What works for us

It’s the worst kept secret in gaming since the Steam Machine, but cosy correspondent Dr. Margaret Downs PhD. and I are partners. We also like to play video games together; sometimes not even games designed for multiplayer, and sometimes games that have a reputation for being stressful, and that fill our friends with dismay when we say that we’ve been playing them together.

Pico Park 2, for example, is a game apparently notorious for destroying lives, but we haven’t had anything but fun playing it, and the last time we played it, we had to stop not because we were stressed, but because we laughed so hard that we couldn’t breathe.

This month, we chiefly want to reject this idea that there are games that you just don’t play with a loved one. We wish to make the point that all games can be fun with the right people; including the ones that have a rancid reputation for the breakup of the nuclear family. 

We also have hardware reviews (Margaret has willingly agreed to go out with an insufferable hardware bitch, after all), accessibility corners, and cozy game reviews out the wazoo. I talk about my disability some more and how it’s affecting my ability to engage with and get excited about handheld gaming consoles.

We hope you enjoy reading this month’s issue! As ever, comments / pitches / threats should go to please@makebad.games.

What we’re playing together

Pico Park 2 mini review (Teco, NS, PC, PS, XB)

Margaret and I have been playing this on and off in person (it has online, but somehow we never think to do that). It’s lots of puzzle campaigns with different mechanics, supporting up to eight people. I couldn’t even name eight people that I know who also play video games and that I’m regularly in touch with, so we’ve been going with two. Some of these campaigns are brutal; we gave up on one that involved time limits, but you also don’t have to go through them in a linear fashion, so there’s always something to be doing. We have a friend who despairs that we’ve been playing this together, I suppose because it has a reputation of being hyper stressful in the same way as Overcooked, but we actually have an amazing time playing this. We didn’t manage the Time Limit levels on that one occasion, but that was only because we were reduced to fits of laughter and were physically unable to play more. I couldn’t recommend it more for the right combination of people.

Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes mini-review (2015, Steel Crate Games, available for pretty much everything under the sun)

One person is the bomb defuser and the other one has the manual; neither can see what the other person is looking at; calamity ensues. Yeah, this has been another unexpected hit for us. I’d played it a bit before, years ago, and had fun, so it was really nice to get back into it. We had two sessions of maybe a couple of hours, and we started out completely useless, progressed to being less useless, regressed to being useless with the morse code module, and then finally getting to grips with that one as well. It’s also great fun to be like “We’ve got thirty seconds”, scramble together on a module, and defuse a bomb with two seconds on the clock. It’s like being in a film. It’s very immersive in a kind of spy-tech world that’s only been matched previously with games that take place in a UI, like Uplink (2001, Introversion Software, PC; still fantastic to this day) or Hypnospace Outlaw (2019, Tendershoot; likewise). I can imagine playing this over Discord or something would make it feel even more like ‘hacker voice: i’m in: Official Video Game of the Bit, The.’

It’s one of those games that the wisdom suggests should frustrate us, but… it doesn’t? It’s just… nice? We keep plugging away and we improve. It might not be therapeutic, but it is enjoyable. In our second session, we only stopped because we clocked that it was getting dark and we wanted to go out and fetch takeaway food. It’s very more-ish, but probably with the right people, yeah. That’s what I like about this game; the set-up is really free-form: as many people as you like could play this together; an entire crack-team with the manual, and a set of bumbling buffoons bickering over who’s the best at giving instructions, and who has the right idea. That’s unique, and all credit to them.

Don’t take it from me; take it from my dear love, Dr. Margaret Downs, PhD., who writes:

In addition to my love for cozy games, I'm developing a real affinity for co-op games that are sort of designed to be frustrating. However, it's very important that they’re played with the right person. When I told my best friend that my partner and I had started playing Pico Park 2, her response was “oh no” as if she expected that it had led to a fight. Our experience was quite the opposite, though, and on our most recent visit we had to stop playing because we were literally wheezing with laughter. I don't even remember what prompted it in the first place, but every time we tried to start over or even looked at each other it set off another laughing fit.

