Valve Steam Deck Is a Game System Built for Frenzied Parents

tech.hindustantimes.com:

On a recent Sunday, I had just put my 2-year-old down for a nap and sat at my office computer to play the sublime, new game Elden Ring. It took about 10 minutes before my daughter started screaming to get out of her crib, which would ruin any shot I had of getting in some gaming that day.

Or would it? With the Steam Deck, a new portable video game system from Valve Corp. that I’ve been testing for the past few weeks, I was able to move to the living room with her and pick up where I left off in the game. Elden Ring didn’t look quite as good and the frame-rate wasn’t as steady as it is on my desktop PC, but the portability was worth the compromise.

Players like me are the target audience for this new hardware from Valve, the privately owned company best known for operating Steam, the biggest online store for computer games. The Steam Deck looks like a super-sized Nintendo Switch and comes at a super-sized price of $399, or $529 or $649 for a version with a solid-state drive with a decent amount of storage. The device allows players to take their Steam games on the go. But unlike the Switch, which runs on a proprietary operating system from Nintendo Co. and can only play games that Nintendo approves, the Steam Deck is an open garden that can run just about anything that can be played on a computer.

The Steam Deck consists of a small screen flanked by joysticks, buttons and two trackpads that operate sort of like a computer mouse. It runs many Steam games effectively, with more becoming compatible every day. It feels like a mid-range PC capable of running games with heavy-duty graphics, like Sony Group Corp.’s 2018 gem God of War, at a stable 30 frames per second. Lower-impact games I tested ran perfectly, from critically