Siri

I felt the same way about Torchlight 2 after the superb controller support that TL1 had on the Xbox. But then I played the port they released on the XBox One, and I realised the game was just plain wank

Agreed - I did this to play Clannad for like 20 hours, it works out a lot better than tapping the touchscreen (which isn't really great in terms of response or accuracy - one of the few things that is legitimately a negative about the deck). It's also really good as an action set toggle, or activating gyro as soon as you start waggling the analog for broad stroke movements (and using the gyro to do the precision movements, or adding to the acceleration for 180 spins).

I don't mind that on some games, really. I use trackpad clicks for slower games like visual novels and such, or on Diablo II Remastered / Diablo IV - where the controller is set up to be a controller, and the pad is just there to navigate Battle.net and click the 'Play' button. Inscryption's most popular layout has both the left d-pad and analogue handling the WASD manipulation of the play area, the right analog and right trackpad handled the mouse movements and left/right clicks were on the triggers and buttons. I gravitated to the right analog more, but I think that was because I touched the trackpad, noticed how slow it was and thought 'I can't be arsed modifying this to make it usable'. But, yeah, I wouldn't yuck anyone's yum over it. That's just embarrassing.

Going back to this - yeah, Inscryption runs well on both the Linux binary and via Proton (tried both by accident to try and retain my old completed save, not that it matters). There's like one deck community configuration on Steam that was 100,000 hours, lol. I tried it, it's pretty much all you need, outside of tweaking the sensitivity of the trackpad and mapping a certain keybind to unlock something without beating the game again.

I've still got Game Pass until Oct 2025, but I'll probably treat it like any other entertainment sub after that point. If there's no offers on, Just sub when there's something I absolutely have to play. This year is definitely worth the cash with Forza, Redfall and Starfield, and I'm certainly sure Microsoft will bring something cracking out long after my cheapy sub has ended. The only difference is I'll be paying when something is actually out, everything else that's third party can be picked up on PC for a tidy sum via humble or whatever.

I think in addition to trying Inscryption this evening, I'm going to start the long, arduous journey of starting up every game that I've got installed on my Steam Deck at least once, to prepare for a few long haul flights in a month and a half. The usual suspects are already good to go, I just need to get everything else ready before I promptly ignore them and play Tetris for 18 hours

Should do. I haven't played since Kaycee's Mod got released, but I can have a quick peek this evening as I'm free from the clutches of Diablo IV. And, yeah, ignore emulation if you can unless you really want to play one specific thing at a time. Choice paralysis is bad enough with the average Steam Library anyway. Of course, I say that after spending the weekend playing something that's not on Steam.

Long story short - Xenia's canary branch had some Vulkan renderer updates that makes more commercial games play nicely in its currently experimental state. It's still primarily a DX12-only emulator until the Vulkan renderer is fully featured, but it's gone from 'I hope you like Goldeneye' to 'hey Lost Odyssey is basically full speed even when you double the framerate of the original version via a patch'.

One step closer to having a portable version of my favourite kusoge white whale, Operation Darkness.

You're right. There's probably a load of spare RE codes floating around after that very silly Resident Evil humble bundle happened.

Alright, got to level 25 on Necro. I think I'm happy to call it there. In all, I think I like it. Not to a fever pitch amount like Diablo 3 before it came out, but those were different times. I'm glad that the itemisation is mostly a lot better than Diablo 3's core stat hunting wankery - there's actual affixes that give +1 to skills for one, and quite a few legendary mods do give some nice benefits early on. The lack of sets on launch might hurt, but it sounds like it's more a long tail thing, so fair enough. Also, looks like some passives have a lot of impact - gaining essence on consuming corpses was a big QoL on corpse explosion in my time playing. But most importantly, it just felt right to play. A bit slower than D3 and a lot slower than peak PoE, but combat had weight, played well on a controller and I felt compelled to keep playing. And as mentioned, even on low, it looked gorgeous on the Steam Deck and generally held together at 40hz. And yes, I'm fully aware that the game's online only and playing on a portable doesn't make sense - I've used phone tethering to run PoE maps on a work lunch break, so I know what's up. Unfortunately, I think one of the main reasons I jumped at Diablo 3 on launch because you could pick up a PC boxed game for cheap from retailers, and I wouldn't be surprised if that will no longer be the case after umpteen years. We'll see, I guess.

FYI: This will only work with the very latest Xenia Canary, as it's brought a lot of Vulkan Changes that's made some games like this possible now (and RDR1, but that needs more parts implemented to get a framerate over 10-20fps) - I'm not sure if Emudeck is using that yet, so you might have to fuck around with it. Also, Lost Odyssey is 30fps by default, so to get the 60/40hz stuff you'll need a patch for the game itself. EDIT: here's a guide with a link to the emulator:

I don't refund often, but I think the only time I got refused a refund was when I wanted get rid of an unplayed copy of Gris after it came to humble bundle. Normally I'd be in my rights, but it was like three weeks after I bought it instead of the 14 days policy, so that's fair. I do remember successfully refunding a WWE 2K game on the basis of 'It's not fun', though.

