(previous entries:
1: https://gbatemp.net/blogs/valve-steam-deck-review-part-one-prior-to-arrival.18904/
2: https://gbatemp.net/blogs/valve-steam-deck-review-part-one-prior-to-arrival.18904/)
Intro:
The more I play, the more I realize why the switch is a success: the ability to quickly start and stop. As a father of a 2.5 year old toddler, I'm often switching between video games, kicking a ball with her in the garden, playing video games, helping potty training, resuming video gaming, cuddling with her, more video gaming, and so on. Of course the portability is great, but I'm not mentioning this to demonstrate how bad of a father I am (you probably already pretend I'm just gaming while she's shouting "DADDY!! DADDY!" and I'm muttering something like "after this boss battle, darling"...you'd be wrong, but I can see why you think so
). I've got to mention it because doing all this on a gaming pc is just impossible. The steam deck isn't so much burning through my backlog as it is re-enabling gaming time that got lost due to household chores, exactly because the start-stop time is roughly nullified.
Anyway...that said...more personal gaming news...
Ageless and chasm:
both of these are backlog platformers. The former is a celeste knock-off: pixel art, moving story, clever mechanic. Unfortunately, celeste has the obstacles to overcome woven into the narrative, whereas ageless just gets balls hard because...I don't know why, really. It's a puzzle platformer in which I usually tend to grasp the solution fairly fast but am either too slow or inprecise to perform correctly.
Chasm is just a bog standard 2D action rpg. Nothing wrong with it, but no great qualities either.
Both have in common that the technical difficulties were absolutely absent. Install, start, play, go. They're verified, but even so: I can't even imagine even the slightest bit of fault technical wise whatsoever.
Children of morta:
A roguelite dungeon crawler. Gameplay is like diablo mixed with rogue legacy: you go in, fight until you die (which you usually will), but you'll keep your stuff and experience, thus gradually making the game easier to progress in. This is a perfect fit, as the gaming parts are roughly twenty-thirty minutes per run. The story bits in-between are also remarkably good.
Only negative I would say is that the UI text isn't easy to read. I should check steam's magnifier glass more...
Avalanche 2: super avalanche
I picked this as my first unsupported game to try. And...well...steam is too kind yet again. It started without issues, but even though I was greeted with a developer welcome message saying that xbox inputs should work, buttons did nothing. The solution: load a custom button layout, pick the 'advanced' button layout (which should really be 'standard') and done.
I've played it for roughly an hour and that's honestly the only miss I've encountered. Was it because of this it was unsupported? Was this on an earlier proton build? I have no idea...it's literally two minutes of tweaking to get it to work perfectly.
Oh, right: the game's a platformer mixed with tetris, with some roguelite elements thrown in for good measures. It's fun, but a few screenshots will determine whether this is something you'll love or hate.
Stealth bastard deluxe:
This one blackscreened. Aha...so finally a game that doesn't work? Nope...sorry: I just checked some settings, enabled experimental proton for this game, and had no further issue whatsoever anymore.
Well...cloud syncing failed for some reason. But while it does unlock extra costumes if you finish levels multiple times (this is my third time playing through it), I couldn't care less.
The desktop mode / heroic launcher:
By this time I at least found how to get to desktop mode. So I went there, installed heroic launcher and linked up both my epic games account and gog one. While I would strongly advise having a mouse, and keyboard plugged in for this, I managed to do this all by just using the deck (hint: steam+x conjures a keyboard).
However...
axiom verge (epic): installing this through the launcher worked, but this one just blackscreened. I should still figure out how to add it to steam gaming mode, but so far this has been my first "can't get it to work" game.
Mark of the ninja (gog): got it to install, and it runs...in the wrong resolution. This got solved once I added heroiclauncher as a non-steam game to steam. So yeey for that...
