays off, or just lucky when you guess the identities and fates of people you have no idea how to otherwise identify. It’s a masterpiece.

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds and the Price of Early Adoption

Yo, am I supposed to be able to see through these rocks, or what?

The end of the year is upon us once again. Wherever you look, there’s one game that’s making every game of the year list. I’m talking about PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, of course, and no matter how many GOTY lists I read, it’s always PUBG this, PUBG that. Always in the top 5, if not at number one.

Don’t get me wrong, PUBG is a fantastically good game, and it absolutely deserves all the praise it gets. It’s been the only game I’ve really played this year besides DOTA and a minor fling with CS:GO that only lasted a few weeks. There’s just something about the battle royale gameplay of PUBG that makes it appealing to everyone, whether you’re a lone ranger slowly working your way towards a solo chicken dinner, buddied up with a friend trying to win as a pair, or working tactically as a squad, against a whole bunch of other squads.

You loot your way across the map. Hopefully the play area shrinks in your favour, lest you spend the entire round “circle-chasing”, constantly riding the outside edge, one bad encounter away from death. Occasionally, when you decide that you like the look of a set of buildings and decide to make camp, some unlucky squad will drive up, only to be gunned down by your squad’s perfectly orchestrated burst of assault rifle fire from multiple angles. Sometimes, you’ll be that unlucky squad, and other times, you’ll will that encounter, only to die to a unfortunate circle shrink mere minutes later, pinned down by two other squads.

Maybe you’ll be involved in an epic car chase. Be half-a-second late to save a mate. Jump out of a window to get into a better position. Crawl prone through some nice wheat as the battle erupts around you. Spray and pray with the micro-uzi. Get a lucky headshot to kill the last man in the squad. Notice someone out the corner of your eye. Revive someone, only to have them be immediately downed again. Or, if you’re really unlucky, get your entire squad wiped out by a single mortar round.

Has anyone seen my guns? I knew I left them around here somewhere…

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is a lot of fun. It’s all the more impressive that this game reached 1.0 just a few short weeks ago.

That’s not to say PUBG has been without its fair share of bugs. Everyone who has played before 1.0 experienced some kind of wonkiness. Nothing particularly game-breaking, just frustrating inconsistencies between patches that make you want to quit playing the game forever. I’m not talking about the patch-to-patch balance issues — we have to be a little lenient, given that it was listed as early access for the vast majority of 2017 —
stuff that was “working” in one patch is now completely broken in the next.

All of this might sound like PUBG is a broken mess of a game, but honestly, PUBG has been pretty good in that department. There aren’t many bugs that I can remember, and while the game will likely have “balance” issues due to what seems like an inconsistent ballistics model, those are unrelated to any technical aspects of the game. It’s by no means bug free, but animation bugs are about as worse as it gets.

But isn’t that the price you pay for being an early adopter? Isn’t the trade off of a few bugs — many of which you might never run into, most of which have workarounds, and none of which break the game completely — worth being able to play one of the undisputed standout titles of the year?

None of this is particularly new, of course. Even for games that aren’t listed as early access on Steam, games from developers and publishers bigger than PUBG have always had more issues on release than they do months after their initial release. Not because they couldn’t live up to their astronomical-levels of hype, but due to technical issues plagued them from the outset.

Prey is one such game. I’ve been playing Prey in the last week of the year. I remember the demo coming out a few months ago. At the time, I was quick to dismiss it after an hour of uninspiring gameplay. Truth be told, Prey didn’t even make it onto my radar of games this year. Seeing it on as many GOTY lists as PUBG changed that, and I thought I should give it another go.

I’m glad I did, because Prey is great, exactly the kind of action-RPG that I am into. In more ways than one, I’m glad I didn’t play it when it was first launched, because it apparently had save-corruption issues when it first came out. Save corruption bugs are the worst of all, because they’re lost progress, putting them squarely in the game-breaking bucket.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time Arkane/Bethesda has had launch issues with one of their triple-A titles. Dishonored 2 suffered at the PC performance altar when it first launched late last year, and it took a bunch of patches until it were finally fixed1. Even after six months, I still ran into one performance issue with one specific part of Prey, even though the game ran perfectly otherwise.

And isn’t that the ideal scenario? Wouldn’t you rather wait a few months to play a game you’re really looking forward to, just to make sure that all the bugs are ironed out of the 1.0 release, so you can have the best possible experience of the game?

In a perfect world, games would be released with zero issues. In reality, games are often broken on launch because programming is hard and because people aren’t perfect, so we end up with these bugs and issues. In the world of pre-order bonuses and where games spend years in development, it’s hard to not want to play a game as soon as it comes out, even if that means using a VPN to get a few extra hours playtime because the game has already been released in a different region. All I’m saying is, sometimes waiting can pay off.

But bugs can be fun too.

I call this one “the level 3 helmet squad”.

  1. Although, to be fair, I don’t remember any of these performance problems a year after the fact. Probably because the game is so good, any negative experiences early on were minor in comparison. ↩

Secondhand Mac Pro Pricing Is Ridiculous Now

IMG_3038If money was no object, my dream Mac would be the Mac Pro. Back in high school, we’d have these impromptu competitions to find the most expensive computer possible. And since the Mac Pro was both insanely expensive and able to be configured to an eye-watering level of performance, ticking all the boxes meant you could get your Mac Pro configuration towards the $30,000 mark without breaking a sweat.

I’ve never actually owned a desktop Mac before. No desktop Mac has really appealed to me, and as someone who’s had a separate PC for gaming for years, having two desktop machines means I lose out on any potential portability I wish to partake in. So every time I’ve had to decide on a new Mac, the only real decision that makes sense is a MacBook Pro, upgraded as much as I can afford it to be.

So here’s the deal: I use a Mac as my primary machine, and at the moment, it’s a Late 2013, 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display. It does everything, from composing blog posts late at night, to writing the daily new summaries in the morning. General web surfing, media playing, and, on occasion, I’ve played the odd game of Dota 2. Although it’s a portable machine, it almost never leaves the spot on my desk where it’s hooked up to my 4K external display, Thunderbolt dock, and all the other peripherals you’d expect to be plugged into your daily driver.

Which brings us to the other side of the equation, my gaming PC. I recently put together an almost-entirely new gaming rig for the purposes of upgrading to a more modern platform, but it’s been pretty lacklustre as far as upgrades go. For what I’m using it for (i.e. gaming), there hasn’t been any real noticeable difference in performance, which is kind of disappointing, and kind of makes me feel like I upgraded in order to keep up with platform changes, instead of upgrading because my old PC was getting a little long in the tooth.

PC performance (Mac or otherwise) has long passed the point where CPU performance makes a difference, which goes to explain why buying a machine from 2010 doesn’t faze me. In terms of general, day-to-day PC performance, the number one thing that matters these days is a fast SSD. Even then, you’re going to be hard-pressed to notice the difference between any modern SATA-based model or the newfangled PCIe-based ones, despite PCIe SSDs have much higher throughput. Again, it all depends on the kind of workload you’re throwing at them, and for gaming, the only thing that matters is GPU and to a lesser extent, CPU performance.

Which is just about where my dilemma begins. The portability on my MacBook Pro is nice and all, but I almost never use it that way. And having such a highly-specced PC that I only use for gaming seems like a bit of a waste. What if I could combine the two? I’d go from two separate computers to one, and I’d have the best of both worlds — a machine that runs OS X for my day-to-day, then reboots into Windows when I want to play some video games.

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