For some reason I got into gaming on my laptop now. I have done it before, but I still wanted to write about it, since it has been kinda nice!
This past week I’ve been thinkering again with my laptop, due to a regained interest in gaming on it, after I beat TOEM on it and had a great time playing.
My first gaming controller was my PSP, I wrote about it before, since it’s honestly pretty useful on a whim. After that I got a knockoff XBox 360 style wired controller, on which I remember completing Ocarina of Time and playing hundreds of hours of Monster Hunter Freedom Unite, it was nothing special and it stopped working properly after a while, but it was good while it lasted.
I had tried stuff like the Xbox Series controller and a PS5’s, but just for brief moments. When I got my Switch and got a 3rd party controller for it, it worked well with my laptop too, and played some Monster Hunter on it again, but connecting and reconnecting between Switch and Laptop wasn’t great, so I only use it on my Switch now.
A few months ago I bought an 8bitdo Ulimate 2C, a controller for Windows and Android, with Bluetooth and a 2.4Ghz USB receiver, and that has worked absolutely wonderfully on my Laptop, and after getting an 8bitdo Bluetooth receiver to use on my Switch, I can now switch painlessly between both.1
Honestly tho, it wasn’t until now that I finally gave it a proper shot with TOEM that I saw how comfortable sitting in front of a computer, grabbing a ready to go controller and playing like that really is! This was maybe the push I needed to play more games on my laptop at last!
Speaking of wich, my computer is nothing special. It’s good enough for indie games and older AAA titles though, which is all I have anyway, but my biggest hurdle is storage.
I’m still dual booting Windows for some reason, and I haven’t taken the time to swap my main drive or at least start fresh with my current one.
A long time ago I bought a new SSD that I never ended up using. It was originally meant to replace the one on someone’s laptop, but I realized too late that the laptop used NVME drives, not SATA, so I just kept it to gather dust in my shelf.
After the gaming session I did, I decided to buy a SATA to USB adaptor and use it as an external drive for my games on Steam, and also other platforms.
I set up a partition for it, and since I have Steam installed via Flatpak, I added an override to allow it to access the drive’s location.
After that, I just configured the drive on Steam and moved my existing games to it painlessly.
Nowadays, for the most part, Steam just works. And I’ve managed to somehow build a pretty decent collection of games there. Many of them I got from Steam codes given to me by friends, and some of them I’ve paid for.
Proton and Wine have made it so playing pretty much anything is as easy as a couple of clicks, which has been my experience so far. In fact, the only games that have failed for me some times are the Linux ones, Portal refuses to go past the menu screen, CrossCode does not recognize my controller in the Linux version, and similar small caveats are present.
Of course Proton is not perfect and stuff like The Legend of Heroes: Trails in The Sky did require me to change some of the defaults, but nothing too bad.
On my controller, using Steam’s Big Picture mode has also been pretty enjoyable, and the Steam Input options to use with games that don’t have good controller support, or don’t recognize my buttons properly, is also a very amazing feature.
However, ever since the days I only used Windows, my biggest collection has been on Epic Games, because the games are free!
A while back I remember using legendary, a super neat terminal tool to launch games from Epic on Linux, but Heroic has proven to be a great alternative with a GUI that really manages to just add that extra bit of flare to the mix. I also installed it via Flatpak and it also works really well out of the box. Not only does it connect to my Epic account, it also works with GOG super well, even having support for its achievements! Something I didn’t even know until @amin pointed it out ot me. He uses Lutris and only plays DRM-Free games from GOG, and his setup is so much more crazier and custom than mine, so, consider this my public request for a blog post about it go check it out!
Of course, I have been playing on computers since forever, Minecraft is there, my first time playing Into The Breach too, and FTL is something I will return to someday as well, but I don’t know, the act of playing non-pixelart games and doing so with a controller instead of a keyboard, does change my perception somewhat.
So, yeah, I guess I can only blame TOEM being such a different game from what I usually play on my computer.
Some other games I’ve been trying are Dredge, an interesting fishing game with some strange elements on it, and Batman Arkham Asylum, a game I tried ages ago on Windows but didn’t really work that well, and having it now running on Linux feels kind of awesome!
It is a bit weird to have a Switch and many other portable consoles at this point only to then turn around and say “Hey, PC Gaming? not bad at all” yet again. But well, I’m only human, maybe I should get a Steam Deck. STOP.
This is day 19 of #100DaysToOffload.
They also have a more recent Ultimate 2C Bluetooth model that works with the Switch, without the need of their separate Wireless USB Adaptor that I use with mine. ↩
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