The Asus ROG Ally Pre-Release
Hello everybody, this is Shane R. Monroe, you’re in the passenger seat with me it’s passenger seat radio. It’s Sunday, June 11 2023. And as you can hear by the pervasive sounds of air jets and bubbles, I am indeed in fact in the backyard. Welcome to the hot tub. So, yeah, I’m not feeling super great. This whole weekend has been kind of bad. My, on Friday, my son graduated from Teen Police Academy here in Glendale. Really proud of him. It’s it’s a week long course I know week long, but they have to do all sorts of like realistic police stuff. They shoot tasers and guns and drive police cars and helmet. There was nothing like that when I was in high school. I’ll tell you that. So he had a graduation on Friday. And I wasn’t feeling great on Friday, but I feel worse over the weekend. You know, I think I get out in public and you know, I don’t have much of an immune system laughs like the boy in the plastic bubble. I leave my bubble. I get sick. I gotta go back, right? I’m with John Travolta. Anyway, but I did make a trip out on Saturday to take a look at the A Soos r o g Republican gamers ally, the new handheld coming out on the 13th although half the damn planet hasn’t other than me. I don’t understand. I mean, there are people that have had it for 30 days. And they’re doing 30 Day retrospectives. I haven’t been able to get my hands on one yet. But I did go down to BestBuy. And they did have the end cap set up that had a demo unit available to play with. And I figured them well, let’s let’s record uh, you know, a minute or two of taking a look at it. And I posted it on my Monroe world channel. And you can see, you know, I think so let me let me just roll back a little bit. So everybody believes, well, not everybody, but there’s this big conspiracy that this is the steam debt killer, right? This is going to be what puts steam out of business and, you know, blah, blah, blah, the numbers don’t lie, yada, yada, yada. It’s so much better hardware. I can play fortnight on it. But yeah, I mean, play all of your games, right? That’s sir. That’s how they’re marketing this thing. Play all of your games. Like, you know, that’s something hey, we’ll be what’s up. So I went took a look at it, I gotta say, um, you know, the, the kiosk itself is, is done very well. I mean, it’s very well put together, it’s very informative. I was kind of like, Wow, this looks, this looks great. But the hardware itself, let’s, let’s talk about it for a minute. I didn’t do any voiceover work on the video that I took, at Best Buy the few minute video that I took and posted, because I kind of wanted to save that for this forum. And I want to save it for my videos this coming week, when I’ll be giving you my first looks at the A Seuss ally in hand when it’s not locked down to a stand. And I have the opportunity to make it my own. So this is being heavily touted as the steam deck killer, because it has a massively better processor, right? It is lighter, thinner. It’s got a 1080 p screen that supposedly much better than the steam DAGs. It, it puts the controls in a little bit more X Box like situation, it runs Windows GUI windows, where I can run all my games, and I’d have to learn proton or anything. So these are the killer points of the of the Allied these are what’s going to put, you know, put valve Six Feet Under, excuse me. Gotta stay hydrated this time of year it gets nasty out here. So let’s talk about what I saw. Now, before I go into detail, I will tell you right now, I do not expect this kiosk to be indicative of the actual product. And there’s a number of different reasons why. First, if the if the Ally was as bad as this kiosk presented it, we would not be seeing positive reviews about the product on even by the compensated endorsers that had been plaguing YouTube with how great it is. And it’s a sad shame that they bought the steam deck first, blah, blah, blah. Because if this this kiosk was indicative of the final product, I would say they’re completely screwed. I would say this product was set up by somebody who didn’t have a clue didn’t follow the instructions. or and or there’s no firmwares business assigned to it. There’s no patches been assigned to it. This looks like it might have been at an early trade show. That’s what the OS looks like, you know, it’s branded with Best Buy. And it’s locked down to only show a couple of demos. Right? Forza Horizon was one. I didn’t see what the other one was. But I know there’s two demos on there. And I’ll tell you what, just seeing windows on there makes my skin crawl. Because I really don’t like windows. I mean, I love what I can run on it. But I don’t I really don’t like Windows. And to see windows. What are you boys doing out there? dogs running around? You know, to see windows on there it is almost. Okay, imagine this, you go to a magic show. And all night long, you’ve been amazed by the amazing feats of illusion and trickery that you’ve seen right? Now imagine this. They close the curtain, everybody demands an encore, they open the curtain, but this time the stage is turned around. Now you’re not seeing the magic trick, you’re seeing the magic trick going on from behind the stage, so to speak. Now you’re watching the, the you know, the hot assistants slide underneath the box, or neatly dodged the swords that are being stuck in there. It it, it ruins it. You