Hello, and welcome to The Back Page A Video Games Podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts, and I’m joined as ever by Matthew Castle. Hello. Matthew, how are things going with you? We haven’t had a podcast for a while where we’ve just shot the shit and see what’s going down. So what’s been new in your town or life? I’ve obviously emerged from the Xenoblade Chronicles 3 tunnel. And yeah, basically learning to sort of live as a full human again, which is fun. And I, yeah, I’ve not played like any game quite as intensively as I played that one. And so now I feel like the game, the part of my brain that decides what game I’m gonna play next is sort of frazzled. So yeah, I’m hoping it heals and I can work out what to do with my life. You gotta play Ambrose Island in Hitman 3, Matthew. That’s gotta be on your list. Oh, I have been playing that actually. I was playing that this morning. Have you played it yet? I’ve actually just turned it on before we started recording this. There’s a big slapping contest in it. That sounds good. That sounds more like if you and I were at age 47, so I’m… It’s very, very odd. Okay, yeah. To kick us off, Matthew, I’ve actually arranged a little calendar of what’s coming up in August for The Back Page:, just so listeners know. Very organized. Yeah, for sure. We always like to tell people what we’re up to, just to also give us a plan of what we’re meant to be doing. Just useful in general, really. So this episode you’re listening to now, the Steam Deck Special, we’ll discuss in a minute what that will look like. And that’s obviously August 5th that this is available to people. August 8th is our first Patreon exclusive episode of the month, Hitman Levels Reranked. That’s the Excel episode. We just mentioned Ambrose Island there. We will basically just do the entire episode as every single map just ranked. And talking about a subject that I think our listeners always enjoy discussing and thinking about. Plus, it’s been, I guess, like almost two years since our last Hitman episode, right? Because Hitman 3 is nearly two years old, so yeah. At the time, you’d played a bit of Hitman 3, but I’d played a lot more of it, so it would be interesting to kind of see where you’ve landed on everything now. Yeah, because I hadn’t played the very last level at that point. I still haven’t, actually. You put me off it so much in that episode, Matthew. Oh, good. I’m guessing that one doesn’t have any escalation contracts or anything. Pray for the train. So yeah, that’ll be really fun to go back over Hitman for sure. We’ll talk about that beyond this episode too. So August 12th is called Mailbag and Minigame. So I will reveal what that is, Matthew. So we’re going to answer a bunch of our listeners questions. People know the deal with that. But I’ve pitched to Matthew that we do a 90s video game magazine quiz where we each have to read out quotes, found from old games magazines, and then the other person has to guess which game is being referred to. I think that would be fun. How are you feeling about that one, Matthew? Yeah, I’m looking forward to that. Yeah. Going to load up some scans because there’s no way I’m going into the attic to find scary old copies of magazines. I might ask Dan Dawkins or Matt Pearce if they can let me into the future office so I can go really deep into the archives, pick out something that will completely frowns all year. That would be too much work, I think, for one silly sake. It’s like that room with all the crates at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. It’s like that. Where they stick all the old occult bad stuff. It’s like that, but it’s about 6 by 20 metres. It’s not quite the same thing. But yes, definitely as many horrors in there for sure. So August 26th is the 2000-2005 PC gaming draft. The 90th PC gaming draft, Matthew, definitely got a lot of tongues wagging with the old. Trespasser nonsense. If that’s how you choose to frame it. No, no, congratulations on your victory, of course. Oh man, I feel like it’s going to be a bit of a grudge match, that one. It will be fine. So we’ll do the same thing again. 10 different categories covering just 6 years of PC gaming there, but definitely a great period where I think we’ve got even stronger thoughts on what we’d like to pick for this one. So I think people will really enjoy that one and as ever, the listeners will be able to vote on that. And lastly, last episode of the month for our Excel tier patrons is the best thriller movie. So the Excel tier always does one extra games podcast, one pop culture podcast a month. So me and Matthew will talk about some thriller movies. Excited to do my impressions of both Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive, Matthew. Any thoughts to add on that list, Matthew? It sounds great, and if I wasn’t subscribed to Patreon, I would get right on there. A great advert. So yes, patreon.com back page pod. This episode though, the Steam Deck. I have one. Matthew, do you have one? Does Catherine have one? What’s the deal with you in a Steam Deck? Catherine has one, and I basically played it all day today. Oh yeah? Cool. Let’s start there. How has that been for you? Yeah, good. Hot. It’s quite warm. It pumps out quite a lot of hot air. It’s a bit more PC-ish than I was expecting. The hot vent reminded me of gaming laptops. But yeah, it’s been fun, actually. Installing some stuff. I mean, a lot of today was basically spent trying to get my head around the particular quirks of it and work out how it all worked and functioned. But yeah, I jumped in, played some of, is it Aperture, Desk Job, Desk Day Job? Desk Job, yeah. Yes, which is like the Valve inbuilt thing, and it’s kind of like a nice little kind of tour of the hardware. So yeah, it’s fun, actually, I had a lot of fun with it. Yeah, it’s the Astro’s Playroom of the Steam Deck, I don’t know, what’s that, or Astrobox, whatever that one was on PS5 that came with it. Yeah, a little more slight than that. But very strange ending, very ominous credits, I don’t know, I don’t know if we’ll talk about this later. No, I’ve actually not played that, so that’s… Oh, okay, yeah, it ends with another sort of song, which I guess is, you know, sort of, this is part of the Portal universe, so it sort of makes sense. But it’s very, very sinister and mournful, and I’m not entirely sure what they were going for with it. It’s not like, considering this might be, is this likely to be the first thing you play on Steam Deck? Obviously not, in your case. Well, it wasn’t for me, but yeah, a lot of people want their Valve 3B, yeah. It doesn’t, like, sort of send you on your way with a kind of spring in your step, it ends on quite a dour, sinister note, which, I don’t know, sort of sets the tone for, like, the rest of my relationship with this piece of hardware. Yeah, for sure. So lay of the land, then. The Steam Deck has launched. It is currently shipping in batches. It’s a handheld PC made by Valve. It features triggers and analog sticks, a D-pad and also two trackpads, which is, if you’ve ever used a Steam Controller, a very similar deal. You can kind of use it for some sort of functional mouse control, face buttons and a front touchscreen. It is quite big compared to a Nintendo Switch, I would say, noticeably. And as Matthew says, it does get quite hot. But this thing is enormously sought after. It’s in the classic CEX style mad economy where it’s like, you know, extraordinary amounts of money to get hold of when you might as well just pre-order it and wait from Valve itself, which was, to be honest, nice and straightforward. I put in my pre-order thing like last year and it’s rolled around quickly enough, built up enough FOMO, but also didn’t feel like I had to wait forever for it. Not feeling tempted to sell it for a grand on eBay? It’s a lot. That’s two Steam Decks. Yeah, it is. But I don’t know, I feel like I’d just be contributing to the problem, do you know what I mean? I kind of hate the idea of scalpers and I feel like if I become one, something bad will happen to me. You do it and then on Twitter you’re like, god damn these scalpers. Yeah, it never happened while I tuck into my new packet of cigars that I’ve bought for like 800 quid or something. Yeah, so, nah, I’ve got to keep hold of it, it’s too nice to get rid of it. That’s good, that’s what I like to hear. So, I did buy it thinking it was the novelty of a handheld gaming PC and the fact they were showing like Jedi Vaul and Order running on it and stuff. I was there thinking, oh wow, okay, this is properly powerful then. They feel confident showing blockbuster games running on it. And yeah, you know, I have a vast Steam library so I thought, well, I’ll just pick it up and see how it goes. And I absolutely adore it, Matthew. I’ve had it for 10 days and I’ve recharged it 15 times in that time. Now it does drain batteries quite fast depending on the game you’re playing. It’s not too bad. It depends on how intensive the game is, but I absolutely adore it. It feels like a work in progress. There’s always more games being added to the playable list, but I really like the interface of it. I really like how it makes you revisit parts of your Steam library you haven’t thought about in years and offers new value to them. I think it’s a really great complementary bit of hardware if you already own a gaming PC. Whether I’d recommend it beyond that, I will get to, but that’s my first thought, Matthew. I can see why it’s top of the Steam sellers. What’s your take on it as an overall project? Yeah, so, when they first announced it, I was quite dubious of it. Mainly because… is this based on just their Steam controller? Maybe that, and the faff of their VR stuff as well. I don’t think they are necessarily a natural hardware maker. Obviously, a thing I love is Nintendo, who take this stuff very seriously and have made a real art of lovely user-friendly hardware. And to me, in my head, it’s like Gabe Newell hammering this thing together. It’s got a bit of DIY homebrew feel to it. And that isn’t particularly what I want from a handheld. That was my overarching thought. But then obviously if people have got it and said, well, generally, anecdotally, people have seemed to be really into it. Catherine definitely vouched for it. Yeah, playing it myself today, it struck me that really, once you get to the heart of it, it’s no more cumbersome or fussy than the PC experience already is. And the ability to kind of untether that experience from sitting at my PC is actually kind of awesome. Like, my least favourite bit of PC gaming is having to sit at my PC because I associate it with work and it’s a desk and it’s just not very comfy. I, you know, maybe that’s on me, I should buy a better chair. But the idea that I can lounge around playing, getting the benefits of PC gaming, I think is pretty great. Yeah, I completely agree. So a bit, a big part of buying this for me is I’ve been working from home for the better part of a year. Before that, I was working from home like everyone was during the pandemic because, you know, there was, we were all going to die otherwise, if not just to, you know, people just a solemn reminder of that, just in case you’ve forgotten that the pandemic happened. So I was getting to the point where I just I could no longer, there was a point in the pandemic where I could no longer spend my evenings just playing PC games after sitting on my PC. I just could not do it anymore. And I just needed to step away from it. And I feel that way firmly now, like I, you know, I will work in an office again, eventually, for sure, and I might have that separation in my head. But for now, I imagine this applies to a lot of people. I just don’t have that separation. So I don’t, I don’t sit at my desk and think of it as a fun hobby space anymore. And I did before, like when I was on PC Gamer, I did, I did do that when I went home. But without that separation, it’s been a lot harder. So the Steam Deck comes along. It’s the idea of taking a lot of games that I don’t want to sit at a desk and play that are very, you know, perfect for like lying on a couch or in bed or whatever, and then just kind of getting more out of them rather than just having them sit in there collecting metaphorical dust in my Steam library for years and years, which some of them have been doing. And also, we have talked before in this podcast, Matthew, about how certain genres just lend themselves better to handhelds, visual novels in particular, narrative based games that, you know, you can transfer to a smaller screen, it doesn’t impact the experience. Those games I was never, ever playing on Steam, but now I have a Steam Deck. They are, a lot of the things I’m downloading are in that space. Yeah. So, it definitely, it gets you to reframe the way you look at your own Steam library, I think, and the opportunities for fun there, you know? