I don’t recommend the upcoming Lenovo Legion Go 2. The Go 2 is around $1300, and only offers some 20% performance increase over the previous gen (with the Z1E CPU) which is currently $750. The ROG Xbox Ally X pricing is yet to be revealed.

The elephant in the room is the Steam Deck OLED, which you can find refurbished/certified for $440. It’s not as powerful, but power is never going to be a handheld’s strong suit anyway. They’re everywhere and tons of indie games are made with it in mind.

If you’re willing to get a bit nerdy, game streaming is getting pretty good these days, and is really easy on battery life. Moonlight lets you stream games from your desktop PC, while Xbox Remote Play can stream from your Xbox. If cloud gaming is your jam, Nvidia Geforce Now and Xbox Cloud Gaming are available. For any of these, the Steam Deck would be perfectly adequate, but if you want something smaller and lighter, you could also go with an AYN Odin 2 Portal, which is an Android-based handheld with WiFi 7 and a nice 120Hz OLED screen for around $330.

Not an expert, but here are some good ones:

Earthbound (SNES) - Kids-on-bikes fight aliens and meet cryptids in a quest to stop a cosmic horror in a JRPG set in suburban America. It’s weird, wonderful, musical, and sometimes startlingly heartfelt. Not too grindy as JRPGs go, but keep the 2x fast,forward button handy anyway.

Chrono Trigger (SNES) - Another must-play. It’s a time-travelling fantasy JRPG with one of the best OSTs ever made. While playing it, I had an existential crisis realizing I’d never run a D&D campaign this cool.

Metroid Fusion (GBA) - A metroidvania (duh) set in an infested space station, where an injured Samus races to arm herself against an unknown enemy. It manages to feel desperate, claustrophobic, and fast-paced, which – hot take – I feel is rare for the genre.

The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap (GBA) - A self-indulgent pick for me, as I imprinted on this short-but-sweet game at an early age. It’s the last isometric Zelda and a swansong to the genre. The central gimmick, shrinking Link to the size of a mouse, gives the pixel artists the rare chance to show environments in lush, up-close detail that makes the world spring to life. Also: Ezlo sounds like Danny Devito. That is all.

Running Steam games on Mint, I don’t think I’ve ever run into a game that flat-out didn’t run. Usually they work out of the box. The most I’ve ever had to do was select “Force the use of a specific compatibility tool” and try out a different version of Proton from the dropdown list.

It’s been remarkably unproblematic.

Yeah, the video really isn’t making the point its title suggests. I think we’re all just primed to expect gatekeeping in video games at this point.

If you’re using Retroarch, I’ve found this overview useful. https://thingsiplay.game.blog/2024/10/19/showcase-for-retroarch-shaders-2024/

I strongly disagree with the premise that there’s a “wrong” way to play retro games. Don’t gatekeep. Imagine if people told you not to listen to Pink Floyd unless it’s on vinyl. It would be lost media.

That said, CRTs present images fundamentally differently than LCD displays, and a lot of developers took advantage of those idiosyncrasies. There are scanlines everywhere. CRT phosphors aren’t square, and appear smaller when darker. Bright pixels can “bleed” into nearby pixels, particularly when using composite signals.

Before LCDs, many (not all) pixel artists used this to their advantage, basically harnessing the imperfections of analog TV to provide equivalents to anti-aliasing, bloom, extra color depth, and even transparency. Some particularly famous examples came from Sega Genesis games. This video goes into good depth on the whys and hows, and there are some solid examples of the outcomes here.

I’ve attached examples below (hopefully they upload). If you like the raw pixel art, then no harm done. Enjoy! But if you like the way CRTs interpreted and filtered those signals, you owe it to yourself to look up some shaders for your favorite emulator.

(Zero Tolerance, 1994, on the Genesis/Mega Drive)

(Sonic the Hedgehog 2, 1992, on the Genesis/Mega Drive)

I’ve started playing through some classic SNES and GBA games.

