How is Your Steam Deck Gaming Going?

Post by **pierrot** » Thu Jul 04, 2024 1:33 am

Classic topic format. Modern "console." I'm curious if anyone else here has fallen into the trap.

I picked up an OLED Steam Deck a number of months ago, and spent a bunch of time initially loading it up with stuff from the immense number of games in my Steam library that I've barely payed any real money for. It's kind of odd to me that I'm in this situation, since I'm so opposed to the monolithic storefront Steam has been for years now. I tend to prefer supporting DRM free models like GOG, but fortunately the Steam Deck itself is quite open (even if there's no native Linux support for GOG galaxy).

I also have never really preferred handhelds, and there are a number of things about the form factor of the Deck that I don't love. That said, the Deck does actually make me feel a bit better about all the games I don't technically own on Steam that fit into a nice little device. Makes the Steam library somehow feel a little more tangible than just playing them on my main PC.

I've also been finding all kinds of games originally for 3DS and Vita that are available on PC and compatible with the Deck. (I actually have an OLED Vita with CFW, but the Deck is still just a much nicer device to use.) It's a pretty compelling platform to me, at this point. I was able to bounce between my main PC and the Deck pretty seamlessly while playing through Dragon Quest XI, because of cloud saves, while also taking advantage of mods aplenty. I can access pretty much the full gamut of retro indie games since they're nearly all on PC. Then there are all the ports and remasters from older consoles. (Even most of the Toaplan shooter library is ported to PC now.)

Right now I have a sorted group of Steam games on my Deck as "Retro & Ports" that looks like:

which feels like a pretty lascivious collection of games to have on one console, when I can also do crazy stuff like play PSO Blue Burst on Ephinea servers with it.
Anyway, enough of me rationalizing my purchase--.

How about it Racketeers, have you a Steam Deck? If so, what do you end up doing with it? In other words, how's it going (on)?

Post by **Anapan** » Fri Jul 05, 2024 1:41 am

Never got one, but I've enjoyed pushing my GPD Win 2 to its limits.

Of course it's lower spec and can't even play GTA5 without low spec hacks, so I push the limits with games to see what it can do. New 2TB M.2 and a 1GB MicroSD; 3RD party big aluminum heat-sync and fan solution and all.

It is my only computer aside from my phone on out-of-town jobs - sometimes for over a month. I remote desktop to my at-home PCs for anything that requires a lot of computing power, but it's a fine daily-driver for mostly anything aside from video editing and AI stuff.

Nearly all emulation is great locally, and my favorite games - 2D Metroidvanias all play perfectly.

I played through AM2R again but entirely handheld, Also Rainworld, tho I havent started the new DLC. Carrion, The Blaster Master Zero's, Timespinner.

Heh, am I invited to make a spoiler'd list of my favorite retro and indie games on pc? I feel like that scene from Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. "What do you play?"
"Wow, Zelda, Tetris...That's kinda a big question."

After finding its limitations, I started seeing if I could sidestep it's lacking gaming-pc prowess by streaming games to it when I dock it to wired ethernet. Steam Remote Play, PS4 Remote Play, Boosteroid, Nvidia GeForce NOW and Playstation Now.
I actually started using cloud gaming for goofy fun on my smartwatches and in-dash Android deck, but after playing a few games while out-of-town on good wired networks, I have to admit the gameplay is decent for certain types of games. Neat that I can play Shadow of the Colossus anywhere from something in my pocket.

I've had my eye on the GPD Win Mini for a while... now that's it's available and vetted I'm just waiting for another big paycheck and it'll be mine. So cool that by itself it's crazy powerful, but then you can dock/connect an external GPU box and just do anything a tower PC can.

Post by **pierrot** » Fri Jul 05, 2024 7:59 pm

Sweet! Never heard of the GDP Win 2, but it sounds like it serves a lot of similar functions. Looking at it, do you use the controller built into it, or connect a controller of your own? I'm a little amazed it runs GTAV at all.

When I was mulling over the Steam Deck, I actually came pretty close to picking up the Lenovo Legion GO instead. I passed on it because it seemed like the design wasn't quite as mature as I would have liked, and it's Windows based. Probably could have side loaded Linux, but that's work I didn't want to bother with.

Anapan wrote: ↑Fri Jul 05, 2024 1:41 am Heh, am I invited to make a spoiler'd list of my favorite retro and indie games on pc?

Absolutely, please do! Secretly, part of my motivation for this thread was possibly catching some of the 5th Gen and newer console games, and arcade games, that have newer releases to PC that I didn't know about. That and maybe finding some new Indie games that look interesting. I've been building out wishlists, even if I rarely pick up specific games on digital storefronts.

Post by **pierrot** » Sat Jul 20, 2024 4:03 pm

I played through all of the story mode in Sonic Adventure (DX) for the first time since about 1999/2000, on the Steam Deck. Added all the Dreamcast mods to it in order to really pump up the nostalgia.

I liked Sonic Adventure back in the day, and spent a fair amount of time trying to get all the emblems--I remember being pretty upset that the servers to download the Sonic Chao were taken down by the time I had collected enough emblems for it, though. I got kind of caught up in hype for Sonic Adventure 2, and somehow SA2 stuck in my head as the more fun experience for a long time.

