Soundtracks filled front-to-back with bangers that have stuck with me over the years:

Sonic Mayhem’s Quake 2 – and, of course, Trent Reznor’s Quake. 植松 伸夫 – Final Fantasy 7. Grant Kirkhope/Graeme Norgate’s GoldenEye 64. Max Lichtenstein’s Pax Imperia 2. Richard Joseph’s Chaos Engine. Just about anything Mick Gordon touches. …aaaaand just about every Mario, Metroid, Sonic, DOOM (Heretic included), Command and Conquer, Advance Wars…

Honestly my backlog has still somewhat grown at a steady pace, but I’ve kept my Steam Deck mostly roguelikes for killing time and one or two ‘main’ games which helps keep focus. The steady stream of disappointing 2023 releases has certainly helped too…! It’ll be interesting to see stats if Valve do another Steam Replay; 2022 on Deck for me was Vampire Survivors, Rogue Legacy 2, Horizon, Hitman 3, and Elden Ring.

I also still alternate between the Deck and my main machine, playing more controller-focused stuff on Deck. My main machine is more FPS and driving-sim focused – although it would be amusing to play a sim on Deck hooked up to my racing rig…!

I’ve played Diablo since the first one (back when my harddrive capacity was smaller than the CD the game was on!), but couldn’t believe how many people mentioned that D4 felt great on a controller, even if they usually played with K/M. Seemed alien to me.

Goddamn were they right. Not only does it run very well on SD (I lock mine to 40FPS), but it really does suit a controller well. I might even switch to an XBox pad when playing on my main machine…!

After religiously following the order number tracking efforts on the Steam Deck subreddit (finally got mine May '22) it’s been my ‘clearing the backlog whilst sitting with the significant other’ device…heavily punctuated with Vampire Survivors and, lately, Diablo 4. It’s a great little roguelike device – stuff like Cult of the Lamb, Spelunky 2, and Rogue Legacy 2 – that I can just play for a few minutes wherever the Heck I’d like.

I still find it like holding black magic. I’m a software engineer, and I understand how it works, but playing a Windows port of a PS4 game (like Horizon) in Linux in my hands is something I don’t think I’ll ever not be impressed by!

I fell into the SE pit a little while back. I really enjoyed it being such a long slog with long-term objectives, but then after a while it felt like I could play a few hours after work and get nowhere. If you want your Factorio game to feel like it’ll never end, and there always being something else to work towards, it definitely scratches that itch!