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Also genre wise, I think, like, even though kind of PC is the sort of home of the rogue like, and the rogue light, I find the looping quick shot structure of those much more handheld friendly. A lot of indie and puzzle games just sort of fit it because they’re not, you know, as demanding, you know, there’s no real compromises playing on the Steam Deck. I think there still is a tier of genres which I wouldn’t want to play on this thing. I think there are some, I would say, things which are still exclusively PC and PC for a reason, probably because of like the whole mouse and keyboard setup, like, due to the size of the screen, like I’ve been watching Catherine play Chaos Gate on there. And she’s been having a great time with that and really enjoying it. But I’d say for my eyes, that’s verging on being a little bit too small, you know? And like, I think of like Borders Gate 3, you know, something like that, I think would be a bit of a nightmare playing on, just due to the like the real estate of the screen. So I think that there’s also a tier of game that I don’t think fits it because you are compromising the graphical experience too much in order to get it on there. Like, you can, but should you element to it? And I would say that Red Dead Redemption 2 is an example of that. You know, I’ve still not played that properly. But it’s sort of like, even with the graphics cut I’ve got now, it’s a demanding game. And so putting on to a handheld feels like a compromise too far for a game that’s all about spectacle, you know? Yeah, that’s fair, because I think actually the narrative around this has been, they were maybe a little modest in how they talked about it, and maybe you can actually get some surprisingly good stuff on it. I think they’ve been careful not to over-egg it and say, like, it’ll play everything at 4K. Obviously it won’t, it doesn’t need to, but some of the stuff I’ve seen running on there very well, you think, oh, actually, that’s, you know, I would have thought that would have been beyond it, given, like, the price point or whatever. Yeah, that is the amazing thing about it, is that the most expensive model of this, I think, is 569. That is the model I bought, with the highest amount of high-speed storage you could get. It was well worth the price, I would say, because a lot of big Steam games are, like, get close to 100 gigabytes, so having that flexibility is really good. Yeah, but I think you are right, they did, like, go out with Control and Jedi Fallen Order, but they weren’t, like, pretending they were selling you a PS5 in the palm of your hand, essentially. They were… Yeah, it was maybe tentative, and then they kind of, like, let them surprise you a little bit. Yeah. And it can run those kinds of games, it’s just that, like, that element of the console definitely, the handheld definitely exists, but it’s how much you’re willing to compromise to get an experience you’re happy with that also runs appropriately on there, and that is maybe a less sexy sell than, you know, going out there and saying, this thing can run everything, as long as it has controller support, you know what I mean? Yeah. And I think maybe it speaks to us because, like, the period of games it really handles no problem is the period we largely cover on this podcast. Like if you are playing games from 2006 to probably 2014, you are going to get, you know, better than console experience for sure. You know, you can play the 360 PS3 generation, like, you know, 60 frames at the resolution of the machine, and that’s quite something, you know, there isn’t something else that does that. You know, that is quite a unique selling point. It just may not be as sexy to say to people, hey, everyone, it can play Castlevania Lords of Shadows really well on a handheld, but it can, and there’s no other handheld that can do that, you know. And given that we have had handhelds in the past, like the Vita, that sold themselves on the console experience, to actually have something which does replicate a certain period perfectly, is pretty cool. Yeah, and we’ll still play games from today if you want it to, but with compromises. That is a heck of a pitch. So that’s the thing, right? It’s an 800p screen, essentially. So it’s smaller than your standard HDTV would be. But that’s good in terms of performance, of course, because it’s a handheld, it doesn’t need to have any higher resolution than that. The screen looks really nice as well. And so, yeah, I completely agree with you about that sweet spot. I quickly discovered the same thing, the same kind of like period of games that was perfect for it. So, Matthew, I’m curious how you found it to use because you’ve suggested there that it’s a bit fiddly like PC gaming can be more generally. But I must say that in terms of using the handheld interface Valve has built for it, I think it’s really good at surfacing stuff that’s already in your library, not aggressively selling you things and having an interface that’s genuinely quite nice to browse. But I guess I want to know what your thoughts are. How fickle have you found the machine? How fickle have you found using it more generally? I think you’re right. They obviously did a lot of work with their big picture mode to give Steam a kind of console-like interface on a TV and that’s put them in quite good stead here. They’re just replicating a lot of the thinking there. No problem with the front end at all. And I think you’re right. The way that it kind of repackages your own library for you by saying like these work great on Steam, or these are good. That’s all really cool. I like that. That it kind of sort of takes what you have and puts its best foot forward using that. That’s a really nice experience and it’s an experience that leans heavily into the knowledge that a lot of people are coming into this with an existing library. So how it treats that, very sophisticated, I really like it. I think where it begins, where the kind of PC-ness of it begins to sort of creep through is just in their categorization system for games that are like optimized and tested on the Steam Deck. Ones which maybe have some problems, and ones which haven’t been tested. And it just feels like the language they use makes it sound like, oh, it won’t work. When actually, a game they haven’t tested probably will work. You may have to like, you know, mess around with some like, you know, the resolution or the graphic settings to like optimize it. And but like I say, I think that actually is part of the PC experience anyway. So you’re probably used to that if you if you’ve got a substantial Steam library, you’ve been doing this for years. But I will say like, you know, going through my library and it’s saying like, oh, this isn’t this, you know, this isn’t good for Steam Deck. And it’s that’s that’s kind of off putting, you know, like, I feel, you know, that will change in time, you know, that it is an ongoing process where they are sort of certifying things as being like, this is absolutely rock solid, no problems. But like, you know, that that wouldn’t be acceptable on like any home console. This idea of like, oh, this thing, you know, it’s kind of like, it’s sort of like, it’s the console saying, I don’t know that I don’t like. I’m like, well, what am I meant to, what the fuck am I meant to make of that? It’s like, I have no idea if this is going to work. And you’re like, not great. Well, that is the thing. I say it’s a kind of work in progress, but an exciting one. I think that is that’s where this speaks to the most, because they are, as I understand it, adding games to the playable list all the time. So for listeners who don’t have one, you know, I know these are hard to get hold of still. It basically has a kind of traffic light system. I don’t know if it has a red actually, but it has a gray or a white that indicates not tested essentially. And then it has yellow, which means it will work with caveats. Like it might have something that requires typing in in-game text. You have to use the keyboard for this. There’s a keyboard function you can activate in games, or a bit of mouse control or something like that. And then it’ll have green, which is verified for Steam Deck. So that’s, you know, Bob’s your uncle, crack on sort of thing. But even then, I saw Age of Empires 2 was like green on there. And I was like, I mean, I love Age of Empires 2, but that is, I just don’t think it’s quite the place for it. So yeah, and plus the little men are tiny in Age of Empires. So there’s a couple of odd bits to it, you know? Yeah, I think that’s what it is, because it… And like, that’s… I know, egregious is too strong a word, but that stands out, because it is surprisingly console-like in how it behaves, like you say, because it has this really nice interface. That the odd moments where actually, you know, it is more honest about being a PC thing, and at the end of the day, you would rather it was honest than dishonest, it’s enough to go, oh yeah, I remember, like, this is this, you know, like, booting up a game, and a couple of things I played today had, like, like, pre-launch menus come up, which on PC, or like, you know, a little thing comes up, you start setting some settings, some of these wigged out, because it was like, oh, I don’t really know how to deal with this, because it’s not really a desktop, it doesn’t really know what to do with them, and, you know, there were some things I had to Google, you know, oh, does this work on Steam Deck? And if so, how do I get through this stage of it? And I think little things like that, but again, like, that’s just true of playing things on PC, you know, like saying about the Steam Deck, for example, if you download Max Payne and it doesn’t work on Steam Deck, well, if you download Max Payne on PC, it doesn’t work, you know, So, you have to do something on your PC, you have to do something on Steam Deck, and I think as long as you’re open to that and you appreciate that that is going to happen, I don’t think it’s as big a deal as I thought it might be going in. Yeah, I would agree with that. I think, yeah, it’s accepting the limitations of buying games on Steam more generally, where things won’t be supported, won’t be patched. So, Max Payne is a good example where the only way I know how to get that running is to run it in Windows compatibility mode with an older, basically pretending your PC is an older version of Windows to get it to boot, and then playing it in, I think, like windowed full screen and not full screen, or otherwise the screen will go black. And I know that because I went out of my way to play Max Payne about six years ago. You know what I mean? Right, yeah. But most people won’t know that. So it’s true that if you logged in and thought, oh, I’ll play Max Payne, then it won’t work. And that’s kind of a bummer. So yeah, that is completely fair. And I think, yeah, you kind of need to keep in mind that this is PC adjacent at the least really. It’s kind of like, it is a PC that’s pretending not to be a PC essentially. That’s kind of where it’s at, I think. Yeah, and I think it pulls that trick off like 95% of the time. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Very, very impressive. The other thing is it doesn’t try and sell you stuff very aggressively. I assume that this exists, Matthew, because Valve probably sees that there’s a hard limit on how much you can sell high-end PC gaming to people just in terms of the outlay, the cost is massive. For most people, that’s just spending over a grand on some video games hardware is not something that they can do. And so, you know, Steam is a platform. Valve are the platform holders in a lot of ways. They’re thinking, I assume, is we want to grow PC gaming beyond what it is now. So we want to give people another avenue into it. And I think it’s possible it will have that effect. But yes, those people coming into it will need to know that a lot of what you buy won’t necessarily run out of the box. And that verified list is going to do some heavy lifting for people who pick up these games after they pick up the hardware. So that is interesting. Yeah, I actually haven’t explored the store heavily like on the device itself. Does it, like, is there a Steam, like almost a Steam Deck curated version of the store where it’s saying this stuff is, this is the stuff you should buy? Because that’s great, you know, in terms of like, you can basically reenergize the sales of everything from like 10 years ago. Yeah, yeah. It’s like, I think it’s like a great on deck tab in the store. And the store you can navigate, you know, using the same interface that Valve has built. You’re not, it’s not like it awkwardly turns into the desktop Steam interface, which looks quite old hat these days. So yeah, very much stays its own kind of like, it’s its own form. So yeah, that does exist. And it will give you like a basically endless list of stuff that will work on there. So yeah, it’s that curation does exist, like you say, which is exciting. Yeah, so I like how much it is not trying to sell you things. It will also, if you search for games in your library, it will also find games in the store that you might want that you don’t own. And then it will show you at a glance what’s in your library already and what you don’t own, which is useful if you’re like me and you’ve bought games across so many different formats, you can’t remember where you own Bioshock 2 and where you don’t own Bioshock 2. And so it makes it really easy to understand the limits of your library and the potential, which I really like. So something I said, all right, after I got one, Matthew, I wonder if you agree with this, is that I think that the Steam Deck, if you want it to, can be like 90% tinkering to 10% playing games, whereas I think that the Switch is