(previous part here: https://gbatemp.net/blogs/impressions-of-the-steam-machine.20303/)
GAME PONDERINGS:
I finished Yoshi's Woolly world this morning. It wasn't a hard game, but man was it beautiful. Solid 60 FPS, quick load times, crisp clear image and swift loading times. A whole difference from ten years ago on the actual wiiu, and that's even when taking USB-loading into account. And that's pretty much straight out of the box. Yes, the games that don't have native pro controller support built in took some tweaking (see previous entry), but I've done nothing in regard to video or audio settings.
Is it all sunshine and glamour? Hmm...no. Can't recall if I mentioned it, but the thing sometimes wakes itself up after going to sleep. There's apparently a fix in the beta channel for it, but it doesn't bother me enough to subscribe to it (did it a couple months with my deck. The problem is that every time you run into things, you presume it's because of beta patches being untested). And OF COURSE the thing got weird on controls the moment I wanted to show my daughter what this thing could do. That was partially my fault as I tried connecting the steam controller that wasn't paired yet, but somehow afterwards not only did emulated games refuse to use the controller but the thing ran suspiciously slow.
Okay, it was fixed after a reboot, but...not the greatest of first impressions for daughter and wife. But soon after, we jumped in a coop game and all was well.
On the field of what I played...a few weeks ago I tried Doom (2016) on the couch and it was underwhelming. But what perhaps isn't that obvious: for a desktop PC, the machine is surprisingly mobile. Just unplug power and HDMI, and plug them in somewhere else. It's worse than the steam deck (only one USB-c cable to connect to the docking station), but it won't be the last time I'll take it to my desk when my wife claims the television (EDIT: since I started this writing, that has happened three more times).
Back to Doom: once I started playing with keyboard and mouse, the whole thing instantly became much, much better. Not to the degree to which I played FPS games up to mid-2000's, but it clearly was more fun than than any other first person shooter I've played in the last years.
But now that that's tackled, I decided to try the burden of getting wii games to work. or rather: their controls. In theory, emudeck has configured dolphin so that select+joystick L up or down swaps gaming profiles. That may be, but a simple horizontal wiimote (like Epic Yarn or Newer Super Mario Bros Wii) looks like it was too much trouble. I'll spare you a couple dozen tries and getting NEARLY there with Wario shake dimension (all works flawless except throwing, which involves tilting the wiimote, which I honestly can't get a smooth alternative for). Though I'd rather avoid it, I'll settle for an actual wiimote (which you apparently can set as controller, and works surprisingly well).
HARDWARE:
Let's start this part with something honest: if you have a PC at home that's more powerful than the steam machine, I don't see the point in buying one. That is: apparently (and I'm going to test that in the not so distant future), moonlight and sunlight have become such good remote tools that it's perfectly doable to stream from and to devices for gaming purposes. Given decent internet speeds within your house, obviously. If so, the more logical step would be to put steamOS or bazzite on your strong PC (can't speak on behalf of cachyOS), get a cheap micro-PC for underneath the television and then play through that. I know I'm person 1'574'326 to piss on the launch price, but it's like there's an open divide. On one hand, the abandoned "not windows 11" certified stuff like liter box HP G6's and older Lenovo Laptops, run bazzite pretty darn smooth, and can get most indie games to work fine (Mina the hollower and even Silksong play quite good on such a potato PC).
I know, I know: I'm privileged in that I can get these for free. But these go for 100 bucks on e-bay, so if your gaming taste isn't expensive then you can get some extremely good value out of it with some tinkering.
SOME MORE PONDERINGS:
I've bought a bunch of cheap wiiu games when the switch became popular. That decision bites me in the ass now. I have the choice of playing it natively and bear the slow loading times and disc jockey'ing anytime daughter wants to play something else...or emulate it on the deck and run into small issues like that the pointer of the controller can't move (nintendo wouldn't be nintendo if they didn't include such gimmick at least once in their games).
The wii...is more fun as a concept than real use. Sure, I can use a genuine wiimote, but then I'd have to shelve out at least ten extra bucks for a wireless sensor bar that'll hardly ever sees use, not least of which because I've got a working wii in the attic!
Next up...after some trial and error, I've managed to set up lutris to the point that a game runs and works. Not to the point where I know 100% what I'm doing, but I'm more confident that I can get all the hundreds of windows games I've collected over the years to run when I want them to. And since it also has ways to connect to epic games launcher and GOG, I don't see why I shouldn't try it.