know, we’ve we’ve been we’ve been given like, you know, a Criss Angel, frickin magic show, all this time with the steam deck. And now essentially, they’re, they’re ripping out the magic. And they’re just showing you what the trick looks like, without any magic. That’s the best way I can describe it. There’s, yeah, there’s no magic anymore. It’s just another Windows machine that you have to care and feed. That happens to have a couple of video game programs installed on it that I mean, that’s kind of what it is. There’s no, there is no magic. It’s essentially a handheld laptop running windows. And you know what, some people are gonna love that. Some people are going to think that is the cat’s fucking meow. But okay, so So first of all, just seeing Windows kind of puts you in that loss of magic frame of mind, right? It’s like seeing a movie without all the special effects not on it yet, or workprint. And so that was kind of the first thing it’s kind of like, Okay, well let’s, let’s take a look at the let’s take a look at the hardware as is right? Let’s, you know, it’s nailed down. And it’s not even like on a chord where you can pick it up and turn it and look at the back and everything. It’s, it’s like on a, it’s almost like a steering wheel, the way that it’s locked in there, you can pull it out five or six inches, but it’s still fixed, you can’t, you can tilt it just a little bit. But it’s not. It’s not easily accessible. So you can’t really get a feel for the weight. I can tell you right now, it being smaller than the steam deck and its ergonomics, I am not going to be as pleased with it as the steam deck, it feels closer to the switch, which literally makes my hands start cramping within 20 minutes of play, maybe less. And those who could at least remove the Joi cons, right and put them next to you or lay him in your lap or something. So I’m not I’m not jumping up and down about that. The other piece I’m not jumping up and down about is the sticks. The analog sticks are, are feel like they’re on the edge of broken. Now what do I mean by that? So do you remember, maybe some of you do you remember the apple two or the Atari 5200 analog sticks. On the apple two computer, you could get like this joystick that had a joystick in the middle and a fire button on the outside sort of like the Atari 2600. But it was you can control the tension of the x&y axis by using these little sliders. So if you wanted to have a very tight controller, you’d slide it all the way to one side. And if you wanted practically a limp in your hand stick, you could move the you could move the spring tension all the way to the side. Or like I said, Imagine the Atari 5200 controllers were literally if you push to the left and let go just that it just stayed there. Now, it’s not quite that bad. But it’s really damn close. These sticks. These sticks have like practically no tension at all. They feel extraordinarily loose and my son’s like, well, it’s a demo unit dead. And I’m like yeah, but this demo unit spun out like a couple of days doesn’t mean enough time for her to have the living shit beat out of it. So my guess is this is just how it is and I’ve seen other reviews is people talking? They downplay it, of course, because you know, they’re compensated endorsers or they got it for free. So they’re not putting a lot of scrutiny on here. I’ve been telling people on Reddit, I said, Forget about every single review. You see, until, until people who actually paid 800 bucks for it, start posting their reviews, when they start posting the gorilla reviews, that’s when you start paying attention. And now that the gorilla reviews are starting to come out, it’s looking a lot less rosy. So yeah, didn’t didn’t care for the sticks, the there’s only one set of rear panels. So that’s automatically a defect in my book, I love having to I want to replace bumpers, and the stick clicks with the rear controls, and there’s only enough room to replace one set. Let’s see. So let’s, so there’s got to be something good about this thing, right? I don’t like the opposed joysticks. With the face buttons on top of it. I realized that’s the Xbox controller methodology. And that’s fine with the Xbox controller. I just don’t know how comfortable that’s going to be where the handheld and supporting that kind of weight on time will tell. And I’ll give you the honest impression of it when I get the thing and have the opportunity to play with it. So it’s got to be the screen right the screen is what knocks it out of the park. Oh mg the screen is so great. The steam deck screens suck so bad. And this This is why you buy the ally is because the screen is that good. I wasn’t that impressed? I mean, I went in there expecting to be completely blown away by the screen. Because that’s what all of these goddamn compensated endorsers are telling you. Oh, this screen is so much better than the Steemit while you see it. Oh my god. Oh my god. 1080 P Oh, I can never go back to 800 P now. Yeah, it’s, it’s not that good. Now listen, I’m I am also assuming that whoever set it up, probably didn’t calibrate the screen or the colors or did any sort of adjustments, right. So what I’m seeing is what I’m assuming is a very shittily put together kiosk demo. So it’s entirely possible that that screen looks 100 times better, once you go in and start dialing it in. Because every screen is a little bit