We’ve come a long way since the Game Boy.
Released in 1989, Nintendo’s two-tone, grey-on-green, handheld was the first major success of the handheld gaming market. It wasn’t the first handheld electronic game – 1975’s Quiz Kid might take that title, or maybe 1976’s Mattel Auto Race (a reminder that Mattel, of Barbie fame, was for a time one of the leading game developers thanks to its Intellivision home console) – but the Game Boy was the first to make a major splash. Tetris, obviously, had a lot to do with that, as did the Nintendo cachet.
While I never owned a Game Boy, I’ve dipped in and out of the handheld market over the years, even as I’ve largely stuck with the bulkier console cousins. My first handheld was actually the Game Boy Advance, where I spent far too many hours replaying Donkey Kong Country 2 and 3 – both games I’d already completed (102% and 103% respectively) on SNES – before graduating to the Nintendo DS and its impressive roster of titles. The PSP and LocoRoco followed, and then… that was pretty much it. I have a Nintendo Switch, which I adore, but I personally use it more as a TV-docked device than a portable. (Not to say I haven’t lugged my Switch on an aeroplane.) I’ve never really gotten into mobile gaming, though shoutout here to iOS masterpiece Year Walk, one of the eeriest games of all time.
The Steam Deck, manufactured by Valve, is my latest foray into the format, and, well, you can colour me impressed. Having recently gotten my hands on the Deck OLED, courtesy Valve, I’ve spent the past few weeks putting it through its paces. The Steam Deck OLED is a brilliant piece of tech – dazzlingly powerful, surprisingly light for its size – and comes with a built-in library with (almost) everything I could have asked for.
Read on, for our Toronto Guardian review of the Steam Deck OLED.
PORTAL TO GREATNESS
Much like the Microsoft Xbox before it, the announcement that celebrated developer Valve, best known for the Half-Life / Portal series, was entering the home console market was met with a mix of excitement and scepticism. Excitement because of the Valve pedigree; scepticism about whether they could pull it off.
Having already cornered the PC gaming distribution market, thanks to its proprietary distribution service Steam, Valve’s leap to hardware did make a certain amount of sense. But it was also a gamble: Valve didn’t build PCs, let alone Game Boys, and its success in game development / selling the games of others would not necessarily translate into the success of its own machine.
Still, Valve’s famous founder/co-president Gabe Newell, a notorious perfectionist, promised us that the Steam Deck wouldn’t be released without the gold stamp of Valve approval. Given that Valve’s output includes Portal (one of my personal Top Ten games) and Half-Life 2, we probably shouldn’t have worried so much.
TECH DECK
Built on SteamOS, the same Linux-based operating system which runs the Steam storefront, the Deck amounts to a very small but powerful gaming computer, with touch-screen capability to boot. Right from release in 2022, the Deck worked well, it had decent battery life, and it had a great catalogue – and yet many gamers maintained the same scepticism with which Microsoft’s Xbox was (as it turned out, wrongly) met all those years ago: Would it be able to keep pace with modern releases? Would Valve maintain support in the long term? What was the half-life of this thing? (Sorry.)
The Deck’s successful first year should have already been enough to put any concerns to rest, but Valve had bigger plans in store. In 2023, an across-the-board hardware update was unveiled, in the form of the Steam Deck OLED. (Amusingly, the OLED chip is known as the “Sephiroth”, to the original’s “Aerith”.) Priced at the same point as the original Steam Deck, the best thing about the OLED is its bigger, brighter screen, though players shouldn’t discount the upgraded Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3 support, quieter fan, and improved battery life.
That battery life is key: it’ll still take a beating when you play the newest games at the highest resolution, but you can expect to get anywhere from 3 hours (say, Baldur’s Gate 3) to 10 hours (my personal experience with retro-styled 2D titles like Stardew Valley).
