The Steam Deck already has me giddy with excitement, and I can’t wait to play these five games on Valve’s portable PC.
Like countless individuals across the globe, I put my hard-earned money down for a Steam Deck as soon as preorders went live for Valve’s portable handheld. Unfortunately, though, securing the new device was a nightmare experience to say the least – something that I should have probably expected with the PS5 and Xbox Series X still being so damn hard to find. My inability to get my preorder in quickly had dire consequences, sadly. I won’t be able to cradle my very own Steam Deck until Q2 2022, which is still incredibly painful to write knowing that some lucky sods’ pre-orders will arrive sometime in December 2021. The upside, I guess, is that by the time my Steam Deck arrives (I opted for the 512GB model that comes with the anti-glare etched screen because I don’t want to see my sullen face staring back at me during a late night gaming session), any launch day kinks that may occur will have hopefully been ironed out by then. Valve’s lofty goal of ensuring that every game on Steam will work on the Steam Deck should also be realized by that time, or at least I really hope that will be the case. While I have a more than capable desktop PC, one which I proudly built myself from scratch over the course of one terrifying weekend, I spend so much time at my desk these days that the mere idea of booting up a game after work feels completely implausible. And that’s a shame, because even though the majority of my time is spent gaming on PS5 and Xbox Series X right now, there are a number of games in my Steam library that I’d love to play on a portable device, one that won’t come with massive compromises like we’ve seen with Nintendo Switch ’s “impossible” ports. So while there’s no guarantee every single game I’ll want to play will be available on the Steam Deck, these five games have me giddy with excitement at the thought of being able to play them anywhere, anytime and… well, alone. Even after four years, my love hate relationship with PUBG continues to endure, though we’re definitely going through a rough patch at the moment. I’ve sunk a quite frankly disgusting amount of time into the Xbox One version of the game (40 days,9 hours and 12 minutes to be exact), and honestly, I’ve grown tired of how little the game has evolved from a visual perspective since its 2017 release on Xbox consoles. Running the game on Xbox Series X at least lets me hit 60fps now, which I’m certainly thankful for. But it’s at the expense of the game’s 4K resolution that I’ve grown so accustomed to. If you opt for the ‘Framerate priority’ option, PUBG drops to 1080p, and the result ain’t pretty when blown up on a 55-inch TV, guys. What makes things worse, however, is that I also own PUBG on PC. And let me tell you, the difference between the two when it comes to graphics is akin to those hilarious ‘ RTX ON versus RTX OFF ’ memes that you might have seen. You’d be forgiven for thinking PUBG was a different game entirely when running on a capable PC, which makes playing the Xbox One version feel horribly outdated. The dance emotes are still fun, though. I’m cautiously excited, then, at the prospect of playing PUBG on the Steam Deck, though as it stands certain anti-cheat software doesn’t mesh well with Linux, which is what SteamOS runs on.