different. You can’t just send it to some factory setting and call it good. Yeah, so the screen, it looks it listen, if you put the two side by side, which I will, you’re gonna you’re gonna give a nod to the ally screen, but you’re also not going to look at the Allies screen the Steenbeck screen and go, Holy shit, I can’t play the steam deck anymore. It’s that, you know, it’s that big of a difference. It’s not from what I’m seeing, not what I saw so far. And honestly, with that size of screen, I kind of dig on 800 P, I don’t I don’t find a problem with 800 P on a screen that small 1080 P is almost, it’s almost too big. And they’re saying that you can’t adjust like pixel density or, or dpi or anything else on the Asus ally, which means you’re stuck with a 1080 display on a seven inch screen. And you can’t you can’t mess with any of the quality of lifestyle. I can’t believe that that’s true, but that’s what I’m hearing. So the only thing I really had time for I wanted to try one game and see how smooth and silky it was, was trying to play for Forza Horizon, right. So I started loading that. And you could see in the video, I let the entire video play, I never got to the game. I sat there the whole time waiting for it to load, waiting for it to load again, then waiting for it to load again. And then finally getting to the title screen that you couldn’t seem to skip anything. So again, an extraordinarily poor demo. Or not optimized or I don’t know, I don’t know what it is. But listen, if I were a prospective allied buyer, and that was my first and only exposure to the unit, I’d laugh my ass off. I’d be like, What a piece of shit. And we know it’s not a piece of shit. We also know that it’s not the Second Coming of Jesus. Right? I mean, the few people who are willing to go out on a limb and say, Yeah, it’s nice, but you know, don’t go selling your steam deck. You know, there’s a few of those out there that are basically saying, yeah, there’s there’s a couple of nice features in here, but don’t go crazy. In You know, I’m starting to kind of believe that just for my, my brief time with my hands on it now. Again, demo unit. Again, maybe it’s running off of an SD card for all we know, I don’t know. All I know is that the demo kiosk was a complete disappointment. Like in every possible way. And had I gone to the store to buy an ally played with that demo unit. I wouldn’t have, I wouldn’t have left the store with one. So I’ll be interested to see how other people experience the kiosk demo and see what they think of the unit without actually having it, you know, on hand. And a lot of people were saying, Well, this is why a Soos is going to kick the steam Dex ass is because they’ve got Demo units. They’re in a store where you can walk in and buy it. Yeah, but right now their Demo units appear to suck. And you know, yeah, okay, great. So you can buy it at Best Buy, you can also return it to Best Buy early word on the street, and the people that were receiving shipments are getting them. And like a third of them, I’m just I’m just grabbing numbers from Reddit folks, that like a third of them are DOA, or were damaged in shipping. Because apparently, the box that they’re shipping in is like, not protected at all. So apparently, they stick the the actual retail box inside of another box with no padding. And that’s how they’re shipping it. Well, the box inside the box has essentially no protection in it either. So from what I understand, there’s no protection of no protection of no protection. So it’ll be really interesting. I just I changed mine from shipping to pick up in store before I knew anything about this. And I’m glad I did that now. And instead of getting an early you know, getting it early, like Apparently some people are and having it may be damaged in transit. Boy, you’re thinking, sorry, I need you to drink. This is such shit. Why are you getting one? Well, two reasons. One, listen, I like toys too. And I haven’t bought anything expensive for the channel and a long time. And I believe the ally will be useful to generate videos for I think that there’s a lot that I can offer. With the ally, especially the fact that it runs Windows, I’ll be able to horde Directory Opus, and I’ll be able to do be able to offer other tutorials for people that wouldn’t normally be wouldn’t normally be, you know, viewers of the channel. So I’m kind of excited about that. And second, it can’t suck as bad as everything that I’ve seen so far. So there’s a couple of people I trust that I’ve watched videos for, and I’ve talked to that are, you know, that have good things to say about it. There are a handful of of use cases that I could see the Allied being useful for, you know, one of them, of course, is Call of Duty, right? Call of Duty Modern Warfare two won’t play on the Steam deck without windows installed. So I could easily make an argument saying that the Allies might call of duty box because you know, the next Call of Duty is not going to run on the Steam deck either. And eventually, some mainstream game but I do care about what’s going to come out that doesn’t run on the Steam deck. Meaning you know, I mean, there’s and of course, if you’re chasing the third party Digital Locker nonsense, right? Both Electronic Arts, and Ubisoft, and now battlement are all playing Hokey Pokey shit on the Steam deck. With Diablo four coming out, we