...except it has another weird bug that I couldn't figure out: it just loses all progress after you quit the game. Some further testing with other games (towerfall ascenscion) proved it was something with MotN, but I couldn't figure out what. But to be honest: I only later realized I have it on steam as well, so there's not much reason to check this further for me... :-\
Observation:
Okay...so how about unsupported games, then? Does this...nope, it just works. It'd be frustrating if it wasn't such a positive thing.
I played roughly two hours and the only issue I have is that it uses a lot of mentions of xbox360 buttons (not QTE's, but similar), and the text prompts are hard to make out on the screen.
To be fair: it's a horror game set in space. Think 2001: space oddyssey wherein you are the AI on a ship that's off course in space with seemingly only just a single astronaut on board (who bosses you around like the computer you are). It's weird, it's unsettling and the game - thus far - is pretty much about finding out how to regain control of the ship. As a result it can sometimes feel like you're pixel hunting in a confusing (and low poly) 3D environment. Heck...I've managed to not find an opening in a room I was in for nearly twenty minutes. But credit where due: you're in space. There is no "up" and "down", and I feel the controls are somewhat clunky on purpose. Because while you're faffing about trying to find out how to get power to a hatch door, completing it gives a great sense of accomplishment.
Dead man's draw:
This is a simple push your luck pirate-themed card game that I picked up in a bundle. Tried it because it's not yet tested and I wanted to know how it'd handle mobile ports.
Well...the good news is that it's flawless. I'm really starting to enjoy the trackpad on this thing: it's fast but precise, the shoulder buttons as button replacements are satisfying to use (though weird that left mouse is right shoulder by default) and it plays like a breeze. The touchscreen works fine, but why bother with that if the trackpad's so convenient?
The game's pretty addicting as well. Yes, it's a filler game, but a fun one. Two notes, though:
One: this one hangs upon exiting and at one point my mouse clicks weren't registered anymore until I loaded a completely new profile (mouse only). So by the time valve's team gets to it, this one should be a "playable" title at most.
Two: it was originally released on both android and iOS years ago, but due to update policies the android app's no longer in the store. As such, this game's an argument AGAINST those who see the mobile ports flooding steam as store pollution: the deck makes those games more convenient to play.
Portal 2:
As to be expected, it works straight out of the box. With good controls, even. Even so, I spend five minutes to rearrange the buttons (to end up with roughly the same as the original ). My aim was simply to keep my right thumb on the touchpad at all times, so I'm using those clicky buttons at the back for jumping, ducking, using and zooming. It's not entirely smooth, but doable (certainly better than the way I wobbled through portal 1 ).
Worth noting: it just picked up straight where I left off some month or two before (I started it on PC then). I ended up restarting, but that doesn't mean the feature is any less of a plus.
Just this morning I remapped the D-pad for controls as well. The joystick works fine for most part but the speed gel part (roughly 3-4 hours in the game) is just a frustrating annoyance if your "move forward" has 0.5% sidestrafing into it.
YUZU (Captain toad & Link's awakening):
While on desktop mode, I downloaded emudeck from their site (as advised here). And because this is the internet, getting the games (legal, of course), firmware and the keys was almost harder than figuring out how to properly copy-paste everything in the correct locations. Mind you: this was mentioned in the installation screen. So...all in all it was pretty easy. It just seems hard in comparison because full picture steam itself is such a breeze to use.
Captain Toad never had a problem running and kept a smooth framerate throughout my tests. Link's awakening has a few minor glitches and noticeable framerate drops in the outdoors (meaning: 80% of the game).
The latter can be fixed with a mod that can be found on yuzu's mod page. After getting the 60fps and no bloom mods, getting it to install took some searching until I found this link.
After that, it's been smooth sailing. Well...I still have some small kinks to work out on setting the emulator (how to map the buttons for yuzu navigation itself?), but it's playable.
My main "issue" with emulators is about as first world problem as you can get: the moment I can get it to work I lose interest. I have already played both games, and have hardly any interest in other switch games. And most previous generations I can play on other devices just as easily. Not always on the go, I admit, but I've spent actual money on plenty of stuff in my backlog and I don't really do piracy "because I can". For now I'm content to know that it's possible and feasible.
