[Discussion] New month, new games. What are you playing on your Steam Deck? - May 2024
[Discussion] New month, new games. What are you playing on your Steam Deck? - May 2024
Are you playing it with the onboard controls? Do you have any recommendations for making it feel better?
I want to get into Mindustry but the basic movement controls of the ship just don’t feel inspired to me in the base game at least with the starting ship. I mean it makes sense, the focus is more on tower defense and automation, but is there a modpack or something that focuses the gameplay a bit more on the ship movement and combat?
Do you have any other advice for playing Mindustry on the Steam Deck? Which kinds of levels are best to start with and what kind of control scheme do you like?
I play with the built in controls, I use a slightly modified version of the mouse profile. I constantly switch between touch screen and trackpad control and I personally don’t have a problem with it.
I don’t think there are any mods that revamp the ship. The ship isn’t really that important for the game. In the mobile version the ship just flies on its own
I personally would start with planet erekir, it focuses less on defense and more on producing and commanding troops. Also I really recommend pvp.
After beating Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, I decided to revisit the previous game, Yakuza: Like A Dragon. I first tried playing YLAD a few years ago on my gaming PC, but the incredibly long, unskippable cut scenes were super frustrating. Infinite Wealth had some of that same problem, but the story clicked with me a bit more and I’ve fallen in love with the mix of heartfelt quirky gameplay.
Plus, the Steam Deck makes the long cut scenes way easier to deal with when you can just pause and sleep your console if you need a break.
Yeah, I know YLAD has a stretch of fights/boss fight/cutscenes that took nearly 2 hours without being able to save. The deck being able to sleep mid gameplay is the only reason I was able to make it through. YLAD cutscenes are also super sensitive to instability from undervolting, I kept having cutscenes freeze for me but it turns out that I needed to reduce my undervolting setting a little.
Great games though, I recommend them both.
Definitely! The gameplay loop of action <-> base management is super cool. You end up feeling attached to the characters you’ve leveled high, so the missions feel high stakes even though losing characters isn’t really that punishing in actuality.
I thought the game looked too chaotic in the trailers, but it allows you to play methodically if you want to.
I want to play the Dead Space remake, but its like I’m watching a flipbook that doesn’t move nearly fast enough :(
Slay the spire and Portal 2 are my current time sinks tho
Oh, its only 10% off right now
Tbh i didn’t even look how high the discount was, i knew i wanted the game and it was 13$ so i just went for it lol
I’m getting annoyed with the constant crashes of Workers & Resources (Industrial Planning, Construction and Management Game). It is by far my favourite game at the moment, but the game is very unstable on Linux, which can be very frustrating. I’d really like to learn more about troubleshooting compatibility layers and start options.
Minecraft runs smooth with Prism Launcher, which doesn’t even have this annoying credential-loss bug like on the official launcher. Why would anyone map shift to pressing the stick in Minecraft? Proper crouching is but so important to edge-work and digging down.
Every game added to your steam deck’s steam library (whether it is an official steam game or simply a shortcut to a game you installed some other way and are just linking to steam (right click on game or application in desktop mode and click “add to steam”)) has a set of controller profiles associated with it. Your steam deck starts off with some basic templates for steam deck onboard control schemes like Gamepad Layout or WASD and Mouse Layout that map the onboard steam deck controls to what most defaults are for that type of software or game.
You can search for community layouts very easily in the steam deck’s controller menu, and you can go into the settings and start changing things by simply opening up the controller layout menu and clicking edit layout. You have control over all of the buttons and inputs on the steam deck and there is a simple menu system that allows you to walk through settings for everything on your deck (buttons, joysticks, touchpads, triggers etc…).
It might seem overwhelming at first, but the good thing is that manyyyyy popular games already have controller mappings that a steam deck user in the community uploaded to steam. Just go into the community layouts tab and browse a couple steam deck layouts, try them out quick and pick the one that feels most intuitive to you and then just go. Later down the road you can get your hands dirty and tweak the little things if you want (and I promise it really isn’t that overwhelming).
The starting controller layout templates can’t be deleted/written over, so you don’t need to worry about messing anything up either, you can always just start again from the very decent templates and defaults.
Note: If you add a non-steam game to steam so you can play it in gaming mode, make sure to rename the added game (which probably has an ugly name taken right from the name of the file .exe or whatever) to the exact name of the game. So if the non-steam game you added shows up in your library as Minecraft_v12.4_shaders or something you would want to rename it to Minecraft and then ALL of the community layouts will show up for you. An additional benefit to this is if you use the utility from Decky Loader called SteamGridDB then when you open up the settings to give your non-steam game some nice looking artwork and icons in the Steam Launcher, all of the community made steam compatible artwork for that game will show up automatically for you to select. Fast and quick, no text input needed for search, it is fantastic.
