For Steam in general: If you are not in a major hurry to get a game wait for sales. There are major sales a few times a year and smaller ones all the time. Add games to your Steam wishlist to get notified when it’s on sale. Check steamdb for price trends.
Check out protondb.com/ to see how compatible a game is with the deck (and Linux in general). The comments will usually have suggestions for getting the game to run well.
This (along with DK Country) was one of the games I was jealous of as a Sega Genesis kid growing up (then Nintendo from the N64 onward) and never really had much chance to play later. It’s nice to be able to finally play through it (legally) with a nice shiny modern coat of paint. As someone who never did play through the original, having this version be essentially 1:1 to it is appreciated, but I do also feel like they could have maybe added more for those who do know the original well. At least it’s not a Pokemon BDSP situation where the devs already had a much improved version to borrow from and just directly remade the poorly-received original versions.
I’m sure once us crazy fans get the chance to really dig into it, we’ll find lots of little things they did. The original game had alot of hidden easter eggs, no way did a new team spend that much time on it without adding a few of their own.
And some of the updates and refreshes of side content mechanics might make some of them a bit more accessible to a wider crowd than they were in the original, effectively adding content to the players that weren’t able to succeed originally. There was some pretty tough stuff in the original for people willing to endlessly practice.
Enable SSH access (but make sure it only accepts key-based logins - password based on a mobile device that might operate in untrusted networks is a bad idea).
If you enable SSH, you can transfer files from the PC over WLAN. (If you are on Windows: FileZilla is your friend.) Also, you can remote access the Steam Deck command line via SSH. (If you are on Windows: PuTTY is your friend.) That’s way less annoying than having to type longer texts (think: script files to launch emulators) with the on-screen keyboard.
I know next to nothing about PC utilization. I’ve mainly been a Mac user, but am familiar with PCs from using one at work. It’s not really admin locked so u typically can use it for personal things; but I admit that I don’t really know anything about SSH access or transferring files via FileZilla.
Is there a good guide somewhere that explains how to do this?
There are plenty on the web (for instance on handheld.quest), but I haven’t found a single one that contains all details…
So, I’ll just try to sum up the details here:
First things first: SSH stands for Secure Shell, and is basically an encrypted remote command line, but it offers much more features than just a command line, including, but not limited to, file transfer. The file transfer feature is also known as sftp, and generally considered to be the successor of the more well known ftp protocol.
The very first thing I would do on the Steam Deck would be to set a host name in the settings, such that you don’t need to use the IP address to address it over the network. Screenshot (I totally haven’t just found by googling).
The Steam Deck comes with an SSH server pre-installed, you need to enable it though. The following steps need to be done on a terminal, in desktop mode. The terminal that’s installed on the Steam Deck is called “Konsole” (if I remember correctly). Once you have a terminal running on Desktop Mode, you can enable the SSH server via the following steps (I’ll link the help for all commands I mention, so that you can verify that I’m not trying to trick you into doing something bad):
First you need to get administrator (“root”) access to the Steam Deck, what can be done by setting a password for the default user. Don’t worry, the Steam Deck won’t start asking for a password on startup, it’s just required in order to get admin access. The command to set/change the current user’s password is simply https://manpage.me/?q=passwd. While typing the password, there won’t be any feedback on the screen. This is normal.
Once the password has been set, you can use the https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man8/sudo.8.html command to run other commands as administrator. sudo will ask you to confirm your identity by entering the password.
To stop the SSH server again, you can use sudo systemctl stop sshd.
To enable autostart for the SSH server, sudo systemctl enable sshd (but I would not recommend this unless you disable password based logins - see below)
To disable autostart for the SSH server, sudo systemctl disable sshd
On the PC from which you want to connect to the Deck you will need some kind of sftp client. On Linux most file managers have sftp functionality built-in. On Windows and MacOS one needs a special program for this though (afaik). There are many, many alternatives here (just search “sftp client” in your search engine of choice), but the most well known one is FileZilla, which works on Windows, macOS, Linux and many other operating systems. I recommend FileZilla for two reasons. The first is that it’s open source (and free of charge), the second one is that I personally like it as a tool. At work I (have to) use Windows, and whenever I have to transfer files to a remote system like our webservers, our contractor’s cloud storage, or simply to copy a few music files from my phone to the office PC (yes, I am this old), FileZilla is the go-to solution for me.
If you have started the SSH server on the deck, you should now be able to access its contents via sftp. The default user on the Steam Deck is called deck, the password is the one you set earlier using the passwd command. If you are lost using FileZilla, there’s a user’s guide online.
Now, as promised, a few words on security and autostarting the SSH server. If you plan on auto-starting the SSH server on the Steam Deck, I would recommend to set up a means to connect to it without a password, and then to disable password-based SSH connections. The reason is that the Steam Deck, as a mobile device, will quite likely end up in insecure or otherwise untrusted wireless networks, and passwords are really not the most secure way of user authentication… Since SSH is a full remote access protocol, anyone who guesses your password and can reach the deck over the network could do anything on it. Given that the deck’s battery runtime is already short enough even if there is no bitcoin miner running in the background, you probably don’t want password based logins via SSH enabled permanently.
