The Nerd Next Door

Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is one of my all time favorite games, an easy Top 10 greatest for me. It's story is magnificent even if it stumbles by the end, it's design adopts my favorite class system from Final Fantasy V , and the game pushes the Switch to it's limit. It's like Metroid Dread in that it was my dark horse Game of the Year. Indeed, the only downside is that The Game Awards didn't give the game the love it deserved. Losing to God of War for best soundtrack? Not even getting a nomination for best story or voice acting? Seriously? It's snub at the Game Awards aside, Xenoblade 3 is a game chock full of deep themes and messages about war, love, loss, the nature of humanity in the face of hardship, and bitchin guitar/flute duets. But one thing I don't think a lot of people talk about is the games ties into The Book of (Sega) Genesis from the Bible. Not just how it has parallels, but how it criticizes specifically the creation of humanity portrayed in ...

Last week Valve announced Steam Deck, a handheld PC with a starter price of $399 and going up to $650 for the highest end model. Automatically people compared it to other Valve hardware, namely the Steam Machine; Valve's attempt at the console market in 2015 that failed miserably. However, I disagree with people making this comparison; in fact I think Steam Deck stands a far better chance than Steam Machine did. But in order to understand why I need to explain why Steam Machine failed in the first place and where the Deck seems to learn from it. The Steam Machine was released in 2015 as an attempt to go up against the PS4 and Xbox One while offering an entry into the PC market for non-PC gamers. This was where the problem began, no one knew is this was meant as just a prebuilt PC or a whole new console. And because Valve took the 3DO route of licensing the brand no one knew if you could even upgrade a Steam Machine. It was a very muddled system with an unclear role in a market wher...