After replaying SA1, I think it's the more complete game, for me. I like the hub environments, and the world aspects of it. The main downsides to the game are that the auto-camera is very slow to respond to player movement, and some collision interactions cause various physics weirdness. I generally don't have any issue with these things, though. One thing I did experience on the PC version that I don't recall happening on DC was that in certain terrain transitions the position vector seemed to get locked to a particular path, and wouldn't allow me to move into an orthogonal path, for instance. I guess there's also Big, but while I don't love the fishing, I also really don't mind it either. I really enjoy the Knuckles levels in SA, as well (something I can't say for SA2).

I didn't really expect to come away from replaying SA1 with a favorable outlook on it, and I don't think that's just about nostalgia, although I'm sure it plays at least a small part in it. I think I'll probably try replaying SA2 on the Steam Deck, too, but I really don't have a whole lot of appetite for it--in the short term, anyway.

Sonic Adventure DX is actually listed as incompatible with the Steam Deck, but I can't really think of a reason why. Especially with the mod pack loaded, the Deck is a pretty great way to play it.

Post by **pierrot** » Sat Nov 16, 2024 3:09 am

I played through Hollow Knight on the Deck, and finished with 60% completion. It's a confirmed deck compatible game, so all I can really say in terms of playing it on the deck is that it seems to play as advertised. Also, I was a little concerned about playing a kind of technical platforming game on the deck as opposed to with a controller on desktop, but it was actually all right. Maybe I've just gotten more used to using the dpad on it or something.

That said, I did not particularly enjoy playing Hollow Knight, and have no real plans to go back to play any more of it. About five years ago, I played through the first area and boss when I had a free voucher period for Xbox Game Pass. It seemed like something I might kind of enjoy, so I had always intended to get back to it at some point. I don't remember when exactly I ended up with it in my steam library, but I started it up a couple months ago, and have just been chipping away at it until now.

The main thing that I feel is kind of compelling about the game for me is the atmosphere. At first it kind of seems a little bit like it could be similar to Ico or SotC in terms of style, but It's maybe more dreary and introspective. That's not necessarily an issue, but there's not really anything else I particularly enjoy about the game, so it just doesn't carry the experience very far for me. It's overall not bad, but the movement doesn't feel good to me (even with all (I assume) of the relevant upgrades), the story is sort of sneakily expository and not interesting to me, and way too many enemies are just ungodly damage sponges. Most of all I can't stand the map: The overall map design; The design of the progress through the map; The mapping system. The map locations don't really feel all that distinct or varied to me, I find the places that need some unlockable to progress though extremely difficult to remember the location of (and I didn't really want to bother with even buying the marker tokens), and there's just so much doubling back through dozens of screens to get to something. Mapping the dungeons is just a case of 'shit or get off the pot'; Either have regular metroidvania mapping, or no mapping. None of this in between shit to act as a money sink to prop up a currency "reward" that the game would be better off without to begin with.

I guess this is also a game that has a reputation of being kind of difficult, but I didn't find that to be the case, personally. For the most part I found it to be fairly easy to average difficulty with just some real bullshit around it with some of the damage hazards and a couple of regular enemies in the latter part of the game. There were also two or three bosses toward the end of the game that I struggled a bit with (because they're assholes), but mercifully the 'last' boss was pretty easy.

I had actually forgotten this was a Kickstarter game, so from that standpoint it's probably a pretty big success, but like Momodora, in terms of metroidvanias I would just say skip Hollow Knight in favor of SotN, Ori and the Blind Forest, or Guacamelee unless you're just 100% all in on the style above all else. Happy to have finished it, but god was it annoying.

Post by **marurun** » Wed Nov 20, 2024 1:38 pm

I did find Hollow Knight too hard, because it seemed like I always took too much damage and it was too hard to deal significant damage back, and I just didn't have the reflexes to keep up.

Post by **pierrot** » Wed Nov 20, 2024 6:38 pm

marurun wrote: ↑Wed Nov 20, 2024 1:38 pm I did find Hollow Knight too hard, because it seemed like I always took too much damage and it was too hard to deal significant damage back, and I just didn't have the reflexes to keep up.

My personal feeling is that anything that just allows for immediate continuation without any real drawback is fairly low difficulty. I tend to feel like I can brute force just about anything, but I will say that the Watcher Knights in the tower, and Crystal Guardian second fight nearly broke me. (The latter of which I could have just skipped, but I didn't really know that.)

I don't know if you got tripped up by bosses, or some of the larger enemies that take off two health on hit (taking damage from just touching enemies is another bit of BS), but those larger enemies can rot in hell. I mostly just jumped around them and kept going because they're such a waste of time to deal with. That and the areas of absolute stupidness (Queen's Garden) with damage zones on the walls that act like death pits conspired to make the game a real chore to play for me. I forgot to mention my absolute favorite thing where crystal dashing into a wall climb would start the slide down the wall before registering the jump button, and all the times that lead to me sliding into damage zones that would reset me back to the spot I originally crystal dashed from--.

