This is How I Play the Steam Deck

[Music] hey everybody this is Russ from Metro game core today I have a special video instead of the usual guides and reviews that I'll do on my channel we're going to do something a little bit different and that is we're going to talk about what it's like to game when the camera's off so when I'm not actively testing something and trying to get the best performance what am I actually doing in my spare time and as you've probably figured out from the title of this video we're going to be talking about the steam deck this is a device I've now had for nearly a year at this point and honestly anytime I have a spare moment and I'm not playing on like a smaller retro handheld the steam deck is usually what I grab and so in this video we'll talk about my typical use case when it comes to this steam deck and a couple tricks and tips that I figured out along the way now there's a lot more to unpack about the steam deck in fact I could probably make a dozen more videos with different guides and tweaks and things like that but this video is going to be a little bit different we're really just going to talk about my overall experience and so without any further delay let's just jump right into it foreign [Music] okay let's talk about accessories for a little bit we'll start with cases so I'm Still rocking the original case that came with my steam deck I've actually been sent a couple to test out and to be honest I've never made a video on them and that's for a reason and the reason is I think that the case that came with the steam deck is just great there are some cases that do have more bells and whistles for example a storage compartment so you can put more things inside but to be honest even those extra accessories don't really justify an additional cost over the case that already came with it and so when it comes to going on travel and things like that I have usually just been taking this case and it's been working out great and so yeah I think that long story short my conclusion here is that a new case may not be worth it your money may be better spent by getting a better SD card or something else now another accessory I've been using for the past few months is this leather skin from dbrand I actually did a dedicated video about that I'll leave it in the video description below and if you watch that video you may remember that I wasn't a huge fan of the skin when I first put it on while I did find the application process of a leather skin it's much easier than with a vinyl skin I didn't like how thick the skin is itself because it got in the way of some of my key elements of gameplay in particular I found the part along the sides where the skin matches the part that doesn't have a skin to be just a little bit too thick now after making the video I had read that you're able to actually just rub this down a bunch and get it a lot smoother but to be honest I never really sat down and actually did that either instead I just played the thing and it came to the point where it got rubbed down naturally and so as you can see here the dark spots on the skin are where my hands touch it the most so the outer edges here and then the part underneath the triggers as well and over time I will say that the leather did soften up and get more comfortable as well it actually got to the point where the sides and the gap between the skin and the non-skim didn't really bother me anymore now that's not to say that this skin is without fault for example up on the top there are still parts that become loose like the adhesive is not sticking very well and so at least two or three times a day I have to go along the top and then press that top down to make sure it sticks down nicely my worry here is that over time there's going to get a bunch of dust between that Gap here and it's going to get less sticky as well and so to be honest I don't feel like this is a skin that's going to last something like a year or two another thing I really didn't like about the leather skin is that I felt that it inhibited the travel of the face buttons in the d-pad and over the past few months that feeling has not gone away I still feel like I'm not pressing down all the way on the face buttons in particular now from a glass half full perspective I have definitely gotten used to it took me about a month but now it doesn't really bother me that much but all the same when it comes to long-term use of this leather skin I would say that's the thing that bothers me the most however as you've probably figured out in the end I did decide to keep the leather skin on initially I thought I was only going to keep it on for a month but it's been three and there are a few reasons for that number one is that I like that it provides some additional protection to the steam deck and honestly I like the feel of the leather skin in my hands as I'm playing it and so I've come to really enjoy that and finally this one's probably the weirdest of them all but I do like that it makes this theme deck not black at this point I have so many different black handhelds that it's cool to have one that it's leather and kind of stands out from the pack additionally and this is for purely selfish reasons but it doesn't mess up the auto white balance on my camera when I'm filming footage either and so from a YouTube Creator perspective I really enjoy that aspect but just from a playing perspective too I have come to really enjoy it now at the end of the day this is a 50 skin and so it is quite expensive for what you're getting out of it and it is a bit of a shame that there are plenty of downsides to come with the upsides of getting a leather skin like this and so if you are thinking about getting one I do recommend checking out my full review video that I released before but really this is just a note I wanted to add here in the fact that the thing has kind of grown on me over time okay and the next accessory I want to talk about here is the steam deck dock if you remember I did a full review video of four different options that were available earlier last year and as a quick update from that last video I have been using the official valve dock more than the others and I think