There's definitely a learning curve to it but if you put the time and effort into it the trackpads can become second nature. I don't really care for gyro but your mileage may vary. Take some time playing with the different setting adjustments to figure out what works best and then try to stick with those settings across different gamesto build up your muscle memory. Personally I find 175% sensitivity, trackball friction high, haptics off to be most comfortable. I started practicing with Amid Evil since its controls are quite basic, and moved up from there. Now I don't even think about the controls and I recently enjoyed a full playthrough of Doom 2016 with no gyro or aim assist. Another approach that might help your coordination and fluency could be to spend time playing something highly mouse-centric like Torchlight, Titan Quest, FTL, etc. It'll feel really clumsy trying to click around at first but after several hours it'll probably start to feel more natural. As for the rest of your movement, I recommend setting up the back buttons for jump/crouch/walk/sprint so you don't have to take your thumbs off the sticks/pads.

Perhaps you may or may not enjoy ~~Space Asshole~~ Red Faction: Guerilla. It's a 2009 game that got a solid enough PC port that may run on weaker systems. There's a remastered version but if you're aiming for low-spec the original might be a better bet.

Anyway, it's an open world set on Mars and you go around wreaking havoc and blowing up buildings with ahead-of-its-time physics/destruction mechanics. The combat is more like a shooter and you play with lots of explosives. It's not a huge map by standards today but is a big enough playground to keep one occupied.

I test drove Heliboard the past week and I quite liked it, especially the customization options. I've been trying to escape Gboard for years but viable options with swipe typing support are few and far between.

Unfortunately, the lack of Japanese input makes it a total non-starter for my use case so I had to go crawling back.

It's a fairly common type of cat toy...

It's not all bad; as far as I'm concerned Nier Automata had one of the greatest and most compelling soundtracks of all time. I still listen to it on a regular basis and am floored every single time.

Sorry, I must have missed the "no fun allowed" sign, but I'll bite. WB has now shitcanned 3 fully completed or nearly completed films. Then they claim the films are literally worse than worthless, and report all expenses incurred as loss, which lowers their tax burden. This is obviously a system designed to protect business when struggling, but it's a pretty clear example of abuse. The film/media industry in particular has a long and storied history of manipulative, abusive accounting, and there is essentially an entire cottage industry of legal experts who specialize in the art of bending the laws and threading the loopholes for maximum exploitation. There are enough legal smoke and mirrors that film productions can and do fudge absolutely everything remotely financial, often drastically inflating or deflating officially stated costs.

Another part of the problem is how damaging this kind of behavior is to the creators and production staff themselves. When a studio bins something like this everybody loses, except for the corpo leeches moving the beans around. Movie production can have a lot hanging on royalties. Imagine you do a job on a film for a token amount with a royalty component. Then a suit decides he can get a bigger bonus literally burning your movie instead, and suddenly you're out all that time invested and never receive proper or fair compensation for your work. The accountants can say, "Oh, this movie needed effects work, we only paid them with a few pizzas and a promised 1% royalty, now let's project ourselves some massive sales and extrapolate to claim 20 million spent on effects!" and suddenly it's money for nothing (and the chicks for free?) when the taxman comes around and listens to the sob story of burdensome expenses. Again, this kind of shenaniganry has decades of experience weaseling out of nearly all significant oversight or regulation and the corruption is systemic.

This also really sucks for everyone involved, even if they actually do get fully paid, because even a single movie can be several years of work that suddenly became a worthless, unverifieable void on a resume. Truth is, it's easy to rant for hours about the shady stuff going on.

Bringing it back around, the WB games arm hasn't been very good for people either. They've been shoehorning in predatory microtransactions and forcing battlepass style games-as-a-service mechanics in numerous games lately. I realize the devs themselves have no control over these kinds of additions forced from above. However, the catch-22 is that success for these games would only reward and reinforce the MBAs interjecting buzzwords and pulling the strings. So either the devs lose, and their game gets tossed, or the players lose, since management smells blood in the water and doubles down on profiteering mechanics in the next game. Unfortunately, rather than apply critical thinking and conclude that these toxic elements relate to the game's unpopularity, they took to the media playing the world's tiniest violin, vaguely gesturing that the poor devs worked so hard to make good games but the consumers are bad for not supporting them.

This also sucks, which feels bad. Therefore, I leveraged a sarcastic inference relating two morally dubious, greed-driven examples of poor behavior by a wealthy international megacorp trying to paint itself as a victim. Such attempts at humor are sometimes used to make bad feelings turn into slightly less bad feelings, lightening a mood or delivering some modicum of mirth. In some cultures, it might be called a "joke".

Yes, how generous of WB to allow it to be released slightly before binning the whole thing for a tax writeoff. How dare we not properly consume and obey!

The low quality parts thing can't be overstated. The original DS was really the last "Nintendium" quality hardware in my book. The DS Lite had a ton of issues people tend to forget about. Extremely flaky shoulder buttons, yellowed screens, and cracked hinges were not a question of if, but when. Mine lasted about 6 months before the R button stopped working reliably. The first generation 3DS was a step back in the right direction, and mine is still going strong, but the circle pad longevity is dubious and the bottom screen plastic scratches if you look at it wrong. Then came the New 3DS, which looked good on paper but the New 3DS LL was a huge disappointment. The backplate cracks around the screws, the hinge has tons of flop in it, and within a year the paint and coating was flaking off of the top shell leaving a ~2cm patch of bare metal. Then came the Switch, with the lowest quality sticks I've ever seen. Even my Switch Pro Controller drifts like crazy.

Knowing Nintendo the Switch 2 will already be obsolete at launch and power users will get better performance emulating the damn thing on modern hardware instead. Fool me twice, I, uh, won't get fooled again, or something.

I haven't tried it on Deck, but personally I'm a bit skeptical you'd get much tangible benefit over just setting lower package TDP limits as necessary, considering how much of a pain in the ass stable undervolting can be. TDP also has the advantage of per-game settings so you can just crank down undemanding games automatically instead of trying to juggle voltage/stability across the board.

At least it's nice to see them sticking with George Carlin's nomenclature.

Here's a phrase that apparently the airlines simply made up: near miss. They say that if 2 planes almost collide, it's a near miss. Bullshit, my friend. It's a near hit! A collision is a near miss. [WHAM! CRUNCH!] "Look, they nearly missed!" "Yes, but not quite."

It's a personal preference and your mileage may vary, but I found a silicone skin to make a huge improvement in handling comfort.

I'm in central Japan and this summer has been by far the worst in the 9 years I've been here. Energy prices are also through the roof right now since TEPCO chose to slander and FUD nuclear energy instead of admitting that their chain of penny-pinching, engineer-ignoring poor decisions was ultimately responsible for the Fukushima meltdown. I suspect a lot of people, particularly the elderly, are going to be squeezed past the breaking point as electric bills are doubling and tripling and air conditioning becomes an unaffordable luxury.