Chrono Trigger – Oh man, this one’s good. The soundtrack is on fire, and the game does a good job at making you feel like your actions make a difference.

Metroid Fusion – If you told me this was made in 2024, I’d probably believe you. It has a sense of pacing and suspense that I wasn’t expecting for a metroidvania.

I haven’t gotten very far in either, but so far it’s looking like they’ve aged like wine.

Beyond All Reason is my favorite RTS at the moment. I enjoyed Planetary Annihilation (despite its flaws), and BAR provides the same sense of exponential growth, escalation, and strategic pivots.

One of my favorite things about the game is that it’s not ridiculously APM-intensive. The controls have a learning curve, but they enable you to “fire and forget” most of your tasks.

If you want to get a sense for the game before diving in, Brightworks does some good casting for both competitive and community-level games. https://www.youtube.com/@BrightWorksTV

The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap is one of my favorite games of all time. It’s the last isometric Zelda game, and they made it a swan song. The main quest it pretty short, but it’s the sort of cozy game where doing the sidequests just feels right.

In the game, you shrink down to the size of a mouse to traverse rafters and explore tiny temples and float on lillypads. It’s the sort of thing that would be no big deal in a 3D game, but is wildly ambitious in 2D. Not only do they pull it off, but they fill the environments with lush, lived-in detail that springs to life when you shrink down and look at it up close. The art style still sticks with me after 20 years.

Also, forget all the “hey, listen” stuff, your sidekick Ezlo just sasses you the entire time. It’s great.

Tailpipe emissions? No. Round-trip emissions? Yes.

Biofuel sucks CO2 from the atmosphere while the plants or algae grow, then releases it again when the fuel is burned. It’s net-zero in the literal sense. They only have a GHG footprint if fossil fuels are used during the processing. In the US for example, during the processing of corn into ethanol, they burn natural gas for heat because it’s convenient and cheap. So the GHG footprint of American corn ethanol is approximately the same as gasoline.

Make no mistake, this is a publicity stunt and you shouldn’t expect Virgin Atlantic to follow through. But SAF is feasible.

Cost: Currently, according to Argus Media, SAF is around $6.69/gal compared to $2.85/gal for jet fuel. Jet fuel accounts for between 15% and 20% of airline operating costs per US BTS reports. So using SAF would increase operating costs by 22-35%. Given that airfare fluctuates around 20% depending on whether or not it’s a tuesday, that’s actually not bad at all. (Also, I think the airlines could fully absorb that price increase if it weren’t for the deadweight of shareholders, stock value manipulation, and executive bonuses.)

Scaling: Despite how hard America tries, there’s only so much used fry oil. Biofuel needs farmland, and there isn’t enough farmland to serve the automotive sector. Given typical yields, we would need about 373m acres of biofuel farmland, which is every last inch of unused farmable land the US has. But aviation is a different story. According to the EIA, the US uses 8.81 million barrels of gasoline a day, 2.98 mb/d of diesel, but only 1.5mb/d of jet fuel. That’s an order of magnitude less fuel, and an order of magnitude less farmland.

Sustainability: This one’s trickier. Biofuel doesn’t need to be produced using fossil fuels, but usually is. The US’s 893m acres of farmland produce only 10.6% of our GHG emissions. I think the biggest concerns would be increased water, pesticide, and herbicide usage. I am also not sure of the impacts on other nations with different geography or agricultural potential. I am not well-equipped to quantify those impacts.

Another way to say it is that every movement needs a carrot, a stick, and an ultimatum. The carrot is evangelizing the injustice (MLK), the stick is direct action (Malcolm X), and the ultimatum is an implicit show of force and dedication that demonstrates how many people will resort to the stick if the carrot is not accepted (the mach on Washington).

While I am nearly always in the peaceful outreach camp, I strongly suspect that my efforts will not see fruition until breathless WSJ editorials start describing environmentalists as “dangerous” and “unamerican.”