Andi Hamilton's Videogame Newsletter - Issue #51 [The Steam Deck]

Author

Andi Hamilton
January 27, 2023

I was unexpectedly rich for a week in December when I got a big, fat bonus from my day job. I bought a Steam Deck because there's very few consumer electronics I don't already own. It has revolutionised the way I play PC games AND my emulation setup but it isn't exactly something that I would categorically recommend to everyone. Here's my thoughts about the device after a month of owning the thing.All of the .gifs in this newsletter are taken directly from the Steam Deck output, which is utterly meaningless because the .gifs are all at a lower framerate than what the game is actually performing at but I guess its a nice way to show a cross section of the stuff I've been playing recently on the thing.

Big Deck Energy.

The first thing I have to say about the Steam Deck, which is something that permeats throughout every aspect of the device and in lingers in the background of everything I have used it for is that it is far from a console, plug in and play solution to playing your PC games library, be that on the move or when plugged into a monitor. Everything requires some degree of tinkering and your mileage is going to vary with the Steam Deck depending on your tolerance for endlessly fucking around with settings and menus. Performance wise, there's a million videos out there by people who have significantly more expertise in the subject that I do if you're looking for some serious analysis but to my untrained eye, you've basically got a handheld PS4 here. A PS4 that can play everything from the latest greatest games to literally Pong and almost everything in-between. I love the thing, despite some initial reservations.My first impression is that it is one ugly bit of kit. It's massive, for starters, with buttons and pads hanging off the edge of the thing. However, it is clear that the Steam Deck is built for comfort over anything else - it is surprisingly comfortable in the hand, which is far more important that it looking good, at the end of the day. Everything about it FEELS premium, even if it doesn't necessarily look it. It's a little heavy, which is likely more of an issue in prolonged handheld play, which doesn't happen that much because the battery life is pretty diabolical. You're looking at three hours max if you're playing anything even remotely taxing, even if there are ways to improve this if you - surprise - have a fiddle about with some settings.There's a lot of stuff instantly likeable about it, though. The OS is very clean and console-like and it is fast as hell. For the most part, the cloud saves make picking up where you left off on your PC to be a seamless experience and if you put the thing into Desktop Mode, it is a very capable PC replacement. I could do my day job from the Steam Deck, which is wild. It is, at the end of the day, a gaming device, so here's my experience so far with the three main things I'll be using it for.

Street Legal Steam Bought Games

For the most part, buying a game direct from Steam will ensure that the game runs on the Steam Deck and is a pretty good experience. Valve have created their own traffic light system, with a green light meaning it will run flawlessly on Deck, while yellow usually means there is one minor thing you'll have to get around but otherwise is going to be a pretty good time on the handheld. Everything else falls into either "doesn't run at all" or "no idea". This is supposed to be straightforward but the reality is quite different. There's so many games that fall into the yellow or "no idea" sections that actually run completely perfectly but might require you to bring up the on-screen keyboard to pass through a prompt before the game starts, for instance. Hilariously, there's also loads of games that are given the On Deck green light that, although have perfect button mapping and controls, run like absolute dog eggs.I was replaying the Tomb Raider reboot on my Deck, getting about 30FPS at medium settings, which still looked excellent but seemed a bit odd seeing as it can shift much more advanced games at a much higher framerate. Turns out, there's this thing called Proton, which I don't really understand but I think it is a wrapper that is used to get Windows games running on Linux, which is what powers the Steam Deck OS. There's loads of different versions of this thing and although most Steam stuff just uses the default version, you can get better performance if you go into the launch settings for a game and change it. There's an essential plug-in called ProtonDB, which connects to the website of the same name and gives a much more accurate rating as to whether a game performs well on the Deck and also gives you instant access to community created settings and tricks to maximise performance and/or battery life. Long story short, I installed this plug-in, looked at the Tomb Raider page, switched the Proton version to 'experimental' and now get a locked 60FPS on the Ultra setting.The controller side of things is absolutely magic, mind. Again, any game that supports a control pad will work with no problems at all but for older titles, or mouse-driven games, you can simply bring up the overlay menu and pick from a bunch of 'official' options, loads of community created control schemes or even create your own from scratch, which lets you customise EVERY single button press and even make macros or set different actions for long/short presses, for instance. You can even partition the touch pads into nine square areas and map inputs to each one of them, which is amazing for hotkeys and weapon switching. It's a very impressive suite of options that essentially guarantees that as long as the game boots, you can control it.That's pretty much the story for everything outside of modern indie titles - you just have to tweak things until you get the performance or controls you want. I like a project, so this little ritual you have to do before you really settle into a game is something I find quite enjoyable but there's no denying it is going to be a unsurmountable barrier for some. I can see games shipping with LOW/MED/HIGH/STEAM DECK settings in future, or a setting that automatically picks the best options for Deck performance for any given title, which will go some way to addressing this. If you're accepting of the fact you might need to do a little legwork with some titles, you can get some really, really impressive stuff running on Valve's handheld. Playing Death Stranding with it looking amazing at a locked 40FPS whilst you're taking a shit is some top tier gaming decadence, I tell you.

