These were the most popular Steam Deck games for January 2023

I'm still so, so surprised that so many top-end games are on there. I only use my SteamDeck for card-battlers, horde-survival and so on. 2D games with slick presentation - that's my bag on the Deck. For anything vaguely powerful, I'm at my desk, beefy GPU, and mouse/kbd.

Witcher 3... CP2077... God of War... Horizon Zero Dawn... Hades... Stardew Valley... All on my Steam Deck.

Lately I've been doing a lot of emulation. I was able to rip my whole Wii library from my old scratched DVD's. I was even able to rip games that wouldn't start anymore in a traditional way.

I'm currently into another Witcher 3 run, because of Next-Gen... I really like the new graphics and FSR2, but content wise... Found the CP2077 easter egg and the Netflix gear set (not really hard).


Last edited by Mohandevir on 1 February 2023 at 6:26 pm UTC

Oh man Skyrim never dies...

My last few days have been completely
dominated by Dead Space. It was rough going the first day, to the point I was on the verge of refunding it, but it got very smooth as time went by and just today I noticed it was actually verified by Valve. Performance isn’t quite there, but it’s basically problem-free now.

I ran out of steam halfway through Skyrim and forgot all about it, perhaps it’s time I gave it another chance. Burnout may have something to do with it, I got through every Elder Scrolls game except Arena.

Yep, I only use my deck for the triple AAA games and it does a great job with them because of Valve devs that work on proton and Community-led GE Proton drivers. Also when big devs get their ducks in order in sorting out performance and bug issues and start patching them for games at the end it works in the Deck favour. I'm enjoying Dead Space remake on my deck, literally, nothing beats that.

Lately I've been playing HOMM3 HD Edition. Yes the GOG version is better, but I never played the original campaign and it was cheap on the Steam summer sale, so it's just click n play now.

Then I even finished Paradise Killer. It took too much for me to play this game, it's one of those gems I would have never bought because of the screenshots: I mistook it for just a visual novel . What a ride! Sound design, bizarre setting, mix of genres, not-so-lazy-as-it-first-seemed-lofi-retro-art. Even the platforming felt good (you would not be punished by falling for example). Can't recommend it enough. It has an unique experience as the cult classic Pathologic and yet is so different still.

Other random played games: for thrill Redout, for chill Grand Mountain Adventure and Hokko Life.

Finally I'm also play-testing a bit of the last alpha test build of KeeperRL which is adding full deck support.

These lists always seem like a testament to the flexibility of portable devices - especially ones that can be docked and used with a television or monitor. It'll be interesting to see what appears on them throughout the coming year.

What have you been playing over the last month on either Steam Deck or your Linux desktop?

I rang in the New Year by revisiting Bomberman '94 (PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16*), which is one of my favourite games in the series and one which best encapsulates what it's all about (it's also the most re-released one, as a result). Bomberman is my favourite video game series, and 2023 marks its 40th anniversary, so this felt like the perfect start, and I'm really looking forward to what's ahead - I'm hoping that it won't be too long before I log onto GOL one day and see a report that the upcoming Super Bomberman R 2 has been Steam Deck Verified, since it would be a very good fit for the system.

*The English version is Mega Bomberman (Mega Drive/Genesis), though it has a bit of a butchered soundtrack compared to the original.

I've also been slowly chipping away at Doom (1993) (via Proton) for the first time ever - the vast majority of first-person games give me terrible motion-sickness, but after getting Steam keys for this, Doom 64, and Doom (2016) in some Fanatical mystery-bundles during the winter, I discovered that, played a stage or two at a time on a handheld (my trusty GPD Win Max 2021, in this case) on the default settings, I can play them and not get ill. FPSes are far from my favourite genre (the only one I could ever play without issues was GoldenEye 007 on the Nintendo 64), but I've been having a good time experiencing something iconic that's more-or-less completely new to me!

On the "endless" front, I've been continuing to enjoy Vampire Survivors (Proton - I'll use the native version when it's ready), Pac-Man 256 (native), Race The Sun (native), and Bail or Jail (Obakeidoro!) (Proton).

And, last but not least, my most-recently-cleared games have been Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge (native), Choplifter (Master System) and Lode Runner (NES).

All of this has been spread across all of my Linux hardware, as listed in my profile.


Last edited by Pengling on 1 February 2023 at 10:05 pm UTC

Been playing a lotta heavily-modded MechWarrior 5 which runs great! I laid off the graphical mods outside of the optimization ones, turned on low aim assist, and it's been great.

SD: What is my purpose?
Gamers: You play Elden Ring.

I find the demanding games are less fun to play because the device becomes thermite and I can hear the fan through open back headphones. But that's just my preference. I'm happy the device is capable of it and helping many games to run outside of Windows, but I'd like to see Sunshine/Moonlight get close to the quality of Gamestream so I can stream the heavier games.

I was able to rip my whole Wii library from my old scratched DVD's.

Got any tips on good tools for that? Does it require anything special hardware-wise? (I think there was some console platform where there was a specific model of DVD drive that would be able to properly read them, but I don't remember details.)

the vast majority of first-person games give me terrible motion-sickness

Then 6DoF games like Descent must make you vomit uncontrollably!

(I think there was some console platform where there was a specific model of DVD drive that would be able to properly read them, but I don't remember details.)

You remember correctly - that was the Sega Dreamcast's "GD-ROM" format.

the vast majority of first-person games give me terrible motion-sickness

Then 6DoF games like Descent must make you vomit uncontrollably!

Hahahahahaha! I'd imagine so! Oddly, I have zero issue with that in flight games/sequences (something which I enjoy), as long as the view is third-person.

I played ELDEN RING whole January (finished it :-)), not surprised it's a first on the list.

I was able to rip my whole Wii library from my old scratched DVD's.

Got any tips on good tools for that? Does it require anything special hardware-wise? (I think there was some console platform where there was a specific model of DVD drive that would be able to properly read them, but I don't remember details.)

https://dolphin-emu.org/docs/guides/ripping-games/?nocr=true

Personally, that's what I followed. I used my Wii and an SD card to setup the Homebrew channel. Once it's done, I copied the content of the USB Loader GX zip file to an external drive (Fat32 partition), launched it via the Homebrew channel entry and began to install my games on the external drive (inserting the DVD into to Wii will prompt an options menu, just choose install). After that, I added Priiloader to my Wii (same as USB Loader GX) and configured it to boot directly into USB Loader GX, so that I may start my games from the external drive... The DVD drive on my Wii is doing some really disturbing noises and it destroyed a couple of my DVDs already. From that point, I recuperated the .wfs files of each games, from that external drive and put them on my Steam Deck (Emudeck). Dolphin can read them as is, even if broken in multiple files (Fat32's 4gb max). The final touch is to configure the controller layouts per game (in Dolphin). There are good tutorials for that if you google it.

Edit: With a simple udev rule addition and a Dolphin USB passthrough for the Portal, I was able to play Skylanders: Spyro's adventures/Giants/Swap Force on my Steam Deck... I connected our Swap Force portal to my usb hub and it got recognized.

https://www.reddit.com/r/DolphinEmulator/comments/k12x1o/skylanders_portal_on_linux/

Seriously, for all games, the visual upgrade over standard Wii graphics completely justifies it (Gamescope FSR, I tested it on my Holiso install on the PC that's connected to my 1080p TV).


Last edited by Mohandevir on 2 February 2023 at 3:16 pm UTC