Post by: u/megas88
I know that I’m a week late as I have had my deck since last Wednesday but I really wanted to get a good handle on most of what it could do before I gushed about it.
I have been playing video games since I was 3 or 4. My first memory of one was being at sears with my mother and late father and they picked up a Super Nintendo that came with Mario Paint. I had a blast with that thing and everything I got to play on it.
I’ve had the NES, genesis, n64, many a gameboy from the original to the pocket to the color to both advanced/sp, the ds lite, ps1, ps2, xbox 360 and the last one being the wii. We don’t talk about the wii anymore. I’m ok with that lol.
When I first held a friend’s lcd deck, it immediately felt like the most comfortable thing I have ever held in my hands. It was so nice to hold. I tried portal thinking ya know, l’ll put it down in a few minutes cause I could never get into it. An hour later and everyone still playing the board game they were playing and the deck would not let me put it down. I have never enjoyed playing portal. I know others have but I never did. Dear god the controls, the trackpad oh god the trackpad and the screen. Everything just begged me to keep playing. I couldn’t stop enjoying myself.
Now I have my own 1tb oled deck with several accessories, almost all of which were somehow on sale before my deck arrived. I am addicted to using this thing. Playing games just to see if and how they run, tweaking performance and playing with deckyloader.
I am still figuring out emulation and will one day succeed at learning how to get my custom boot animation to not auto delete lol, but I am ridiculously satisfied with my purchase. I’m hoping to make a list of things I found for folks that are looking for a reference for things that weren’t obvious or didn’t necessarily have an easy search option. Like, I had no idea you needed to enable steam input to allow custom or community controller layouts. I just thought you simply selected and were good to go. Haven’t figured out how to delete a downloaded layout yet.
My current addictions are sonic frontiers now that I figured out how to get a good and solid frame rate but also slay the spire may be the easiest game I’ve picked up since the nes and snes days lol. Never have I enjoyed failing so much and climbing back up that damn spire!
Tetris effect in hdr is so jaw droppingly gorgeous I can’t even explain it! Spyro runs fairly well at medium and if I don’t mind 30fps, I can go all the way to ultra which is insane!
Having mega man battle network has brought me back to middle school and I gotta say I almost teared up a bit. Also, having a color profile that brings out more contrast in those collections is incredible!
I look forward to unlocking more of my deck’s true potential as I learn more and more. Of course now I am gonna try figuring out how to get surfshark to work so I can use it for stuff in desktop mode.
Overall, ridiculously happy. If you are deciding between anti glare vs glossy, don’t even worry about it. Pick which one you feel you want more. The antiglare screen looks just as nice as the glossy oleds I’m used to.
Happy to be part of the deck gang and looking forward to playing stuff I never felt inclined to play before and enjoy stuff I did even more.
swordfishonthebebop: I’m a tiny bit conflicted about my OLED. On one hand, it’s genuinely the best handheld I’ve ever owned. Love SteamOS, love the look and feel, love the performance and screen.
On the other hand, I’ve run into a few “quirks” that have triggered my OCD all over the place and made me question if my Deck is faulty or not. No sticky buttons, no dead pixels, nothing that inherently ruins the performance and usability. It’s more like cosmetic/hardware quirks? The OLED fan makes a very faint buzz/click sound when starting up, and it becomes noticeable when performing actions that cause the Deck’s fan to turn on then off. No biggie if you disable the updated fan curve, but then the fan is always blowing… on top of that, the haptics feel slightly different from each other. The left is a little more coarse, the right a little muffled. Not sure which is “correct,” but it can be fixed by adjusting the haptic output in settings. I’ve also recently noticed clicking L3 activates my left haptics. Not sure if that’s intentional or not. Maybe it’s just the wiring and positioning of the haptic motors?
So there’s general fixes for most of these quirks, which is awesome, but I can’t deny it’s made me wonder if I’m in need of an RMA. I’ve held off the action of doing so because I fear I could get a worse issue upon return. I’m also probably being a little too nitpicky and overthinking a lot of my machine, because as it stands, the device performs beautifully, and that alone is enough for me to ignore these quirks and love it for what it is! I hope if you get some repairs or a new device, you have a better experience!
wassinderr: Once I equated the feeling of the left haptic pad to a mouse cursor wheel I got over it quick
swordfishonthebebop: Yup, same here!
dlo416: If you're getting haptic feedback when triggering L3, that shouldn't happen. RMA your device.
swordfishonthebebop: This is gonna sound completely insane, but hear me out: I was browsing around to see if other people had similar issues. Found a Steam discussion with a very extensive guide on restarting the device a few times, changing haptic sensitivity. It was getting praised for its success, and helped confirm a lot of it was a software issue. I’m apprehensive to try it because it’s dated from 2022 and the OLED models weren’t even out of course, but I grabbed my Deck to begin with it anyways.
Before I started, in the home menu I put my thumb on my left trackpad and clicked into L3 to see if it was gonna do it again. I kid you not, nothing. No haptic. I can’t believe it. I don’t know if I was imaging the whole thing or if it was a software bug. But it’s perfectly normal now. This has completely alleviated my OCD and concerns of defects. I have done absolutely nothing except what I described.