The other thing, I guess, is you could potentially use a certain set of charms (less knockback, longer I-frames, longer nail, etc) to increase survivability for getting through stuff you might be stuck on. Charms were another thing I forgot to mention; I didn't find the system to be particularly useful in its implementation, but--. All of this really speaks to what is probably my base level criticism that the game is not well balanced (and there are probably a lot of poor design decisions), but it's a wildly popular game, so what do I know.

Post by **marurun** » Thu Nov 21, 2024 10:26 am

What tripped me up was the mantis boss, and the run up to it. If you died, the restart point was just far enough away with annoying mantis enemies between that I rarely went into the fight with full health and that fight was definitely more than my twitch skills could handle.

Post by **pierrot** » Thu Nov 21, 2024 4:53 pm

Ah, that is a tricky spot. Those normal mantis enemies suck, but it's actually possible to jump past a lot of them. I assume you had the nail upgrade from the city. It helps, but they still don't go down easily. That was probably the part of the game that I started to get really pissed about the inconvenient placement of benches and stag stations.

Later bosses are honestly a lot worse. Watcher Knights are like the mantis boss on steroids, and it's not particularly fair. With a lot of the mid-game bosses, I spent a fair amount of time figuring out where I had time to heal. Some later bosses have safe zones at times. The mantis boss you can heal without really moving if they shoot an upward disc out, or dash high. Also getting used to pogo-ing is useful.

I guess one of the reasons I don't think much of the charm system is because I basically just full-timed the one that gives more soul on attacks, or later the one that recovers soul when taking damage (and the auto Geo collecting one). It's kind of tricky to use, but the spirit blast also does ridiculous damage, and can make quicker work of a lot of bosses. I used it heavily on the Watcher Knights in particular.

Post by **pierrot** » Wed Nov 27, 2024 2:08 am

More of a general, 'I'm kind of impressed that I have a device that can do this' sort of post, but I finally installed Lutris and got it linked up to GOG and Humble. I also got a 256GB SD card to install some particular things to, and it's kind of like I actually own some shit on this Steam device! Crazy.

For anyone unaware, Lutris is a launcher for Linux that handles all of the basic wine configurations on a per install basis for games and programs. There's another Linux launcher (Heroic Games Launcher) that I believe functions fairly similarly to Lutris, but Lutris seems to be a lot more flexible from the limited research I put in beforehand.

One thing I kind of wanted to do was download and install the GOG release of Eiyuden to the SD card just for fun, because apparently the Switch version is still riddled with bugs, and borderline unplayable for a lot of people. What I've found with playing it on the deck is that it runs basically as I would expect having played through it on my desktop system, but there doesn't appear to be a way to have the game render in 1280x800, so it just displays in 1280x720. Also, it seems like a lot of the 2D elements (character sprites and artwork) are poorly sampled for 720p with a lot of aliasing. Otherwise it's pretty nice, and makes me kind of feel like playing through the game again even though I didn't enjoy it a whole lot the first time--. Anyway, functionally, I have a working 'Switch version' of the game with a cartridge I can put other games onto as well, which I think is kind of swell. One downside is not having the GOG galaxy platform to sync saves between the Deck and desktop like with Steam games, but I was planning on uninstalling Eiyuden from my desktop at this point anyway.

I also got PSO BB set up through the Lutris Ephinea server installer. I had to copy over my addon settings from my desktop, and then tweak a whole bunch of things due to the difference in resolution, but It's running flawlessly with all sorts of enhanced graphical settings applied. I haven't been using a physical keyboard with it at all, which is a little bit of a nuisance for things like TTF Dragon resets, or trying to use function keys, though.

A more ill-advised use of the Deck for me recently has been installing and playing PSO2 and NGS on it. I stopped playing just over a year ago when there were some changes scheduled with the anti-cheat software, but I care less about the implications of that if I'm only playing the game on a handheld. It also requires a fork of Proton (ProtonGE) to get running reasonably well, which has to be installed in desktop mode, but once set up the game performs surprisingly well. PSO2 graphics settings can just be maxed out with no performance issues, while NGS I have on basically high settings with FSR set to quality and even HDR on (I don't really notice the difference, heh). It does start to get pretty taxed when fighting some 'world boss' type enemies in open fields during heavy weather events, but that's not surprising. Feels kind of insane to be able to play this way since this game is technically available on the Switch (on JP servers), but it's just a cloud streaming version.

The ill-advised part of it is NGS is something I end up playing more than I should, and isn't necessarily a great use of time. It's a pretty button intensive and timing heavy game that I'm reasonably good at, but has in the past given me some significant fatigue in my right hand. It was worst with an XBOX controller (that I eventually broke the face button membrane on from use), and considerably better once I got an 8bitdo controller to replace it. Maybe because of the weight, and the way the face buttons are kind of out to the edge of the device on the Deck, my hand started flaring up a bit the last couple days. So I should really give that game a rest for a bit.

At this point, I am somewhat interested in seeing whether or not I could be playing FFXI and Dragon Quest X on the Deck as well. I don't think I would tend to play them on it normally, but it would just be kind of cool if I could along with everything else it allows me to do.

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