Once we'd calmed down, we started playing Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes. Here, as with Pico Park, even the tasks that were the most frustrating (looking at you, Morse code) were opportunities for support and celebration. The saying “a burden shared is a burden halved, and a joy shared is a joy doubled” comes to mind. We support each other through the challenging tasks, and celebrate the wins together.

We also find this with games that aren't even meant to be played together, like pinball. Our local arcade, Versus, has gotten to know us well for our frequent visits to the Dr. No pinball machine. I've found over the last eleven months that many games can be a collaborative activity, and with the right person, they're always a bonding experience.

Playing video games in love forever

Hi, me again.

Margaret and I are fans of Mario Kart 8 (Nintendo, 2014, Wii U, NS), and we’ve been playing that either at Boston arcade bar Versus (an exciting site-specific experience, and they should do tournaments because I would relish the opportunity to tear it up), or in hotel rooms on the Steam Deck in-between bouts of me being fucking stupid and not knowing how to map the controls properly in an emulator. Mario Kart is especially great because it’s really easy to figure out how to play, so you can skip right to swearing at the screen, but also apologising for blue-shelling your dear love and swapping skill tips. Plus, we can play as a team, so it becomes a co-op game if we want. 

I like to think that we’re the ultimate team if we really want to be, and even if we are playing something lightly competitive, we’re so effortlessly silly with it that we’re defying the prophecy that co-op games will destroy us. 

Overcooked: All You Can Eat (2021, Team 17, NS, PC, PS, XB) is also on our list, and that game is a lot to juggle at once, and I’ve stopped playing it with a friend before just because of the psychic damage that having to keep track of orders on weird levels can do, but I believe in us. And if it’s not for us - that’ll be fine too! Different games work for different couples and dynamics, and I really love that.

The personal essay section

Dr. Margaret Downs, PhD on finding Super Mario Galaxy (2007, Nintendo, Wii, Switch) ‘deeply healing’

Turns out that I'm more of a basic bitch than I thought when it comes to games. I'll never give up my cozy indie corner, but I actually found Super Mario Galaxy to have a far cozier vibe than I’d expected. Holidays can be hard for me, as a walking stereotype of an eldest daughter who's experienced a lot of change and loss in the last few years. This combined with weapons-grade Sunday scaries, staring down the barrel of a crazy week at work, had me in a fairly deep funk. Fortunately, I'd managed to set up my Switch 2 (a non-trivial task, though some of this was user error and being freaked out by a “delete” button) before the funk set in, and I was able to boot up Super Mario Galaxy. Thank you to my partner, Chief Raccoon, for both of these. 

I have a nostalgic attachment to Galaxy specifically, as I spent many a day off school as a tween playing it on the Wii. I was excited to delve back in, but I wasn't sure how well it would hold up. The galaxy quests are reasonably self-contained and this sort of structure lends itself well to either sitting down for a few minutes to knock out one or two, or for the better part of a day to really get into it. For the most part, they're also just difficult enough to be satisfying. Personally, I’m likely to put the challenges that require swimming, time trials, or both on the back burner, but there’s always something else to do. Some of the maps require more precision than I possess after a long day of work, but I can always focus on the ones that don’t and/or find the humor in the fact that I accidentally launched myself into space via a spiderweb or a spring powerup. The enemies are also nearly universally very satisfying to beat up for the part of me that loves a boss fight. All in all, I've found it to be near-medicinal in the escapism it's provided. 

I didn't really have plans to get myself a Switch 2, especially as none of the exclusives really spoke to me, but damn if it's not sexy. I play almost entirely in handheld mode, and I'm also really enjoying having a touch screen for Galaxy specifically. I wouldn't have said I had that deep of a connection to the Super Mario franchise, but it was just the right level of nostalgia for it to be deeply healing. I've had a similar experience with the Percy Jackson series, which I had some exposure to as a kid, and have greatly enjoyed picking back up as an adult. Media geared at young people can provide great escapism and satisfaction, no matter one's age.

A purchase I loathed

I loved the Steam Deck. I loved the Steam Deck OLED more. I saw a pre-owned (and barely used) Legion Go S (32GB RAM, Z1 Extreme, SteamOS) on sale and went for it, because in theory, a more powerful handheld device running SteamOS sounds really neat. And it is, because SteamOS steals Windows 11’s lunch money every day of the week, but I also ended up returning it, and I want to talk about why.