started to see some weird shit going on with Battlenet. And both EA and Ubisoft upgraded their launchers in the last couple of weeks that significantly broke steam deck access to those lockers in those games. So for people who seem to love these third party lockers? Yeah, I mean, like I said, there’s there’s a market for the ally. I’m not saying that it’s, you know, Decker nothing. I’m saying that there’s a market for the ally. I just don’t think it’s as big of a market as there is for the steam deck. To be honest, I really don’t. And so we’ll see. I mean, again, we’re going to see, I’m going to do all the tests, I’m going to do the battery life tests, I’m going to do the side by sides, I’m going to do it all. We’re going to look at my favorite games running on both machines. We’re going to look at what it’s like to set up certain processes. We’re going to, you know, there’s all sorts of good stuff we can do with it, to test it out and get a feel for it. You know, there are some things I’m very much looking forward to, you know, being able to treat it like another machine on my network, right? I’ve got great KVM software called What the hell is it called? Multiplicity multiplicity from Starbucks software, and it basically gives you you know, a soft KVM to every PC in your house. Right? Well, there is no client for the steam deck. It would be great for me to have the ally sitting on my desk somewhere and I’m remote controlling it with a KVM solution, a software KVM solution just like I do, my Plex server and everything else that’s in my house. So I’m looking forward to that. I’m looking forward not to have to set up weird ass SSH, and, you know, stuff of that nature. When I could just use window sharing now, it will be easy to move roms around or whatever. You know, people who people who insist on storing all their games on a NAS somewhere, they have a real problem using steam OS on the Steam deck. I listen, I wouldn’t play a game across the network like that, but whatever. Everyone’s got their thing. But it’s a pain in the ass on the Steam deck. And it’s gonna be easy peasy lemon squeezy on the ally. You know, these people who play fucking fortnight these people who play Destiny to these people, you know, who want to play Game Pass? Now they can do all that shit. And they don’t have to compromise? Well. They do have to compromise. Asus is just telling them that they don’t you know, what’s the overhead like, you know, they say, you know, we’re supposedly have this huge uptick in processing power, GPU, blah, blah, blah, right? Well, how much of that is Windows taking? We all know that if you if you stand up a Linux machine and a Windows box, the Linux machine is going to take half, you know, half is less resources it worse. You know, I’m saying you’re gonna run Linux on a frickin toaster game running Windows on anything that doesn’t have some balls behind it. Because it needs a lot of shit. How much crap is running in the background? How much? You know how much Hootie hoo and hokey pokey shits running on that thing? I don’t know. We’re gonna find out though. Am I going to be able to get in without a Microsoft account? Windows 11. Right. Windows 11 is locking you to using a Microsoft account. I want to use a local account. Is that going to work out? I don’t know. You know, because people don’t talk about the shift. A lot of us care about. I care that I can get in with a local account. We’ll just use a burner or two who cares? You’re gonna say anyone’s open and shut up. No, you don’t. This isn’t a Seuss device. If you want me to create an Asus account, I think I’ve already got one from my router. But Fine, I’ll do that. I shouldn’t be able to listen, if it’s my machine, and my windows, I can do what I want. Whatever I do what I want, I should be able to login with a local account. Don’t force me into using even a bullshit Microsoft account. Let’s see what else can I tell you? Sticks Oh, the face buttons feel very clickety. I’ve got controllers Android controllers that have those kinds of click any buttons? Not my favorite. I mean, it’s not a deal killer, but it’s just not my favorite. I think I commented in the video, the D pad is actually nice. I like the D pad. Of the two things I do not like on the Steam deck ones the D pad. Two are the bumpers. Now I didn’t get a lot of chance to play with the bumpers. I need to play that in combat. Right. I need to I need combat sir. Get myself busted to private so that I could try the goddamn bumpers on the ally. I don’t I don’t like the ones on the same day. And so I immediately ran to the back. So maybe maybe if the bumpers don’t suck, I can just route L three and R three to the back to bumpers. Life will be good. We’ll see. One of the other great things that I’m looking forward to is more mature. emulators, right. Emulation is more mature on Windows because more people are using it. You know, there’s always better builds. And honestly, you can get you can get Emulation Station desktop edition for Windows. Right. I’m not going to be left out there. So we’ll see. We shall see how it all turns out. But, you know, right now, you know, listen, I got 30 days, it’s not outside the realm of possibility. But I’ll take it back. Or, you know, it may end up being my son’s in the end, right? I mean, we want to be able to sit in the living room and play Overwatch together. Right? He