Portable gaming has always been a staple of gaming. Dating all the way back to the Gameboy, developers have always been looking for ways to innovate upon the market. Nintendo has the DS family and the record breaking Nintendo Switch, Sony had the PSP and PSVita, and Microsoft has cloud gaming, though rumour states that they do intend to produce a dedicated portable device at some point in the future. That left Steam, the proprietor of PC gaming out of the mix. That was, until they announced the Steam Deck. Boasting itself as a portable pc, with easy access to your steam library, it seemed too good to be true originally. However, after years out on the market, it most definitely was not.
The Steam Deck, in my opinion, is the greatest device to come from the gaming sphere, at least in recent history. Although the Switch was the first of the kind, the steam deck took obvious inspiration and built upon it, and aimed it more towards the PC market. The deck, as I will call it from now on, offers portable access to (nearly) every game in someone’s Steam library, and rather easy to set up access to emulation software, giving portability to older games that players may seek out. Not every game can run perfectly, however, Oftentimes graphics need to be tinkered with in order for a game to run at all, and the Linux operation system sometimes doesn’t allow games to be playable due to anticheat, such as Destiny 2 and Call of Duty. While these games are unplayable through the Linux OS, other options exist that allow playability on otherwise locked games, such as NVIDIA’s GeForce experience, allowing nearly seamless game streaming.
The aspect of being able to play fully AAA games in the comfort of your own bed isn’t one that is exclusive to the Steam Deck, but it is one that it certainly does the best. Being able to play through the entirety of the Halo saga, including multiplayer, or go old school with a nostalgic look back on Spider-Man for the PS1 all while either sitting comfortably on a couch or thousands of feet in the air during travel really shows just how versatile this device is.
Customization is an aspect of the Deck that I wasn’t expected to like as much as I do. The Steam Deck can be customized both cosmetically and functionally. Shortly after purchase, I looked into options for skins and wraps, and was met with pages worth. Among the best I’ve seen comes from the well known company DBrand , who offers a wide array of skins that can be simply wrapped around the device. For the people who are looking for more in-depth ways to change the look of the device, shells would do the job nicely. Requiring a dismantle of the device, shells oftentimes are translucent colors, harkening back to consoles of old. This doesn’t include the simplicity of being able to install a new SSD for the device, which I have done recently, expanding a measly 64GB up to 2TB worth of storage, allowing an almost endless amount of official/emulated games.
Purchasing myself a Steam Deck is one of the best purchases I have made in a very long time. I have predominantly been a console gamer my whole life, with little interest in putting time into PC gaming. However, that has changed drastically with the introduction of a deck into the fray. Outside of a few outliers, most of my time spent gaming in the past year has been exclusively on my deck, be it replaying old games or new playthroughs of previously unavailable games. Additionally, with the constant Steam sales, and various Steam key websites, my library has increased exponentially, and shows no signs of slowing down.
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