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Vampire Survivors (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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Let it be known: I actually spent actual money (rather than money gained from selling farmed trading cards) on this Steam game. I don’t think I’ve ever done that before. The things a Steam Deck make you do.

I’ve wanted it for some time. Yes, it looks a bit pants and yes it’s cheap and yes, yes it rips off the Castlevania aesthetic to the point of why-hasn’t-Konami-stepped-in, but there was something interesting about how you just get ridiculously overpowered and swamped by a billion baddies that meant I couldn’t not get it.

What I didn’t know, was that there a number of levels. I thought it just played out on a single one until you unavoidably get done in by the undead horde. Well, that still happens, just you’ve a number of areas to do it in. And, do them all and grab the right items and power them up in the right way, and you unlock the final boss, which I was definitely not expecting to be a thing.

As you inevitably die, play sessions end at 30 minutes whether you want them to or not (unless you’ve unlocked and enabled endless mode). Death swoops in and scythes you, and there’s no escape. Well, there probably is some escape with the right powers and upgrades, but I never managed to get it to work. With increasingly difficult waves of baddies coming in every minute you can’t relax – you have to zoom round collecting XP gems dropped by baddies to power up and keep a few steps ahead of them. With a number of different autofiring powers, from whips and fireballs to shields and spikes, several of which you can have running together, there are unending combinations of ways to kit out your character. There are loads of characters, each with additional skills or alternative starting weapons, to choose from too.

Vampire Survivors is very addictive, “suffering” from a severe case of Just One More go, and it was only because I completed it I managed to wrest myself from its grasp. Although I am very much open for more goes. There’s something about the random drops, the weapon combinations, and the Numbers That Go up which remind me a lot of Luck Be A Landlord. They’re totally different games, but they both give you the same feeling when you play them.

Oh, apparently there’s DLC. Oh no.

Little Inferno (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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Is this the third platform I’ve played and 100%ed this on now? Probably. It’s still great. I suppose I’d not realised before but Little Inferno is really “just” a simple clicker game. You buy things to make money (by, er, burning them), with which to buy more things. Which you then also burn.

There’s a checklist of combinations of two or three things to burn together for extra kudos, and a story about the world getting colder all the time, but it’s just the silly but relaxing nature of Burning All The Things which keeps me coming back to it. That and the music. Little Inferno just for me!

Fallout 3 (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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I did so love Fallout 3 when it came out. I completed it, did all the DLC, got pretty much all the achievements and milked it for everything it had to offer. So why has it taken me so long to replay it? Well, it was so big that doing that again was a bit off-putting. But then, Epic gave it away for free and I now have a Steam Deck to play it on, so I thought, why not? Handheld Fallout 3? Which I can play without worrying about how I’m affecting the story because I’ve already done the story? Sold. Well, not sold because it was free, like I said.

So in I went. Considering how old the game is (14 years old? What?!) it still looks pretty incredible. Part of this is probably due to being able to whack up the detail to max on the Deck, and part of it is probably just how impressive it is that Fallout 3 is now on a handheld. Thing of dreams, that is.

I do want to make one note about it on the Deck, however. Because it is an Epic game (and possibly because it had Games for Windows Live surgically extracted from it), it’s a bit crashy. Or rather, very, very crashy. Almost all of the crashes I attributed to Epic signing me out about once an hour, causing it to quit every time that happened. There were also a few “things are really busy” (read: giblets everywhere) freezes, which could be that I’m running a Windows game under Proton. Thankfully, though, I saved frequently and the loading times – even running from an SD card – are almost zero. That in itself is a game-changer, as Fallout 3 on the 360 was really, really slow to load (especially when “checking DLC”) but here you can’t even read the text on the loading screens before they vanish. Incredible.

As for how my play went, well, it didn’t go as planned. You see, I intended to just be a right bastard, murder everyone, steal everything, blow up Megaton – the lot. But I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Aside from the stealing. I did that a lot. I’m not sure it was the morality of killing everyone that made me stop, much as I’d like to claim that, it was more my concern that taking that route would close off quests, make the game harder, and require more ammo than I really wanted to waste. I’m practical, if not moral.

