Thanks for the clarification! I should try stuff more, and read less landing pages

Thanks for raising awareness of FOSS Discord alternatives. Revolt certainly is the best looking of all of them.

Last time I looked into this, Revolt’s voice and video chat was “unsupported” for self-hosting while they were working on a complete rewrite. Is this still the case?

The other big FOSS Discord alternative is Synapse-Matrix with the Element X client, but no clue how far along voice and video is over there either.

Then there’s Mattermost, which is more work-oriented and has voice and screen share, but no video calls.

I should host some of this stuff to try it out.

It is. Very atmospheric, and I’m sure there’s a whole lot more depth to things like combat and crafting if you’re interested.

For me it’s just an easy and accessible story RPG. The text-based dialogue and turn-based mechanics make it ideal for on the road gaming IMO. You can look up from your screen or suspend and drop the Deck into your bag at any point.

The writing is great and the game feels much, much, much more fluid than the actual old games it is based on. A lot of love and care has been put into this. It’s very affordable and the most battery-friendly game I’ve played. So when you start up your Deck on the train and only have 15% left, this gives you much more enjoyment per battery charge than anything else.

Full disclosure: I happen to know the artist who did the character art.

• Skald: Against the Black Priory
• Mud Runners

Does Cold Waters work well on the Deck?

I’ve been hoping that the new Sea Power: Naval Combat in the Missile Age will work well on the Deck in a year or so, and was planning to stick to Dangerous Waters until then.

My P-3 (maritime patrol aircraft) bindings are shared on the community bindings already!

DW runs incredibly efficiently. The graphics look like 1999 anyways, so I just dial the TDP all the way down to 3 W and set FPS to 20. Perfect game when the battery is low!. I haven’t modded it at all, I actually like the retro vibe (and the incredible sonar simulation).

Dangerous Waters.

Very old style, bit clumsy on the controls, but incredibly tense with the gritty sonar stuff.

Been only playing the P-3C airplane so far, but there’s also tons of submarines, a helicopter and a frigate.

It is so satisfying to find and torpedo a submarines after staring at sonar graphs and dropping buoys for a while. Love it! I’ll be sharing an updated aircraft-oriented controls config when I’m happy with it, based on the one community config that was there, which was more sub-oriented.

In my first month with the Deck, I have mostly played:

• Death Stranding
• Red Faction: Guerrilla
• GRID (2008)

And the hilarious tech demo of course!

I’m really happy with how well Death Stranding works and really see myself finishing it now that I can play it on commute. Love that game but it never fit my schedule (at the desk, I always played flight sims in VR or just a very quick shooter session).

Red Faction and GRID are easy enough on the battery, especially at 40 fps, and not too fussy about controls so they feel good with a controller (I felt a bit handicapped in Dirt Rally 2 and Project Cars 2).

In terms of emulation, I installed RetroDeck and tried Gran Turismo PSP but found that hard with the large stick and no analog controls for accelerate/brake Just putting some PS1 and PS2 games on it now, let’s see if those will be able to bump GRID and Red Faction from my frequented list:

• Metal Gear Solid 1,2 and 3
• Gran Turismo 4