like the other way around. It’s like, get you into the games, all your tinkering will be done just trying to understand how the store works. Or like maybe doing a bit of storage management. But I was wondering if you agree with that, if it’s like a tinker is handheld at its heart. Yeah, I think so, but isn’t that just like now? But isn’t that your initial relationship with it? Won’t that change over time? I don’t know. Yeah, I mean, I would say I’ve been surprised from the very limited, I should say, selection of things I’ve tried today. Like most of them played acceptably out of the box. Like I didn’t go in and mess around with things. Is that the kind of tinkering you’re talking about? Like sort of just trying to kind of optimize things and get things to work. A little bit of that, but also a little, quite a lot of going into the desktop mode on there and seeing what other stuff you can boot through its Linux OS, basically. Yeah, I mean, I must say that side of it doesn’t interest me at all. What I like about Steam on my home PC is that it kind of saves me from having to engage with my PC at all. I am not a PC guy in terms of, I have no interest in that kind of stuff. I like things to be user-friendly out of the box. I’m not installing my own fricking operating system on my phone or whatever. I’m a bit of a sheep. I’m like your dream customer because I was raised on experiences that were easy and didn’t ask anything of me. So that side of it, I wouldn’t even know to start with that. I mean, is there a lot I can do outside of what it does on the surface? So the first thing I wanted to do was understand how I can plug my Epic Game Store library into the console. Yeah. So I went and looked it up. And yes, there is a way you can do this. You can add your games to the library. It’s like it’s a good app. It’s called the Heroic Game Launcher. I downloaded it. About half the games I tried on there worked. Hitman 3 worked, Observation worked. Something else worked. I can’t remember what it was. But then I was finding out of quite a few games struggle with it as well. Obviously, they weren’t made to work on Steam Deck. They’re made for a different store, so they’re different builds or I don’t really know how that differentiates. But I tried Jet the Far Shore, for example. I tried Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 and 2, which is actually not on Steam. I didn’t realize that. I’ll put that on Steam so I can play on Steam Deck. That’d be rad. That just didn’t work at all on Steam Deck for me. And much to my shame, Matthew, I played Kingdom Hearts 1 and 2 as well, and that just would not boot, which I’m sure is a decision you would agree with anyway. But yeah, so Hitman would work fine, and then yeah, Observation worked fine. So it just seemed to be very unpredictable. But like installing that did require a bit of a faff. And I must admit, the arc I went through with it was, it’s cool that you can do this in a way that you never could with a console, of course. But also, it made me just relish having this straightforward Steam experience for like a week afterwards, which is what I’ve done. And now I’m thinking about tinkering more and understanding what else I can do with it. But it was really nice to get it out of the box, sign in to Steam and just have all my games there. And it is really good at offering that. But the tinkering is there if you want it, essentially. Right. Yeah. Can you do anything with Xbox Game Pass stuff on there? I don’t think there’s an easy way of doing that. I think it’s because they are… I know nothing about any of this, so anyone who actually makes games listening to this, which is a few people, I believe that the Xbox PC Game Pass version that you make is specifically native to Windows. It’s actually a different build of the game to Steam itself, so it’s not designed to run to the same parameters. It runs by Microsoft’s parameters instead. I think that’s how it works, but apologies to any actual people who know what they’re talking about out there as ever. So, yeah, that would be good though, right? Yeah, I mean, it would be nice if it was on there. It’s kind of interesting this sort of blurring of the lines because you read quite a lot about actually how flexible Xbox Series X and Series S are with regards to, you can actually put stuff on those that they’re not meant to have. It’s got quite an open developer mode, and a lot of people talk about them as being sort of like prime emulation machines, whether or not you’re into that and the various legality or not is up to you to decide. Thumbs up from our lawyer there, Matthew, on the sidelines. You’re safe, lads. By all means, do it. If you tell us about it on Discord, we will knock you out to Microsoft or Sony or Nintendo. That is our duty and my pleasure. So the idea of hardware which is a little bit more open and a little bit more accessible or that kind of tinkering edge is beginning to even get into the bones of the home consoles, which is kind of interesting. Yeah, I’m not endorsing emulation here, but there is a massive part of the discussion around this console is what it can do in terms of people playing Metro Prime 1 and 2 at 60 FPS with texture mods installed and stuff like that. That is a whole side of the console that seems to be quite easy to unlock. It’s not something I’ve done, but it’s… Yeah, I’ve not read much about how this thing stacks up compared to… What is even the term for them? The kind of… Retro handhelds? Yeah, retro handhelds, I guess. I think it is the king of them, just through the sheer power of it. And the fact that the emulators… A lot of them seem to either have been tweaked to work out of the box for Steam Deck or already worked on Linux, so they’re fine to run. And so, yeah, this stuff is… I was reading a PC Gamer article about it, something called MU Deck that basically puts all of the framework for it onto your… all of the legal bits it basically puts onto your Steam Deck, and then the legal bits are up to you, essentially. So, it’s very, very streamlined, as long as you’re prepared to go and mess around in the… It’s a lot like, can you find a BIOS? Yeah, that old one, you know. Someone who’s sailed the seas of piracy before, I see. No, I’ve heard about this from others. Yeah, Matthew’s secretly got a cupboard at home that’s like 10,000 memory sticks, all with a different PS2 BIOS on it. Yeah, OK, good. So yeah, that does exist there. But I have admittedly relished just using it to explore games that I’d forgot I owned. There’s a few of those in the second section we’re going to do here. We’re actually going to talk about the games we’ve been playing on there and just the amount of experience of using them. It’s definitely made me take a completely different look at my library in terms of what I’m picking up and playing, which is cool. But yeah, that tinkering side exists as well. So I can see that growing over time as people experiment more and more with what it can do because it is very, very powerful. So Matthew, let’s do it. Steam Deck versus Switch. So what do you think the advantages of one are over the other? Because I don’t think this replaces the Switch by any means. But it does maybe replace some of the ways in which I was using it. What do you think? Yeah, so I’d say the main thing for me is the fact that it’s tied to the Steam ecosystem. And that being generation free is a huge thing. The idea that this has got a lifetime of PC games versus the Switch library, which is just the Switch. It’s really, I’d say, rather than getting into the actual hardware, the physicality of the two devices, so much of it just comes down to library behaviour. The scale of the two libraries obviously steams absolutely vast, and we’ll have just, like I say, it goes way before Switch and will long out last Switch. But also things like the pricing of those libraries, like I actually don’t own many games on Switch that aren’t first party games, it’s still largely a first party thing, just because I know you can buy these games on PC for cheaper. You know, the massive sales, or just the fact that some of these games have been on PC a lot longer, and so have kind of, like, the prices dropped over time. You know, it’s much cheaper. I’m sure you could find individual examples where games are maybe cheaper on the Switch in places, because of, like, mad sales or whatever, but generally speaking, Steam’s always going to be cheaper. And, you know, in the past, you know, what would have maybe swayed me is, like I was saying earlier, when you’re playing something and you think, do I really want to, you know… Yes, it’s cheaper on PC, but do I really want to play it on PC? Is that the natural environment for, like, Ace Attorney, you know, for example? And now that, like, isn’t a question, you know. So, you know, for a lot of people, that wouldn’t have been a question to begin with. They’re like, cheap is cheap or whatever. But, yeah, now that’s, you know, the final kind of hurdle of PC gaming is kind of crossed. Yeah, for sure. I think that my big take on the Steam Deck is that I think it makes more sense if you’ve owned a Switch and therefore see that the handheld play, whether you’re doing it out of the home or at home in a different part of your house, if that makes sense in your life, I think that’s like prerequisite one for getting a Steam Deck. Like, I think the Switch kind of will tell, your behaviour with a Switch will tell you your behaviour with a Steam Deck, I would say, and whether it fits. The other thing is, I think that if you have a big, pre-existing Steam library, it makes total sense, but I’m not sure I would buy this to start my PC library because while I think it is an amazing device, and you can, there is an official doc that will let you play with the monitor, I think that as an overall PC experience, it will still be a more compromised version of what PC gaming can do, and it makes more sense if it’s complementing a PC you already have in your life, I think. So people might disagree with that, and that’s not me gatekeeping and saying don’t buy this if you don’t have a Steam collection, this is your first foray into PC gaming. I’m not saying that by any means, but I guess what I’m saying is I think I’m the perfect person for it, Matthew, because I have the appetite for this stuff. I have a Switch that fits into my lifestyle very nicely, and I have a massive Steam library because I was the editor-in-chief of PC Gamer. So, you know, those things kind of coalesce really nicely. But there are more caveats to buying, I think, if you don’t have a background with a Switch or a big pre-existing Steam library, do you think that’s fair? Yeah, that’s probably fair. Maybe outside of the Switch, like, you know, if you got into playing a lot of, like, indie games on, like, the Vita, that might also be a similar case. Like, a Vita owner, you could see them comfortably transitioning into this, and in the same way that a Switch person could. Yeah, I think that’s fair. I think, like, the point I was trying to make about the longer history of Steam as well is that, you know, Switch has, you know, there are some valiant ports on there of some modern things, but there’s, you know, there’s hundreds, thousands of amazing games that will never be on Switch. That would probably sing on Switch because of the sort of technological level. Like, you know, I would love to play Tomb Raider Reboot on the Switch, would be fine, I think. You could probably manage that. But it won’t happen. But on the Steam Deck, it obviously will. You know, it has this… it just covers so much more time. And that really speaks to me. But, you know, I also make a weekly podcast about that period, so maybe I care more about it than others. Yeah, yeah, that’s it. Whereas, you know, if you’re buying this to play new PC games fundamentally, and for indie games, it’s a dream machine. And if, you know, it’s… if you want, like, a port of something from about, like you say, from about 10 years ago or more, even, like, less time than that, it is, like… I will always play that on the Steam Deck now instead of the Switch, because the extra power just makes it worth it. And for, like, indie games generally, like, it just makes it worth it having the extra power when those games are a little bit more intensive. But the pricing is such an important point as well, Matthew, because I have a good example of this, right? So I’ve been eyeing Shadowrun Trilogy on the Switch, and because it’s three RPGs, one package, 36 quid. Great, right? But 36 quid is still quite a lot of money. These are all games. I already had one in my Steam library. And I went and bought the other two for two pounds each, I think, on Green Man Gaming in their sale. And they’re like, I think they’re yellow. They’re each marked yellow on the Steam Deck verification sort of, like, panel. So they will work. And I was, you know, there’s a lot of browsing of Reddit to see how things run on Steam Deck as well. So I was doing a bit of that. But that alone just feels like, you know, over the course of a year, I might actually break, you know, I might have paid the equivalent of what I, of having a Switch and the versions on Switch, just by the price reduction of buying the PC version. So there’s a bit of that to it, you know. Yeah, and we should add the Switch as well. It’s just because it’s on Switch