That’s a very cool idea, seems great for receipts and quick stuff.

If only they explained why I’m the article snippet posted…

I guess If I were an article snippet I would also like an explanation

While I understand what you’re talking about, I would argue it’s bad metaprogression that you dislike. I liked Rogue Legacy when I first played, but didn’t enjoy the second one even though it’s essentially the same. Let me give you an example of good metaprogression: Dead Cells.

There’s the metaprogression that allows you access to new areas and new mechanics, but that’s fairly quick compared to the length of the rest of the progression, and I would argue it’s not the sort of thing you’re complaining about.

What could be similar is the way you unlock equipment, although you don’t become stronger with each run, you unlock more weapons. This gives you variety, but the vast majority of the progression happens in your head. If you have enough hours in Dead Cells and think the metaprogression is what made you so good at the game that you couldn’t finish one level when you started and now you play for hours, do me a favor and start a new save. After being on the second cell I bought the game for a different platform, on my first run I got to the first cell.

Which brings me to the second metaprogression in the game, cells. They make the game harder, not easier, and it’s the way to progress, you have to purposefully make the game harder to progress. IMO this is how metaprogression is supposed to be done, you need to be better, and when you think you’re good enough to beat the game it lets you know “you’ve only just started”.

Also with a rumble enabled controller, but you need to wipe your memory of that feature so the magic becomes real.

These aren’t nicknames, these are the standard names of US currency. Pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, and half-dollars (not super common though)

They’re nicknames for those (Similar to how people refer to bills by whatever president is printed on it), they might be very popular nicknames which grants them the “common name” descriptor, but the official names are the boring “<amount> cents coin”. People outside of your country have no obligation to know how you nickname your coins.

Also if someone pulled out 26 coins to pay for a meal they’d also have a very annoyed cashier at minimum

Well, that might be true now because most counties only have 5 different coins, but pre-decinalized currency in the UK had 11 coins, it only got to 26 coins in my example because I included 7 of those (Sorry for farthing, pennies and Guinea fans out there), most of which in small numbers that someone might be carrying around in their pocket individually. And my point was precisely that, it’s such a complex system that you end up with dozens of coins with random values trying to mix and match them to get to the amount you want.

The point of this was more “Coins are a pain in the ass regardless of whether we’re dealing with 100 or 240 as the base”

But they’re not, like you realized with 26 coins of 7 different values you didn’t even get to a whole pound, with a decimal system the closest you can get is 1 50¢, 1 25¢, 1 10¢, 2 5¢, 4 1¢ which is 9 coins, and like you can see the vast majority is a single coin because 2 of them would get you to the next coin already.

Sure, but that’s more about Valve not pursuing violations than anything else (in other comment I also mentioned how they turn a blind eye to Humble Bundle as well). But legally they could go after silent hill f and demand it be sold for a similar value to $31.49 since some time has passed and stem users have not been offered a comparable offer. I think what’s in the clause they make people sign is more important than whether they enforce it or not, because if it was about price parity with other stores then it would be abusive (even if they didn’t enforced it always), but if it is about selling something they provide then it’s not abusive even if they do enforced it always.

That’s not true, it only applies if you’re selling a steam key. Devs are free to set the price on any platform they want, want proof? Check out the currently free game on epic which has never been free on Steam.

Steam provides developers with infinite steam keys that they can sell outside of steam for 100% profit, however those keys cannot be sold at a lesser price than what it’s sold on steam. Which honestly sounds like common sense.

How does it do that?

No idea because I don’t know how much a dime, or a nickel is worth, nor what you define as a roll. I can guess a quarter is 25¢. None of those are a decimalized values though, and you’re giving nicknames to certain coins because you’re still holding to a non decimalized money system, it only makes the system more difficult to you.