Emudeck:
Emudeck is, I've got to admit it, impressive. Since my wii couldn't go on the internet anymore (security is too low), I spent a couple hours adding and correcting all sorts of covers and stuff. Emudeck does all that for you. I've thrown in a couple older roms for testing purposes, but haven't gotten around to it yet.
Conclusion (for now):
I know I'm not really "WWWWWWOOOOOOOOO"-ing in my texts, but rest assured: I freaking LOVE this thing. Valve has all the rights to be proud of it, as what they've created is all sorts of impressive and then some. I've collected some handhelds before, had fun on mobile and even on a laptop when our home renovation roughly limited girlfriend and me to a single room. It took until last december to finally give a good home to my desktop (two screens! The good desk chair!), but I pretty much exclusively use it for actual work now. It fits my hands perfectly, plays anything and - as I predicted - the ability to turn on and off the device mid game is such a ridiculously good feature.
I won't lie: the device isn't for everyone. It's a great size for me, but I imagine people with small hands (like...kids) won't have it so easy. And while it mimicks the ease of navigating pretty well, it has a few rough edges when you directly compare it to a console. Or to a switch, I imagine. You can't fault valve for this: the software on their store is written for a different operating system AND wasn't exactly error proof there. Linux might make performance better but won't magically solve software errors somehow. So...I've had a few crashes, and unless you strictly want to remain in the "verified" side of steam I think that's something to live with. I've been gaming on linux since...erm...2018, I think. Linux mint still works fine, whereas my windows partition is clogging up. The desktop mode of steamos resembles that quite a bit (and I will probably transition my main PC over there once valve officially releases it)...but while functional I can't say it's the best operating system for a steam deck. Well...it probably IS the best operating system for the deck (I don't doubt the ones trying windows), but I mean that there's plenty room to improve if valve wants to go there.
Will post some more musings on this later on. That'll probably be the last of these series. I know they're rambling, but ey...this is more about quantity than quality.
1: https://gbatemp.net/blogs/valve-steam-deck-review-part-one-prior-to-arrival.18904/
2: https://gbatemp.net/blogs/valve-steam-deck-review-part-one-prior-to-arrival.18904/)
Intro:
The more I play, the more I realize why the switch is a success: the ability to quickly start and stop. As a father of a 2.5 year old toddler, I'm often switching between video games, kicking a ball with her in the garden, playing video games, helping potty training, resuming video gaming, cuddling with her, more video gaming, and so on. Of course the portability is great, but I'm not mentioning this to demonstrate how bad of a father I am (you probably already pretend I'm just gaming while she's shouting "DADDY!! DADDY!" and I'm muttering something like "after this boss battle, darling"...you'd be wrong, but I can see why you think so
). I've got to mention it because doing all this on a gaming pc is just impossible. The steam deck isn't so much burning through my backlog as it is re-enabling gaming time that got lost due to household chores, exactly because the start-stop time is roughly nullified. Anyway...that said...more personal gaming news...
Ageless and chasm:
both of these are backlog platformers. The former is a celeste knock-off: pixel art, moving story, clever mechanic. Unfortunately, celeste has the obstacles to overcome woven into the narrative, whereas ageless just gets balls hard because...I don't know why, really. It's a puzzle platformer in which I usually tend to grasp the solution fairly fast but am either too slow or inprecise to perform correctly.
Chasm is just a bog standard 2D action rpg. Nothing wrong with it, but no great qualities either.
Both have in common that the technical difficulties were absolutely absent. Install, start, play, go. They're verified, but even so: I can't even imagine even the slightest bit of fault technical wise whatsoever.
Children of morta:
A roguelite dungeon crawler. Gameplay is like diablo mixed with rogue legacy: you go in, fight until you die (which you usually will), but you'll keep your stuff and experience, thus gradually making the game easier to progress in. This is a perfect fit, as the gaming parts are roughly twenty-thirty minutes per run. The story bits in-between are also remarkably good.
