I played Magic about 24 years ago and then stopped. I am interested in getting re-engaged but was wondering if I could still play the older version of the game which had far fewer number of cards and was easier. The version I remember had 5 different colors (Black, White, Green, Red and Blue). On line you would choose a color and build your deck from a random selection of the cars associated with that specific color. Does that version still exist somewhere?
Death Stranding 2: On the Beach’s bleak slog along hostile, post-apocalyptic delivery routes should have pulled me into the proverbial tar. However, despite director Hideo Kojima’s best efforts, I found myself drawn to a different source of philosophical curiosity, meaningful exploration, and bountiful vistas.
Genshin Impact, a high-concept fantasy action RPG, may seem a far cry from Death Stranding to the uninitiated. Developer MiHoYo’s marketing revolves around a colourful roster of impractically dressed Genshin Impact characters to appeal to prospective players, but that’s not what gives the game its staying power. In a previous life, I looked upon Genshin Impact with distaste: To these fans, I apologise with the heaviest possible heart. I was wrong.
In MiHoYo’s colorful RPG, you spend a great deal of time venturing across the Genshin Impact map in search of enemies to loot, challenges to overcome, and travel nodes to unlock. The game world is immense and, contrary to Death Stranding 2, you’re given relatively few tools with which to explore it.
However, given that Genshin Impact famously (and perhaps controversially) borrows from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the tools with which you are equipped are far-reaching and ambitious in their scope. You traverse the map primarily with climbing and gliding mechanics – both are limited by an energy bar, which can be gradually upgraded as you play. Given the impressive verticality of Genshin Impact’s level design, this is more than enough to allow the savvy traveller to plot creatively efficient routes across the terrain.
This process contains the essence of Kojima’s sequel. Death Stranding 2 gameplay revolves around the practice of logistics. Playing as Sam Bridges, brought to life by the excessively gruff but undoubtedly talented Norman Reedus, you are tasked with linking up disparate parts of a ravaged world by delivering packages and bringing new settlements onto the ‘Chiral Network’ (a sort of post-apocalyptic internet).
Director Hideo Kojima has made much of the unique qualities of what he calls a ‘strand game’, of which he would doubtless tout Death Stranding 2 as a dauntless example.
However, if Death Stranding is a ‘strand game’, then so is Genshin Impact. The routes you plot across its maps draw lines back and forth between points of interest. Even travel in familiar areas will often necessitate lateral thinking to plot the most efficient route. While none of Death Stranding 2’s cavalcade of ladders and vehicles are available, the essential puzzle at the heart of traversal is looms large across Genshin Impact’s world.
However, Death Stranding 2 is more than just its traversal mechanics. In the tradition of games associated with Kojima, hot, heavy and thought-provoking themes are baked into the title’s very substance. It’s not subtle, but its treatment of fatherhood, grief and social decay is resonant and emotionally affecting. What’s more, Death Stranding 2 graphical fidelity is mind-bendingly engrossing to the point of near-cinematic realism. This in itself is deeply impressive, worthy of recognition from any player. It elevates all of Death Stranding 2’s features, grounding the game’s sense of post-apocalyptic unreality within a deeply human context.
Despite these herculean achievements, however, Genshin Impact is able to demonstrate that Kojima Productions does not have a monopoly on thematically compelling open-world exploration games.
That said, at first glance, the story of Genshin Impact is far from distinctive; the title follows an interplanetary traveller who, having crash-landed on the fantasy world of Teyvat, finds themself on a quest to find their sibling – so far, so generic.
However, the world in which the adventure takes place is anything but. Like Death Stranding 2, Genshin Impact takes place after an apocalyptic catastrophe, the outcome of which its main characters must confront. Teyvat’s humans live in the shadow of seven living gods, known as Archons, whose inner turmoil and personal baggage cause crises for mortals on an alarmingly regular basis.
To live in Teyvat is to be caught in the middle of a (very literal) war in heaven where, hour by hour and layer by layer, the answers to weighty metaphysical questions are teased and, eventually, answered. Genshin Impact manages this process with consistency, something which cannot always be said for Death Stranding 2.
Death Stranding 2, much like its predecessor, is both tonally and metaphysically uneven. For instance, the death of a significant character at the end of the game’s first chapter sees the sensitive protagonist embark on an uncharacteristically self-destructive arc fueled by alcoholism and self-loathing.
