JonCole

If Valve says some of the design purpose of the touch pads mirror that of the potential touch screen, I think they can't be wrong to do so considering they are literally designing the controller. Considering so few people have actually used the touchscreen version of the Steam Controller, I think it's practically impossible to ascertain how much was actually lost in removing it from the design. It's great to have faith that it would have been awesome, but the overhead for creating a profile manager to change what's on the screen per game, having devs potentially setup controller profiles manually for each game they make, and putting custom profile creation in the hands of consumers for games that don't support the touchscreen out of the box is not insignificant. It's been attempted before - Razer has their Switchblade technology that really never took off and Logitech has had LCD screens on keyboards that require a lot of tinkering except for a small subset of supported games. Sure, Valve has more leverage in this respect but I can't imagine it would have been as popular or successful as the DS (mostly considering the second screen was a major physical presence on the device so I imagine more devs were compelled to use it in more interesting ways). As someone who loves technology, I'm disappointed that the Steam Controller is a less daring attempt to redefine the PC controller than originally thought. But as a gamer and someone who wants the device to actually succeed, making it something that requires less overhead, probably costs less to make, and it more immediately approachable to more casual gamers seems like a smart move and one I can't give them much grief over.

I actually got a new microwave this year that has "Inverter Technology" that's probably the best microwave I've ever owned. In my research before buying it, I found that this technology allows for variable voltage meaning that the "power level" aspect of the microwave is real. The microwave at my work deals with power by cycling the microwave at full power; ie, at 50% power the microwave is on for 15 seconds, turns off for 15 seconds, turns back on for 15, and so on until complete. This microwave actually does heat at a variable "power", meaning I can defrost frozen meat without cooking it and heat up soup at 70% or something so it doesn't bubble up and make a mess of my microwave. Anyways, the Panasonic Genius 1.2 cuft 1200 Watt Sensor Microwave w/Inverter Technology is my MOTY 2013.

I checked when the daily first hit Vita and it was a different seed then. Don't know if it still is, but it seems the more natural design choice.

I frankly find the controller essential for Rogue Legacy, if only because it feels so much like old-school console platformers that it'd feel wrong not to use one. You can even just use a utility like Xpadder to use a 360 controller on older/incompatible games. Have they released a wired controller with converting D-pad yet? I'd love to upgrade my 1st gen white 360 controller at some point. I just started getting back into this game because I feel I should finish it before seriously considering my 2013 GOTY list, and man does it scratch an itch. I feel like I could just farm forever and not make any "progress" through the game. Did finally beat the second boss, despite being able to really handle myself on the Tower. In some ways it really makes me want to play Metroid, mostly in the pattern-recognition boss fights and the map screen.

After not playing for about a month and a half, I tried playing again on the Vita version. Man, I really have to be practiced to play on that platform because I just feel those controls are much less tight than a 360 controller on PC. I died in the daily challenge about 1.5 minutes in jumping directly onto some spikes.

The DS is great, but I feel like that's barely a function of the second screen. I can practically count on my hand the number of games that wouldn't have been possible without the second screen and were actually good.

Random thought - I wonder if Steam OS/Linux will guarantee Microsoft's being really slow on introducing a DirectX standard that isn't easily backwards compatible with older OSes. Because if at some point, I needed to upgrade to upgrade to Windows 9 to play the top 10% of games (or AAA games), I imagine there might be a lot of resistance granted a totally free option running on OpenGL over there.

Ah, yeah. I imagine that not only MMOs, but also ARPGs with those hotbars could benefit from that. A gaming keypad seems much more friendly to use function keys on because that's it's primary purpose, I could actually see myself using one of those Razer Nostromos or something. But still, I don't know how the hotbar utility would map to the original Steam controller because the touchscreen only essentially had 4 easily accessible keys (although I guess you could potentially cycle through F-keys with swipes or something, though it seems unnatural).

Do people (like, people that participate in these forums) actually map function keys? I've had like two or three keyboards with those things but I've never used them. I also know that those Naga mice have them, which seems slightly more intuitive than a strip of F-keys on the left side of my keyboard away from the home keys I naturally place my hands on.

Jake also didn't write any entries (unless I'm reading wrong?) However, Jake is the VGOTY.cx himself so I don't think he gets a vote.

I think I'll be ready to talk about my "real" GOTY 2013 list in about three months when I actually make it through my backlog. For now, I'm comfortable giving the temporary honor to Tomb Raider and honorable mention to Spelunky PC.

