Hello this is the Provoked Prawn and in this video I want to talk to you about why the Steam Deck
sucks or at least why it sucks for me and that's because this device gives me more chances to play
more games around different places in my house which has LED to my wife complaining at me a lot
more and my marriage being more uncomfortable but let me tell you my gaming experience is a
lot better and now have the flexibility to play a variety of games in all sorts of places not
just at my desk and in my gaming PC but also in various different places around my house now I can
finally lounge on the sofa and play all the games that I don't have enough time to play otherwise
and enjoy some of those experiences but obviously I'm getting it in the neck regularly so I then
have to battle with those problems but if you're interested in playing games in a more free way
then the Steam Deck is obviously a great option to use now I was curious about what this experience
would be like obviously coming from a pretty high-end gaming PC I was concerned that moving
to a handheld console of a gaming PC would be a lesser experience and frustrating one but I was
actually surprised by just how good it has been and how successful the experience has been as well
now this is obviously a battery-powered device and I've had a lot of experience with gaming laptops
over the last few years and my general experience has been that if you're not using a gaming laptop
plugged in and the graphical power of it isn't as good the FPS isn't as good in the experience
isn't as smooth but what I found with the Steam Deck is that you can play untethered on battery
quite comfortably without much issue and it runs really smooth and really well now I've played a
number of different games and I'll link to a video in the description where I did a stream
using this uh for a couple of hours twice on my gameplay channel where I show off various
different games that I've played but I've tested out all sorts of different games you can see me
playing no man's sky here but I've played a little bit of Forza Horizon 5 at dirt rally and other
games on it too and it's been a great experience all over obviously a little bit less power
but a lot of other things of interest now I'll talk to you about that as we go through I'm also
going to unbox the Steam Deck now and just show you what's included in the box you've probably
seen this already if you're interested in the Steam Deck now this was the q2 batch I was unlucky
and that I wasn't fast enough to pull the trigger on this so I had to wait quite a while I've had
it for a bit now and I haven't had a chance to do a video on it yet but I wanted to talk to you
about my experiences and what it's been like now I bought this thing because I wanted to be able to
play games that I don't have enough time to play on my main machine and to be able to do that in
a free way getting into kingdom come deliverance for example is something I'd like to spend more
time on I really love that game but I haven't put enough hours into it and no man's sky that
you could see me playing there and I wanted to be able to play those games and enjoy them in more
places and with more freedom I also was curious about how many games would run now one of the
things of interest is that you can find out before you purchase the Steam Deck just how many of your
games are verified as playable I've got about 900 games in my library and at the time first
purchasing it and getting out of the box as you can see me doing now I found about 90 something
games were verified or marked as playable at least has actually increased since I got this original
footage and now I'm over a hundred games where there's still only a small portion of the games
that are available to play now inside the box you do get a nice carrying case and it's a good
solid case and this obviously protects the Steam Deck when you're carrying it around the house or
taking it out with you and it's a nice addition to have that you don't have to pay extra for this now
I bought the 256 gigabyte model of the Steam Deck obviously comes in three different sizes
with ever so slightly different specs it's also worth noting that news has come out recently that
they've changed the internal storage on the newer Steam Deck so now it actually comes with slightly
slower NVME SSDs inside so that's worth keeping in mind although my experience is actually I
wish I'd gone for the 512 gigabyte one and that's because I found that I filled up this Steam Deck
with relative speed just a few games I think I had about four or five games on there and it was full
obviously that's gonna vary depending on the games you're installing but with modern game sizes it's
ridiculously easy to fill up now when I got it out the box I was really impressed with the overall
build quality of the thing it feels nice in the hand as you can see those back sort of trigger
areas and grips stick out nicely has a good solid build quality to it it feels fantastic in the hand
and it sits really nicely it's really easy to play for ages and that's one of the things that I've
found is that you can play for quite some time as well again this is going to vary my experience has
been that you can get two or three hours out of it before it needs plugging in charging now the
charging port is on the top you can see that's a USB-C port and obviously it comes with a plug in
order to do that and it seems to have some fairly fast charging capabilities so it's pretty good one
of the things I did note though was this key was pretty short so it doesn't go very far so it would
be frustrating if you're trying to plug this in and game but you're quite a distance from a
wall socket obviously that'll be a bit of annoyance it boots up with relative speed
but one of the things I'll show you later on is the games themselves take a while to
load the other thing I'd highly recommend is buying yourself a micro card a nice large one
if you've gone for the 256 gig model like I have or the smaller one you'll definitely want
an SD card in there that obviously means that the games are a little bit slower to load but it does
mean that you can put more games on it now one of the joys of the Steam Deck though is that you can
use your gaming PC to stream to it but I'll talk about that a bit more in a second
now you can see when you first turn it on and log in you get the various different sort of talk
throughs and what are the buttons do and what they go through on here you can see there's a power
button on top you can put it into sleep mode you can turn it off you can restart it there as well
the button on the left takes you to the steam menu the one on the right takes you to various
different options and there are all sorts of options and they keep adding to it as well and
that's one of the things that I really liked about this when I first got the Steam Deck I found that
my main complaint about it was the fan noise was really loud so when you're playing quite intense
games the fan noise was quite obnoxious there was a lot of white noise coming out of it and
that resulted in a bit of a problem I just wasn't really enjoying that sound you do get that with