The Legion Go S has the world’s dinkiest trackpad. It’s designed for use in desktop mode, but even then, it’s still not pleasant. As I’ve stressed previously, I play video games with one hand - my left - and the trackpad is on the right, so that’s not excellent for me. At least the Steam Deck OLED’s trackpad’s are the size of a house to compensate, and I can set the mouse to the one on the left if I want (and I do often want).

My external controller didn’t work when running Sonic: Racing CrossWorlds on it. As far as I know, this is a software quirk on the version of SteamOS that runs on the Legion Go S specifically, and SEGA’s customer support told me to go away and talk to Lenovo. Sure, but the game is listed as SteamOS Compatible, and the badge description says that changing the controller order in Steam Input manually should work when it doesn’t. When SEGA said that “the game is officially not compatible with handheld consoles,” despite it being sold as such, I had premonitions of this happening with other games, and other developers being similarly not fucked about it (as they say in the industry), so I decided to take it back and get it out of my life, and now me and my wallet are much happier.

I didn’t have the above issue running Crossworlds on my Steam Deck OLED, even without the steam-deck-input-disabler Decky plugin running, so I was in the position of a weaker device actually working with the game I wanted to play, and still running it at a fairly sturdy 60 frames per second on low settings. I’m happy to be corrected, but I think this means that the Legion Go S version of SteamOS diverges from the one running on Steam Deck, since you get regressions like this one. Plus, at the time of writing, the ‘low power downloads feature’ has been moved to the stable branch of Deck SteamOS but has yet to appear on the Go S.

So, the power of the Go S is one thing, but for the amount that I paid for it (even going pre-owned, it was in the ballpark of buying a brand-new Deck OLED), there were too many compromises. I still needed a Killswitch case (so adding on another hundred to the base price) to give it a kickstand, which I, personally, given my specific disability, desperately need these things to have, and the input-disabler plugin would have had to have been been modified by a friend to avoid the kind of input conflicts that I was having with CrossWorlds. The same conflicts are a huge issue when trying to play emulated games with external controllers on any of these handheld PCs that come with built-in controls. I put up with having to use third party solutions for a kickstand and community plugins in order to make the Steam Deck usable, but it’s also a cheaper device. For as much as I paid for the Go S, I was looking for near-enough perfection. 

(By the way, Valve, I do still resent having to resort to third party doohickeys and plugins to use your device in a way that I find comfortable. Stick a kickstand on it and introduce a system-level toggle to turn off the built-in controls in whatever SteamOS device is in use, please; the very existence of kickstand cases and the steam-deck-input-disabler Decky plugin both show that the demand for these are there and that they’re both possible.)

I did have actual mainstream thoughts about the device in use before I sacked it off. I found that it ran even big-ticket games well, which was exactly what I came for. I hated having it on my lap though, as it runs hot in performance mode (to the point where, and I’m not taking the piss, it heated a freezing hotel room in November), and sounds like a jet engine. Something like that definitely needs a kickstand for me, and probably for anyone with enough hands to hold the thing; ideally not for $100 extra as part of an essentials kit from Dbrand. The battery life in performance mode is about an hour to an hour and a half if you’re pushing a heavy 3D open-world title from this decade like I was, although there are also ‘low-power’ and ‘balanced’ power profile presets, limiting how much power the device can actually draw, and even the performance mode will likely give you more battery life in less demanding, 2D games, though you might not even really need it there. I got too fucked off with the Go S as a device and it was too close to my flight home for me to really be bothered enough to do any more testing, though. 

The screen is nice; it’s not OLED, but supports a variable refresh rate in the SteamOS options, making framerate drops feel less severe. I’m too spoiled by the Deck OLED screen, and to have both OLED and VRR. I’d be looking at over a grand for the Lenovo Legion Go 2 brand new which, in this life or the next, is not happening; and that’s coming from me, the person who seems to impulse-buy a gaming handheld every other month.

