I’ve done a ton of testing trying to find PS2 , GameCube and PS3 era sports games. Most of the PS2 and GameCube stuff works just fine but I wanted to pass on what I’ve seen on PS3 and Switch. All of these games work perfect (IMO) right out of the box and no tinkering is required to get great video and audio. Feel free to add your own personal perfect “no tinker” games in the comments below. I’d love to see more sports games suggested, I’m especially missing a good baseball and American football game 😄
PS3:
- The Bigs 2
- College Hoops 2K8
- NBA 2K9
- NBA Jam
- Skate.
- Tekken 6
- Virtua Tennis 4
- Fifa 08
- PES 08
Switch:
- Layton’s Mystery Journey
- Mario Kart 8
- Metroid Dread
- Phoenix Wright
- Super Mario 3D + Bowser’s Fury
- Tony Hawk 1+2
- Hades
- Rayman Legends
PS2:
- ESPN 2k5
- Fight Night Round 3
- God of War II
- NCAA Football 06
- Tiger Woods 2005
- NHL 2002
GameCube:
- NBA Street 2
- NFL Street
- SSX3
- Super Mario Strikers
I’ve updated the Deck to ‘main’ release channel 3.5, though technically that’s “tinkering”, but - it makes a much wider list of things work really, really well. Currently playing through XenoBlade Chronicles and Breath of the Wild (Switch versions) and both seem to play really, really well. I don’t have the framerate display on, I’ve not tweaked power settings or anything, I just run them…
The SMT improvements I believe are in the 3.5 main-branch release, so that’s probably why… seems to work well.
Wait so you are saying you are on the preview channel? All I see is stable, beta and then preview. Thanks in advance.
There’s a setting (under developer options I think) to show advance update channels. Once you’ve turned it on, you can choose different update levels for both Steam OS and the steam client. The most cutting edge version of SteamOS is main, which will put you on 3.5. This has several advantages (including better shader handling and SMT being worth using in emulated games).
However, updating to the bleeding edge software update is not without downsides. Expect things to break fairly often. I tried the main update channel for awhile, decided too much was broken, and then found that something else that was broken was downgrading back to stable or beta. I ended up being stuck for awhile until the next update came out, at which point I was able to successfully downgrade. So proceed with caution.
Thank you for the list! I’ve been wanting to try out Metroid Dread, it seems really fun and fitting for the Deck.
Did you encounter any issues playing Super Mario Galaxy on Dolphin? I expected it to work well enough, but every session longer than 30min would make the game stutter heavily (audio was noticeable first, but soon everything was stuttering, including inputs which made the game unplayable), and I had to reboot the game or the Deck for it to work properly again. I don’t know if that’s an issue with the Deck, Dolphin, the game or my config (not that it is anything special) but I’ve been holding off more recent emulation because of that.
I think Super Mario Galaxy needs tinkering even if there are no issues running it because of how heavily it uses the pointer
The configuration needs to be adapted a bit otherwise the game is a pain to play, like having the pointer accelerometer constantly active. What kinds of tinkering are you talking about?
Exactly the sort you mentioned. The game was not designed for a standard controller, so tinkering with the controls is required
Lollipop Chainsaw PS3 doesn’t run too badly.
For switch i have also tried
subnautica (save gets corrupted but its a port issue, can be fixed by clearing the cells cache)
stardew valley
Mario strikers battle league
Fez
Except for Mario Strikers, all those games have PC ports that run really well on the Deck. What’s the advantage of running them on a Switch emulator?
I don’t see why anyone would rather pirate a Switch game than using a PC crack, especially for Fez and and Stardew Valley which both have GOG versions.
I think I’ve put more time into Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate on my Deck than I did on Switch a few years ago.