(Side note: if it is a windows program you are adding, make sure to go into the gear and set force compatibility to proton experimental, this tells the Steam Deck to run the program with proton instead of trying and failing to run it as a normal Linux program)
I’m playing the invincible but I think it’s one of those game which are a lot better on a big screen, I think I’ll finsih it on desktop.
Wandering sword is pretty good but I think I’ll switch the controls to mouse and keyboard since it’s kinda annoying to use as joystick
Still have to decide on which big game to try, I have a lot of great indie games waiting for me. I have the resident evil 4 remaster to try so maybe I’ll do that
Picked up warhammer Boltgun during the fps sale. Never been into warhammer or played this style of game before but loving it so far.
a mysterious figure in a trench coat strafe jumps out of the alley way so fast you can barely catch a glimpse of them before they shoot a rocket at their feet and launch over your head. Before you can react they are gone.
Wait! it looks like something fell out of their coat when they leaped by!
On the ground is a semi-intact cd-rom jewel case with video game artwork showing some unreal tournament-like ripoff game you have never heard of with the title Xonotic
Do you:
a) immediately go home and install Xonotic on your Steam Deck
or
b) attempt to strafe jump after the mysterious figure
How does this game compare to the more recent Steam World games?
Is Steam World: Heist a procedurally generated roguelike or a singleplayer game with a specific constructed sequence of levels?
It looks really good, I have heard good things about most of the Steam World games I just have never actually given one a try.
Heist has a story and preset levels. Each level is usually a different ship you have to board and clear. They’re all connected by a sort of star map. The objectives for each level are preset. Though, the level layouts may be generated. I’ve rerun a couple and I remember the layouts being a bit different.
SteamWorld Dig 1&2 are platformers. I really enjoyed them. The gameplay for Heist is different but it still feels like the same quality.
I’ve mostly been playing a F2P game called Minion Masters. It’s a card game, but the cards come alive in 2-lane combat like a tiny auto-battle MOBA. It has short game lengths (6-10 min are typical), is generous with F2P players (I’ve paid $0 so far), and has enough strategic (deck building) and tactical (card playing) depth to stay interesting throughout.
It plays great on the Deck without any configuration, even though it’s “unsupported”. I suppose some of the card text might be a bit small for some, but that’s only relevant in the deck building screen where you can easily zoom in on cards. There’s a UI option to read your partner’s cards in 2v2, but I’ve never felt the need to. By the time you’re good enough at the game to react to your partner’s hand, you’ll already know the cards well enough that you don’t need to read them.
I should maybe add that I got a bunch of free cards when they had free DLC to celebrate the release of the game on Android, so idk if my F2P experience is typical.
I’ve been salty over it ever since (around a week now)
Sounds like you have been rather unsalty landlubber!!!
but seriously fuck that ughh
I am honestly incredibly impressed with the show so far. My big question was how the power armor/steel brotherhood were going to be handled because there is a similar risk to warhammer 40k with the space marines or stormtroopers in star wars were the baddy fascist guys are the cool looking ones that look righteous so people begin to casually associate with that imagery… which I don’t think is bad in a vacuum I just think there is a responsibility in 2024 for artists to not make the system of fascism and conservative violent extremism look sexy lol.
There was a big risk of a bunch of business execs looking at the fallout pilot and saying “that t-60 power suit looks cool, make those guys the main characters/good guys” and the fallout writers would be left saying “but… om… I know they look cool but…” and the business executives would just start impatiently tapping their pencil while they wait for everyone to shut up hell up so they can go back to their yacht.
But nah, it is good and it is subversive so far in exactly the ways it should be. I am not a huge fallout video game fan (though I acknowledge the fallout series is undeniably a massive and well loved series in gaming, and for good reason) but I imagine fallout video game fans must be loosing their fucking minds right now with how much better the show is than it had any right to be in the way only someone who has spent decades as a fan of a game series (or comic book, or book, or whatever equivalent) could possibly appreciate.
Inspired by a true story:
“Hugo Boss began to produce and supply military uniforms for the Nazi Germany government, resulting in a large boost in sales.”
After watching Nerd Cubed play Coin Pusher Casino, I also got hooked. Bit of a guilty pleasure, that. But, three things to recommend it, though:
You play tables to get credits, to get perks that make it more pleasurable (not to mention possible) to play tables, to … The very essence of an RPG grind. And a bit of a skinner box.
Finally managed to get my hands on a Deck this last week. Been having a blast with both Hades 2 and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous.
I was a bit worried with Pathfinder since it’s not verified, but I figured the controller scheme would be functional since they have a console version. So far I’ve been quite impressed with how smoothly it controls.
Yeah I usually don’t worry about non-verified games not working. It happens but the overwhelming majority of the time non-verified games work fine.
What to look out for is when a game is verified not to work.