Games

Steam Deck

This is the thing I alluded to recently* a couple of weeks ago: I won a Steam Deck! The 512GB OLED model, to be precise. And I spent most of today playing with it. Not playing on it — I played bits of various games, but nothing properly — but playing around with getting it set up and stuff.

Because, sure, my Steam library is all easily accessible and installable and whatnot (even if it doesn't all necessarily run, though there are websites to help with that), but I've got so many games from other places (mainly GOG, but others too) that I'd like to be able to play on there that I had to get some other stuff going. Those aren't much more difficult thanks to Heroic Games Launcher (which I mentioned a couple of weeks ago because it's also helped with my Mac. Also, that's how long this has been incoming!)

No, the thing that occupied most of my time was emulation. The Deck is basically just a PC in a console shell, which means it's very customisable, and that means you can run emulators on it. Considering my interest in the Switch 2 had reached a point where I was on the verge of purchasing one and had begun planning what exactly I wanted to buy (the console itself, obviously, but also which peripherals and games), plus the fact I'd already had a go at emulation on my Mac with an eye to playing more, and I was keyed up to get some classic games going — as if I don't have enough natively-playable games to be getting on with! (I do. I really, really do.)

There are various emulation solutions, the two main ones (it seems to me) being EmuDeck and RetroDeck. I'd been umming and ahhing about which to go for, eventually settled on the former, but over the course of today decided the latter was more my speed. And so I've been installing stuff and setting it up and testing out old games.

First up: James Bond adventure Everything or Nothing. Although I'd tried the GameCube version before, I read that the Xbox version was actually the best one, so I tried to get that going. Turns out, EoN doesn't play nicely with Xbox emulators — as in, it's entirely unplayable — so, after trial and error getting to that realisation (if only I'd found that link earlier and realised it was futile), I caved and went back to the 'Cube version. That runs pretty much perfectly.

In a similar vein, I tried GoldenEye 007 Reloaded, the PS3/Xbox 360 port of the GoldenEye remake originally released on Wii (which I owned on that console back in the day but don't think I even got round to starting). It runs, and while it's running it runs well, but then it will suddenly completely freeze up and the app has to be killed and restarted, and you have to pick up from wherever the last checkpoint was. Frustrating. I have tried to see if there are some fixes that can be applied (changing graphic settings, that kind of thing), but everything I turn up is related to getting an Xbox port of the N64 original to play. Grr. I've left it installed, just in case. So far I've tried the Xbox 360 version, because the controller layout matches the Deck (no silly circle/square/whatever PS BS here), but maybe the PS3 one is worth a shot if it's more stable.

Considering they always run such closed ecosystems, it's kinda ironic that the easiest of all was getting Nintendo stuff to run. Legend of Zelda games from both SNES (A Link to the Past) and GameCube (The Wind Waker) ran without a problem, as did the N64's Paper Mario. I also started up a couple of other SNES games — EarthBound and Super Castlevania IV — which also seem fine. Quite why I'm interested in Castlevania right now, I'm not sure, but I also popped on one of the most acclaimed, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night from the original PlayStation, which I got going easily enough. Finally, a couple of PS2 titles — ICO and Shadow of the Colossus — required some more fiddling (in part to set up some recommended graphics settings to ensure they ran well), but weren't too strenuous really. Well, that said, I wouldn't want to be having to faff with that all the time, but for a couple of well-regarded titles I've been on-and-off curious about for a while, I'm hoping it was worth it.

Obviously, as I said earlier, I've only touched on each of these games briefly — enough to establish they run at all, not that they won't break apart / crash / etc when playing them properly. I fully expect the Nintendo systems to all be fine, but who knows if those PlayStation ones (especially the PS2 pair) won't behave like GoldenEye Reloaded when I do more than run around the opening room for two minutes?

Anyway, I'm done with all that setup now (apart from maybe trying the PS3 GoldenEye), so maybe I'll actually get on with playing some of the games. Of course, I also ought to take the time to go back to Gray Matter and Dungeons of Hinterberg — although as the latter is scheduled to leave Luna tomorrow, it makes more sense to just quit now and start over on my Steam Deck. At least that makes it easier to know which game to start with.


* Two weeks! That's for two reasons: firstly, it took quite a while to turn up; and secondly, it came almost a week ago, but I've been too busy to sit down with it until today.