A purchase I’m liking a lot

At the same time, Margaret’s early Christmas gift was a Nintendo Switch 2. I’m not a walled-garden, 80 currency units a game person (I managed to get the deluxe edition of CrossWorlds for 60 currency units on PC, which is about as much as I’ve ever paid for a game), but the fact remains that the Switch conceit and design is SEXY. You’ve got your (new, improved) kickstand (although the one on the Switch OLED at least is actually good), you’ve got your detachable controllers, you’ve got your seamless external controller support, and you’ve also got a fuck-off massive screen on the Switch 2. Software aside (Mario Kart: Worse and Monkey Harris Cunt don’t do it for me), it seems like a neat proposition, especially given that it’s priced like a console. So I thought, what if I had that, but in a handheld PC?

Well, the same friend that started to look at modifying the input-disabler plugin had pointed out to me, many, many moons previously, that the Legion Go existed and that you could get one, used, for somewhere in the region of 300 to 400 currency units. It has the same Z1 Extreme chip as the Go S in it, and still a big screen in it, but without VRR, and also a kickstand and detachable controls that I could decide to use or not. So, after packing in the Go S, I ordered a Legion Go 1 off of eBay that was waiting for me when I got back.

The first thing is that the screen is fucking huge; very good for a machine I’m going to be predominantly using in tabletop mode. The kickstand is very good too, being essentially the same half-foldaway design as the Switch OLED one. The detachable controllers are nice, and I can take them off (albeit not as easily as the Switch) and they don’t get in the way. The JSAUX controller connector grip that the seller threw in is so big as to be useless to me, so unless I get a compact one off of Etsy, I don’t plan to use them as a joint pad. I’m more impressed by the ‘FPS mode’ that lets me use the right controller as a mouse, with or without a little holder-base-puck thing that’s kept in the official case. Oh yeah, I don’t need a third-party carrying case anymore either, because I don’t need a protective grip case just to attach a kickstand to the device anymore. As a handheld, I find it a lot easier to lug around, and less unwieldy to lift and set up as a result. I keep the controllers in their little dugouts in the carrying case, but detached, so I can reach for the tablet on its own and then later the right-hand controller if I want to use it as a mouse, or to use the proper, full-size touchpad to tweak things on Bazzite.

Ah, yes, here we come to the slight snag; the Legion Go comes with Windows 11, quite possibly the most frustrating operating system to ship a handheld with, even with the new Xbox Game Bar Experience Jiggabits Pentium UI overhaul. I gave Windows a try, I really did, and what happened was that I had to plug in a USB-C dock and a keyboard to use the command prompt to even set the thing up because that’s the only way to disable the Microsoft account requirement in this day and age. I couldn’t get past the onboarding sequence in the Legion Space app (Lenovo’s attempt to do a frontend for Windows, and I do mean that derogatorily) without using the detachable controllers, which, as above, I’m not fussed about. But Windows by itself is miserable to use on a handheld, so off it went for a Linux distribution. The question was, “which one?”

I took this question to @sleepyhart, a user on Bluesky who I didn’t know until they were posting about customising their Linux distribution on a Legion Go to look more like a tablet. They were running CachyOS, but also said that Bazzite was good. A friend then told me that Bazzite is more for gaming and CachyOS for general desktopping, so on this occasion, I’ve put Bazzite on the Legion Go. It’s good! You can put SteamOS on it, but you then don’t have TDP controls, but a third-party tool called Handheld Daemon, that Bazzite preinstalls, sorts that out.

Handheld Daemon was a little bit unwieldy at first; it defaulted to using the Nintendo button layout on my controller for a start, and the shortcuts to bring it up in Gaming Mode (Bazzite is like SteamOS in that you can have it boot straight into a Steam-powered frontend) can sometimes get in the way of bringing up the actual Steam quick access menu. I also had to work out that TDP controls would only work on the device at all through Handheld Daemon, but they do work nicely. I also liked that I can set the Legion controllers to disable themselves in steam input if they’re connected to the console, prioritising an external one. This is how I use any PC handheld, so that’s good. I’m still miffed that it’s an external program, but it is one that’s included in Bazzite by default, meaning that I don’t have to get into Decky Loader; the plugin system that seems to have something break in every update. I like that I was able to just install Bazzite (truly very simple, there’s nothing more complex about it than installing Windows) and have everything there to configure at my fingertips. 

