Castlevania Advance Collection works on Steam Deck, despite what Konami say

Konami went on to state: "Also, bumblebees cannot fly as the lift generated by the wing does not support the weight."

Konami posted the same announcement on Castlevania Anniversary Collection but not on their other Classics Collections.

Hopefully just a misunderstanding of SteamOS/Proton on their end.

Maybe it's just outdated information on Konami's end?

I didn't work before at least. IIRC even with Proton 6 I had the same issues blocking each game in the collection.

Castlevania Anniversary Collection is also working without issues, same with Contra Anniversary Collection.

i dont want to be the thin foil hat here, but i bet sony, nintendo , microsoft, google or amazon are involved.
some partner of then may have asked then to say bullshit like that.
google had to pay capcom 10 millions to support their platform with resident evil 7 and 8, imagine their face when valve get this for free while they have to do deals?
the same probably goes for amazon and any un stabilished platform.
even nintendo, sony and microsoft strugle to get thirdy party support when they relase an new unproven platform.

i dont want to be the thin foil hat here, but i bet sony, nintendo , microsoft, google or amazon are involved.
some partner of then may have asked then to say bullshit like that.
google had to pay capcom 10 millions to support their platform with resident evil 7 and 8, imagine their face when valve get this for free while they have to do deals?
the same probably goes for amazon and any un stabilished platform.
even nintendo, sony and microsoft strugle to get thirdy party support when they relase an new unproven platform.

Best not attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

So... it actually works better on Linux than Windows because of the headphone thing?! :-D

Castlevania collection working nicely on Deck ?
Ok, I'm sold, shut up Valve and take my money!

Maybe we should understand

it does not support SteamOS

as "don't ask us if it doesn't work, we are not responsible of your experience with the game on steamOS"

I recently played Aria of Sorrow (one of the games included) and it is absolutely a blast, probably the best Castlevania game (not that I have played most of them, of course). It was not as part of this collection, though, I had to hunt down the original game.

I think it is super cool when ROMs are sold like this. They could even be extracted/uncompressed and played on other emulators, though of course the convenience of just using the default it comes with is usually preferable - but I saw a tutorial on how to mod the ROMs (applying patches and re-compressing them), for example. But the Nintendo policy of "no, this game does not exist anymore, forget it and buy the new game" is silly, there should be no reason for this, especially for things like the GBA where emulating the hardware is trivial.

The scary notices that "this is not supported!" are very weird for us Linux users, used to hack everything and run it regardless of whether the devs worked on it or planned it. But for the console environment, where the norm is "no of course you can't run software I didn't sell you, and even that only at my convenience", this might look normal? Maybe they are being overcautious about support tickets, maybe they are half-testy about their games working on a handheld that they didn't specifically release them for (they could be selling a PC version and a Deck version, if it wasn't for Valve meddling too much!), maybe they didn't research and/or test it properly, or something else.

But the Nintendo policy of "no, this game does not exist anymore, forget it and buy the new game" is silly, there should be no reason for this, especially for things like the GBA where emulating the hardware is trivial.

I'm not a fan of that approach, either, but avoiding competing with their own pasts at the cost of not keeping older works in circulation is probably more of a loss to us as consumers than to the businesses that do so, unfortunately.

Maybe they are being overcautious about support tickets,

maybe they didn't research and/or test it properly, or something else.

I think that it's probably a combination of these.


Last edited by Pengling on 3 March 2022 at 5:14 pm UTC

If they merely said that the Steam Deck wasn't a supported platform, I'd just kind of shrug my shoulders regarding the situation and move on. While I hope the Steam Deck is massively successful as it will support the growth of Linux, I can't really fault devs for being unwilling to support something through Proton.

But it's exceptionally bizarre that they flat out state that it doesn't run on the Steam Deck. Maybe it's to head off potential refunds, but I don't know why you'd go out of your way to make that statement.

Konami posted the same announcement on Castlevania Anniversary Collection but not on their other Classics Collections.

Hopefully just a misunderstanding of SteamOS/Proton on their end.

Japanese companies seem to know/care significantly less about Linux than even the major US publishers do. Also, Konami gives zero shits about video games at this point, so I wouldn't be too concerned with anything they say.

But the Nintendo policy of "no, this game does not exist anymore, forget it and buy the new game" is silly, there should be no reason for this, especially for things like the GBA where emulating the hardware is trivial.

I think Nintendo's position is more like, "This game doesn't exist anymore until we can figure out how to sell it to you again."

Maybe we should understand

it does not support SteamOS

as "don't ask us if it doesn't work, we are not responsible of your experience with the game on steamOS"

Sure, but then how should we understand

it cannot be played on Steam Deck

But the Nintendo policy of "no, this game does not exist anymore, forget it and buy the new game" is silly, there should be no reason for this, especially for things like the GBA where emulating the hardware is trivial.

I'm not a fan of that approach, either, but avoiding competing with their own pasts at the cost of not keeping older works in circulation is probably more of a loss to us as consumers than to the businesses that do so, unfortunately.

Absolutely, it is stupid because they should not get away with it, but they do and it is probably profitable. They are not being stupid in a "they are losing so much money" way, just in a "they are making money by pulling an obvious scam and it is not even a cool creative scam".

Castlevania Anniversary Collection is also working without issues, same with Contra Anniversary Collection.

Is it? When I played these collections (two years ago), they ran terribly. Problems with fullscreen, aspect ratio, wrong button binding, glitchy emulator menu, no hotkeys, encrypted ROM files... I couldn't even quit the game without Alt+F4.

Castlevania Anniversary Collection is also working without issues, same with Contra Anniversary Collection.

Is it? When I played these collections (two years ago), they ran terribly. Problems with fullscreen, aspect ratio, wrong button binding, glitchy emulator menu, no hotkeys, encrypted ROM files... I couldn't even quit the game without Alt+F4.

They work as they should. Just with Castlevania Anniversary Collection you have to force quit the game since the Devs didnt implemented an Exit Game option for whatever reasons. So thats an "issue" on Windows as well.

Castlevania Anniversary Collection is also working without issues, same with Contra Anniversary Collection.

Is it? When I played these collections (two years ago), they ran terribly. Problems with fullscreen, aspect ratio, wrong button binding, glitchy emulator menu, no hotkeys, encrypted ROM files... I couldn't even quit the game without Alt+F4.

They work as they should. Just with Castlevania Anniversary Collection you have to force quit the game since the Devs didnt implemented an Exit Game option for whatever reasons. So thats an "issue" on Windows as well.

I don't know what systems these were made for, but on early "home computers" or the like, we didn't have an option to leave a game. I remember I had a game that had a quit option and I considered that so much unprofessional...

Similar case we had with web browsers. Before creating pages supporting web standards was advertisement/focused by professionals, many web pages claims it worked only with IE, but it worked in Firefox (many times) better.
Maybe it's time to say goodbye Windows? It's a similar case.