Unlike on the 360, I didn’t complete every single mission, and the only DLC I completed was the post-main-story Brotherhood of Steel one (Broken Steel?), mainly because I have other games to play and I’d already applied about 50 of my precious hours to this as it was, and I’d done it all before. However, I did find some stuff I’d not found previously! For example (spoilers, sorry), at the end of the main game you have to choose to either send the Brotherhood woman into the reactor to flip switches and die from radiation, or bravely sacrifice yourself in the same way. What I didn’t realise, was that if you have Fawkes, the intelligent Super Mutant you saved earlier, as you companion, you can send him in instead, and – being a mutant – he’s immune to the radiation so nobody has to die. Hurrah!

I know many people say that New Vegas is far superior to Fallout 3, and I’d agree to a point, but Fallout 3 is still amazing. The world, the humour and the combat are all amazing even after all this time. But, I can check for myself because Amazon just gave Fallout New Vegas away for free so guess what I’ve just installed on my Deck?

Oh, and I forget to mention! Toilets! So! Many! Toilets!

Shadow Complex: Remastered (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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Back when this came out on Xbox Live Arcade (remember that?), I played through it over and over. I completed, and in fact, 100%ed, every single difficulty setting and then maxed out my level. I loved it, not least because it’s a Metroidvania, but back then the term wasn’t so widely known or used.

I have no idea what is actually “remastered” here. It seems identical to the original, so unless my memory is playing tricks the only real difference is the platform I’m playing it on. Actually, I’ve installed Heroic on my Steam Deck to let me play Epic Store games, and Shadow Complex was free on there years ago, hence why I have it. It’s great on the Steam Deck too, with the fact that (even in remastered form) it’s pretty old now meaning I can knock all the quality sliders up full and it still not even wheeze.

Shooting the windows won’t help.

This is all waffle though, as I have said nothing about the game. Well, you’re a guy who ends up in a terrorist base “by accident” (spoilers: it wasn’t an accident) and while trying to rescue his captured girlfriend from the baddies gets caught up trying to stop them from beginning an attack on the US, finding upgrades and – eventually – a super suit along the way.

The game has a handful of “into the screen” shooty bits too.

Like all good Metroidvania games (and school Geography lessons) there’s plenty of map colouring-in, giant bosses, tricky platforming, hidden areas, places you can’t get to until you’ve unlocked skills and items, and it’s really, really good. The acting in it suffers a bit from overly macho nonsense and hasn’t aged well, but the traversal and shootybangbang stuff is still incredible.

Fallout: New Vegas (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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How kind of Amazon to give this away for free just after I’d played Fallout 3 which was also given away for free!

Like with Fallout 3, I wanted to play this as A Bad Man, but actually, I didn’t. Well, not entirely. You see, I wasn’t really a big fan of all the factions in New Vegas, not least because none of them were truly “good”: The NCR wanted control and land, Caesar’s Legion wanted slaves and loved to murder, Mr House was such an Elon even though he should have died decades ago, and the Great Kahns were happy to cosy up with the Legion and provide drugs to even worse people. The Brotherhood of Steel, ostensibly the “good guys” in Fallout 3 (or as near as possible) didn’t see an issue with melting anyone who had any technology and acted more like the Enclave than the righteous folk they were in Washington. Even the smaller groups, like the Boomers and the Nightkin had “social issues”.

I decided early that the “least worst” of the Big Three was probably the NCR, so happily tore my way through all the Legion on my quest to find Benny and the Platinum Chip. By the time the NCR told me I had to “deal with” the Brotherhood, I couldn’t be bothered sorting out their problems so killed them all at the first opportunity then blew up their bunker.

OK, so maybe I was a little bad.

Whatever. I enjoyed playing through this again, and completed a big raft of optional missions and stuff, although I didn’t do any of the DLC. At least, I haven’t done it yet – there’s a good chance I might.

Oh, and as this wasn’t an Epic store game, I didn’t have crashes like I did with Fallout 3! Well, I had one or two, but I was getting that many each hour previously. Stupid Epic.