The mouse/FPS mode on the right Legion Go controller also just works in Bazzite, and I can absolutely see myself using it to play Sims or House of the Dead, The on it.

@sleepyhart also gave me pointers on what packages to install and tweaks to make to panels in KDE Plasma (my chosen user interface, just because it LOOKS like Windows; an alternative called GNOME also exists, though I couldn’t tell you very much about it at this time), but I’ve yet to get around to those. I’m enjoying just playing games on a handheld that doesn't make me want to chew my own lips off, to quote The Thick of It; and I think that’s enough for now. 

Learning to like (but not love) achievements

I’m hot and cold on achievements; sometimes I like the challenge, and the satisfaction in checking off reasonable demands of a player in a list, and sometimes I find that the achievements are intended to make you grind, or include things done in some sort of online mode or social feature that’ll be shut down in a year, and I resent the notion of checking off tedious bullshit in a list. Two of the best examples of either end of the spectrum are probably games I’ve been playing at the moment, explicitly with 100% completion in mind; Terror of Hemasaurus (still terrific) and Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds.

Terror of Hemasaurus has 30 achievements, which is a reasonable amount (compare this to Binding of Isaac Rebirth, which has 641; pull the other one). They’re also ones that you get simply by playing the game; destroy 50 X, do Y with Z amount of people. The only exception to this is the one for kicking a single person 10 times in a row, which is one that I had to deliberately set out to do. Well, the one for 50 military trucks I finished off by playing a particular stage in story mode a few times (Pollutacorp Outskirts 2, achievement fans), but let’s leave that to one side. I now have 100% in it, and Steam says I have just under 10 hours in it. That’s good going for an arcadey indie game with a story mode that you can probably beat in less than four hours. The achievements, and a truly moreish endless mode that lets you spawn in whatever you like and put cheats on so long as you complete the achievements to unlock them, gave it more life than it otherwise would have. It’s still a very fun game regardless, and I intend to return to it, but associating the achievements with meaningful reward beyond being able to say that I’ve rinsed the game is how they should be implemented.

CrossWorlds, on the other hand, is a game with achievements that I’m still working through, but that are now actively boiling my piss. it has 44 achievements (still a reasonable number), and though some are some that you’ll get just by playing, like ‘win against a rival team’ or ‘win a grand prix’, others involve grind: ‘get an A Rank or higher’, on two separate difficulty levels, on two separate course sets, in time trials. I loathe time trials in racing games; I’ve never found them fun, and I’ve never been good at shaving seconds off of my time. The idea of setting about checking these off is filling me with dread, and so I just might not. I maintain that the handling in CrossWorlds lacks the control that you need for a time trial mode in a racing game to be enjoyable.

I do have a lizard brain though; I like having stuff to work towards. Maybe the key is to not care so much about the grind, and to just partake in whatever task is relevant to an achievement, but to just not care so much about the outcome; to stop checking the list for progression and to just see failure as practice. I feel less annoyed with CrossWorlds already, so yes, that may be the key.

Honourable mentions for achievement inclusions include Streets of Rage 4 (2020, DotEmu, available on literally any device you may own; available as I type in the Humble Choice bundle for December 2025, although absolutely wonderful bought on its own, I’m sure), which is striking a balance between achievements that you get for pressing buttons and those you get for playing around in stages and for actively doing well in the game. It does, however, have hidden achievements. What’s the point in them?

Margaret also unexpectedly bought me the The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered (2025, Bethesda Game Studios, Virtuous, PC, PS, XB), and thank you very much to her for that. I have fond memories of the original, and a feeling that the achievements being there in such a sprawling game will keep me, a now-tired adult, on track for longer than if they weren’t.

Achievements are a good feature so long as developers don’t take the piss, and some of them do. I have nothing else to add. Thank you for your time.

Accessibility corner: 8BitDo Pro 3 controller review

I spent a chunk on this because I read that SteamOS has native support for it, meaning that you can map all of the extra buttons directly within Steam Input, rather than using 8BitDo’s ultimate software to remap them all manually. It’s for this reason why I love the Pro 3 like a son.