doesn’t mean it runs well on Switch. I still have to, like, the same checks, ironically, that I’m running on Steam Deck, of does this thing actually work because they haven’t said. You have to do that with some things on Switch. Like, there are some nasty surprises. I haven’t tried it on Steam Deck at Midday, but I bought that 3D platformer, A Hat in Time, is it, on Switch, and it runs like an absolute pig. Like, I’d go as far as saying it’s broken on Switch. Shockingly bad. So, like, you know, it’s not… You know, when I said earlier that, you know, there is this extra level of faff, it’s not like that doesn’t also happen in the allegedly quality-tested Switch space. Yeah. Also, shout out to PJ O’Reilly, who, whenever I look for the Switch version of a game, PJ O’Reilly has reviewed it for Nintendo Life, and will tell me if it’s got framerate problems or not. And that is a valuable service. That stuff’s vital. Yeah, for sure. But yeah, it’s true. I think it’s like Cloudpunk I saw. It was a bit, you know, a really beautiful-looking Voxelart game on PC, but quite compromised to get onto Switch, seemingly. Very good. And that’s… It’s a hot Sunday. We’re doing our best. This podcast is going to get so much better in the winter. If you think this is good now, just fucking wait until October. Do you know what I’m saying? Like, it’s going to be… Wait until it’s cold outside and all of a sudden large men are in their element. Yeah, that’s it. Do you think we have all this body fat for nothing? It’s just to get through the bath winter. Right, okay. So I had one more thing to add on the Switch comparison. No, I don’t think it will replace the Switch in my life because the Switch has a fundamental Nintendo-ness to it that is just lovely. Using the Switch afterwards was kind of a relief. I actually got really used to the Steam Deck size. It is a very wide bastard. On a train, on a train, it’s basically the entire sort of like length of one person’s shoulder to another. And I felt like I was… It was like man-spreading in console form. I felt very obnoxious getting that out on a… Going on a train from Devon to Somerset, I must say. But yeah, it won’t replace the Switch by any means, because yes, the exclusive games are there. The main reason I play it for sure, it will just… When it comes to those ports in indie games, the Steam Deck is now suddenly like something I’m thinking about a lot more than buying those games on Switch. So that is an interesting dynamic change. Quite an annoying trend I’ve spotted over the weekend, actually, looking at some Xenoblade 3 threads on various forums. People talk about Switch emulation on both PC and in these cases specifically on Steam Deck as if it is just like a valid alternative. And listen, if you do it, it’s fine. But there is something quite obnoxious about people who strike the tone of like, you know, the pros and cons of this. And it’s like, well, it’s not really intended for Steam Deck. You know, Steam Deck isn’t really the home of Nintendo games. And I find that talk, you know, like, by all means do it, but just have a bit of shame about your skeevy arts, you know? Just stand up in people’s face. It’s like, if the game is commercially available, and this is, then don’t… You know, if you buy it and then you emulate it, that’s maybe more in a grey area, but if all you’re doing is stealing it and playing on Steam Deck, that’s just fucking bad. Well, it’s more like, see people getting excited about it on Switch, and then there’s just some prick who’s like, oh, well, yeah, well, if you think that’s good, wait until you see it on PC, and you’re like, that’s not even the fucking conversation, you know? Like, people haven’t opted in to that, so don’t rub it in their fucking face. Obviously, I buy all these things, and I’m probably a sucker for giving these people all this money, but that rubs me up the wrong way a little bit. Yeah, for sure. So fair enough, Matthew, I think you’re along right lines there. I only had one last thing to discuss, was do you think it’s worth getting one now or waiting for a better model? I mean, it does feel like they will make a better model. It could take a while, though. They haven’t replaced that VR headset yet, you know what I mean? Yeah, that’s true. That’s true, but it’s definitely like a success or it feels like a success. So it feels like it will be sort of an ongoing thing. They’ve been quite careful not to really talk about that stuff, I guess, because they want everyone being happy with what they’ve got now. Yeah, it’s quite plasticky, I find. I could imagine there being an even more luxury version of this down the line. And I could say those vents. But I guess that’s just inherent. What can you do? That is what it is. It’s a miracle that they’ve got it working. If you’ve looked at gaming laptops, they are just generally vile as design goes. The weight of them, the smell of the heat coming out of them, it’s really grim. I’ve worked on a gaming laptop for a long time, and it’s just a horrible thing. I would definitely take this over that, but as a sort of physical user experience, it’s fine, but there must be a better version of this somewhere down the line. I will say if you work from home and you do want to heat up a smoked salmon and your smoked salmon bagel, just pop that bad boy behind your gaming laptop and five minutes time, that thing’s cooked. I will tell you that. One function which I think is absolutely ass is that, and I hope you’re not going to correct me on this and say that there is a way of doing this, it stops downloading in sleep mode. Oh, right. I don’t, yeah, I think you might be right there. You have to have the screen on for it to download. That sucks. Like, just leaving it whirring away, because that basically means it has to be plugged in. Being incredibly hot somewhere in your house to download stuff. That sucks. Like, what console in this day and age can’t download with the screen off? Come on. The logic might be something like, if, maybe if you do leave it, if you leave it plugged in, can it not just, can you not just turn off the screen shutdown function if you did want to? Oh, because what you’re saying is you don’t want that heat coming out, yeah. Well, I just don’t want to look over at a console on the floor with the screen on. Like, my entire history with handhelds has told me not just to leave it running open, and it feels wrong to me to see it like that. And I’ve seen people go like, well, what you do is you download a small game, and then while you’re playing that small game, you’re downloading a big game in the background, but it basically has to be active to download. And that just, I don’t know, doesn’t that feel wrong? I sort of get what you mean. Yeah, I guess I haven’t thought about this that much, but it has always been a long queue when I’ve turned on my Steam Deck. It’s finally clear now. Yeah, there’s maybe a bit of that at the start. That seems weirdly clumsy to me. It might be a thing to do with the fact that, because it’s got such lean battery life, they may be worried about if you’re in the middle of a game and you wanted to leave it on sleep mode and come back, it would still work, as opposed to it draining the battery while the screen was off, essentially, and then you come back and wonder why it’s powered down. Maybe that’s the logic. I haven’t explored the menus to see how much you can change that. Maybe there is a way to change that. Yeah, I can’t find an option for it. Maybe I’m wrong on this. Yeah, I trust you. I trust you. You seem like a good guy. Yeah, so I’m very aware that on this podcast, Matthew, a lot of people go and buy stuff because we say it’s good. And I feel quite guilty about that, because I do want people to feel in control of their finances and not like we’re agents of chaos, designed to create arguments in your household because that’s not what we’re going for. I use all those tweets to try and get PRs to send us free stuff. I’m like, look how influential it is. Please send us 20 cans of Rio. Well, the Rio aside, I am finding that more people are sending us stuff now. At least it’s easier to get, you know? I should add, I don’t actually do that. I’m not like super obnoxious. Now, I’ve asked for three games, and I think I always say when I’ve asked for a game on this, just for, I don’t know why, I’m not obliged to. I’m not a member of the press, so I could basically be as corrupt as I want really, but I choose not to be. Isn’t that good of me? That’s damn decent of you. Cheers buddy. But what I was going to say was that I, what I’m saying is I don’t recommend that everyone goes out and buys this. I, like I say, I think that for me specifically as a Switch owner with a big pre-existing Steam library, it is perfect and I do absolutely love it. But I think it is, there are definitely certain types of people it will appeal to more than others. And I think being a pre-existing PC owner is probably useful here, at least until a doc comes along and we can see what performance is like on that, because I imagine there’ll be a lot of, you know, people who want to play some of the more interesting PC-specific stuff on the console, sorry, on their handheld, let’s say Stellaris or Cities Skylines or Humankind Civ, all this stuff that, well you can’t play Civ, but all this stuff that’s more built for a mouse and keyboard at its heart. Without knowing exactly what that experience is like, I still feel like you kind of need a proper PC to get that core PC gaming experience, but this is the best possible alternative to that in handheld form. That’s how I feel about it, Matthew. Nothing that’s fair. Okay, good. So shall we take a quick break, Matthew, and talk a bit about the games we’ve been playing on there and how those are fed? Yeah, let’s do it. Welcome back to the podcast. So, in this section on our Steam Deck Special, we’re gonna talk about the games we’ve actually been playing on this handheld and the experience of doing so. Me and Matthew are not Digital Foundry. We’ve made that clear on very frequently, we’ve been on many occasions at this point. We don’t know what we’re doing. Take none of this as actual technical advice. Go and find people who know what they’re actually doing. They exist everywhere. We are not authorities, but with that in mind, we can get into the games. Any thoughts, Matthew, before we go into this? What on whether or not we’re Digital Foundry? Well, I guess anything related to that. Yeah, you’re bang on the money. I’d say the only thing we are truly an authority on are the fictional laws of our own fictional kingdoms. And sandwiches and bath. And sandwiches and bath. Outside of that, you’re on thin ice taking any kind of advice from us. Yeah, it’s just a bad idea, frankly. So I will ask you, Matthew, because I’ve written about eight or nine games here, and you’ve added four as you’ve been playing today. When it came to download some games from your Steam library, then what went through your mind? What did you seek out? Was there a kind of logic to what you picked? I wanted to test a genre that I own a lot of, but I hate playing on PC. I wanted to test something quite old with a mouse interface to see how that actually worked for me. I wanted to see something from that period we’re talking about, that kind of last gen, not last gen, last, last gen, gen before last, whatever, you know, the 360 PS3 generation, basically. And then something which was a kind of indie fit. I mean, this is quite poor testing because I cramped this all into a day, you know, I would much, you know, if I’d known actually how well I got on with it today, I would have probably done this over the last couple of weeks. Catherine’s had this thing sitting in the house for ages and I’ve had nothing to do with it. But I would have liked to have tried some more kind of like dip in kind of games, you know, like yeah, your Hades or your Dead Cells or something. But so, yeah, I picked something along those lines. Yeah, yeah. So for me, it was a broad spread of stuff I grabbed, basically, I’ve been off for the week, I went home to my parents’ house. It was exciting to take this with me and just see what this thing can do, take it for a proper test drive. That’s been really fun to do. And, yeah. Did you show it to your dad? He occasionally plays PC games, right? Yeah, I did and they didn’t seem that bothered. Yeah. They’re just not really games people. Do you know what? They took so little interest in any of my hobbies growing up that as an adult, I don’t even bother trying to engage with them on it. Like I think I just said to my dad, I’ve got this, I can play PC games on the go. And he was like, oh, that’s nice. And I think that’s kind of it really. Well, whenever either of us write something nice about the podcast on Facebook, I always see members of your family, I’ve seen your dad saying, way nice one. Oh yeah, they’re very proud for sure. Like there’s no, they’re supportive, absolutely. But they just don’t wish to engage with it themselves. Like I think the last time I tried to engage with them properly on games Matthew, was I tried to get them to play Heavy Rain. And in fact, what happened was, is we played Beatles Rock Band at Christmas one year, and it was such a disaster. My mum just didn’t understand how the controller worked, and she was so upset and angry by like, the experience of just