- Sektori (steam)
- Tomb Raider GOTY (GOG)
- Stardew Valley (GOG)
- F-Zero GX on the Dolphin emulator
I’ve discovered that I’m tired and bored of the new AAA titles, so I’ve been playing the old stuff more and more.
The old games also conveniently run very well on the Steam Deck. It is perfect for games roughly pre-2019.
I was playing a couple games, but I’ve dropped everything else to focus on playing Sekiro.
Fantastic game, I never got into the regular Dark Souls games that much, so I’ve kinda avoided it. But I find parry focused combat incredibly satisfying, and the streamlining of some of the mechanics is nice too.
How does it run on the Deck? Seems like a great fit so long as the framerate holds up.
It runs pretty good. I reduced a few of the less noticeable graphical settings (like shadow quality), and locked the frame rate at 40fps. It can hit 60 a lot of the time, but 40 keeps it very consistent.
At default high settings it can probably run at 30fps the whole game.
If it helps, Sekiro is kind of an outlier. I love soulslike games but I can’t stand Sekiro.
Getting into Esoteric Ebb. Enjoying it so far, though I do dislike some aspects of it (the combat fucking sucks and the D&D racism is tiring).
What is D&D racism? Orcs are barbaric ace wielders and elves are sophisticated archers?
Yeah, the whole race bioessentialism, especially the concept of evil races, that is so endemic to D&D and fantasy as a whole.
I guess that stuff is based a lot on the Tolkien race concepts. It’s an interesting thing when mythical creatures, often understood as inherently evil or chaotic, transform into playable races and fellow citizens in a fantasy world.
Played a whole bunch of No Way Home in the last week or so. A charming little shooter I had to buy after playing the demo on the last Next Fest. Now playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shattered Fate - a button bashing rougelite with cool artwork and combat that I’m enjoying despite being far too old to be a Ninja Turtles fan.
I just got Super Meatboy 3D after enjoying the demo as well, which will be my next thumb-buster.
I finally finished Spider-Man: Miles Morales and just started Spider-Man 2. Man, that game runs like ass on the Deck while I have to make it look worse than the previous two.
And it actually feels like what I’m experiencing are bugs and not necessarily the Steam Deck’a fault. Stuff like models popping in without animations. I remember seeing pictures of that when it was new. Strange that they didn’t manage to fix it. Couldn’t they just have stayed on the old engine? It worked perfectly fine!
The Binding of Isaac Rebirth
Final Fantasy 7 (the original). With so many singing it’s praises, I figured I should try and finish it once. I just got out of the desert prison. I have to say, so far I don’t really get the hype.
STALKER 2 buy on GOG through Amazon Luna. And Diablo 2 Resurrected
Slay the spire and Titanfall 2
Marvel Heroes Omega via the Project TAHITI private server. It has a lot of frame drops despite being on the lowest settings, but it’s playable. I’m surprised a game from 2018 runs this rough on the Deck.
You might try pinning gpu speed or setting a fixed cpu speed (through powertools if installed). It can fix some games that have drops when they shouldn’t, at the cost of slightly worse battery life.
Scritchy Scratchy demo
Orginal Oblivion with mods. I have never played it. I just got the game installed yesterday, and set up in Vortex. Now I have to go grab all the mods, which is very manual. Vortex mod installation links on the Nexus don’t work on the deck. There might be a way to fix that because the mod suggestion list I’m looking at said there’s a way to make links work with Mod Manager 2 on the Deck.
I’m following a curated list of mods that will be a “vanilla+” experience. Not too crazy or anything. It’s called “A Pocket Full of Cheese Wheels” on the Nexus. It comes with a one-click installer shell script that installs Mod Manager 2 and a bunch of other stuff on the Deck but I’m just going to do it manually. The script is old and no longer maintained.
I modded Fallout 3 with Vortex on my Deck, and it was pretty easy when the game is installed on the SD card. I feel like that was key, but I don’t remember exactly why. You also have to symlink the “My Games” folder from the Fallout 3 (or Oblivion) Proton prefix into the Vortex Proton Prefix. That’s so Vortex can manage the INI files and such. Plus you set the SD card as the D: drive in the Vortex Proton prefix so it can see the game’s folder, too. In fact, I think that’s was done automatically done by Steam. Maybe that was why I installed the game on the SD card. But it’s not like you couldn’t make your own drive mapping. It’s a simple symlink named like “d:” or “e:” in the “dos_devices” folder. I don’t see why that couldn’t point to the NVMe drive, but I feel like people online said that wouldn’t work. Vortex is also installed on the SD card.
Maybe some day I’ll document all of this.
Just finished playing Detroit with my girlfriend and we started Split Fiction. I didn’t expect it to run so well! We are having a lot of fun with it. One plays on SD and the other uses 8BitDo little controller. Screen is a bit too small for split screen sometimes, but it’s a lot of fun nevertheless!
And for myself I play Spider Man remastered now, runs very well on relatively high grafics and get good 40-60fps and battery lasts quite long.
Archolos plays great, though I had to create my own control mappings. Still can’t figure out why the hardware accelerated cursor pops out when I use the trackpad as a mouse though, but not much of an issue, since I rarely have to touch it.
Also some Hades 2 and a fan mod on FTL, called Multiverse
I got Terraria for 5 bucks, I didn’t think I’d like it so much.