there's a couple reasons why I prefer it over the others but number one is the fact that it comes from valve so I don't have to worry about compatibility issues or anything else like that it's just going to work secondly I've moved it over to my studio space which means that I have the room for it to actually put on my desk if you remember from my previous video it was a little bit cramped and so I didn't like that setup there now there are plenty of other dock options out there including ones that are a lot cheaper the valve one is something like eighty dollars but you can find some for 50. however one main distinction here is the valve one does come with another official adapter which makes it really handy to have two adapters for different use cases and finally the next accessory I wanted to talk about is my 8-bit dopro controller and I did another video about this one too I feel like a broken record at this point but the only really thing I wanted to touch on here is the fact that it works seamlessly with the steam deck dock in the steam deck in general now when the product first launched and I made that video there were some compatibility issues especially when it came to the analog sticks with certain games but luckily valve saw that issue and they released an update specifically for the 8-Bit dough controllers and now they work flawlessly and so if you are looking for a companion to a dock I think this is the best bet out there it has a 2.4 Wireless signal which means you don't have to worry about Bluetooth pairing or anything else like that you literally just pull it off of the dock and start playing immediately and so if you remember from my initial review of this controller I really liked it and I gotta say I like it even more today now 8bit dough has also released a Bluetooth version which has Hall sensor sticks and I actually got this one in the mail not too long ago and I still do plan on making a video on it and in that video I'll do a comparison between these two but to be honest I really like the pink ones so who knows how it's going to go okay we actually talked way more about accessories than I planned on so let's actually move on to the meat of the video here which is actually talking about what I do when it comes to gameplay and as you can imagine most of the time I'm actually playing in a handheld mode after all this is a handheld PC and what generally will happen is that when my wife and I are done for the evening and we're ready to just kind of kick back and relax we'll throw on a movie or a TV show and then I'll also grab the steam deck to play while we watch and so it turns out that most of the time when I am playing I'm playing it in a setup like that and that actually does dictate what type of games I end up playing on the steam deck for example I haven't really found the desire or to play something like an epic role-playing game where I have to do a lot of reading or listening to some voice dialogue and so when it comes down to it I find myself playing a lot of games that maybe some would consider to be mindless for example I've logged a lot of hours with Hades and vampire survivors as well as Celeste now one of the nice things about playing some of these lower end games like this is that they don't have a huge tax on the battery either and the implication here is that if we're watching something and we want to keep going like we want to see the next episode of Jack Ryan we can actually do that and I don't have to worry about the battery dying on me halfway through and so I've really been enjoying these low end games on the steam deck now the nice thing about the steam deck is that when I have the time to do something a little bit more intensive the steam deck's ready to go as well and so I've been playing a bit of Marvel Spider-Man and then also I'm working on my third playthrough of God of War and there have been some nice updates to the steam deck that have really improved that experience number one there's been a new update to the layout for the stats up here on the top this will allow you to see everything without taking up space in the game especially if you're playing something in a 16x9 aspect ratio It just fits into that black bar up top and so that's been really nice to be able to glance up and see my battery life remaining or the current TDP and additionally since launching valve has been pumping out updates almost every single week and some of those updates have been really significant and have impacted the way I enjoy the device number one is the fact that we have per game configurations that means we can make all these tweaks and it'll stay specific to that one game and so for example with Marvel Spider-Man I can set it to a frame rate of 30 frames per second and that's going to give me a super solid frame rate anytime I'm playing the game but then if I jump into any other game it's going to go right back to 60 frames per second and saving me the button presses of having to go and toggle that has been really handy another update that's been out for quite some time now that is really handy is the ability to change the refresh rate on the screen itself and the refresh rate can go all the way down to 40 frames per second and for many PC games this seems to be a sweet spot here you can set the refresh rate to 40 and then also a frame cap to 40 frames per second and all of a sudden you've got a game that's going to be playing really well and taking up less CPU power and so for games like God of War that's what I've been doing I've been setting it to a 720p resolution and then also setting this to a frame rate cap of 40 frames per second now I will get some dips here and there in some larger battle scenes you know I'll go down to like maybe 36 or 35 frames per second but to be honest I don't really notice In the Heat of the Moment and so this has been a really great experience for me and the battery life has been pretty good now obviously the more intense game that you have the more battery life it's going to take up and so you do have to kind of find that balance but on average I found that after making my per game configuration and all the tweaks inside I can usually get an average of