thin and light gaming laptops as well I've had that experience with those one of the things that
valve's done is they've actually released updates for this and they keep pushing updates for it to
make it better and one of those updates is now changed so that the operating system can handle
the fan speed more effectively and also to manage it on the fly to adjust to the right circumstances
so what I found is this means that the fan noise isn't as obnoxious if you're doing less intensive
things so it's not constantly ramping up and it's a much more pleasant experience obviously there's
also a 3.5 mm connection on top so you can plug in a 3.5 mm headset and there are a variety of
other options that you can plug in and connect up things so you can connect up Bluetooth devices for
it for example I haven't done that to be honest because I prefer to just play on the speakers
and on the device itself but it is possible to connect controllers and other things as well
and it goes through all the different controls and talks to you about verified and non-verified games
now non-verified games and unsupported games are potentially problematic when I first set up the
Steam Deck one of the games that I wanted to play was medieval dynasty and one of the things that
you'll note is that this says it's actually not supported at the time of purchasing the Steam
Deck and trying to install that game whichever was another one I wanted to play just a sort of casual
survival sim game it said it was unsupported and wouldn't work and if I went through my
library there were numerous different games that were marked as unsupported what I've actually
found is medieval dynasty is now supported and I actually found that I could play even though
it was marked as unsupported the other thing I found is that some games are marked as unplayable
or unsupported and you can play them but they're a bit tricky and you do have to go through and sort
of customize some of the buttons and the controls so you have to assign in-game controls to specific
buttons on the Steam Deck this is something that is a little bit fiddly and not that user friendly
but a game like ready or not for example which is an FPS co-op shooter that required a little bit
more programming in order to get working nicely however there are some that are marked as playable
and that was fairly straightforward in order to play those you can see breath edge for example
is one of those and also you have other games that are just fully verified where they completely work
and then you just basically plug and place you install it you download it and then you
just play it it's no problem at all and all the controls are as they should be nice and logical
obviously you've got control sticks on both sides directional pad the usual sort of a b x y layout
in terms of the buttons you also have two little track pads below either of the joysticks as well
so you have plenty of different controls there below the steam button on either side of the
screen you have the speakers so you have speakers there and on top of it you've got the vent grille
the 3.5 mm and the volume control and power buttons so that's where all the air gets blown
out the top and you'll find that you're sucking air from the underside and then blowing out the
top and that's where you'll hear some of the noise but the front firing speakers mean that if
you crank that up you can actually soak in the sound from the game and then get a pretty good
experience out of it and if you find that you're not getting the best experience just plug a 3.5 mm
headset into it so you've got a lot of flexibility here as you'll see it's quite a chunky thing and
I put it up against my kids switch because I wanted to see what sort of size differences
and you might have seen comparison photos of this but it's actually quite a bit bigger
so I've just been calling it the adult switch in my house because it gives me access to a lot more
things now one of the other highlights to this is obviously it doesn't have the processing power of
a proper gaming PC but what you can do is you can stream from your gaming PC so you can choose to
stream games from steam running on your gaming PC and then beaming over your home wi-fi to the Steam
Deck this gives you the option to obviously not have to worry about storage internally
and storing games on your PC but also to stream games and use the power of processing power of
your PC so therefore free up some of the power of the Steam Deck one of the things obviously is
that your FPS count won't be as high you can't turn the graphics on as high if you're running
straight off the Steam Deck because obviously internally the the graphics power of this machine
isn't as powerful as a dedicated desktop GPU but it does mean that you can then free up that power
and use your processing on your gaming PC what I'm saying is you can get a much faster
better experience smoother assuming that you have a fast home wi-fi network of course and that your
PC is running well that you can then stream the games directly to it so this gives you a lot of
flexibility in what you can do but actually the experience just playing games directly installed
on the Steam Deck I was really impressed with it this video doesn't do it justice I think
ignore the sort of weirdest in the screen that's just trying to capture the screen on camera
actually looks really crisp he's got a great looking screen nice and bright really good colors
really good color representation as I said the sounds fantastic I found the controls to be great
I really have very few complaints about this I joked at the beginning about my wife nagging at me
that is really one of my main complaints the other one was the fan noise and just how much noise that
gives off but that has been tackled and handled since then obviously battery life will vary for
some if you're playing the more intense games you can see me playing god of war here for example
and also if you've got the settings set so that you have high FPS because you can adjust not only
the refresh rate but the FPS in the performance settings and obviously if you have things like the
brightness turned all the way up and the volume turned all the way up that's going to eat into
your battery life on the other hand if you're playing more indie games a bit less intensive
than the high-end AAA games then you'll find that the battery will last longer and obviously you can
plug in and play anyway or you can just leave it alone give it a rest plug it into charge and then
come back to it and as I said it seems to charge up pretty quickly as well so it's not a problem
but for me just sort of casually playing around my house whenever the mood takes or I have some
spare time where I'm not parenting or creating videos or working then it has a great flexibility
to be able to do that and the experience has been really great so overall a fantastic device
I'd highly recommend purchasing just don't cheap out and go for the small storage option
or make sure you purchase a large micro card you'll soon find you're filling it up and then
you'll be frustrated with that this has been the Provoked Prawn, be sure to check out the
links in the description to the stream if you want to see more gameplay thanks for watching