trying to play She’s Leaving Home on a plastic controller. And like failing within about eight notes of the song, that like, that basically ruled out video games as a concept for the rest of her life. I’ve killed some of the Beals for a second time. She hasn’t even left home yet, do you know what I mean? Yeah, so there was just no point. It’s like my little brother, he’s big on like boring my mum with the stuff that he’s always got going on, whether it’s like I bought some Pokemon toy that cost too much money or some Lego. My mum’s like, yeah, yeah, yeah. She kind of politely put up, puts up with it. But with me, I feel like I lost this war so many years ago. I no longer even try and engage with them on it. So yeah, yeah. But you know, they were happy. I was having a good time, Matthew. I found out over the weekend while we’re just having a brief family diversion that my little brother sold, he’s recently bought a Switch. He used to have a Switch, but he sold his original Switch. But he didn’t like properly understand the whole factory reset and just sold it with all his digital games account in it. And so he doesn’t have any, he doesn’t have access to that anymore. So he’s just having to buy everything from scratch. Oh my God, how many games did he have on it as well? Well, like a decent library, I think. So someone out there bought that Switch and it’s just got a complete games library on it. Well, not complete, but the basis of one. Yeah, and I guess because that’s completely gone, there’s no way it’ll be deactivated ever. So as long as he creates a different profile, he can just enjoy those games permanently, whoever it is. Yeah, I mean, it’s good for me because I’m not a very imaginative present buyer and it means I can just buy him Mario Kart and that’s acceptable. Yeah, it’s sort of like, yeah, I’ll get you a different Switch launch game each year and it should be fine. That is funny. Is that the brother who likes Kingdom Hearts, Matthew? No, that’s my even younger brother. Ah, gotcha, yeah, yeah. So I know there is a brother who wants us to do a Kingdom Hearts episode, which is probably a no-go, to be honest, but I do always find that the thought to that I’m using. I created a bit of a, yeah, very different, who’s the black sheep for liking, am I the black sheep for not liking Kingdom Hearts or is he the black sheep for liking Kingdom Hearts? What’s Leslie’s take on Kingdom Hearts? I imagine there’s not really an angle on that. The only game she showed interest in was Episode One Podracer, which we famously, I told you about that, right? Yeah, yeah, it was a great, yeah, yeah, yeah. You’re like, oh, we’ll buy this for our mum. It’ll be a great gift. That was the, yeah. She humored us by saying, oh, that looks good. And we thought she wanted it for Mother’s Day. That’s amazing. Oh yeah, but there is a bit of a family rift opening over the Nintendo Online Switch subscription. Because obviously I said to my little brother, well, as you’ve got Mario Kart, you should join my family Switch subscription because I’ve got a space left on it, one space. And it means you can get all the tracks, you can download it as part of the expansion pass. But he’s already on my other brother, Alex’s subscription. And Alex doesn’t have the expansion, you see. So it’s kind of like traitor to the original subscription by leaving it to come to my old singing or dancing subscription. Yeah, that’s good. It’s a rejected Kirby enthusiast of Blot Lines. That’s what this is, Matthew. I would say it’s more like Succession. Yeah, it’s exactly the same. Yeah, I mean, I’m on that family account. So for a second, I thought, is my place suddenly in question? Like, am I gonna be replaced with- No, no, everyone who’s on there, basically, if you’re on there, you’re on there for life. That’s my rule. That’s good. I’m very happy with that rule. Yeah, it’s working out well for me so far with, yeah. I’m looking forward to that. Isn’t that the Wario Pinball track they’re adding to the Switch, the Maricar 8? That’d be pretty good, wouldn’t it? I thought that looked decent in that trailer they did, but not so bothered about this. Yeah, someone who wants to sit on a big ice cream, but on a big ice cream track, but I’m trying to give up sugar at the moment, so I don’t know if I really need that in my life. Yeah, fair enough. Just manically driving around to be a virtual fucking choc ice. Whatever. Yeah, there was one other gag I was going to make about your N64 buying your mum the pod racer, actually. I could just imagine it’s like the next year, and you’re going, do you think mum would like Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine? She just suddenly has a cartridge of that coming her way. There you go. Joke is to be spiced up. She likes the collective works of LucasArts. That was a fun diversion. This section’s going great so far, isn’t it? Yeah, anyway, Steam Deck. That’s the sort of thing we’re meant to say for the mail bags, isn’t it? Oh, yeah, sorry. Sorry about that. People out there thinking, oh, God, they’re going to be 40 minutes on their breakfast next and giving us one star on iTunes. That was gaming adjacent. Yeah, it’s fun. It adds background to the various fictional characters have been discussed before. My mum, Leslie, various Castle brothers. It’s good. Rich tapestry, I’d say. OK, so yeah, I’ve got a few here. Let’s start with the one I’ve played the most by far, Matthew, which is XCOM Enemy Within slash Unknown. Now, this came up on the podcast just two weeks ago in the Best Games of 2013. It sparked a bit of an interest of mine to go back and actually finish a campaign of Enemy Within, which I got very close to doing on Xbox 360, but never actually pulled off. And so I’ve been doing that this week. I have actually finished it. So XCOM Enemy Unknown brought back the series, very kind of like from its sort of 90s PC roots, and turned it into a game pad friendly, turn-based tactics game, where you drop into these little maps around the world, go and sort of shoot aliens and manage a larger invasion, a sort of conflict in the game’s strategy level. So two layers of strategy that sort of like merge together to form one sort of epic experience, repeatable experience. Expansion comes along, gonna add some mechs, mechs that can set fire to aliens, mechs that can have like a robot punch, you can use to smack an enemy across the map. All kinds of fun stuff, new mission types, these kind of like rogue human faction who sympathize with the aliens, secret narrative missions, loads of different weapons, like it just a really complete feeling expansion. So it was great fun to get my teeth into that. You mentioned Chaos Gate, I mean, you know, full disclosure, my name is in the credits of that game. So, you know, can’t be objective here. But I think that turn-based tactics games are actually spot on for this because they are snackable, Matthew. They are like you can play a mission in about 15, 20, 30 minutes and then you can kind of move on with your day. So I found it kind of perfect. Do you think that’s why Catherine’s engaged with it so much on that level? Yeah, I think, yeah, and definitely in terms of like, yeah, dipping into it and playing a little bit here and there. Yeah, I mean, it runs absolutely fine. Like there’s no problems on that front. All I was questioning was sort of the density of interface and things like that. But, you know, I guess if you know what you’re doing and you’re used to these things, it’s not a problem. But yeah, like I haven’t played it myself. So it was like entirely over the shoulder observation. Yeah, it’s sort of like on XCOM, the text is like smallish, but definitely sort of visible because it’s such a, like they put the widest possible screen they can on a handheld device. So it’s sort of like, I found so far that very few games have had games where, have had text where it’s like unreadably small. So, and the performance is excellent because this is, of course, a game from 2012. Like you’re saying, Matthew, games up to 2014 seems to be the sweet spot. This thing seems to be as powerful as maybe a PS4, slightly more powerful than that. Maybe, yeah, definitely more powerful than that, but not, you know, not anywhere near next gen consoles or power levels. So what is useful as well, Matthew, is obviously XCOM Enemy Within is unlikely to be many people’s game that they play these days from this series because there is XCOM 2, considered the superior game. And handily, someone called Andy Humphreys has emailed in to the podcast to talk about his Steam Deck thoughts around XCOM 2. So I was just gonna read that out, Matthew, if that’s okay. Yeah, absolutely. Hello Giants both, with reference to the Destiny 2 episodes preamble, Matthew, listen to that, you fucking love that episode. I’ve been playing XCOM 2 on my Steam Deck. Like Samuel, it’s one of the games I was mostly good to try out on the handheld. And as this came up in the last pod, I thought it’d share my experience. Brackets, except by the way that this is really just an FYI for Samuel and a bit boring for a mailbag. I just had thoughts to share and the Discord had already moved on. I like that this is the podcast that critiques itself as it goes along. And we have readers who critique their own letters into us as it goes along. Yeah, we’ve set a precedent there, haven’t we? Anyway, I can report it mostly works alright. Mostly. Performance is smooth even on the higher graphics settings, but battery life suffers dreadfully the more you throw at the decks impressive but limited power envelope. I don’t know if that’s an official term or not, but it sounds like the sort of thing I would say. It sounds legit. Why didn’t we use a phrase as cool as that? Power envelope just sounds like something you pick up in Smash Bros to like batter Kirby with, but yeah. Or one of those envelopes with like loads of bubble wrap on the inside, you know, like a real Uber envelope. Like an elite envelope. Yeah, like one pound fifty from Smith’s kind of envelope. Oh yeah. Yeah. Luckily the game still looks snazzy enough on the seven inch screen even on low settings. If you’re anything like me, you’ll quickly become confused with the deck’s own performance layer. Faffing blindly, willing the projected battery life to increase just a few more minutes. There is a bit of that with the Steam Deck, isn’t there? Finding every game’s performance balance sweet spot is truly the Steam Deck’s pre-installed mini game. That’s a great observation, as me saying. Then there are the usual Steam Deck caveats. Every update to the OS brings a possibility of new bugginess. After zero issues for the first few hours of my campaign, a proton update seemed to cause load screen hangs that still arise from time to time. A subsequent one then knocked out my painstakingly configured control scheme. Annoying. While expecting to get much more than a couple of hours play from XCOM 2 on any settings is simply not realistic in my experience. As someone who rarely has the time for a gaming session lasting longer than half an hour, the novelty of experiencing such a complex and full feature title on a handheld is more than worth any compromise. With a little work, the controls feel great and the quick resume function is worth the cost of the console, in my opinion. It works perfectly every time in XCOM, making a AAA experience truly snackable. For folks like me, the dad of two young kids whose free time comes in 15 to 20 minute intervals, this is nothing less than a game changer. It still feels like magic every time I use it. I’ve read a lot of editorials since the Steam Deck’s announcement appalling that it’s hard to glean the console’s target audience. I think some of those gaming professionals might have forgotten what it’s like to not have a current gaming PC at the time to use it. I honestly don’t know who the console’s aimed at, but I can tell you it’s definitely made for me. I no longer have the money for a proper gaming PC, wouldn’t have the time to devote to it if I did, but I do have enough of a Steam library to justify taking on a punt on the crazy old game’s wonder machine. Three months in, I’m still glad I did. Anyway, keep up the giant, the great Etcetera, not the giant Etcetera. And may you ever be the best person in every anecdote. Oh, that’s a classic reference, Matthew. So that’s Andy the Obfuscator on 85 on Discord. I’m sure Discord people can go find him if they want to share their thoughts. But I thought that was a great little rundown of how that game works, Matthew. Absolutely packed with great observations. Yeah, more than I have them. I didn’t get into any of the power management stuff, so I can’t really speak to that, but I’ve heard that you can squeeze more juice out of it. Yeah, I don’t really understand that, to be honest. But I will say for XCOM, I was getting close to three hours on this older XCOM, which is kind of spot on, but it did seem like sometimes it got a bit more intense and the fan would get a bit hotter and then suddenly it would go from like 10% battery to 3% in about five minutes. And I thought, oh, what happened there? Did I just sit on it and make it hotter or something? But yeah, it does happen. Matthew, why don’t you give me one of yours next? So I played a bit of Vampire Survivors, which I’ve been meaning to play for a long time after Joe Scribs talked it up