GAME PONDERINGS:
I finished Yoshi's Woolly world this morning. It wasn't a hard game, but man was it beautiful. Solid 60 FPS, quick load times, crisp clear image and swift loading times. A whole difference from ten years ago on the actual wiiu, and that's even when taking USB-loading into account. And that's pretty much straight out of the box. Yes, the games that don't have native pro controller support built in took some tweaking (see previous entry), but I've done nothing in regard to video or audio settings.
Is it all sunshine and glamour? Hmm...no. Can't recall if I mentioned it, but the thing sometimes wakes itself up after going to sleep. There's apparently a fix in the beta channel for it, but it doesn't bother me enough to subscribe to it (did it a couple months with my deck. The problem is that every time you run into things, you presume it's because of beta patches being untested). And OF COURSE the thing got weird on controls the moment I wanted to show my daughter what this thing could do. That was partially my fault as I tried connecting the steam controller that wasn't paired yet, but somehow afterwards not only did emulated games refuse to use the controller but the thing ran suspiciously slow.
Okay, it was fixed after a reboot, but...not the greatest of first impressions for daughter and wife. But soon after, we jumped in a coop game and all was well.
On the field of what I played...a few weeks ago I tried Doom (2016) on the couch and it was underwhelming. But what perhaps isn't that obvious: for a desktop PC, the machine is surprisingly mobile. Just unplug power and HDMI, and plug them in somewhere else. It's worse than the steam deck (only one USB-c cable to connect to the docking station), but it won't be the last time I'll take it to my desk when my wife claims the television (EDIT: since I started this writing, that has happened three more times).
Back to Doom: once I started playing with keyboard and mouse, the whole thing instantly became much, much better. Not to the degree to which I played FPS games up to mid-2000's, but it clearly was more fun than than any other first person shooter I've played in the last years.
But now that that's tackled, I decided to try the burden of getting wii games to work. or rather: their controls. In theory, emudeck has configured dolphin so that select+joystick L up or down swaps gaming profiles. That may be, but a simple horizontal wiimote (like Epic Yarn or Newer Super Mario Bros Wii) looks like it was too much trouble. I'll spare you a couple dozen tries and getting NEARLY there with Wario shake dimension (all works flawless except throwing, which involves tilting the wiimote, which I honestly can't get a smooth alternative for). Though I'd rather avoid it, I'll settle for an actual wiimote (which you apparently can set as controller, and works surprisingly well).
HARDWARE:
Let's start this part with something honest: if you have a PC at home that's more powerful than the steam machine, I don't see the point in buying one. That is: apparently (and I'm going to test that in the not so distant future), moonlight and sunlight have become such good remote tools that it's perfectly doable to stream from and to devices for gaming purposes. Given decent internet speeds within your house, obviously. If so, the more logical step would be to put steamOS or bazzite on your strong PC (can't speak on behalf of cachyOS), get a cheap micro-PC for underneath the television and then play through that. I know I'm person 1'574'326 to piss on the launch price, but it's like there's an open divide. On one hand, the abandoned "not windows 11" certified stuff like liter box HP G6's and older Lenovo Laptops, run bazzite pretty darn smooth, and can get most indie games to work fine (Mina the hollower and even Silksong play quite good on such a potato PC).
I know, I know: I'm privileged in that I can get these for free. But these go for 100 bucks on e-bay, so if your gaming taste isn't expensive then you can get some extremely good value out of it with some tinkering.
SOME MORE PONDERINGS:
I've bought a bunch of cheap wiiu games when the switch became popular. That decision bites me in the ass now. I have the choice of playing it natively and bear the slow loading times and disc jockey'ing anytime daughter wants to play something else...or emulate it on the deck and run into small issues like that the pointer of the controller can't move (nintendo wouldn't be nintendo if they didn't include such gimmick at least once in their games).
The wii...is more fun as a concept than real use. Sure, I can use a genuine wiimote, but then I'd have to shelve out at least ten extra bucks for a wireless sensor bar that'll hardly ever sees use, not least of which because I've got a working wii in the attic!
Next up...after some trial and error, I've managed to set up lutris to the point that a game runs and works. Not to the point where I know 100% what I'm doing, but I'm more confident that I can get all the hundreds of windows games I've collected over the years to run when I want them to. And since it also has ways to connect to epic games launcher and GOG, I don't see why I shouldn't try it.