Only negative I would say is that the UI text isn't easy to read. I should check steam's magnifier glass more...
Avalanche 2: super avalanche
I picked this as my first unsupported game to try. And...well...steam is too kind yet again. It started without issues, but even though I was greeted with a developer welcome message saying that xbox inputs should work, buttons did nothing. The solution: load a custom button layout, pick the 'advanced' button layout (which should really be 'standard') and done.
I've played it for roughly an hour and that's honestly the only miss I've encountered. Was it because of this it was unsupported? Was this on an earlier proton build? I have no idea...it's literally two minutes of tweaking to get it to work perfectly.
Oh, right: the game's a platformer mixed with tetris, with some roguelite elements thrown in for good measures. It's fun, but a few screenshots will determine whether this is something you'll love or hate.
Stealth bastard deluxe:
This one blackscreened. Aha...so finally a game that doesn't work? Nope...sorry: I just checked some settings, enabled experimental proton for this game, and had no further issue whatsoever anymore.
Well...cloud syncing failed for some reason. But while it does unlock extra costumes if you finish levels multiple times (this is my third time playing through it), I couldn't care less.
The desktop mode / heroic launcher:
By this time I at least found how to get to desktop mode. So I went there, installed heroic launcher and linked up both my epic games account and gog one. While I would strongly advise having a mouse, and keyboard plugged in for this, I managed to do this all by just using the deck (hint: steam+x conjures a keyboard).
However...
axiom verge (epic): installing this through the launcher worked, but this one just blackscreened. I should still figure out how to add it to steam gaming mode, but so far this has been my first "can't get it to work" game.
Mark of the ninja (gog): got it to install, and it runs...in the wrong resolution. This got solved once I added heroiclauncher as a non-steam game to steam. So yeey for that...
...except it has another weird bug that I couldn't figure out: it just loses all progress after you quit the game. Some further testing with other games (towerfall ascenscion) proved it was something with MotN, but I couldn't figure out what. But to be honest: I only later realized I have it on steam as well, so there's not much reason to check this further for me... :-\
Observation:
Okay...so how about unsupported games, then? Does this...nope, it just works. It'd be frustrating if it wasn't such a positive thing.
I played roughly two hours and the only issue I have is that it uses a lot of mentions of xbox360 buttons (not QTE's, but similar), and the text prompts are hard to make out on the screen.
To be fair: it's a horror game set in space. Think 2001: space oddyssey wherein you are the AI on a ship that's off course in space with seemingly only just a single astronaut on board (who bosses you around like the computer you are). It's weird, it's unsettling and the game - thus far - is pretty much about finding out how to regain control of the ship. As a result it can sometimes feel like you're pixel hunting in a confusing (and low poly) 3D environment. Heck...I've managed to not find an opening in a room I was in for nearly twenty minutes. But credit where due: you're in space. There is no "up" and "down", and I feel the controls are somewhat clunky on purpose. Because while you're faffing about trying to find out how to get power to a hatch door, completing it gives a great sense of accomplishment.
Dead man's draw:
This is a simple push your luck pirate-themed card game that I picked up in a bundle. Tried it because it's not yet tested and I wanted to know how it'd handle mobile ports.
Well...the good news is that it's flawless. I'm really starting to enjoy the trackpad on this thing: it's fast but precise, the shoulder buttons as button replacements are satisfying to use (though weird that left mouse is right shoulder by default) and it plays like a breeze. The touchscreen works fine, but why bother with that if the trackpad's so convenient?
The game's pretty addicting as well. Yes, it's a filler game, but a fun one. Two notes, though:
One: this one hangs upon exiting and at one point my mouse clicks weren't registered anymore until I loaded a completely new profile (mouse only). So by the time valve's team gets to it, this one should be a "playable" title at most.
Two: it was originally released on both android and iOS years ago, but due to update policies the android app's no longer in the store. As such, this game's an argument AGAINST those who see the mobile ports flooding steam as store pollution: the deck makes those games more convenient to play.