on our last Indie Hall of Fame. Survival shooter, I guess, where you’re sort of stuck in a field and lots of things run at you. You only control the movement of your character. It also fires. And then you’re sort of leveling up by collecting gems. It’s all about like mad power curves and kind of moving through a kind of upgrade tree super fast for like little 10 minute bursts. This is something I tried because, you know, I knew it’s a game that can be over in 10 minutes. I think the level’s got a maximum time limit of 30 minutes on it or something. So, you know, a nice, like you say, snackable experience. I was also interested in this one because it famously gets so crazy in terms of enemy numbers and the amount of like projectiles and stuff that’s coming out of you that I think it can become a bit of a sort of system hog. I think you basically play this until you die or until your PC can’t handle it anymore. Which is like a really awesome like idea for a game. It just gets so mad that everything melts. Admittedly, like as someone who’s only really started playing this recently, like I haven’t got very far with it. I can’t push it into the truly mad stuff that I think this game’s capable of, but this seemed perfect. You know, it was running really smoothly. It’s throwing around loads of stuff. It’s graphically incredibly simple, but it only needs an analog stick to play. Like it doesn’t use any other buttons. It’s really stripped back. I could see myself playing a huge amount of this. Like even in between testing other things, I was coming back to this already to try it on the deck and play a little bit more of it. So yeah, it’s like the perfect sort of short, but deep kind of micro arcade game thing. Yeah, yeah, really, really good fit. Yeah, but maybe when you push it to the, I don’t know if you push it, when you push it to the absurd limits that this game can go to if it will like struggle, that I haven’t tested it. Yeah, I think Joe said that it wasn’t verified for the Steam Deck when he played it. I don’t know if it is now, but he said it was like, it didn’t feel like it was totally optimized for it at that point, but I very much, this is a game I feel like I need to play before the end of the year. And it’s just sat there for almost no money. I should just get on that and play it. So how long do you kind of play it before the deck starts to struggle? Is it quite quick that you see the limitations of it? No, not at all. I mean, but that’s what I was saying in terms of like where I am with the game, you know, like I haven’t, you know, upgraded my character. You have permanent upgrades that kind of build over the course of the game, which obviously push you into the kind of, the more hectic play faster. At the moment, I haven’t got those. So, you know, it can, I can’t survive long enough for it to become a problem, is what I’m saying. Gosh, you’re right. That makes sense. Well, I’ll pick this up then and I’ll give that a go too because I need more game of the year suggestions. It just looks very sharp, you know, like sprite work looks really, really nice at that resolution. Yeah, it’s just, yeah, nice. Like the control parts are nice. Like the analog stick is a nice analog stick and the buttons feel good. You know, it’s not, it’s a pretty, you know, it’s nice in the hands, I guess. Yeah, it’s, I think the sticks are better than the triggers and the bumpers. Like I’m not totally sold on the buttons yet for like really complicated action games, but the sticks are really nice. Right, yeah, I mean, I haven’t really tried any of those, any of those yet. Yeah, the closest thing I can liken it to is like a Wii U game pad, which is another very unsexy thing that was actually like quite comfortable to use. So if you have an experience of that, it’s kind of in that sort of ballpark. There you go, Matthew picked the most niche possible peripheral that he has owned, the Wii U game pad. But yeah, people have probably had a go on that. So that’s a good… Yeah, but it’s got a similar like sight. Like I have a muscle memory. When I used the Steam Deck, it’s like, oh yeah, I remember like the game pad used to feel like this. And I’m playing Xenoblade X at the moment. So I’m, you know, I am still using the game pad. So it kind of, yeah. You’re playing Xenoblade X on the Wii U, Matthew. Haven’t you heard about the Steam Deck can play your Xenoblade? Are you still humming the theme tune to yourself? One of our listeners really liked that you did the theme tune on the episode last week. But yeah. Awful, awful piece of music. Yeah, so yeah, okay, great shout. That came out this year, right? So if I play it, I can add it to my Game of the Year suggestions if it’s good. Yes, I think it’s still in early access, right? Oh, it’s, oh, fuck’s sake. Well, that can still go on the list. I put an early access in Game of the Year. Yeah, I forget. I’m at an outlet where I can control my own rules, so I don’t have to walk into hell. Yeah, like literally do whatever we like. It’s amazing. Yeah, I’m gonna put Microsoft Paint in mine. It’s gonna be good. I look forward to it, top 10. Okay, so my next one is Metal Gear Solid V, The Phantom Pain. So very much inspired by a popular Metal Gear XL episode with Rich Matthew, which went down amazingly. We were very happy with the response to that. I thought I could download and play this because I’m firmly in the post-game in Metal Gear Solid V. I’ve not played it for about six years at this point. And so my memory is that it was a very well optimized PC version. So in terms of modern looking games that would run nicely on a handheld with more modest PC specs, this seems spot on. And it is, I think that like you still need to be willing to adjust things to get it like to a super perfect frame rate. But to be honest, out of the box, it just worked pretty nicely and looked fantastic still. So all I did in this was I logged in to Mother Base. I was in debt for some reason, didn’t know why, because obviously there’s like a whole economy part of this game that I had completely blocked out of my brain. And then I kind of found some diamonds underneath like on one of the struts on Mother Base and was suddenly back in the green, which is good. And then logged on to look at my messages. And I basically, my Mother Base had been invaded nonstop for the past like six years. Just like a procession of people going in, killing my men and stealing stuff. And like just completely fucked up, my FOB just in tatters. So I thought I’d get a bit of revenge and went and found some players who were like basically 1% into the main story and just invaded their base and used their poor NPC lads as basically cannon fodder to try and remind myself of how the game works. And really good fun. But yeah, because this game is, when you get to the post-game, all you’re really doing is repeating content you’ve already done or walking around the open worlds. It’s actually like, I think it’s really, really good for a handheld and like I say, because it’s originally made for 360 and PS3 as well as PS5, sorry, PS4, it runs perfectly. And yeah, go ahead, Matthew. Yeah, I guess because like, because, you know, Phantom Pain and Modern Metal Gear sort of stems from a portable experience. You know, it has more in common with Peace Walker than anything else. That kind of makes perfect sense. You know, it’s obviously much scaled up, but yeah, the mission structure and the kind of time you can be expecting to spend in those missions. I could see, yeah, dipping into this for a little bit of fun with quiet before bedtime. Oh, God. It was the first thing I actually installed. Not for quiet-based purposes, just to be very, very clear. Or Diamond Dog or The Horse. The Dog was, yeah, more appropriate. I assume if you’ve downloaded a mod that patches that dog out, Matthew, replace it with a giant cat, maybe, I don’t know. But that sounds quite cursed, actually. Thomas the Tank Engine. So, the first thing I did was boot up and just look at Snake sat in the helicopter, that camera angle you load in on. Just that was such a great burst of this is what this handheld can do from playing it. Wonderful. Just really great stuff. Was this the very first game you saw on it? Yeah. Oh, that’s good. Yeah, it was a great first experience. To be honest, though, I feel like I signed about 18 different Konami EU LA’s before I’ve got to that point. I forget this is an online game and about 90 different things has happened to it. I think I even got a maintenance warning message for something that had happened a month before. I was like, I don’t even know what’s going on in this game these days. This is when they turn up at your house and they’re like, we need one of your kidneys, the president of Konami, and unfortunately you have signed up for that. Yeah, it does seem a bit like that, but very impressive nonetheless. I’m definitely going to go replay a bunch of missions with all my nice toys I unlocked in 2015, my hand of Jehuty and all my silly guns, so that’d be good. I love the idea of killing noobs and it just being like a warmup. Like, I wish you could tell them that, like I did this just to remember how to kill. It was also, the worst thing was because of the, before you even got the noobs, I was just going around Mother Base beating up my own guys trying to remember how the buttons worked. And it was just like, you are my own people who I recruited and I’m beating the shit out of you for, basically just to understand how this works. Yeah, they love it though. They’re all like, thank you, thank you boss. Please sir, may I have another kind of vibes, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so those lads got pasted. And yeah, shout out to the probably like, sort of like slightly bored 19 year old guy who, you know, has done two missions in this game, is having a good time and is now having money taken off of him via a premise he didn’t even realize existed within the game. So. Find someone to put a bullet in his dog. Turn his, turn his horse into glue, you know. Yeah, sort of ran away with his version of quiet. We don’t need to get into all this. Okay, so. And smashed his birthday cake. Yeah, exactly. Okay, good. So, moving on then Matthew, so what’s your second one? Is your second one a former draft pick? No, that was, so the second one, I haven’t just picked these to troll you. That would be a great angle for this episode, I’ll be honest. Well, maybe I did, I don’t know. Gabriel Knight, Sins of the Father, first Gabriel Knight game. It’s, yeah, I wanted to try this because obviously I like my point and click games and I was curious about how mouse led games would feel on this because I don’t really play any strategy games, traditional RTS or anything like that. So I thought, oh, this will be the easiest way to see whether or not I get on with this track pad because that’s definitely the input I’m most suspicious of. And it feels very, very sensitive. I feel like I do have to do some tinkering, which I didn’t have time to do with this. Like, you’ve got a little square pad and you’re moving your thumb around on it to move the mouse cursor that you’d move in Gabriel Knight. And then it uses the two triggers. I think his left and right mouse button is the kind of set up. So the idea is that you’re holding it with both hands, but your thumb’s on the track pad and your two fingers are on the triggers. It works okay. I mean, admittedly, point and click games don’t require, you know, amazing sort of reactions or anything. You know, it can be as slow as you like. So it doesn’t matter if it’s a little bit goofy. But like maybe it’ll come to me in time. It didn’t jump out as like, oh, wow, we’ve really solved the problem of like mouse track pad control, which some people have, either way they talked about the Steam pad, they’re like, oh, I can never go back to an analog stick because the track pad was so good. It’s certainly not like a religious experience when you first use it, I would say. Yeah, I think it’s a means to an end rather than a solution. Those two phrases mean the same thing. I just realized, that’s a poor observation. Well, I said, yeah. Okay, good, correct then. Correct then, we move on. I think it gets you about 70% of the way there, but there’s still just something missing from the real thing, you know? But that’s okay. I managed to complete Max Payne 1 and 2 using one of those things. Yeah, that’s a game with like… Yeah, yeah, that’s how I played them. I played them with Steam Controller on my TV like six years ago, so yeah. I’ve used those things. Bit of advice. Actually, instantly, I didn’t add it to my list because I couldn’t get Max Payne to work, but I did install it. And while there are steps online to making it work, but I think you have to go outside of the normal Steam Deck interface to kind of tinker with something. Remedy have done like a controller profile for it, which I thought was quite good. Oh, that’s really cool. It’s like… Yeah, so I like the… I think where Steam Deck can only… It becomes better and it becomes more exciting if developers do think what people are gonna revisit our games and go back. I mean, I would argue, if you’ve gone to the length of tweaking it there, why not maybe tweak the thing you need to tweak that it runs on Steam Deck? And nothing against Remedy, of course. But yeah, I do agree. Like it would be nice