By contrast, during one particularly tragic moment in Genshin Impact, a character is flat out erased from existence, every single mention of them eradicated, right down to the item descriptions in your inventory. These quests ground the characters in the world, proving that consistency is key.
Death Stranding 2 has a great deal to offer for fans of stunning, granular exploration. However, despite all of its graphical embellishments and additional traversal mechanics, Genshin Impact reminds us, by comparison, that less can sometimes be more.
Despite boasting wildly different aesthetic approaches, both titles are about a wanderer who is endeavouring to restore a damaged world through acts of service and compassion. Both games are, at their core, about connection and relationships.
However, when compared directly to Death Stranding 2, Genshin Impact dances to a more reliable tune. Compared to the off-putting tonal inconsistencies and convolution of Death Stranding 2, Genshin Impact makes for an emotionally generous experience where characters and relationships are given ample time and space to take root in your heart.
Genshin Impact is a post-modern opus that confronts ideas of gnosticism, social engineering, morality, and religion with an adroitness and breadth utterly belied by its cover. All of this is framed against intuitive, well-paced, and rewarding exploration mechanics. Despite the title’s gung-ho and, at times, off-putting approach to monetisation, Genshin Impact’s generous open-world vistas make Death Stranding 2 seem miserly and sullen by comparison.
Death Stranding 2 takes between 40 and 50 hours for a campaign-centric playthrough. However, if you’re looking to take a completionist approach, this could extend to roughly 100 hours.
Genshin Impact is popular because it offers a roster of charming characters against the backdrop of a compelling and mysterious setting. The questions at the heart of the story encourage players to devote time and energy to exploring the world of Teyvat.
Chella:
“We are still enjoying online games with friends and family, including improvised Just One using pen and paper; a little rough and ready homemade web version of Telestrations coded by a friend; a phone-based version of Cards Against Humanity called All Bad Cards, and most of the Jackbox games (repeat faves are Quiplash, Drawful, Fibbage and Trivia Murder Party). We’ve also been meeting our friends in Board Game Arena to play Hanabi which is nice because they live in Hamburg.
I’m lucky enough to be researching design fictions on my PhD so I’ve been able spend time playing some old and not so old text based adventures and narrative games (in the name of research!) on Steam and Itch.io, some of which I grabbed in the latter’s ‘Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality’ a while back.
We’ve had a few breaks in play, but when we can get everyone together we continue roleplaying using Discord and Foundry Virtual Tabletop. We are about six sessions into the Enemy Within Campaign from Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay.
We’ve also recently discovered that Airbnb now offers online experience tours, so we can finally realise our literal board game name location challenge: we’ve been saving two bottles of Jaipur IPA so that we can play Jaipur while drinking Jaipur, and now we can have a complete date night of that plus an online tour of Jaipur, India!”
Patrick:
“In our house we’ve been enjoying online card games like Magic: the Gathering Arena and Legends of Runeterra. They’re not quite the same as sitting opposite an opponent to duke it out, but they both scratch a strategic itch! Magic in particular is in a good place right now, and it’s great to just drop a game or two over the course of an afternoon.”
Then, last but very definitely not least… Ella:
“I’ve been making board games into drinking games (Cobra Paw) and I’m going to make a huge Battleships board to put drinks on in place of ships, then if your opponent hits your boat you neck whatever drink is on that square 🤪”
I’m trying out a few Go programs (UI+engine or combined) and have a couple of questions about Leela (v.0.11).
In the analysis mode, some of examined moves are highlighted in color. What do reddish, bluish, yellowish tints mean? Available documentation does not give any clue.
I’d suppose that analysis is made from the point of view of Leela, and that red color is bad (a weak move), but this contradicts to the picture imho, because the red point looks favorable – at least at the current position, until the opposing player occupies it.
BTW, I did not find a way to switch the side of analysis, that is it’s always performed for Leela, and not for the player (human) – am I correct that it’s impossible?
Finally, the game provides 2 files – Leela0110.exe for CPU and Leela0110_OpenCL.exe for GPU. Unfortunately, no matter which one I run, the program always loads CPU 100%, not GPU (AMD). At the same time I tried out Leela Zero (with Sabaki UI) and it utilizes GPU for 100%. This shows that the device and drivers are functioning normally. Yet Leela does not use GPU for some reason and does not show any error messages or logs. What could be the problem and how to solve it?
