The Nerd Next Door

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...

I'm two months late but I beat one of the four routes of Fire Emblem: Three Houses on the Nintendo Switch. Overall I found it a great game with a good story, good characters, decent writing, great gameplay, and not wallowing in the waifu oversexualization/dating simulation that pained Fire Emblem Fates . But one thing I noticed is how much Intelligent Systems borrowed from a long forgotten Fire Emblem, a name that rarely reaches western ears due to its Japanese exclusivity; Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War . Which also leads me to question if we're gonna see the long forgotten 4th game get the Echoes treatment like Gaiden did in 2017. But in order to understand what I mean, we need to look at what is borrowed to understand. Of course, the first and perhaps most important of these ideas is in story. Three Houses follows three heirs, Dimitri, Edelgard, and Claude; all at an officers academy for training. Of course in actuality you play a side character who I named...