Non-Steam Games And Games From 'Other' Sources

A headache, ultimately. There's no way I know of to install Game Pass games (although the Xbox Cloud Gaming site works perfectly, so that's something) and stuff from the Epic Games Launcher (or any launcher, for that matter) requires a whole extra level of fucking around that is going to be an instant no-no for anyone other than the more committed pirates among us. The general way I've been getting things working is this process:

  • Download game from [REDACTED]

  • Use a program called Lutris on the Steam Deck desktop mode to install the game onto the system.

  • Use the same program to setup what Proton version it should run under.

  • Check to see if it works. Fingers crossed because I've no idea what to do if it doesn't!

  • If it works, use SteamGridDB to get correct box art and other visual elements sorted out.

  • Create a link to it in Steam so it appears in Gaming Mode and looks cool and official and not out of place like something you've blatantly stolen off the internet.

I'm still learning the real ins and outs of all this stuff like Lutris and Wine and Proton and that so I can better troubleshoot any issues I encounter but the above is basically a quick description of an install going swimmingly. I've heard that sometimes performance is better through the Steam version than anything installed as a non-Steam game but I haven't really tested that. Most stuff installed this way works, with the odd title (usually older bits rather than recent releases) just flat out not working at all. There's certainly a way, I imagine but when even I can't be arsed to figure it out, you can safely say it is probably a bridge too far for most people.I've also managed to get the Steam Deck working as a pretty good media hub too! By installing Kodi, Spotify and then using a web browser to create direct links to things like Netflix and YouTube, I can access all of this stuff from within the standard Steam Deck Gaming Mode menus. A pleasant surprise.

Emulation and that

Easy. Almost TOO easy. There's a few frontends out there that all have their various pros and cons but I installed EmuDeck 2.0 onto a 512GB SD card and it is a near idiot proof process. You go to desktop mode, go to the EmuDeck website and install the program that then walks you through all the settings and installs all the pre-configured emulators ready to go! All you need to do is drop the BIOS files for the CD-based machines into the BIOS folder then whatever games you want to play you drop into the appropriate system folder. That's it. Of course, there are a few more advanced things that you may want to do if this isn't your first emulation rodeo and all of that is present if you need it but for most people this is as near as you can get to a plug and play emulation setup that covers everything from 8-bit consoles to the bloody PS3 and most of it works flawlessly. The headline act here is without question the PS2 performance - perfect, upscaled and works with nearly every game in the library. Although saying that one of the games that crashed on me was Gitaroo Man, one of the best games ever made, so fuck the Steam Deck really.I've tested a fair bit out and so far the Deck has passed every test I've thrown at it with flying colours. Demon's Souls on PS3? Perfect. Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon's notoriously tough to emulate first town? Smooth as butter. The Dreamcast version of Phantasy Star Online ver.2, modded and possible to connect to working servers and is playable online? Works flawlessly and, yes, allowed me to play online through the emulator. Amiga stuff, C64 stuff - hell, I even got a few PC-98 titles working. Xbox and Xbox 360 titles are a bit hit and miss but then they're a bit hit and miss on my big boy PC, so that's hardly an issue with the Steam Deck.The elephant in the room, of course, is Nintendo Switch titles. Switch hardware was dated before the machine was even released so its no surprise it has already been emulated with remarkable accuracy and, so far, the Steam Deck has handled Switch games very well. Performance HAS varied title to title but that's not necessarily something related to how impressive the title is - it has been pretty random as to what runs and what is a bit choppy. Again, can't tell whether this is a hardware issue or more to do with the current state of Switch emulation on the device. Things can always improve - that's the nature of this sort of stuff. You have to enjoy the journey, the tweaking and incremental improvements you can squeeze out by changing a few settings.

Since I got my Steam Deck, I've not touched my PS5 or Switch and only turned on the Series S for a few games of Halo Infinite. It's a really fantastic device that partially acts as a more console-like experience for my PC library but also is a bit of an endgame to my project of having a portable emulation setup that I started during the lockdown in 2020. There's very clear limitations and more legwork required than what many would have you believe but it fits my entertainment needs more than I imagined it would. Let's see how it fares once the honeymoon period ends.

THANKS FOR READING.

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