There are two extra bumper buttons (L4 / R4) along the top, and two back buttons. It’s a traditional controller design, which means that the ergonomic grips are useless to me as someone who plays video games with one hand. Well, I can hold it by one of them and have access to four buttons, or ignore the grips and rest my hand over the top of the thing and have access to six and can stretch my thumb and index finger to the analog sticks and face buttons.

The two extra bumper buttons are really good, and you really do have access to six buttons on the top because you can flick physical switches to turn the analog triggers into proper clicky buttons. This is really, really good; I had the 8BitDo SN30 Pro for a while, but I only used it for older titles because L2/R2 were just buttons. Now, with the Pro 3, I have the choice. Choice in your technology is good!

I can only speak to my own experience, but being able to remap controls with the Pro 3 is making me more dextrous and all but eliminating the pain I usually feel when playing twitchy action games, so I can play for longer. I also just feel better at video games; I still have Hades’ ‘god mode’ accessibility feature on, but I feel less lost and bumbling in the game, and I’ve had almost effortlessly successful runs with my remappings. 

It’s true that the Dualsense that I was using before could be remapped, but they key here is MORE BUTTONS, and customizability generally; the face buttons can be swapped around in whatever permutation you want using a sponger tool found in the base of the charger dock, and you can fit arcade-style ball-top sticks instead of the analog sticks; though I think they have too much travel on them, because there aren’t any switches in them. I can see that being more of a hindrance.

The layout of the controller being able to have six ‘buttons’ along the top is also a huge boon for fighting games. I had been trying to play Street Fighter 2 with the Dualsense, using a mix of the face buttons and the right bumper and trigger, but this felt massively uncomfortable and my muscle memory wasn’t really getting to grips with which button was what attack. My brain is working really well with three buttons either side on the top; I can put the punches and the kicks either side and it feels organised. The D-pad is also satisfyingly clicky for hadoukens and the analog sticks are good for shoryukens. It’s very playable for me now, and not painful.

I’m also playing the really-good-actually fighting game Facebreaker (2008, EA Canada, Xbox 360, PS3) on an emulator, and whereas before a couple of rounds would put me in a great deal of pain, I can sit and play for a good while now. That’s, basically, a three button game, so it’s one of the few that I can rebind so that I can play it while holding the Pro 3 by one of the grips, which is completely new for me. It’s so comfy. I love that game.

On balance, I’m still not very good at fighting games (also adding in Killer Instinct Gold via Rare Replay, which has been good fun too), but I can play them while feeling that any death or failing is my failing as opposed to the controls not meshing well with my dexterity. Closing that gap has been the boon of this thing.

It also has gyro; something which I’ve never got on with because I generally hold a controller close to me by the top of it, and it then feels awkward to move the thing side by side, especially if it’s a controller as bulky as the Dualsense (truly, the Dualshock 4 was the apex of form and function working together). Recently, I tried to play riotous playable anime Mullet Madjack (2024, Hammer95 Studios, NS, PC, XB) using gyro on a dualsense and it felt too cumbersome. The Pro 3, on the other hand, is relatively compact, and I have been plugging away at tweaking the gyro sensitivity, and I’ve managed to finish levels with the gyro turned on. So, gyro; not a unique feature, but the Pro 3’s slimmed down form factor and additional, adaptable buttons means that I’m more likely to use a feature that I’ve previously felt locked out of on other controllers. That’s exciting, because it means that I’m in theory more open to shooters as a genre, which is big for me, and for this project. 

For my use case of playing games with one hand on a device running SteamOS, I love the Pro 3. It makes me excited to play new kinds of games as well as play games that I already play but more comfortably. Personally, I would like the back buttons to be on the front of the grips such that my hands can stretch to them. I want this enough that Dr. Margaret Downs PhD. and I are going to look into putting them there instead, and we hope to document the process.

