What a twist :) I like it when games subvert your expectations

Yay <3

It's great that you can trace your love of music back to that specific game. Go ahead and share! I'm not really a musical person myself and only just started learning piano as my first ever instrument. That's one childhood regret I'm working on fixing :)

I think as adults we're still looking for a game that recaptures that childhood wonder.

One game that comes very close is Tunic, which is a zeldalike with a lot of spirit. I won't spoil it for you or anyone else who may not have played, but it's brilliant and I highly recommend it.

Best enjoyed on a lazy Saturday morning snuggled in a blanket pretending you're nine years old again.

I love how you didn't mean to read the whole book but totally got captured haha. Definitely a formative experience :)

I'd never heard of that game or the associated editor, but it seems fascinating.

I just had a poke around on the site, and it gives me some very good and happy vibes of how websites used to be, and the cosy communities that they hosted where all the regulars knew each other by name. Or by handle rather, since nobody ever uses their real name on the Internet, right? ;) Good times.

Influential how? :)

Competence through necessity! :)

I remember making custom maps for the Star Trek: Armada RTS with the in-game editor, and I tried my hand at making some Half Life maps, too. For me that didn't turn into any big community like your experience did, but it definitely helped me to believe I could be a creator of things, and looking back that was probably important :)

Disco Elysium. Brilliant game.

The exact same trends go round and round in web design too (and now apps).

At first things were square (because that was all the technology could do) then in the 2000s CSS exploded and everything went colour gradients and rounded corners, just because people could, then that became old-hat and everything went flat and square again, and then rounded came back (but without so many gradients)

Everything is cyclical.

I agree. After all, they are still selling it, and people are still happily buying it. A friend got one about 3 months ago and he's been very pleased.

The Steam Deck is still under four years old, let's remember. The Nintendo Switch is over eight! Of course that's not an apples-to-oranges comparison as the Steam Deck aims to run any game, not just specifically optomised titles. But it's an indicator.

On the subject of being old, we get way more life out of PC hardware right now than we did back in the early 2000s. Nowadays if you buy a high end GPU you might get a decade of gaming out of it. Back then you'd get 2-3 years and it would be obsolete, because graphics tech was just evolving so fast. (Of course, cards now cost ten times what they did back then, but that's another story....)

Point is, there's plenty of life left in the steam deck yet :)