As a new month dawns, we’re taking a look at the most played Steam Deck games for April 2025, and it’s surprising to see Oblivion Remastered storm up the charts despite having become a bit of a meme for its poor performance. In the monthly data, however, Balatro still reigns supreme.
Each month, it’s fun to look at which games are performing well on the best handheld gaming PC and look for any surprises. The chart of top played games on Steam Deck lists, quite simply, the games with the most hours played from one to 100, and there are some big debuts in this month’s list.
In April, while it’s no great surprise to see indie games such as Schedule 1 and R.E.P.O continue to climb the rankings, the inclusion of Oblivion Remastered is somewhat puzzling. This is because of the ongoing performance issues affecting the game on the Steam Deck. It’s even become a meme, with players posting to Reddit saying they’ve finally got Oblivion to run well on the Deck, before posting a screenshot of the original game.
While players were always going to try to get Oblivion Remastered running on the Steam Deck, the controversy comes from Valve’s decision to give it a Verified rating, despite it failing on the core criteria that a game needs to earn this status.
We already tested the best Oblivion Remastered settings and found that, on the Steam Deck, you need to at least consider changing the upscaling method, as well as the level of upscaling from balanced to performance. This crucial change alone should relegate Oblivion to a Playable rating, but this hasn’t happened.
Despite the Oblivion Remastered system requirements suggesting that the game would be difficult for the Steam Deck to run, players are clearly just pushing through and running the game however they see fit. Given that the game only released late in the month, the fact that it’s already the number two game on Steam Deck is quite the achievement. It didn’t have quite enough plays to dethrone Balatro for the monthly stats, but it is currently the most played game over the last week.
Other notable inclusions on this month’s top-played list are Clair Obscur Expedition 33 at 26, a game that launched as Unsupported but has already been upgraded to Playable. The Last of Us Part 2 has debuted at 41 while the first game has reappeared at 60, likely due to renewed interest thanks to season two of the TV show.
Finally, there was another strong indie debut in the list as Blue Prince, the intriguing roguelike puzzle game, debuted at 16 for the monthly list, although it did appear inside the top 10 briefly during its release week.
If you want to read more about some of the Steam Deck’s biggest competition, check out our Ayaeno 3 review and Asus ROG Ally X review to see where they Windows handhelds stack up.
You can follow us on Google News for daily PC games news, reviews, and guides. We’ve also got a vibrant community Discord server, where you can chat about this story with members of the team and fellow readers.
In the game of rubamazzetto the cards are shuffled and four are placed on the table and then distributed among the players to the left, so each player has three cards. Each player takes a turn. When a card on the table matches the player can sweep it by placing their card above the card and taking it. Same goes if a sum of cards on the table sums up to a player card. The player can also take the other player’s pile if the top card matches the player card by placing the card on top of it and taking it (hence, the Italian name, ruba mazzetto AKA Steal Cards). There cards are placed back on the table when they finish and each player keeps on taking a card until all cards on the table are gone. At the end, the player with most cards wins.
I wonder what variations of this game exist.
Thanks.
Despite seeing years of play, the deck (seven of clubs not withstanding) has held up remarkably well. The cards are crisp, snappy, and despite some face wear perfectly serviceable (seven of clubs not withstanding). The cards really are the kind of made for life component we all love in our games.
Varnish Crackling
My new deck of red arrows is a different story. After only two plays we cracked open the deck and found substantial crackling on the face of cards.
To understand what is going on with this, we first need to talk a little about how playing cards are made. First a long roll of card or plastic stock (in this case PVC or a similar plastic) is taken. It’s rolled through a printer, and then is finished with either a varnish or a laminate.
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The Nintendo Switch 2’s dedicated Direct has come and gone. Games were revealed, a release date was set, and there was no pricing information (though this hit the internet, and everything is quite expensive). But how do the games PLAY? Thankfully, yours truly was part of a select few who got to play the Switch 2 at a special New York event. I tried out a good mix of first-party titles and came away impressed by most of what I experienced.
Of the titles I played, Mario Kart World was the one I spent the most time with. For the first section, I played two two-player exhibition races on the television screen and two single-player matches on the handheld, meaning I got a feel for the Switch 2 Pro Controller and the Joy-Con 2. Playing on the television racing against an attendee next to me and the various CPUs was thrilling. Every track was new to the series. There were various character options, including the amazing Moo Moo cow. Many outfits were selectable, too.
