Games: Trombone Champ, Steam, and More

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 24, 2022

• The world's first trombone rhythm game is instantly a GOTY contender

  Trombone Champ works like other music rhythm games: notes move across the screen from right to left, and you move the mouse up and down to meet them and then click or press a keyboard key to play the note. Accuracy and timing determine how well you play, with little words popping up to tell you how you're doing. Words like Perfecto! Or Nice! If you're sucking, as I typically do, you'll get a Meh or sometimes a Nasty, which is maybe the funniest word to use to describe someone playing a trombone poorly. I doubt many music teachers use it, but maybe they should.

• Plainly Put: Plane Power Play

  While it's normally just me (Player 2) and one other (Player 1) there. We don't interact much, especially since they play the most when I'm at work. But there's something special about being the only people on the server. A kind of familiarity forms rather quickly, and because of our play time difference there really isn't any competition. By the time I enter a new game they've already amassed tens or even hundreds of millions of pounds, and for that matter I'm not really a competitive person anyway.

  The other night something happened there. Relevant to the story is the fact that I'd never tried using planes in the game yet.

• Canadian customers seeing a temporary delay for the Steam Deck

  While Valve has been able to repeatedly speed up production of the Steam Deck smashing expectations, they've hit a snag when it comes to Canada.

• Valve upgrade Steam Deck when docked in new OS Beta, plus big Steam Deck Client update

  Two big pieces of Steam Deck news for you today, with two major updates now available. First there's a big Steam Deck Client Stable update and a Steam Deck OS Beta.

• Valve launches Steam Charts giving us better details on games

  Steam Charts, the name of the new system Valve just launched gives us a better look behind the curtain on how games are doing on Steam overall. This replaces the basic stats page that showed the online count for Steam and the Top 100 most played games with a lot more information.