What's Good About The Steam Deck
I usually don’t tackle hardware because I’m an incredibly simple man, I just go with whatever tech makes my games run the smoothest. But a combination of a lapse in both my Game Pass subscription and my brother’s memory has led to me checking out the latest piece of tech on the market. The Steam Deck. But I’m still doing Power Wash Simulator next week because that looks weirdly fun in a “zone the fuck out while listening to music or a podcast” kind of way. But anyway, let’s get into it.
On the physical front, it is full of surprises. While it has the same basic control setup as a Nintendo Switch, the key differences are in the button layout and stick placement. The former has the A, B, X, and Y buttons and L and R button sets set up more like the Xbox layout to avoid confusion (industry standard and all that); two sets of back paddle type buttons can be mapped however you see fit and a pair of scroll pad…button…things. These two buttons/pads are decked out with haptic feedback and are the primary method of simulating mouse movement on the Deck. These features are kind of hard to explain if you haven’t held the Steam Deck in your hands for longer than five to ten minutes. After that initial hump of futzing, I discovered that this thing feels great to hold. This was a pleasant surprise, especially for a handheld PC gaming device as I’ve heard that they tend to not be great build quality-wise, but I should be surprised because Valve is the one making it. It was simultaneously lighter and heavier than I was expecting, which I appreciate because it gives you some decent heft when using it, which makes sense because of the built-in SSD. And this is before getting to the software.
The digital side of the Steam Deck is also pretty goddamn impressive. Running on what looks like an offshoot of the SteamOS, its system user interface is quick, responsive, and on top of that highly customizable. When my brothers and I futzing with it, we discovered that the desktop OS that the Steam Deck uses can be loaded with other apps, so we tested it with Discord, Chrome and the Heroic Games Launcher, a version of the Epic Launcher that’s compatible with the Steam Deck that lets you play the game you have on your Epic Account as long as their Steam Deck Verified. This combined with the fact that it can potentially make for an amazing emulation machine has me looking forward to the next time I spend time with it.
A few more things I want to touch on are downloads, speeds of said downloads, and storage. The reason I bring these up is that they’re what initially sold me on the Steam Deck to being with, the fact that I could download all of my games onto a handheld and play them wherever. That promise of convenience does a lot of things to a man, and my goodness it sold m hard. It appeals to me the same way the Nintendo Switch does in that I can have both a home and handheld gaming experience whenever I want, but in the case of the Deck, it’s far less modular than the Switch for obvious reasons. The fact that you can download things on Wifi super quick is rad as fuck (though I think that’s due to my brother’s having a recently upgraded internet set up), so rad that I downloaded Elden Ring in under an hour. That’s fucking wild. Oh and Elden Ring Runs great on it by the way. Just have to reduce the settings is all. The other games I tried were an hour’s worth of Survival mode attempts in Streets of Rage 4 and picking up where I left off on my second playthrough in the 2014 Strider game that no one played. Nothing too intensive, but it was interesting because of the way it felt in my hands, good build quality and all of that. While I know it’s an issue of it being in its infancy, I do wish that there were more straight-up verified games available. I guess 101 out of mine and my brother’s collective 417 Steam game Library is pretty good all things considered.
The Steam Deck Overall is a neat piece of technology that more than gets over its novelty and access a primal part of my brain that lets me play practically my entire game library on Steam on the go and then some, I’m kind of looking forward to the next time I go over to my brothers’ place so I can mess with it again. That’s a guarantee.