can play on that I can play on the deck. And we could do that and sitting in you know, couch Overwatch. But anyway, the other thing too, that I’m kind of looking forward to. And again, this has nothing to do with liking windows, but rather liking what I can do with Windows one I can have Directory Opus on it, which is going to be fan freaking tastic. And to the software that I’ve been working on for the steam deck, right, I can actually use it on the ally. Right. So this this game, this game backup system that I’ve been kind of working on. One of the things that I was kind of disappointed about it was the fact that because it’s you know it’s a dotnet app and it’s running on Windows, that anybody who wanted to use it would have to run it on Windows against the steam deck and use sshfs and all that stuff. Well, simple drive mapping, and you can actually run the client locally on your machine on the ally. So you can actually load my save game tool up on the ally, sink your save games across to your PC, shut your ally off. And then when you go back to playing on your PC, it’s good to go. So I mean, I’m kind of excited about that, because I can’t write software for Linux, but I can write software for Windows. And I can actually write tools that will help people. And then of course, there’s always the concept that it might actually it might actually make a decent desktop. And when I say what I mean by that is peace and love, peace and love the steam deck. I’m tired of people pimping the steam Deck offers a desktop replacement. It’s not unless you happen to love Linux, which most people apparently don’t seem to be loving Linux. You know, you’re gonna have to put Windows on there to make it a decent desktop, right? Or should I sell my computer and buy a steam deck because I’m going to school and I really need a computer for school, but I want the portability and playing games on the Steam deck or my laptop really sucks. And it’s like, no, God, no, that’s, this is not this is not the device you should be looking for. You know, unless all your shit happens to run in the browser on Windows, then you might as well just get a Chromebook. So, you know, but the ally Hey, listen, it’s already got Windows on it. Everybody knows how to use it. Everybody can hack all the games they want and mod all the games they want. Because apparently no game is good out of the box unless it’s gotten fucking 400 mods attached to it. Well, I’m not gonna play this game for kanmani Shut up. Anyway, I know I know. Not talking nice about mods is so not PC of me. But anyway, I mean that so that’s another one of those things that people lose their shit over on Steam deck. Where it’s nothing on the ally, the ally is going to be run fucking we mods run vortex, do whatever you want. Fine. You know, whatever you’ve done on your PC you can do here. But again, I challenge the magic. There’s no magic with the ally. There isn’t. It’s another handheld PC. And we’ve already got hundreds of the well not probably not hundreds, dozens of those kicking around already. Granted, they’re more expensive. But you know, we don’t we don’t know what sort of nonsense that Acer’s can be have tucked away in there. So we’ll have to see. My point is, I know a lot of people, just like when the quest two came out, everyone with the quest ones got all pissy and it’s like, dude, when the question comes out, your quest doesn’t stop working. In fact, in many cases, the Quest One was a better piece of equipment. It was more comfortable. The blacks were blacker the colors were better. And now you can actually adjust the frickin IPs and RIPD blah, blah, blah. But anyway. So don’t don’t fear your steam deck is still going to be probably honestly superior in many ways. One of the things that I’m kind of looking forward to that I’m hoping is better on the ally is the touchscreen because that’s one thing I really disliked about the steam deck, but touchscreen. Kind of sucks. And it’s sucky when you want to play emulators. Like it requires drawing like pack pigs, or Kirby Canvas Curse for emulation on the DS, or soul bubbles, or medios. I mean, there’s a ton of tons of great handheld games on older Nintendo platforms. We just can’t play because the touchscreen sucks on the deck. So would it be nice? Would it be very nice to have a good touchscreen? We’ll see. Maybe it’ll be better. Maybe it won’t. Time will tell them that’s again, nothing that people are talking about. People just want to talk about frame counts and frame times and FPS this and VRR that nobody’s answering the hard questions, which is why I’m gonna get one of these suckers and make sure everybody gets the true knowledge. All right, well, I’ve had enough of a show here. I’m gonna get out my dogs a little maybe like we go in now. It’s like, yes, we can go in. Yeah, there’ll be no Apple vision review. Somebody asked me on one of my YouTube channel videos. Something like I can’t remember who was Ganeshan Kenshin impact or something? It’s like can you show how to do this on the Mac? And I’m like, No, hey, no Apple products on this channel pal. Sorry. Pack sin. Do you want to do anything that I’m showing on here by esteemed deck or get a Windows PC? All right well that’s gonna I think that’s gonna wrap it up I’m gonna go in the house all right this is Shane R. Monroe pastor see radio we’ll see you next time Take care everybody