A quick Google search let me know that a dime is 10¢, a roll contains 40 coins, a quarter is indeed 25¢, a penny is 1¢ and a nickel is 5¢. And first of all it becomes obvious you need to put large numbers to make the decimalized system appear difficult, I purposefully used small amounts of coins someone might have in their pockets, a total of 23 coins, with no coin having more than their next denomination in value, your example however needed over 130 coins, random nicknames for values and coins grouped in random amounts to try to introduce difficulty.

So the short answer is that if someone pulls out over 130 coins to pay for their meal they will be told to use a machine to count them. But because decimalization actually makes your life easier, a “roll of quarters” is worth 10, a “roll of nickels” is worth 2, and the rest is 77¢, so nope, even with your arbitrary exaggerated amounts and nicknames it’s still easy to count it to 14.77. Had I told you five scores of Bob, 3 Baker’s dozen Joeys, two threescore Florin, 17 crowns, and 3 ten bob rolls you would still be adding stuff into next week. Math is just easier with decimal currency because we use a decimal numbering system, €5/10 = 0.5€, but £5/10=10s or 120p

You sure? Ok, you check your pocket and see that you have 5 half-pennies, 2 sixpence, 10 shillings, a crown, two florins, 3 half-crowns, and 3 pounds. Quickly, tell me, can you buy a 2 pound 15 shilling sandwich and a 1 pound 10 shillings drink? Which coins do you use for that?

If you’re going to use Arch you should use Arch. One of the biggest advantages for Arch is the AUR which can cause many issues on Arch based distros that are not Arch.

That being said, for a media center, if you’re not used to, I wouldn’t go with Arch, Debian is a much better choice since you’re already used to it and should be good for that use case.

What?

Except that’s not what their terms say. Their terms prohibit you from selling a steam key cheaper than on Steam, they don’t regulate your game price on a different store if you’re not offering a steam key together.

All of my systems are Linux, launching Windows games on Linux is not trivial, Steam takes away almost all of that complication. It also provides an excellent ten foot interface for me to use on my TV and buy/install/launch games from my couch without any hassle. Speaking of controller usage, Steam provides excellent support to remap controllers even if a game doesn’t support it, and provide amazing features at that (for example multiple layers, gyroscopic mouse)

Games getting updated automatically is a great feature, I still remember having to download patches and applying them one by one after a fresh install. Similarly Steam also provides a workshop that allows you to install mods and keep them synced across different systems automatically.

Finally, the convenience of cloud saves for someone with multiple systems or who uninstalls a game and reinstalls it later is not easy to achieve without a launcher (I still have a saves folder backed up somewhere from before).

Besides all of that Achievement and other social features are important for some people. And for some games being able to easily play online with friends is amazing (if you’re not old enough to know what GameSpy is you don’t know what it was back then), although I don’t play too many online games so this one is not that important for me, but when I need that feature it is very handy.

In short there are many reasons, but if you’re playing old single-player games with mouse+keyboard on only one windows PC, then none of my reasons apply to you. Still I would argue that buying games on steam is easier than pirating them, so there’s the convenience factor still (e.g. at a friend’s house and they mention a game, open my phone, and in 5 min with a very intuitive flow I have the game downloading on my home PC so when I come back it’s ready to play).

Not European, although I live and work in Europe so the official language at my company is English, so I can give some extra insight there.

English is my third language, I learned it in part because the school teaches it (albeit very badly), but mostly because games and movies weren’t translated back then, especially those a young teen without money but with internet access could have access to. I watch English content regularly (in fact I think 90% of the movies and TV shows I watch are in English). I do watch them with subtitles (in English), but that’s because I sometimes have trouble hearing things (I also watch content in my native language subtitled when possible).

I communicate daily in English with my coworkers, some of who also have English as the second language. We’ve had some minor misunderstandings because of things that sound a certain way in one language, e.g. I came out harsh on one discussion because I said something I can’t remember now, luckily my manager is also a native Spanish speaker and explained what I meant when the other person responded harshly. Speaking of my manager, we usually talk in Spanish, but sometimes you get a technical term or something you’re so used to say in English that you just switch and start talking English, until randomly you switch back, so on and so forth. I think someone would have to be fluent in both languages to follow our conversations.

