If we can just get the remaining countries to jump on board by the year 2005, we might avoid the worst effects of climate change.

Now people get to argue about which parts of Turkey and Russia are in Europe. Kaliningrad is Asia but “Europe” borders Iran.

It would have to be game changing! Get it?!? “Game” changing?!? Ah, whatever.

Awful puns aside, it really would have to be a major step up in hardware. The Steam Deck is a platform developers (plus accessory makers and open source devs for emulators and stuff) seem to care about. Even modern AAA game devs will often try to make their games playable on it even if they have to compromise. (It may not be technically possible or economically feasible but devs seem to all want to support the Deck even if their bosses have other plans.)

At some point, it’ll be impossible for the Deck’s hardware to handle recent games and then we’ll all upgrade to something that sets a new baseline and strikes a better balance — whether Steam Deck 2 or a competitor. But my guess is that it’s going to be more about hardware generations than something Microsoft does. (Proton might be nearly perfect by the time Microsoft makes a decent controller interface and they seem to be focused on shoehorning AI into Notepad and Paint instead of doing useful things.)

I prefer the PS5/SteamDeck joystick layout to the Xbox/Switch layout but I’m addicted to back paddles now — I even got 3rd party joycons for Switch that have two (and also are as thick as the Steam Deck so it feels familiar when I jump over to play Zelda or whatever).

They’re BINBOK controllers and have been great for my needs in handheld mode. The back paddles aren’t fully programmable and I think there’s some features missing but nothing I really notice. And they’ve probably lasted longer than the official Joycons.

What I’d really like is a controller that’s basically just the deck without a screen.

My default move is to map the L3 and R3 clicks to two of them. (I even unmap the actual stick clicks sometimes because I click them by accident a lot.)

I also find it useful in games where the situation changes and A B X & Y completely change what they do. Like if a game is mostly exploring but sometimes in a car/plane/spaceship/whatever, I’ll map the back buttons and use them when I’m in the secondary situation. (There’s lots of other examples of games that temporarily switch genres on you here and there and using the back buttons helps me remember the controls.)