I’ll double check on my Steam Deck, but from what you described, many old point-and-click game would also work, since a mouse input without right clicking should translate well one finger touch input. This might make SCUMMVM and all the compatible classic adventure games potential successes. More modern adventure games might also work well.
Like I said, I’ll have to test, but tentatively I’ll suggest:
SCUMMVM + numerous classic adventure games (Amazon Queen and Beneath A Steel Sky are available for free for the SCUMM project, completely legally).
Thanks for the suggestion. “Unfortunately” I grew up with those and know probably each one of them inside out, as they have been replayed multiple times over the decades. But I did not think about SCUMMVM and reading this I get the urge to Talk to Mr. Tentacle Guy again :-)
There are some remakes of adventure game classics out there, Day of the Tentacle specifically comes to mind. Not sure if it’s “one-finger friendly” though.
Got distracted playing Beyond A Steel Sky, and it seems designed more for controllers, with one stick for looking, b add the other for moving. Granted I didn’t force it to use mouse inputs only.
I mean, you got my upvote already, but one big reason is that Robertson wanted to control all the manufacturing of the screws and the bits. Phillips licensed his patent out and let anyone make them just taking a tiny licensing fee. Made a fortune on volume. Robertson: good engineer, bad businessman.
Because hexagonal screw drives are superior, they can transfer more torque and last longer. What I don´t get is why slotted, cruciform and square screw drives are even still around when there are much more reliable alternatives to choose from, like Hex and Torx for example.
Fall Guys, have had it on steam since before it got bought by epic, having the SD and looking for good controller-based games right after I first got the deck convinced me to play it. I’ve played it almost every day since getting my deck in February of last year. Had been getting a bit bored of it just before the constructor update (user built levels), and the fact that it was broken for ~a week after an epic games services update didn’t help, but the new constructor levels sucked me back in. I usually play it in the morning to help me wake up, the whole bright colors & tight races thing really help my brain to start turning on.
Mostly I’ve used the Deck to continue playing my primary games on the couch or on the go. Elden Ring and RDR2 look and play fantastically once you tweak them a bit.
Smaller games usually run perfectly out of the box. The only ones I’ve played exclusively on Deck so far are Super Pilot (indie F-Zero), Ultimate Chicken Horse (Mario Maker-ish), and Mark of the Ninja.
I just got into Pokemon Xenoverse last weekend and it looks and plays similar to what I imagine a modern pokemon game would feel like if nintendo and gamefreak decided to make a 2D main series game again.
It blows my mind that European pokemon fan games like Realidea System and Xenoverse are so polished that they could possibly be official titles in terms of quality and feature implementation.
Nosferatu: The Wrath of Malachi - This has been sitting in my Steam library for a few years, and I finally decide to try and give it a go. I'm usually a sucker for vampire games, but I'm not sure how I feel about this one. There's so much backtracking, and not in a fun, Resident Evil kind of way. And I guess some of the deaths are either on a timer or scripted? Either way, because I didn't really "know" anything about any of the characters, I didn't have that sense of urgency to get to them so quickly. Like who even are these people to me besides just my relatives? I didn't end up finishing it, but I think I'm going to try to give it another go before putting it in my 'meh' pile.
Diablo 3: Season 29 - Finished the Destroyer chapter! The conquest that finished it out ended up being to complete a level 45 rift with no set pieces. Now I'm taking a little break from it before I start working on the Conqueror chapter.
Diablo 4: Season 2 - I am despising Helltides right now and trying to get Living Steel. That is all.
I finally finished my second run of BG3 myself for a grand total of about 200 hours. I haven’t played a single game that much probably since Oblivion 15 years ago, and I racked those hours up over a much longer period of time. It’s difficult to comprehend, no less express, how monumental an achievement this game is. The only thing that stopped me immediately rolling another character is the memory of the final gauntlet of major battles in act 3 (including the one who sings their own boss theme, which I didn’t do the first time). I’m not following any build guides or anything, so it’s been a pretty stressful week of game time and I’m ready to relax a bit.
On that note, I started playing Omno. It’s fine. Nothing really stands out: not a big fan of the art style, the score is pleasant but not as noteworthy or impactful as something like the score in Gris, and the gameplay is simple and tight. I think I’d have lost interest if I wasn’t playing immediately after 200 hours of BG3. But since I am, it happens to be hitting the right notes.
Magic the Gathering: Arena grabbed my attention again after our friend group picked up the cards again. When I dont play modern stuff I’ll boot up my PS2 and play Monster Hunter 2 (DOS) online. Some smart folks brought back a private server for the old PS2 era games. Great Community (MHOLDSCHOOL Discord, also hosts of the Server) and a change of pace.
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.
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