Welcome to this edition of Paula’s Game Ramblings. If you like these random thoughts, you can find the previous Game Ramblings here.
Remember the joy of holding a new console or device? You couldn’t wait to spend endless hours with it, and you wanted to keep it pristine, as it becomes a big part of your life. Well, I’ve had that feeling lately when I received the delivery of my new Steam Deck OLED; I was like a kid at Christmas, eagerly waiting for it to be delivered to me in Belfast all the way from the Netherlands. At one stage, I jokingly asked Yvonne to hurry the HGV lorry that carried the Steam Deck along if she saw it pass by.
Steam Deck OLED
Valve initially released the original Steam Deck in February 2022, causing a stir in the PC world with the handheld device. The upgraded OLED edition with a fancier screen was launched more recently, in November 2023. I held the original Steam Deck LCD when Yvonne visited us a couple of years ago; she brought her Deck with her. I have read the very useful Steam Deck Tips articles that we published when Yvonne got her Deck. However, as I don’t have the original model beside me to compare the OLED to, I can’t comment on how much of an upgrade it is.
Valve does say that the Steam Deck OLED features a larger OLED display with HDR support, faster Wi-Fi, and a bigger battery. Plus, this new model is slightly lighter and has slightly faster RAM. The OLED screen is lovely, much like the screen on the OLED Nintendo Switch. The colours pop out of the screen, and they have a lot more depth.
Can I Hold The Steam Deck Comfortably?
I was concerned about how the Steam Deck would feel in my hands as I don’t have large hands, and I did wonder if I would be able to hold it comfortably. However, the grips on the back of the Steam Deck make it easy to hold, and surprisingly, it is comfortable to hold for long periods. Furthermore, I bought Anti-Slip Grip Stickers and applied them to the Deck to add a little bit of grip, as when my hand sweated, the Deck’s smoothness didn’t give me a solid grip.
The buttons on the Steam Deck OLED are quite far up the unit. I thought that they might be hard to get used to, but I was wrong; they are just in the right place to make playing in the Deck a great experience.
The Games Run Well on the Steam Deck OLED
So far, all of the games I have played on the Deck from my Steam library have worked well on it, much better than I expected. Even the games that were not built with the Deck in mind have run on it. However, when I opened up a game like Civilization VI, I quickly saw a small problem with the size of the Steam Deck’s screen. The text in some games is hard to read; thankfully, I discovered I can use the Magnifier to zoom in on areas that may be hard to read. That is a handy feature.
Playing games on the Steam Deck OLED is a pleasure as I don’t have to sit with a heavy laptop on my knee. I can relax and kick back and play the Steam Deck while I lounge on the sofa, much like I do with my Nintendo Switch.
Customisation
After I played a few games to test the Deck out, as you do when you have something new, I looked at the settings and saw I could personalise the Steam Deck OLED to my liking. The amount of customisation you can do on it is amazing, especially coming from the Nintendo Switch, where there are hardly any customisation options at all.
I changed the button layout so that I can press the same buttons as on the Switch, as I’m old and easily confused now. Of course, those settings are the same as I use when I play games on my laptop, so they aren’t Deck exclusive. I further customised my Steam Deck OLED by downloading Decky Loader. If you have yet to hear of Decky Loader, it allows you to change the background animation on the Deck and add ProtonDB Badges to each Steam game, giving you a better idea of whether a particular game will run on the Deck.
Overall, I am really happy I invested in a Steam Deck OLED, and I can see myself getting many hours of gameplay and fun out of it.
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