Valve's Steam Deck is a great way to get PC games out of your office and on to your couch, back patio, or anywhere. As we said in our review, it's worth having around even if you just play it a few times a month for a couple hours at a time. But I wound up using mine a little differently: I play the Steam Deck several times a day for just a few minutes per session. And it's almost the only reason I play video games at all anymore. I'm no less interested in games than I used to be, but since becoming a father, I've found I have a lot less time.

Console generations are generally thought to last about half a decade, which is what makes today's Switch anniversary so momentous. Nintendo's hybrid home-handheld console turns five today, and it shows no signs of slowing down: Though rumors persist, there's no announced plans for a new console on the horizon. The most we've gotten are two redesigns -- the Switch Lite and the OLED Switch -- and the expansion of Nintendo Switch Online to include more classic console games. But while it's certainly fun to revisit old favorites like Super Mario Bros., Kirby's Adventure and Earthbound, it's the games made for the Switch that have captured the hearts of the Engadget crew, along with a few other titles that made their debuts elsewhere but really shined on Nintendo's portable system. Regular Engadget readers know there's no way I would let a "favorite Switch games" post pass without even one Animal Crossing: New Horizons mention.

This pandemic has dragged on longer than expected but hey, another 12 months in lockdown means another year to play lots of video games. And what a year it's been, with new installments in storied franchises, remakes of forgotten classics and a game where you date your sword. As is tradition, the Engadget team gathered together to ruminate on their favorite titles released this year, extolling their virtues and sometimes drawbacks, but mostly explaining why we like them so much. We've also thrown in a few of our older faves that we played in 2021, because hey, a good game is always a good game. When people look back at Microsoft's 2021, they'll cite Halo: Infinite and the extra year the company gave 343 Industries to work on the game as one of its best recent decisions. But I think the company also deserves praise for taking a chance on Relic and Age of Empires IV. Coming off the dismal Dawn of War III, fans had every right to be skeptical of whether the studio could pull off a sequel to one of the most-loved real-time strategy games in history.

Hey, 1994 called and it wants its Super Metroid mechanics back. Then again, classic Metroid gameplay is not a bad thing and that's exactly what Metroid Dread delivers for series fans on the Nintendo Switch. Old-school gamers got an appetizer of what a modern 2D Metroid looked like four years ago in Mercury Steam's "Metroid: Samus Returns" for the 3DS. Now the studio is back with the entire full course as Metroid Dread doubles down on the classic formula that helped give rise to a whole genre now known as "Metroidvania." For folks who haven't played a game in the series since Super Metroid, 27 years is a long time – even longer if you go back to the original Metroid from 1986.

It's a comment I've seen hundreds of times, or variations of throughout my time here at Kotaku: internet complaints about the quality of reviews. "A bot can do better than this," some would cry. So let's put that to the test. I've run this test before, although last time I fed Kotaku Australia comments into the machine learning model. That was run using a free online version of the GPT-2 language model, although the more powerful GPT-3 model is available now if you're willing to pay to access the API. So I did that, specifically through a tool called Shortly. We got some fun responses last time the AI pretended to double as a commenter.

Professional speedrunners and Metroid fans have already cracked open the game, finding what's called "sequence breaks" in which players discover new ways to navigate the planet and earn power-ups to access more areas of the map at earlier points in the game. While I'm still chasing a run under four hours, players like Samura1man, a Finnish speedrunner, have beaten the game in under an hour and a half and are still finding new ways to shave off time. Just on Monday, Samura1man achieved what was then the world record, beating "Dread" in one hour and 27 minutes. That record was beaten by approximately half a minute later that same day. On YouTube, his latest run clocks in at one hour, 26 minutes and 9 seconds.

Do you love nothing more than to backtrack through a part of a video game you've already been through? I surely do--I love to confidently revisit an area I struggled through once I've powered up and am now able to take it on with ease. Backtracking can be divisive (my very own editor can't stand it), but if you, too, find it satisfying, you need to get yourself Metroid Dread--the first original Metroid story in nearly two decades, now on Nintendo Switch. It's a game that finds innovative ways to deliver the surprising pleasures of returning to an area again and again, reaffirming my love for this conceit that others may still scoff at.. What exactly are those pleasures, for those who can't fathom traveling to the same place multiple times? I'm glad you asked--because I'm not at all alone in loving this practice.

The recipe for a Metroid game is clear and concise: there's a labyrinthine system of rooms and corridors, an oppressive science-fiction environment, an escalating series of power-ups. A limited map you unlock gradually and rewardingly. Metroid Dread is proficient at all of this: it feels good to play, for a while. But I found that it got tiresome. There is little to hold the player in the world beyond the feeling of a perfectly executed attack or dodge.

Robot design tends to fall into one of two camps. In the first, they look like us; in the second, they look like tools, their bodies molded toward a particular function. And like tools, this second camp of robots--the smartphones of the robot universe--have tended to look very similar and require some thought on the part of their designer to elevate their personalities above that of a can opener. Metroid Dread on the Nintendo Switch doesn't escape this trap: It's a fine and frightening game held back by its boring robot villains. This story originally appeared on WIRED UK.

The result is a Metroid game that feels like it is designed by gridwork and less about creating a convincing world. Again, background details like wildlife roaming the planet help alleviate this somewhat, but in a Metroid game, the foreground should be a priority over the background. The first and second Metroid games were mostly designed with pitch-black backgrounds, yet I could still describe what the Brinstar and Norfair regions were like because the developers placed the details of those regions at the forefront. Norfair was filled with lava, and its music was a raging, syncopated march. And although it's been years since I've played "Metroid Prime," I could still tell you what the snow-capped Phendrana Drifts look like.