That’s where Public-key authentication comes in. You can configure the SSH server to allow users to connect without a password, if the users have access to a private key for which the corresponding public key is known to the server. To enable this, all you need to do is to create a public/private SSH key pair, and upload the public key to the SSH server on the Steam Deck. The exact process of creating those keys is again depending on the operating system. Here’s a guide about SSH key generation that includes instructions for macOS and Windows. On macOS or Linux the instructions are actually identical. You just need to open a terminal, and, if they don’t exist for your user yet, run https://manpage.me/?q=ssh%2Dkeygen to create the keys. Then you can use https://manpage.me/?q=ssh%2Dcopy%2Did to upload the public key to the Steam Deck. Once that is done, if your system uses https://manpage.me/?q=ssh%2Dagent, connecting via public key should “just work” - also in FileZilla. If you don’t use ssh-agent, you can try these steps in FileZilla.
Once you have confirmed that passwordless public-key logins are working, you can edit the file /etc/ssh/sshd.conf on the steam deck. You’ll need admin access, so the easiest way to do that is probably to run sudo nano /etc/ssh/sshd.conf on a terminal (nano help). The relevant change is to replace the line #PasswordAuthentication yes by PasswordAuthentication no (here’s the help file for sshd.conf). In order to apply these changes, you probably need to restart the SSH server: sudo systemctl restart sshd.
KF1 was a huge part of my childhood, and I actually went back recently and started grabbing HoE achievements for the first time. Looking forward to 3 as well. :D
I’m around the last stretch of Live a Live. I bought this game earlier this year during a sale, and it’s a really good game. Every character’s chapter is like an episode of TV show, with varying theme.
The final stretch, especially the trials can be annoying though, from difficulty spikes to long ass dungeon without a map. The other thing that I dislike is that some animation can be bit slow
The game is pretty good so far, and it does look very pretty at times. It makes me excited to play Octopath 2 and Star Ocean 2 Remake
I’m going to make a recommendation for pretty much all the metroidvanias, the deck was practically built for them. The Castlevania Advance collection has three great old games, including Aria of Sorrow, which was the progenitor of Bloodstained (which might honestly have a little too much going on - if you feel like you’d enjoy a simplified version of that, Aria is your game.)
But also do remember to pick up Hollow Knight. And Blasphemous. And if you’re emulating, Metroid fusion, Zero Mission, Metroid prime even, if you feel like frigging around with the GC emus.
Also, Soulslike games play particularly well on deck. I can get a pretty stable 30 out of Elden Ring, I’m sure the older titles work pretty well too.
I definitely am looking forward to doing a HK replay on the Deck. Super interested in getting into emulation too…but a bit nervous to dip my toes into it. Having never been a PC user I’m not super well versed in using them and installing extra stuff on devices like the Deck.
Also: Elden Ring is going to be my day one buy. Been waiting to play this one and can’t wait!
The PS1 original was good, but it had some noticeable flaws. The book writing skill was more or less useless, side quests were often too well hidden from view (which was especially bad when most of them were time-limited), the accessories that gave you items were a bit in-your-face, there was no in-game mini-map, the invisible random encounters and lack of fast travel didn’t age well, and the voice acting… What were they thinking when they released this…
The remake fixes most of what went wrong in the original game, including re-casting the English voice actors, and even adds some new content (like fishing) that wasn’t in the original. I’m enjoying it a lot.
Jagged Alliance 3 - Maybe I was too harsh with this game, but the whole experience felt decidedly "budget." I get that a $45 game today is more like a $30 game of only a few years ago, or a $20 game before that, though everything felt rough around the edges: writing, the sparse weapon and enemy types, the unexciting stock-looking art.
Iron Oath - It's like a hybrid between Darkest Dungeon and Battle Brothers. You manage a mercenary company by hiring and equipping them, then directing them across an overworld map as in-game days pass. Then you dive into dungeons, progressing from room to room very much like DD, and when there is combat, it's turn-based tactics with pre-deployment on a grid. I played this game nonstop for two days before I tore myself away and got my ass back to work lol. My primary issue is lack of content and lack of combat variety, I'm only halfway through the main campaign but after 100+ battles, they start to feel kinda samey.
Despot's Dystopian Army Builder - This is made in the same universe as the creator's prior game, Despot's Game. If you are familiar with these titles, please tell me if/why you like them, because I don't understand their appeal. These look like games, they sound like games, they present themselves like games, but these are not games, these feel as if they were made by someone who has only ever seen other people play video games and never played them personally.
Half life Alyx. I hadn't played it in well over a year, but decided to get the old VR set out again. It is such a fantastic game. The details are absolutely amazing.
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Aktywne