ranzware
I gotta be honest, the sum total of my engagement with Steam’s Game Notes feature is that one time I wrote a news story about people using them to cheat at Counter-Strike 2. I’ve never used ’em myself. Is this because of my incredible mind and prodigious powers of recall? Yes. But also it’s because I tend to open Notepad before I even remember Steam has a notes function.
But maybe the time to switch is now. As of yesterday’s beta update to the Steam client, you can now access your many tomes of game notes via the web. The web! Imagine that. You don’t actually need to opt into the Steam beta for them to work, either: I’ve tried creating some test notes on beta and non-beta versions of the client and they all end up showing in Steam’s remarkably barebones new Notes section.
Which is pretty handy, sure. It’s a lot easier to compile handy notes when you can easily flick back and forth between browser tabs, and you’ll be able to add handy info to them from any device, not just ones you already have Steam installed on.
Nevertheless, I admit people seem a lot more excited about this than I’d ever have guessed. “NOTES ARE OFFICIALLY ON WEB!” declares a euphoric user of the r/Steam subreddit, in a tone you’d usually reserve for announcements about the eradication of polio or the end of a civil war. “THANK YOU!!!” adds another. It’s a big, wide world out there, and people are playing games in all sorts of ways I’m apparently not. Good for them.
There’s work to be done, though. Like I said, the new notes page is sparse. Really sparse. It-looks-like-this levels of sparse:
So that could maybe be prettied up a little. Plus, I’d like a way to spin up a new note for a game entirely from scratch in the web view. As it stands, you can only see notes you’ve already made in-game, there’s no way from that page to write a note for a game you’ve not already pre-noted.
The whole web-notes thing isn’t the only feature of the client update. Valve also says it’s fixed game recording and video streaming in Monster Hunter Wilds, which is handy considering the entire planet seems to be playing it right now.
It’s also added support for the 8BitDo Micro gamepad and futzed about with “display of notifications for in-progress achievements,” meaning those cheevos you get for doing things like ‘killing 100 whatevers,’ and which update whenever you kill a whatever. All sounds good to me, even if I’m not quite sure this is the start of a long career in note-taking.
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Kurt Indovina
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