Xenia's coming along As for controller-supported city builders, here's a list. If I was going to try one, It would be either Kingdoms and Castles or Tropico, but I'm not really one for the genre. I usually gravitate towards even simpler games than SNES Sim City, like Dorfromantik and Islanders.

I think it's also server instancing, too, in rare occasions - when I got through the initial tutorial bit, I had that skeleton stutter in town until I went into another area that required loading. The animation corrected itself, and then when I went back into the overworld which is back where you can interact with others it was still fine. Played a bit more, got a couple of legendary pieces now and it's nice to see some juicier suffixes. I'm still compelled to play it after an evening, which is a good sign compared to its contemporaries.

If you're on PC, you can lower it to 40gb by opting out of 4k textures. Which, well, is alright for the Steam Deck. Speaking of the Deck - I followed some advice on Reddit and raised the max VRAM in the BIOS to the maximum (4gb), which seems to have resolved the crashing issues I had. At least, enough where I actually got a good couple of hours out of the game before signing out. As for the game itself, it's.. okay. It looks lovely on the Deck even with everything on the low preset. Very wordy, so I'm not sure if I'll enjoy subsequent playthroughs with other characters. Necro is good fun, I quite like using the ranged reaper attack and then corpse exploding the rest of the pack. It does feel slow compared to D3 and even post-nerf Path of Exile, but I guess they're trying to emulate the grimdark of the first two diablo games in pace as well as theme. I don't think it's sold me on the game yet like how Diablo 3 did with the jaunt to the skeleton king, but I might have a look when it's a bit more affordable.

Boo - played a bit more, game crashed again, look at queue - 140 mins this time. I think I'll wait until tomorrow morning to play again - it's clear I'll have to fuck around with ProtonGE and video settings to get it running well, and I can't be doing that while it takes hours to get in. I can sit there watching YouTube while in the queue, but it's a waste of videogame time!

I use a PS4 controller, it works great for me. Regarding the 8bitdo controller though, have you tried the different modes? Starting it up while holding the button for xinput mode usually does it for me (on the SN30 Pro, it's start and either X or Y, can't remember which). I also had a retrobit Saturn pad that freaks out with anything other than xinput, from testing. And that's wired.

Well, played a good ten minutes before I hard locked the Steam Deck and got back into an hour queue! Could be anything, though, it's a beta after all. Started with Necro, I'm enjoying the Scythe skill a lot to help manage what your summons are killing - it's slow, but it has massive AoE. I also love how grimy the world is and the initial customisation of the character.

Alright, started up Diablo IV and it's in the queue. 100% GPU utilisation while in the queue even with desktop GPUs, though? *Sets TDP to 3w so it's 99% of fuck all* lol

I've installed it, but I haven't ran it yet. I have played other Blizzard games on the deck, though. It shouldn't be hard by following any recent video guide - essentially, they all boil down to running the battle.net installer in proton, finding the files you installed and running the launcher, and then installing the game you want. As an extra thing, you can link to the game's launcher directly and making it share the same files as battle.net, but just having battle.net is enough.

Generally that's the case - unless you're after something specific (like the M2 slot on that one JSAUX dock, or Displayport/Freesync on the Valve dock), they pretty much offer the same stuff on a sliding scale of features to price. Just make sure it has a Gigabit Ethernet port and maybe a HDMI port with a 4k60fps signal, and you're probably good with whatever Amazon has a deal on at that moment in time. Even then, you might not need that stuff, either, which then that makes it incredibly inexpensive.

Yep, that's it. It's been in Proton for a while (As part of DXVK, which handles DX9/10/11, but only affects DX11), but it couldn't be used on AMD hardware because neither the official (RADV) or Open Source (Mesa) drivers didn't have the Vulkan backend stuff to run it. It's been added to both now and has been rolled out as part of SteamOS updates, but as it's still in testing phases you have to use a command to activate it (RADV_PERFTEST=gpl). I haven't had success, though - I've been looking at the DX11 logs and it hasn't triggered enabling it while playing EGS games (which is where it's more beneficial, because they can't access a shader cache distribution like Steam offers). I'm wondering if the latest Mesa/RADV stuff was only implemented in a preview SteamOS update that I'm not on, but I don't want to fuck around with it until Diablo 4's beta weekend is finished. One less headache to worry about, if you dig.

Got myself ready to DDoS the Diablo 4 server with anyone else this afternoon - thankfully, found an old battle.net install and worked from there instead of trying to find where the fuck I put Diablo II Remastered and Immortal (which I really should, as they're *somewhere* in the billions of files between the SD card and the SSD). Everyone including myself will likely shit on D4 not having server capacity for a test, but one thing I do appreciate is the game offering Ultra HD textures as a separate download. A 40gb download was much more manageable before I got to bed. I also bothered to link up more of the games I had on the SD card - namely, THPS1&2. seems to work great, and it's dropping connection to the online services less now (and as a result tank the framerate), touch wood. Still haven't got my head around enabling GPL, though. It'll have to wait until the D4 beta is over.

If it's something genuinely unknown, I'd just.. well, try and play it. If it doesn't work, maybe try Proton GE. And if that doesn't work, I'd probably refund it if it's old as fuck, or look at the discussions in the Steam forums for that specific game. Speaking of which, here's a post from the developers themselves on their discussions page on Steam: