Valve's Steam Deck brought PC gaming back into my life after fatherhood
short 10-hour story, I found myself thinking about the Steam Deck. Not only was Valve’s gaming handheld a portable gaming system like the Switch, but it promised to give my Steam library something I had never experienced from PC gaming before: the ability to quickly suspend and resume a game. It’s a standard quality of life feature on home consoles, but trying to resume a game after putting a PC to sleep is hit or miss.
When my Steam Deck arrived four months later and the feature actually worked, it changed everything. I spent my first day with the handheld slowly playing through the Deck’s showcase demo: Valve’s, casually picking the handheld up for just 5 minutes every few hours. When that worked, I got more ambitious — finishingI started using the Steam Deck to play games in the margins of my day. Picking it up for a few random battles inRebel Galaxy Outlawbefore turning in for the night.
I've grown to love having my library of PC games detached from the writing and video editing workstation that lives at my desk. You might say that’s what more powerful traditional game consoles are for, but the Deck’s Switch-like portability makes all the difference. Playing games on the couch, in bed, or while rocking the baby to sleep beats out having maxed out graphics settings every time. I’m not even sure if I’m going to upgrade that aging graphics card anymore.
It feels a little silly to laud the Steam Deck for what’s an otherwise standard feature on most modern gaming devices, but I can’t help it. Sometimes one good feature can change everything. Before the Steam Deck, playing a game from my PC library was a chore that required sitting at a desk, booting up Windows, launching Steam and, finally, loading up a game. When you might only have minutes of free time during an entire day, that simply doesn’t work.
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