There’s the small matter of the Pro 3 being compatible with other systems that don’t have full SteamOS support. It is compatible: there’s a Nintendo Switch mode that works over Bluetooth, and an X-input mode that works over the USB-C 2.4Ghz adapter that niftily fits into the dock that you can then plug into whatever via USB-whatever, but any remapping of the extra buttons than has to be done via profiles in the Ultimate software, which is only available on Windows, Mac and Mobile and is an extra step I don’t care for either way. I like the Pro 3 as a Steam Deck owner, but I’d like it less if I was having to mess about with third-party software to use it as our Lord and Saviour 8BitDo intended.

I’ve been coming back to this piece and adding more to it as I use the thing more, and though initially I was grouching at the price, I know now that I’m going to get a lot of use out of it. I still want the back buttons to be front buttons, but it is what it is.

Accessibility corner: I should be able to play games on the bus. I (specifically I) can’t play games on the bus, and this is upsetting

I’m a person with a fine-motor skills disability that leaves me with one functional arm and hand; or hemiplegia, as we say in the industry. Hemiplegia restricts me from a lot of activities, including from playing a lot of video games. Anything that can’t be played on a traditional gamepad with symmetrical thumbsticks is out, so virtual reality and vast swathes of handheld machines are inaccessible to me. I find this upsetting at times, and this is one of the times.

I saw a Bluesky post recently that was like “I can play Burnout Revenge at the DMV now”, and it got me thinking that, as much as I love my Steam Deck, me only having the use of one hand means that I can’t just whip it out on the bus or while I’m somewhere without a table (I’ve written before on here about how I have the Killswitch case for the Deck that supports a kickstand, which is a mega boon; it’s, genuinely, a massive oversight that the Steam Deck doesn’t have a kickstand out of the box). I’m committed to solving this problem.

For me personally, there are three objectives. One: the Steam Deck needs to not be able to fall out of my lap in use. Two: An external controller ought to be in easy reach. Three: I should be able to easily pack whatever setup away. 

I started thinking about a travel case that would solve these problems, and I’ve been (very loosely) prototyping with the Skull and Co. carrying case that I have. That case has straps in it, that are meant to secure smaller handhelds, but I’ve been strapping the deck down with them just fine; as in, I can hold the case open upside down and it stays put. I’ve been aligning the two long straps length-ways, and, vertically, which means that they’re depressing the triggers. This isn’t too much of an issue with the ‘steam-deck-input-disabler’ Decky plugin, but I worry about needless wear-and-tear. The solution to this is probably additional, but shorter straps. Dr. Margaret Downs PhD is going to investigate, but for now, I feel like this is a just-okay travel case.

I still want it to stick to my lap so that it won’t fall to the ground on a rickety bus. I’m thinking of maybe a non-slip material along the bottom that would pile on the friction. For the controller access, I had the idea of hollowing out a bit of the case and sowing in a pouch for a controller; maybe one that’s a bit oversized so it can fit something as big as a Dualsense.

Essentially, I want to invent some cool shit to make playing games anywhere easier for me. The Steam Deck supporting external controllers makes sitting down in a stationary position to play games on a handheld actually viable for me for the first time since 2003, but sitting down in a stationary position isn’t all of life.

Why am I different? Why do I have to be different? I’d like to not be, so if the world won’t adapt to me, then I’ll adapt to it. I’ve gotten frustrated with the situation before, because I can dream up whatever solution to a disability related problem any day of the week, but ultimately don’t have the dexterity to create that solution on my own. I’m very happy that Margaret is happy to listen to me rabbit on about mad ideas for niche inventions - so niche that they’re only of use to me specifically. We hope to have more for you on this - and the 8BitDo Pro 3’s back buttons - in due course.

It’s hard to talk about, and hard to resolve, accessibility in gaming, because it means all things to all people. I saw a headline recently that went something like ‘I’m a disabled person and handheld gaming is a lifesaver’, and I love that for that person, I do, but it’s not my lived experience. Handheld gaming is something that I wish I could do more of, and that I wish I could do at all without third party kickstand cases and lugging around a controller all of the time. Handhelds are supposed to be portable, and yet I find myself in this constant compromise with myself: buy smaller clamshells device like a Nintendo 2DS, or an AYN Thor, and be unable to see the smaller screen(s) at a tabletop distance, or buy larger handhelds like a Steam Deck, or a Legion Go, and be able to see the screens, but having to carry so many additional accessories so as to make a portable device not portable anymore. It’s not always a compromise; sometimes I’m just at a disadvantage; relying on third-party accessories and software to make a device suit me, even though it should work out of the box, no matter my or anybody else’s condition.