The Switch 2 Pro Controller was a joy to hold and control. It and the Joy-Con 2 felt more comfortable for people with big hands, which was great for me. Races start a little differently now: instead of waiting at the starting line, you drift into the race with everyone else, though Lakitu still shows up to count you down and you can still boost if you hold the gas at the right time. Lunch bags are a new pickup you can grab; doing so will cause your character to eat a snack and change their outfit during a race. I noticed some new powerups: a Gold Shell that launches forward and drops many Gold Coins (these boost your speed) and a wand-like item that calls in the sorcerer Kamek to do some damage.
The best part of Mario Kart World was Knockout Tour. 24 racers, back-to-back courses flowing together seamlessly, and if you don’t place high enough by the time you reach each of the five checkpoints, you’re eliminated. It’s the most frantic I’ve ever seen Mario Kart; people were downright bloodthirsty. The race allowed you to go anywhere, meaning falling off a track or going off the beaten path wouldn’t necessarily spell your doom. Getting to each checkpoint felt exhilarating. I placed fifth overall!
We haven’t had a new 3D Donkey Kong title since Donkey Kong 64 so Donkey Kong Bananza is a pleasant surprise. It’s reminiscent of Super Mario Odyssey, except you’re collecting and eating Gold Bananas instead of nabbing Power Moons. Donkey Kong is a simian with one philosophy: punch everything in his path. He can punch forward, punch downward, and even slam the ground from the air. The amount of destruction he can wreak is unparalleled; you’ll be leaving craters in the ground and smashing through terrain. Donkey Kong can even grab a rock slab and ride it like a surfboard. He can also pick up explosive purple crystals and lob them at enemies or rock formations. Donkey felt great to control, especially while climbing the scenery (no Stamina Wheel, thank goodness). My only gripe was that the A button was jump and the B button was ground pound. It was hard to get to grips with but you can remap the buttons.
As a big fan of the Metroid series, I had to make a beeline to the Metroid Prime 4: Beyond play area. The game did not disappoint. It’s gorgeous, running at a full 60 FPS in 4K Quality Mode and an astounding 120 FPS in 1080p Performance Mode. If you’re a Metroid Prime expert, everything will click into place: you have a dedicated button for Morph Ball mode, a button to switch to the Scan Visor, a jump button, a missile button, and a button for shooting and charging your beam. Prime 4 looks to follow Prime 3 in the way it presents its plot: there are other characters you can interact with and a bevy of cutscenes. It’s a different feel from the original Metroid Prime, which evoked a feeling of isolation, so whether you like this approach or not depends on your preference. The best part of the gameplay was realizing you can switch from standard controls to gyro aiming by just flicking your wrist and aiming at the screen, no menu changes required. It certainly helped with the demo’s boss fight, which required shooting different points on its body.
Nintendo wanted to show off its mouse functionality with the Switch 2, so it’s no shock to see a game run hog wild with that gimmick. Drag x Drive is that game. There was an extensive tutorial for this title, and for good reason. It takes time to get acclimated to the controls, especially turning left and right, since you use the opposite Joy-Con 2 to turn in that direction. You can’t expect to go fast in short bursts, either, as you need to do long strides with the controller to build up speed. Once you get used to the layout, it’s fairly intuitive. The 3 v 3 match I was thrown into after the tutorial seemed to last for less than five minutes, but it was fun to pass the ball and use the Joy-Con 2 to angle shots at the basket. It was entertaining, but I had a huge flat surface to glide my Joy-Con 2 across. I wonder if the game will feel as good in tighter spaces or on different surfaces.
This is the only enhanced Switch 2 Edition game I played, but it’s great. The demo throws you right into the Star-Crossed World expansion, and the game runs at a smooth 60 FPS now, improving the gameplay, especially with setting up your dodge rolls. The new spring powerup feels great, bringing to mind Rattly the Rattlesnake from Donkey Kong Country 2 (though using the timing from that title will cause you to miss your jumps and plummet to your death). For all you completionists out there, this add-on has you covered, with many hidden paths and collectibles to uncover. No word yet on how long this expansion will be, but hopefully it’s hefty.
Gameplay-wise, I was impressed with the Nintendo Switch 2. All the peripherals felt solid, and many of Nintendo’s first-party games are stellar. However, the price of the console, accessories, and games is frankly unaffordable, so I believe the Switch 2 will not reach the heights of its predecessor. Hopefully, prices will go down in the future.
Published: Apr 3, 2025 09:04 am