whoops accidental rog ally review

06/15/2023 at 11:06 PM PT

Hi there. Sorry it's been a minute. I haven't really developed a schedule for these yet, but I definitely would like to be more consistent. In my defence, I have a few excuses. I wasn't really feeling the best while I was sick, so I didn't write anything then, and the following days I was waiting for the Asus ROG Ally release date. Then, for the last few days, I've been using the Asus ROG Ally. It is so cool. It genuinely baffles me how powerful such a small device is. Not only can it play games my old PC could barely play (from which I only recently upgraded from), but it can do it on the go.

I think the craziest thing to me is that I can play Skate 3, a console only game, completely on the go. Sure, it's emulated via RPCS3, but it's still Skate on a handheld device. I've been playing Skate 3 since I was like, 11, and it's easily in my top three games of all time. Since the controller on the Ally is just a normal XInput device, it even supports the rumble and such, which is sort of expected, but cool none the less. I was able to somewhat easily add Skate to Armoury Crate, and now I can launch it directly, without ever even seeing the RPCS3 interface. Again, this is all expected stuff, but it still just blows my mind that this is possible, all for less money than I spent on my first computer.

Of course, there's some bugginess in the software, but also I got it on launch day, so obviously it's not going to be perfect. The only non-software issue I have is the battery. Reviews complained about it a lot so I was honestly expecting worse, but it's just a bit underwhelming at worst. I've managed about 4 hours of Minecraft from 100% to 20%, but I was also managing mods with the game in the background, so perhaps in game time would be a bit shorter (or longer?). Skate 3 was only able to give me about an hour of playtime before it drained my battery from 100% to 20%, but with what at one point was a triple-A game, and an emulation layer, the drop in time was expected. These were not scientific tests by any means, but I also don't think a single person in the whole world is actually reading this as a review, so does it really matter?

As for things that aren't the ROG Ally, I'd like to do some more work on the blog soon. I burned myself out a little bit, but I'm hoping to get back into it soon. I have lots of projects to make, and quite a few things to do in my real life as well right now, so it would certainly benefit me to build up a schedule and plan for myself. That's definitely one of my goals this summer, and going into next school year, to get my plans organized. I'm someone who is very all over if not extremely focused on a task, so allowing myself to focus on completing the tasks and projects on a list in order would definitely be good.

I think that's all I have for today, thank you all again for listening to my ramblings! I fear if I post every day, I may run out of things to talk about, but perhaps it's worth a shot.

Thank you all for reading! ~poppy

p.s. i'm still mad about the discord username system