The big problem is that a perspective like mine will go unheard, because most people can just pick these things up and play them out of the box. I’m a minority voice; even, it seems, in terms of being a disabled person who plays video games. I’m finding being unable to play video games how I want to (which is, increasingly, whilst in bed, in line with my energy levels) more frustrating than ever at the moment. I’m aware that I keep buying these handheld machines, thinking a customisability supposedly inherent in Linux or Android as operating systems will give me more leeway to tweak them to what I need them to be, but it never does. There’s always something; the internal controls can’t be turned off; I need to spend an exorbitant amount on a kickstand case; I want to use the thing on a bus and couldn’t even if I wanted to because I can’t use two hands to fix it in place. There’s a part of me that wants to persist and find a handheld gaming solution that works for me and for as many people as possible, and another that wants to stop deluding myself that any product manufacturer will ever reconsider the form factors that these things come in. I also have delusions of being able to construct my own handheld that suits one-hand use, but that involves resources (money, chiefly) and, obviously, dexterity. This website’s cosy correspondent, Dr. Margaret Downs, PhD, has been invaluable in helping tinker with hardware, but this would be a considerable investment, so I’m increasingly thinking that the concept of a handheld is just a millstone around my neck.

Because of this, I’m spending more time playing games on a television under a blanket in the winter months and finding it quite nice. I’m playing Lumines Remastered some more, a game seemingly made for the kind of recovering pleasure to have in class (all credit to Margaret for this bit) that has been reduced to enjoying making pretty patterns with falling squares. It’s the kind of game that I’ll never be good at, but also one I can’t stop playing; truly the hallmark of a positive Capitalist Overlord Raccoons review. I’m enjoying Lumines very much, and I probably could play it on a handheld.

Well now. Is my problem that I’m trying to force myself into being an action game person? Anything that requires real-time reaction could be out of my reach, at least on a handheld. However, I also resent the notion of needing to have different devices, that all cost far, far too much for what they are and do, because I need multiple controller layouts to cover every type of game. Gaming is an expensive hobby already, so multiple devices isn’t the way. I say that as someone who currently owns a Steam Deck OLED and a Legion Go, and is strongly considering getting rid of one of them. I also want to keep playing my Steam copy of Hades anymore, so only owning one device, an Arm device, wouldn’t work. 

I also just feel like my soul is leaving my body whenever I make a video game hardware purchase that’s going to be inherently compromised because I, the new owner of whatever the video game hardware that week is, am inherently compromised. I, a disabled person, don’t fit into a consumerist culture; but there aren’t many other activities, in the list of things that I enjoy but also can physically do, that I can turn my free time to by virtue of being a disabled person. Writing this out as plainly as possible is helping me both internalize the point, and realize that nothing is going to change to make my favourite hobby more accessible to me. I find that really hard. This is the video game enthusiasm website - it is! - but being aware that I partake in the things I enjoy despite my limitations, not because the people who produce hobby-related products are trying to mitigate my limitations, is wearing. It makes me want to not play video games. It makes me want to sell my earthly possessions and live in a cave.

Until a fascist bastard can cure the incurable, I consider the quest for a handheld closed; the Steam Deck OLED is enough of a balance between screen-size, power, battery life, and enough third-party support to be able to get a kickstand case. The Legion Go is the Switch 2; more powerful, a bigger (not nicer) screen, with the compromise being rancid battery life. Both have big enough screens to get by in tabletop mode. I am going to get rid of one. For battery life, it’d be nice to have an Android handheld with an Arm chip, but - oh, let’s not start that again.

Thank you for reading this month’s Capitalist Overlord Raccoons!

I love writing this newsletter, but I love it most when I get to collaborate on it with Margaret. Writing about our game experiences, whether we have them separately or together, and turning our attention together to video game accessibility, is super fulfilling. So thank you to Margaret, too, for getting involved in this super-fulfilling thing with me, so that it can be fulfilling to us both!!!