for the compatibility issues with the old Max Payne games to be solved on PC. Just because they’re so over green. But maybe that’s not their problem to solve anymore. I don’t know. Well, they’re not the publishers. And there’s no financial incentive for them to do it. They sold all the rights to those series to Rockstar. And they’re remaking one and two. So why would you? Well, you know. They made one and two backwards compatible on Xbox. So someone presumably had to do the work of that. It’s probably Microsoft who did that, wasn’t it? But yeah, out of the box, it thinks it’s a mouse keyboard game. But yeah, there is this, if you can get it to work, go into the controller options and there is like a remedy made thing. Which is nice. Ended up talking more about Max Payne than Gabriel Knight. Well, Gabriel Knight, I know really played this for like three minutes just to see what it was like walking around with a mouse per track pad. I went, nah. No, that’s a good segue, Matthew, because my next one is a game I wouldn’t recommend playing on Steam Deck. So, Sekiro Shadows Die Twice, one of my favorite games of all time. I think it was number one on my list of best games of the generation. Maybe it’s number two after Breath of the Wild. I don’t remember, it was fucking ages ago. But played this out of the box really quite slow. I started on one of the snowy rooftops where you fight Genichiro Ashina and there’s all these dudes with twirling blades coming after you. That may not narrow it down for a lot of people who have played Sekiro. It feels like that’s happening everywhere basically. But I thought it was just way too sluggish. And when I tried changing all the graphics things down to medium, it compromised the visuals too much and still didn’t get near 60 frames. And for a game like this, which is all about timing animations, precision based action combat, you want that one-to-one feel of when you slice your blade or you parry, it feels perfect. And just because it’s not 60 frames, it just didn’t do that for me. And I think that you have to change too much of what is great about the game to make it work on this. So that is one I recommend avoiding based on that. Phenomenal game, of course, and it is Steam Deck verified, but yeah, just because you can doesn’t mean you should, I would say. So yeah, not everything can handle it, Matthew. It’s just a way of things. Well, it’s good to acknowledge these things. Yeah, you know, that’s it. I’m kind of installing all these things and just seeing how they variously perform. And in this case, sometimes you can take the frame rate hit depending on the type of game. A couple of games I’ll get into, I think, prove that. But this is one where you just need to play it with the best hardware you’ve got. So no one even on consoles, it was at launch, it was 30 FPS, but you can play it on the more recent ones at 60 FPS. And that is just so the way to enjoy this game, I think, not to be a frame rate guy, again, talking about things I don’t understand. So we will see you on the next one, Matthew. I played a little bit of AI The Somnium Files, which is a visual novel from the chap behind Zero Escape Games. It has a sequel out now called the, I want to say something like the Nirvana Initiative. Yep, that’s right. Yeah, which I haven’t played yet, but I need to because I really like this first game. This is one that I did play through on my desktop PC originally, and I remember thinking, what a huge pain in the ass this was. Just having to sit watching largely static scenes and just clicking, sitting at my computer. It’s not a very dynamic or engaging PC experience. I don’t like visual novels on PC. I try and play them on Switch if I can. Yeah, this one, I just wanted to do a very simple, can I lie down in bed and physically hold the Steam Deck where I need to hold it comfortably? Like, will it rest on my belly? And it did. Obviously, this is a genre that isn’t graphically demanding. This is one of the fancier ones and it has quite nice 3D models. But yeah, I mean, really confirming what I thought would be the case is that this is just a really nice place to play visual novels. Like, Switch can also do these things absolutely fine. Like, there’s no technical demands that would trouble the Switch in the genre, I don’t think. So really, it comes down to like, can you get them cheaper on PC? Which the answer tends to be yes. This one is like, I think it’s like 50 quid on the Switch, like pretty much all the time. Very rarely comes down in sales. A lot of the sort of more niche kind of visual novel games tend to be a bit rough for that. But yeah, on PC it was, you know, that’s why I bought it on PC back when, because it was cheaper. So yes, you know, surprise, surprise, Steam Deck. Good for that. Yeah, for sure. I think another notable event that happened last week when I was, you know, compiling games to play on the Steam Deck was adding games published by Spike Chunsoft to my wishlist. That was a lot of that going on last week. And yeah, because I, you know, I sort of am very aware that the nonary game Zero Escape is not available on Switch, but it is available on PC. During a sale, it will crash down in price to very, very cheap. And PC has a much more complete selection of visual novels than the Switch does, seemingly. Or at least, you know, comparable. Yeah, yeah. If you’ve only got access to a Switch, I think you’ve got like a lot of the big hitters that you’d want. But PC, there’s just, yeah. Like, you know, they come to PC way, way earlier, and there’s like room for like fan translations and things like that. Yep. Plus, you know, have you heard of a little game called 4-2-8 Shibuya Scramble, Matthew? You could play that on the Steam Deck. Yeah, not on Switch. Exactly. That would be a great, that should be a great game. I don’t know why I didn’t test that, actually. That’s on you, but we can always talk about that another time. That’s fine. Yeah. Cool. Yeah, yeah, that’s a good shout out because I did buy the first of these games on Switch as well. And so I did pay not 50 quid, but about probably about 20, something like that. So, yeah. That must have been in a sale. Yeah, it was. Yeah. But for a long, long time, that that price did not come down by more than a few quid. So I completely feel you on that. Like the prices just crash on PC a bit faster for whatever reason. So nice to have that flexibility and a lovely screen for visual novels as well. I think it’s just… By the golden age of Jazz Awakening. I think that’s on PC. That’s good. Does that ever come down from 70 quid or whatever it costs when you bought it? I don’t remember. OK, good. So my next one, Matthew, is a very obvious one, Hitman 3. So I actually only ever played this through the Epic Game Store launcher, like I said, but runs really nicely. Like it sort of seems to run at about 30 to 40 frames per second. It goes slightly higher than your basic 30 FPS. You can see it being smoother when it’s quieter on screen. But generally speaking, you’re getting a sort of like PS4 level experience, I would say, in handheld form, which is obviously fine because Hitman is a very graphically intensive series. I only played a couple of levels but thought that it looked fantastic. On Steam itself, the Steam version is deck verified. So I think this is like a perfect Steam Deck game, Matthew, because, you know, once you get, once you’ve experienced all the kind of story content, quote unquote, of a Hitman level, it becomes about optimization. And, you know, having a run at a level and trying to string together a few kills can, that’s something you can tend to do in about around 10 minutes once you get used to each level. So it was really, really nice to just walk around the Hitman Island DLC level. I did that one and then I did the Hitman Bank as well. I just sort of have a wander around the DLC levels. These are maybe like the, some of the less intensive in terms of numbers of NPCs. Maybe I should have given Paris a well. But I understand this does seem to run pretty well on this, on Steam Deck without many compromises, Matthew. So I was very impressed by it. And I definitely think that like, I could see this becoming the primary platform for Hitman for me, much as I love the spectacle, the optimization side of things. Lovely to play a bit of Hitman in bed, you know what I mean? About 20 minutes before you get to sleep, pretty good. Yeah, and while they are like visually very rich games, they’ve also got just such amazing winning, like broader world design and like art direction, that I think you can dial that stuff down and they still have like mega oomph to them. Yeah, likewise as well. It’s not a game that’s, you know, it’s not like Sekiro, it’s not an action game. It’s a lot of the time all you’re doing is choking a guy out. It’s a very straightforward action to perform. So it doesn’t matter that the frame weight is not as high as it could be. That stuff doesn’t really matter at all. So, yeah, perfectly at home on here, I found. Yeah, maybe there’s some more tinkering to be done so it doesn’t drain the battery in 50 minutes or whatever. But hey, what’s your last one here, Matthew? Castlevania, Lords of Shadow 2. Yes. I just wanted to play something from that sort of tail end of the 360 PS3 generation. Always a very good looking game. For its many flaws, it has some absolutely amazing Mercury Steam art design. Obviously, I love the first game. Second game’s a little bit ass compared to it, but it still has its charms. The Gothic Castle in particular. So yeah, I put this on, had a little run around Dracula’s Castle just to see how it ran. And yeah, it’s like playing the premium version of that console game. It’s 60 frames, no problems with any of the graphic settings. I don’t know if that’s draining the battery horribly. I’m not clever enough to look into those things. And while I was only tinkering for a short while, the controls held up perfectly. Buttons wise, it’s quite an intensive action character action game. So yeah, I was very impressed. I’d hoped it was going to have wound you up a bit more, but I tested that of all things. Is there a way in which these games have wronged me that I’ve forgotten about? Was there a draft where I lost? No, it’s a sport that we always bring up. We mention Lord of Shadow 2 more than any other podcast has or should. I was there thinking, why wasn’t it in your 2013 list? It was a 2014 game, right? For you, all video games ended in 2014 when this released, didn’t they Matthew? This was the peak of the medium for you. Yeah, I don’t know much about this one. I always just knew it didn’t have as good a reputation as the first one for whatever reason. Yeah, but in terms of when these things came out on PC and they put the PC ports, there was like the wow factor of, oh, I kind of played everything half settings on 360 where it was originally released and this sort of unleashes it and that you can now play that standard on a handheld is pretty cool. Yeah, one thing I downloaded but didn’t play actually was DMC as well, which is from the same time, adjacent type of game. So I imagine that would run great on there just in terms of the demands of it and the time it came from and the fact it was well optimized to begin with. So yeah, good pick, question mark. No, that’s perfectly fine, Matthew. Will you be playing the original Lords of Shadow as well? Is that something you’ll go back to on a handheld? Yeah, I mean, that was… Yeah, they were both… The first one was really well received on PC in terms of the port. They did a really, really nice job and it’s such an ornate game that actually it really does benefit from being on more powerful hardware. It kind of stepped up very nicely. So, yeah, I will try that at some point. Cool. Well, I’ve got four more here and Matthew’s done his, so I’ll try and cluster them together so it’s not just me talking at Matthew. You’ve played a lot more. I’m keen to hear your thoughts. Well, I suppose there’s not really a link between these first two, Broforce and Yakuza Kiwami 2. Broforce, a Devolver Digital published, free lives made, side-scrolling shooter made for co-op, that are released in around 2014, feels like a very 2014-era indie game, I would say, kind of like retro pastiche. You play as all these different sort of parodies of action heroes from films based on Terminator and various Chuck Norris bullshit and, you know, all those kinds of people. So it’s that, combined with this very physics-intensive environmental destruction where things are blowing up all the time. And like, even though it looks visually simple, it is kind of spectacular at the same time because there’s so much going on in terms of falling objects and things exploding. Even at the time on PS4, it has some framerate issues. So I was keen to play this under Steam Deck because I thought, well, you know, it’s got the power for it. And it’s kind of a very, and again, a very snackable style game that’s ideal for a handheld. And yeah, I absolutely love Broforce. I think it’s just one of the most, like, switch-your-brain-off-fun indie games I can sort of remember playing from the last decade and really spot on for it. Did you play this one, Matthew? I haven’t played it, no. Yeah, I feel like it was pretty popular at the time. I think it was a PS Plus game, so a lot of people did get it. But yeah, it was