Steam Deck - A couple of days in and first impressions

 

It's as large and chunky as it looks - the Steam Deck from Valve

Way way back in the mists of time I first bought a portable gaming machine. It looked absolutely nothing like the picture above, in fact it was a Gameboy - the original Gameboy which shipped with Tetris, had the world's shittiest LCD screen, some truly awesome games and battery life that seemed to go on forever. Heck, you could even tuck the thing in your pocket (just about) and lug it everywhere for you. 

Nintendo's genius game-changing gaming console paved the way for a few others, notably Sega horned in on the action with their Game Gear (chunky but funky) and Atari with their ill-fated Lynx (which still had some excellent games for it but was as flaky as the finest croissant when it came to stability - and both the Game Gear and Atari noshed through batteries like they were going out of fashion. 

All that was 30 years ago, so forward into the future and I picked up a Steam Deck after a lot of hooing and haahing about the practicalities of purchasing one of these things. What eventually won me over was finding out that the thing could work like the Nintendo Switch - ie you could 'dock' it to a big telly, and plug in your own controllers etc. Cheaper than trying to spec up a reasonably priced NUC or mini gaming PC but still able to play the majority of the games I have had stashed away in Steam for aeons. 

The other thing that won me over was the prospect of finally being able to play BeamNG Drive. Something that, as a mac owner, I would have been unable to do on Steam without a compatible bit of hardware. Various wunderkind out there have managed to tweak the settings of the Steam Deck to allow that totally crazy mental driving experience to be played on the portable, so I figured "What the hell" and laid down the cash. 

When the thing arrived, complete with absolutely no instructions, a very nice carrying case (more like a carrying SUITCASE when I saw the size of the box and then looked inside) all securely strapped together with a Valve tag keeping the zips closed. First quandary - cutting that tag off with a pair of scissors to get at the goodies inside. 

Following advice from t'internet I started setting the thing up while plugged into the mains. I hadn't reckoned with the usual fiddlyarsed process of trying to remember my Steam password (which is normally plumbed into the mac I use it on) before giving up entirely, going with the option to install the Steam app on my phone and doing the multi factor authentication option through that. 

FINALLY I was in. There it was, my steam profile and more importantly my steam library on that gorgeous glowing screen. So let the downloads begin. 

It took a while before I had anything playable ("Unpacking" was actually the first thing I played on the thing because the game is tiny but soothingly playable). I went straight for plugging the steam dock into the TV via HDMI, plugging in an Xbox One Controller and was delighted to find that straight out of the box the Steam Deck loves the controller, and even responds to me pressing the X button by showing the menus for the deck itself. Bonus!

Once a few more games had downloaded I really started to get my teeth into this thing, and rediscovered the joys and pains of 'PC' gaming that I'd long forgotten from being a console kid for the last umpteen years. All that fiddling around optimising settings, tweaking drivers, and generally fuckarsing about just to get games to run at a decent frame rate on the (admittedly powerful but not top notch top end gaming PC powerful) machine are par for the course but whereas back in the days of me owning a sodding great big huge PC rig and not really having that many sources of information on the internet for tweaks and fixes, the internet is AWASH with Steam Deckers all wringing the best performance out of the thing to play some of the current AAA games. 

Amusingly, Portal 1 (ancient!) worked fine on default settings as you'd expect, but Portal 2 kept crashing on load - and required wiping, re-installing and then working with the Proton Experimental drivers that Steam is capable of running certain games in. More downloading, more tweaking and then I finally got one of my favourite games of all time running beautifully and looking gorgeous while doing it. Almost worth the entry fee alone. 

Beam NG - being still regarded as "alpha" some 13 years after it first appeared is a different prospect, and requires a huge amount of fiddling around to get it to work but it was far more playable on the Steam Deck than expected, a lot of fun, but something I'm going to have to invest a lot more time in to get some joy out of. I am particularly interested in building scenarios and crashing the shit out of vehicles but trying to do that with just a controller seems to be a bit much to ask. It also crashes and locks a lot, as you'd expect from a game that doesn't get the 'green tick of goodness' from Steam. 

One last thing I tried was the "Aperture Desk Job" app which is utterly fantastic, and one to be played with the deck undocked. It is a sneaky storified way of giving you the 'missing' tutorial on how to use your Steam Deck, injected with the dark humour of the Portal games and again looking absolutely beautiful. So far Valve's own games are the chief win for me on this thing but I've barely scratched the surface (in fact I hope I NEVER scratch the surface of the deck's screen, it's too lovely - and reminds me that I've got a screen protector to fit at some point and god, how we all hate doing that, right? 

The other thing I really want to do is get some emulation stuff on it. It would be awesome to be able to shrug off using the Raspberry Pi 3 for all that stuff so if I can get Retroarch working on it and figure out how the hell I get all my games and roms onto the thing, that's going to be another win. My old Pi Model 3 was struggling to run an awful lot of arcade and emulation roms and wouldn't have had a hope in hell's chance of running any of the 'newer' console emulation stuff like PS1 or Sega Dreamcast, but allegedly folk out there have demonstrated all that stuff working beautifully, so that's on my to do list. 

Then there's challenging stuff, Apparently Steam Deck can play Baldur's Gate 3, a huge sprawling RPG. I can't believe it but I'm almost tempted to drop the cash on it on Steam just to see, and that will be the first "big and proper" game I've bought on Steam. But don't hold your breath, it's also playable on the PS5 and tbh being a lazy old gamer, I still prefer the no mess no fuss fewer crashes experience of a game on a console compared to a game running on a juiced up linux box (comparing my experiences with BeamNG with what it's like playing Need for Speed on the PS5 shows that you've got to accept compromises if you're going to do all this stuff but seeing the sort of amazingness Nintendo wring out of the Switch, you've got to wonder what magic lies ahead for the deck before its inevitable rejigged Steam Deck 2 launches (probably in a month or so's time now I've punted out for this one). 

I love it though. It's so plush, luxurious and sexy looking. Heavy as hell, gets hotter than a pizza oven (particularly in this weather which is the WORST weather for trying to play games in anyway) but I am smitten so far.