Now that I’ve had some time with it, it’s clear that the Steam Deck OLED is a very cool, very effective, piece of hardware. It looks sleek and modern, but, somewhat antithetically, feels quite a bit like a big ole toy, due to its lightweight build. I love my Steam Deck – in keeping with a proud handheld tradition, it even plays Tetris (Effect) – and I love that it’s giving me the chance to finally work my way through a very long Steam backlog, courtesy a few too many Humble Bundles picked up over the years.
Wisely, Valve has overdone it with control options, combining a traditional d-pad with two analog sticks and two touch-sensitive trackpads, plus four face buttons (your classic A, B, X, Y) and eight more shoulder/rear buttons (L1/L2 and R1/R2 on the shoulders, L4/L5 and R4/R5 on the rear). Given that the Deck is built to play most of the PC games in your massive back catalogue, it only makes sense to offer up so many different buttons which are, of course, freely reconfigurable. Indeed, one of the first things I learned to do, via brain-tingling puzzler The Talos Principle, reconfigured the right analog sensitivity to make the camera more manageable.
STEAM POWER
The Steam Deck was designed to run AAA games, though gamers should be aware it can’t quite play everything yet.
Graphics-intensive titles you can (and probably should) try on the Deck include Red Dead Redemption 2, Baldur’s Gate 3, Diablo IV, Elden Ring, Death Stranding, and the gloriously beautiful Forza Horizon 5.
At the less intensive (but no less excellent) end, the Steam Deck OLED is home to pretty much any one of the great 2D and 2.5D games of, well, pretty much any era. Last year’s hottest new game Balatro is here, as are Stardew Valley, Cuphead, the Banner Saga trilogy, all the Ace Attorney games, and the entire Final Fantasy I-VI Pixel Remaster Collection.
One of the nice knock-on effects of the Steam Deck is that I can also revisit some truly vintage PC titles which have been lingering in my Steam library forever, including the original DOOM, Myst, System Shock, and Thief. As I embark upon my quest to catch up on all the games I missed as a kid, I have a feeling I’ll be making the most out of the Steam Deck.
SWITCHING GEARS
I’ve never been a PC gamer, but I’ve never been averse to PC gaming either. It’s just that, with all the upgrading and custom-building required to keep PC rigs up-to-date, I’ve long been intimidated by the PC gaming ecosystem.
The Steam Deck changes that, to a large degree: it’s a very good handheld PC, and it’s host to nearly every PC game I’ve ever been interested in. There are still some striking omissions – anything with anti-cheat measures like Fortnite or Grand Theft Auto V is excluded, for example – and some extremely demanding games just won’t run satisfactorily, like the 3D bullet-hell shooter Returnal.
But something like Returnal also doesn’t run on anything but the highest end PC anyway, and that’s perhaps where the comparison should begin and end: the Steam Deck is not a powerhouse PC you can carry around in your pocket (for one thing, it’s too big to fit in your pocket), but it’s also not just a portable Tetris device. If there’s a (non-Nintendo) game that you want to play, odds are it’s on the Steam Deck. And that includes many of the games considered to be the greatest of all time, including The Last of Us, Dark Souls, Mass Effect, and of course Valve’s own Portal and Portal 2.
In its upgraded format, retailing for the same price as the original 2022 hardware, the Steam Deck OLED is an easy pick for anyone looking to put in some serious gaming on the go. It’s perhaps too large to tote around on a crowded subway ride, but it’ll do well on, for example, longer plane rides. It helps to think of it as a portable version of that gaming PC you can’t afford: it’ll play pretty much everything that PC could play, for significantly less money and with significantly more portability than a home tower.
Incidentally, it’s also very easy to connect your Deck to a TV with a simple USB-C to HDMI adapter, meaning you can still get the big-screen experience any time you want to. I’ve used it, for example, to play the latest Street Fighter with friends, relying on wireless PS4 controllers I already had lying around. I’ll still be using my Switch (and my PS5) – the Deck can’t actually do everything – but the Steam Deck OLED is definitely here to stay.
I’ve never actually played Half-Life 2 through to completion; perhaps it’s time I give it another shot.
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The Steam Deck OLED retails from CAD $689.00, sold directly by Valve.