fun to go back to it. Then Kiwami 2, obviously Yakuza, we have done a podcast on that before. We’ve talked about Yakuza a lot on these podcasts. Matthew admiring the old man faces in the game, stuff like that. And Fabrics, amazing Fabrics. Amazing Fabrics. I will say, actually, because this is the first one I’ve played in there more recent. Is it the Dragon Engine that they’ve got? Right. I got to properly appreciate just how detailed those old man faces really are. They’re amazing. This is an amazing looking game. Yeah, it is. I did question, am I missing out on some visual spectacle by moving it to the handheld? The answer is, maybe I am, but I do think it works better on a handheld than Sekiro does, for example. I think that’s partly because you have this very brawlery combat that’s not as precision heavy. Yeah. And it does still look amazing even with the sort of like slight visual compromises you’ll make to get the frame rate quite smooth. I don’t know if it’s still advised or not, but again Matthew, because I own this on PC, I didn’t want to sit at my desktop playing this, a Yakuza game, do you know what I mean? It feels like it should be in the house. So yeah, yeah. Did you finish Guam too? There’s something particularly bad. I played Yakuza Zero on PC and there’s something about like whenever you’re doing like the smutier elements, there’s something about doing that at the worktop. It’s like you’re infecting like your workplace or your business place by like running a girls club or the thing where you ring up all the girls and try and chat them up or the thing where you watch the videos of them having bubble baths. I don’t think you have to do that, but you know, the option’s there. There’s something like, there’s something, I don’t know, it’s the cliché of someone being walked in on when they’re on their PC doing something dodgy and it’s, even though it’s a game, I still feel like if there’s something seedier, like when you blast out on the TV, it somehow softens the edges on some of these games because you’re like, yeah, here we are, we’re in the middle of a house, we’re watching some something that’s slightly raunchy, but deal with it. On your PC, it’s kind of like private. Your PC is where you do your private spreadsheets. It’s a bit like someone walks in on you and you’ve got, there’s no light in the room. It’s pitch black. The only light is emanating from the monitor. And you look inconspicuously sideways at the person who’s come in. That person will never believe you are doing something innocent. Yeah, that is absolutely 100% it. It’s the sight of someone lit by a PC monitor. It’s the unholiest of light. Whereas when you’re playing Kiwami 2, you’re like, hey, enough of this game. Let’s put a Denise Richards movie on. And it’s like, yep, that tracks, that tracks. Okay, good. Yeah, some real insight there about Kiwami 2. I look forward to playing more of it. If anything, you can, like, handheld, you can kind of keep private things even more private. Yeah, that’s true. No one needs to know about it. But I don’t consider Kiwami 2 to be blocked. You can be like, what are you doing? And you’re like, I don’t know, just playing Grindstone or whatever. But actually, bubble bath o’clock. Yeah, for sure. Okay, good. Well, a lot to think about there in terms of… Yeah, I would say so. Okay, next up then. My last two games here are kind of combined because they are sort of linked, actually. So there’s No Man’s Sky and Sunless Skies. So a couple of thoughts here. So No Man’s Sky is a game I actually bought in the Green Man gaming sale last week. It was like 16 or 18 quid or something, which I thought was a good price for it. Obviously, they’ve kept updating it in the years since release. I played it in release. I’m afraid I didn’t like it one bit at all. Yes, the planets look nice, but the core loop of finding resources, it was making it too hard to get to the visual spectacle stuff. Do you agree on that, Matthew? Yeah, there was no game in it, you know? Yeah. So I know they’ve added a bunch more stuff. I can’t speak to that because I’m still too early on, but I did put creative mode on. It has quite a few different ways you can start the game now. Created mode essentially takes out the resource gathering elements, so you can just enjoy the spectacle and the journey a bit more. Did that, and then kind of just wandered around a planet, got on a ship and kind of flew around a bit. And it is really nicely calibrated for the Steam Deck. I think it’s because while the planets look nice, they’re never sort of hyper detailed. It’s not like playing a Jedi Fallen Order with a planet. It’s obviously, you know, the textures are made for that one planet and stuff like that. Everything’s a bit more sort of like, you know, it’s procedurally generated, so bits and pieces being thrown together, but none of it looks that complicated. Yeah, so, you know, kind of quite nice to play a sort of game that’s got infinite worlds, but in the tiniest form factor possible. Infinite worlds in the palm of your hand. Yeah, and I know this, I don’t know what the Switch version will be like of this, but on Steam Deck, it’s more than acceptable. I was actually quite impressed by it. So, very, very good. Sun Disguise, even more perfect. So, text-heavy, narrative-centric game from Failbetter Games. Makers of Fallen London. They previously made Sunless Sea. This is like a… Sunless Guys is the kind of like flying through space in a kind of steampunky ship accompaniment to Sunless Seas, which is about basically a submarine navigating like basically the Fallen London universes under underwater sort of like world. Really kind of like visually spectacular, even though all you’re doing is obviously looking at 2D art sort of from this top-down view. And the writing is perfectly legible on there. The 2D art just looks really nice when kind of like shrunk onto a screen like that. Just beautiful sort of like design and kind of sense of universe. Really, really good. And this is another game that I played at the start of the pandemic a bit, then found it maybe a bit too heavy. Literally, the last time I played this was the 15th of March 2020, like grim times. So yeah, going back to the Steam Deck is kind of perfect. And I’ll definitely like play a bit of this before bed each night. I’ve put the merciful mode on so I don’t have permadeath, Matthew, because I’m a bit of a coward. Yeah, do either of those appeal to you on a handheld? Yeah, I mean, I have very little experience with the Sunless Games. That’s a bit of a blind spot for me, so I need to dive into those and see what makes them tick. No Man’s Sky, I played a chunk of when I was on RPS, because that’s when they bought out the first big update that kind of like gave it the base building and it took a lot more shape. And I made a very successful tips video, which was like a great early start on that channel and everyone was like, oh yeah, maybe this guy knows YouTube. And obviously not. But yeah, not a huge amount of desire to play it, but the idea of it being on a portable is kind of cool, for sure. Yeah, I think some of this guys is likely to get more time from me on this, just because it’s just so, the kind of like quick, you know, sort of like resume function is essentially perfect for something like this. So yeah, I would say that, you know, I can’t speak for Fallen London, I’ve never played that. I’m only kind of like vaguely aware of the form of it and how that works, but Sunless Skies is really good as a standalone bit of, a bit of sort of game to enjoy, essentially a bit of universe to kind of like pass. It’s not too complicated. There is a Switch version as well, but you know, because I got a Steam Deck, this saved me from buying the Switch version. So I was quite grateful for that. So yeah, those are my games, Matthew. Some of the tweets about it, I sometimes think, hmm, La-Di-Da? La-Di-Da or what was that, Diddle-D? It’s not that one. It’s not Diddle-D, because it’s like the opposite of it. Because it’s all sort of Eldritch horrors in an eternal abyss. Like, I doubt there’s a coffee shop run by a fucking depressed moose or something. Yeah, maybe there is one run by a depressed sort of demonic entity or something like that. Yeah, just a void that sprays espresso out. Something I didn’t pick you up on earlier, actually, is when you were talking about your family rift. You said it’s opened up a rift. And I thought, has Matthew been playing Dragon Age Inquisition? Because that’s more of an interdimensional rift than family members falling out over a Nintendo Switch Online subscription. Which, don’t get me wrong, is a lot more fun to me as a person. Yeah, so that’s my little journey with the Steam Deck so far, Matthew. I hope you can have enjoyed me babbling on a little bit there. No expertise whatsoever on the technical side, but just some anecdotal experiences. But I think that’s what people need, isn’t it? Because I think the problem with a lot of these things is that the initial wave of stuff you get online is from very tech savvy people or people who are so kind of entrenched in PC gaming that what is and isn’t acceptable maybe isn’t that useful to people who are potentially coming into this ecosystem for the first time or whatever. So actually, yeah, like I would I much rather hear the experiences of you and our excellent letter writer who both seem to come to the same conclusion, which is that, you know, it just hit this very particular sweet spot for both of you. And, you know, maybe judging that sweet spot when you don’t have one of these things is going to be hard. But maybe that’s where this thing lives. It’s just it can it’s so it can speak so specifically to very particular tastes and habits. Yeah, yeah, I think that there’s definitely some some some logic to that and a through line. So I was actually because I hadn’t read the letter in full before I started going. And I was like, oh, yeah, this does tally quite a lot with my experiences. So, yeah, thank you for that, Andy. That was very, very good. So of the games I discussed, yeah, Secure is the only one I would say don’t bother. Just play on a regular PC or a console or something. But I think that’s because, like I say, it’s the most recent blockbuster level intensive game on there. And those games are always going to be compromised because it’s interesting seeing that, like, you know, Jedi Fallen Order was one of the games they used to advertise it. But, I mean, will the next one run on Steam Deck? Maybe at a push. But you would think that that only coming to PS5 and Xbox Series XS is going to be more intensive and less friendly to the handheld. So you would just hope that people will exercise caution in thinking this thing is going to play all new games forever, because I don’t think it will. In fact, it definitely won’t. But what it does do is still incredibly impressive, particularly for the seasoned Steam user. So that’s the end of the episode, Matthew. That was good fun. So that took us exactly the length it took England to win the Euros against Germany. Oh, congratulations. I was really sad to miss out on that in recording this podcast, actually. Oh, were you? I didn’t know if you had any investment in it. Yeah, I’d watched the semi-final, but what were you doing? Oh, sorry. I assumed we were doing this now because we were grouchy and didn’t care about football. No, I was invested in their success. It’s a nice story. Yeah, well, spoiler alert, they won. Well, there you go. For anyone who saved it a week, which people always do when they’re watching football, don’t they? To watch the match that they highlight or whatever, then spoiler alert. I was getting through a whole week not knowing and this is where you found out. We’ll be back next week with, I’ve already forgotten what it is, the mailbag and minigame for all listeners. But as mentioned, patreon.com/backpagepod. If you’d like to listen to the Hitman levels re-ranked, we only ever did a top 10 before. So this time we’ll do all of them, including Ambrose Island, the new one, and that will be the entire content of the podcast. Back us to the £4.50 XL tier level. You can listen to that and all the other Patreon stuff we’ve made to date. So that’ll be good fun. So Matthew, where can people find you on social media? MrBuzzle underscore pesto. I’m Samuel W. Roberts. You can follow the podcast at BackpagePod on Twitter. That was where you can also find a link to our Discord, if you’d like to join our community. There’s little threads on episode chats and dropping questions to the podcast and stuff like that. You can also email us at backpagegames.gmail.com if you’d like to get in touch. If you could leave us a review on the platform of your choice, we’d appreciate it, whether it’s Spotify or Apple or whatever. Let’s see a review podcast. That just helps push us up the algorithm and our ambition to overtake IGN UK in the charts. I’m only joking. That’s a joke. There’s no rivalry there, just a little gag. That would be a foolish rivalry for us to try. We definitely lose, definitely. A big level one Dark Souls player attacking the final boss in the first 10 minutes. Energy to that. Even just that guy on the horse outside the church. Yeah. That’s basically Scribs. A rich analogy. I’m sure he’ll enjoy that. But yes, thank you very much for listening. Are we back next week? Goodbye.