1. Ecosystem is closed, you buy a quest you need to buy from Meta and have your Facebook account linked.
2. It is good, and objectively currently the best (and only) standalone headset.
3. The Quest is a standalone headset, he doesn’t need the phone. He can plug it into his PC, but that’s not the main intended use and there are some quirks.
4. Not sure what you mean, but like I said the quest is a standalone headset, so nothing else needed. If you want to run it connected to a PC it would require fairly decent hardware for it to be worth the bother.

All of this being said, and like others have told you, we should be getting the Steam Frame somewhere in Q1, and it’s objectively better in all those points:

1. Open system means you can’t be closed onto one garden. Although Steam is a lot easier.
2. It’s theoretically comparable with the Quest 3
3. Frame is also standalone, but it’s also designed to be wirelessly connected to PCs using it’s own designated bandwidth, making it much better at that than the Quest.
4. While PC is the same for both cases. The streaming experience should be a lot better with the Frame due to improvements to the way the content is streamed that Valve has made.

All of that being said, the Frame WILL be more expensive than the Quest. IMO, it’s worth to pay more for an open platform, but you might look at things differently. Also you should consider that we don’t know when it will be available and how much it will cost, but I’m confident that it will be a better purchase regardless if both of you can afford the wait and price.

Personally I bought the Quest 1, and while I don’t regret it, I got fed up with lots of the Meta stuff. I plan on buying a frame on release, and would only get a quest if it was given to me for free since I don’t plan on spending a single cent more on that platform.

Monopoly is not intended to be un-fun, it’s intended to be unfair, which is different. People find it un-fun because they changed the rules to make it less unfair, but if you play the game by the rules it’s not bad, but the winner gets picked at random very early in the game, and there’s nothing you can do about it, which would be bad for a long game, but Monopoly is meant to be very short if you play by the rules.

I think the first question you should answer is which games do you want to play, the answer will be vastly different if you say Astro Bot or Factorio. So for this I will try to base it on my own gaming preferences, which is mostly single-player games. Answering your points:

1. You don’t really need a separate PC, there’s no reason to be that paranoid.
2. Most games don’t have kernel level anti-cheat, only competitive multiplayer games, and those you can’t pirate, so they’re irrelevant to your other solution.
3. Yeah, long gone are the days of popping a disc and playing.

Ok, so, this is my personal opinion, but as long as you don’t care about competitive multiplayer games it should be a valid option for you as well.

Get a Steam Deck. Pros:

• It’s plug-and-play for most stuff, so while you will need to download the content it should just work without fiddling.
• Pricewise is very good, you might be able to build a desktop for cheaper, but that would require a lot more effort than going to steam and clicking buy.
• It’s a separate device, also it’s portable, and while that might not be important currently, it’s nice to be able to pack a gaming rig in your backpack when you have to travel for some reason.
• With some minimal setup can run emulation of anything up to ps2 era very comfortably. It’s a very simple setup with just running one script to set things up.
• It can (if you’re willing to jump through hoops to set it up) run and even download pirates content, although with the ease of access of games on Steam I hardly think it’s worth it.

Cons:

• It’s Linux, so it can’t run games that actively try to prevent you from running Linux, e.g. some online competitive games, in short anything that would require kernel-level anti-cheat.
• It’s a lot more expensive than running games on whatever laptop/desktop you have with you.
• It’s not that powerful, because it’s portable it’s very low power, so while it can run Cyberpunk, it won’t look good or flow nicely. If this is your only deal breaker, you might want to wait a bit because very shortly Steam will launch Steam Machines which are the same thing except trading portability for power.

What is pretty cheap for you? Last time I was in Canada a 15GB plan costed something like $45, whereas in Europe that would be enough to get at least 2 unlimited plans and still have money for a coffee.

According to my phone I use around 4/6GB per month (I have an unlimited plan). But I’m guessing you’re in the US or Canada, I’m always boggled when I remember that data is expensive to you guys.