Portal 2:
As to be expected, it works straight out of the box. With good controls, even. Even so, I spend five minutes to rearrange the buttons (to end up with roughly the same as the original
). My aim was simply to keep my right thumb on the touchpad at all times, so I'm using those clicky buttons at the back for jumping, ducking, using and zooming. It's not entirely smooth, but doable (certainly better than the way I wobbled through portal 1 ).Worth noting: it just picked up straight where I left off some month or two before (I started it on PC then). I ended up restarting, but that doesn't mean the feature is any less of a plus.
Just this morning I remapped the D-pad for controls as well. The joystick works fine for most part but the speed gel part (roughly 3-4 hours in the game) is just a frustrating annoyance if your "move forward" has 0.5% sidestrafing into it.
YUZU (Captain toad & Link's awakening):
While on desktop mode, I downloaded emudeck from their site (as advised here). And because this is the internet, getting the games (legal, of course), firmware and the keys was almost harder than figuring out how to properly copy-paste everything in the correct locations. Mind you: this was mentioned in the installation screen. So...all in all it was pretty easy. It just seems hard in comparison because full picture steam itself is such a breeze to use.
Captain Toad never had a problem running and kept a smooth framerate throughout my tests. Link's awakening has a few minor glitches and noticeable framerate drops in the outdoors (meaning: 80% of the game).
The latter can be fixed with a mod that can be found on yuzu's mod page. After getting the 60fps and no bloom mods, getting it to install took some searching until I found this link.
After that, it's been smooth sailing. Well...I still have some small kinks to work out on setting the emulator (how to map the buttons for yuzu navigation itself?), but it's playable.
My main "issue" with emulators is about as first world problem as you can get: the moment I can get it to work I lose interest. I have already played both games, and have hardly any interest in other switch games. And most previous generations I can play on other devices just as easily. Not always on the go, I admit, but I've spent actual money on plenty of stuff in my backlog and I don't really do piracy "because I can". For now I'm content to know that it's possible and feasible.
Emudeck:
Emudeck is, I've got to admit it, impressive. Since my wii couldn't go on the internet anymore (security is too low), I spent a couple hours adding and correcting all sorts of covers and stuff. Emudeck does all that for you. I've thrown in a couple older roms for testing purposes, but haven't gotten around to it yet.
Conclusion (for now):
I know I'm not really "WWWWWWOOOOOOOOO"-ing in my texts, but rest assured: I freaking LOVE this thing. Valve has all the rights to be proud of it, as what they've created is all sorts of impressive and then some. I've collected some handhelds before, had fun on mobile and even on a laptop when our home renovation roughly limited girlfriend and me to a single room. It took until last december to finally give a good home to my desktop (two screens! The good desk chair!), but I pretty much exclusively use it for actual work now. It fits my hands perfectly, plays anything and - as I predicted - the ability to turn on and off the device mid game is such a ridiculously good feature.
I won't lie: the device isn't for everyone. It's a great size for me, but I imagine people with small hands (like...kids) won't have it so easy. And while it mimicks the ease of navigating pretty well, it has a few rough edges when you directly compare it to a console. Or to a switch, I imagine. You can't fault valve for this: the software on their store is written for a different operating system AND wasn't exactly error proof there. Linux might make performance better but won't magically solve software errors somehow. So...I've had a few crashes, and unless you strictly want to remain in the "verified" side of steam I think that's something to live with. I've been gaming on linux since...erm...2018, I think. Linux mint still works fine, whereas my windows partition is clogging up. The desktop mode of steamos resembles that quite a bit (and I will probably transition my main PC over there once valve officially releases it)...but while functional I can't say it's the best operating system for a steam deck. Well...it probably IS the best operating system for the deck (I don't doubt the ones trying windows), but I mean that there's plenty room to improve if valve wants to go there.
Will post some more musings on this later on. That'll probably be the last of these series. I know they're rambling, but ey...this is more about quantity than quality.