at least two hours of gameplay with any game now of course if you play lightweight games or some retro emulation you can have the battery last all the way up to six hours and so I think when it really comes down to it I usually will have to think to myself okay how much time do I really have and what game do I want to play because of that and so for example if I'm gonna be on a flight from Hawaii to California then obviously I'm going to try to play something low powered so I can get all six hours but if I know I only have an hour or two before I'm going to bed then yeah I'm going to crank it all the way to Max Place something like Eldon ring or God of War now another thing that I've been doing a lot lately that I didn't really expect is when playing Xbox cloud gaming it's actually a fairly easy process to get this all set up in fact the instructions are directly on Microsoft's website I'll have those Linked In the video description below and essentially all it's really doing is running the cloud gaming website through the Microsoft edge browser but I found that the overall experience is pretty dang seamless and I've enjoyed a lot of games that way it's been especially fun when I want to try out a game without having to buy it first for example I've logged about five or six hours of high on life and that's probably one of the big benefits of having Xbox game pass is that you can try out a game and then make the decision later on or whether or not you want to actually own it you know as it stands with high on life I'm probably like two-thirds of the way through the game and honestly I probably won't buy it for full price and that was a nice thing to figure out while using Game passed it saved me sixty dollars right then and there and so yeah long story short in addition to playing PC games I've been playing a lot of games on Xbox Cloud as well all and then finally of course I have been doing some emulation but it's strange it's been less than I thought it would be a few months ago I made a video about emu deck in fact I think that was the last steam deck video I made and in that video I wiped my steam deck completely and then started from scratch and set everything up and since making that video I really haven't done that much to change the whole experience for the most part all I've really been doing is going into desktop mode and updating mudex so that way I have the latest emulator updates but other than that I've mostly been sticking to the configuration that I made back then and so if you didn't watch that video I made a hybrid approach I set up emu deck for my very favorite games only about 15 altogether and then for all of my games altogether I put them into emulation station as well and so with this kind of setup what I can do is I can go into emulation station and browse through my entire library and play the game from there if I'd like but then I also have my very favorites available directly in the Steam OS menu now I was really choosy about what games I put on steamos in the first place and I had some specific goals in mind number one came to Metroid I wanted to play through the entire Metroid series and honestly I just haven't gotten there yet I did play through Metroid zero Mission last year and so I think the next one up is going to be return of Samus on the 3DS and so I'm kind of planning on going through them in chronological order I just need to really get started when it comes down to playing emulated games I found that three in particular have really kind of suited me the most number one has been PSP games I think it's the fact that these run in a native 16x9 but I've been having a lot of fun playing these upscaled and so often I find myself playing Ridge Racer or outrun 2006 from the PSP Library directly on my steam deck another game I've been playing a lot of is Mario Kart 8 Deluxe from the switch and it's kind of ironic because I already have this game on the switch but I greatly prefer playing it on the steam deck instead a lot of that has to do with the overall ergonomics it just feels a lot more comfortable to hold the steam deck than it does a switch in handheld mode and finally two other games that I've really been wanting to play on the steam deck are two old GameCube games that I really enjoyed the first was Paper Mario and the Thousand Year Door any other other is Legend of Zelda Wind Waker now like I mentioned earlier in this video I haven't really been in the mood to play role-playing games just because the amount of reading while I'm watching TV with my wife and so instead I've been finding myself playing Wind Waker but the HD version on the Wii U and this game looks glorious in HD and so I think this is a game that I'll slowly chip away at in 2023. anyway that's really about all I have for this video here I just wanted to take a step back you know sit on the couch and kind of talk to you about my experience with playing the steam deck as a fan of the device and not just a YouTuber earlier this week as I sat down to make yet another review video I thought to myself man I wonder if people are thinking that I just reviewed devices all day and don't actually play games now to be fair since moving over and doing YouTube full time I have definitely been testing more games than I've been playing them but all the same I've really been cherishing those moments where I steal away and actually just play games for the fun of it and as I've demonstrated in this video the steam deck has gone a long way in helping me in that regard and so I'm curious to hear about your steam deck experience as well so if you don't mind leave it in the comments below below tell me what game you're playing and how you're playing it additionally I'd love to hear what kind of content you'd like for me when it comes to the steam deck in the future so leave that in the comment below as well as always thank you for watching and be sure to like And subscribe if you found this helpful and we will see you next time happy gaming [Music]

Channel: Retro Game Corps

Views: 590,889

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Id: 45gcweccfNw

Length: 14min 36sec (876 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 20 2023