I liked the idea of the touchscreen, but the utility of it still escaped me much like the utility of the second screen on the DS (in about 75% of games, obviously excluding most Nintendo FP games) and the Logitech PC keyboards with the 300px X 100px LCD screens escaped me (is this a thing MMO players care about or something?). Plus, I can't imagine the touchscreen made the price/margins anything but prohibitive on the controller. In other words, I can't be bothered that it's gone and I think the buttons will make the controller a lot more immediately appealing to regular gamers. Those touchpads are intimidating enough, let alone having far less buttons than a typical controller distributed in an unfamiliar setup around a weird touchscreen.

So, I guess AMD just released their Kaveri APUs today, which seem to be quite impressive - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113359 Sure, they're not going to blow away something like a Haswell Pentium with a dedicated AMD R7 260x, but that A10-7850x does almost as good in a much smaller package at around or less than the same price. It's a shame that the first Steam Machines were shown at CES before this chip made it out there, there are going to be some sweet mATX builds with them.

The joke is enveloping your heads into a lovely joke calzone.

IGN posted a comparison of the XBO/PS4 "Definitive" version vs the last-gen version. I can't say I'm surprised, but the improvements are less than remarkable. I imagine some element of the upgrade is lost when compressed to web video bitrate, but the only major stuff I see is a weird uncanny valley reskin of Lara herself, a lot more particle effects, some HDR-type coloring, and the last-gen version looks somewhat more washed out (like there's a screen or a film grain over the whole image). I can't help but feel anyone would be better served buying the last-gen version for the $10 I'm seeing it go for on sale in various places over this version which I believe will be $59.99 at release, or on PC of course.

Nintendo Gamecube Review While Nintendo purports that the Gamecube is a cube, it is in fact shaped like a rectangular prism.

Sega Dreamcast Review The Sega Dreamcast has the following official accessories - Visual Memory Unit, mouse and keyboard, fishing rod, "dreameye" webcam, maraca, midi cable, and VGA adapter. While playing games such as Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 or Crazy Taxi messages like "Awesome", "Rad", or "Nice Combo" would appear on the VMU screen. It's controller is enormous.

The one with the highest objective review score.

Man, I feel you there. Shame on N1nja for being the only one to misspell that.

Could you give an example of his pedantry? The only time I got annoyed with him was his insistence that DOTA deserved to be so high on the ultimate GOTY award despite him being the only one who actually played it.

Edit the post, remove the hyperlink (the blue text) from the link using the "unlink button" (looks like a broken chain link) and post. As long as the YT video doesn't display as a hyperlink, it gets automatically embedded.

I know that there was a way to transfer 360 saves of Skyrim to PC using some third-party decryption tool, but I imagine that it's not as simple to have it work out that your PC interprets the save file from the earlier game for use in a second game. Also, that was a particularly singular case - I haven't heard it being done with any other Bethesda games, let alone any other games beyond that.

I think that if there was a Mass Effect 2/3-style in-game tool for making choices from previous games, you obviously wouldn't have to make players select every single piece of information, maybe just allow them to select from the choices that are revealed on the end-of-episode stats screen (ie, major deaths, who do you side with, did you take this person with you on this thing, etc). The rest of the minor choices can be randomized, but those major points that you even go back to highlight at the end of an episode seem profound enough that the smaller stuff could probably be glossed over. This is basically how it worked in ME - you got to pick if you killed Wrex, for instance, but I believe you got to see your fanboy originally from the Citadel in ME1 on Illium in ME2 no matter what (despite the fact that you could dismiss him in ME1 and not see him again). As far as games where actions carry to sequels, Dragon Age also transfers some information to Dragon Age 2 and Dragon Age 1's standalone expansions. Since you're not the same character, the choices carried over are mostly secondary character ones, where if a certain character was still alive they might reappear in DA2 and how you chose to deal with Alistair will affect how you meet him there. I also know that The Witcher carries choices to The Witcher 2, mostly in dialogue and also retaining some items from one game to the next. Those along with Mass Effect, Baldur's Gate, and Golden Sun are the only examples of save game imports that I can think of.

I think people that rely on non-gaming software for their computers are not the target audience of Steam (OS). It's not like the $500 Steam Machine will come prepacked with a Steam Controller and a Wacom drawing tablet.

I think what'll make you switch is next time you need to build a new PC and you're trying to figure out if you should spend $100+ on a Windows OEM key, you instead install Steam OS first as a dry run with the possibility of dual booting Windows later and maybe forget about ever spending the $100 to begin with. I mean, this scenario is much more likely when something like... 50% of PC games are also released on Linux and you may take longer to notice.