I just bought Mario RPG at a whopping CAD$90 and it’s got pretty bad slowdown. I only ever play my Switch undocked and performance is decent but not spectacular. Everything is also so aliased and jagged. I kinda feel ripped off after buying a full price Switch game.
It made me reconsider my stance on emulation because the Deck can probably run it better. I’ve never been into emulating because I like the ritual of changing discs/cartridges (kind of why playing vinyl is special to me, it ritualizes music and makes it a “thing” instead of something in the background).
But I have a Switch and 20 some odd games that I could probably sell and buy two new Decks with the proceeds.
To those who emulate Switch on Deck, what’s your experience like?
Ideally yes, if it’s available.
This past summer I played Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2 and Planescape Torment. The Switch games don’t run via emulation and the reason I played on Switch was the controller UI that’s not available on the Steam releases. Sure, I could try and map the PC controls via SteamInput but it’s nowhere near as easy to use.
There are a lot of small things that emulation fails to handle well that make me avoid it, from texture, framerate and effects issues to bigger things like a complete absence of all online features; a big thing in all Pokemon games. Some games require multiple different graphics renderers to be selected to get past bugs, etc.
In a lot of games, emulation is a reasonable substitute but I’ve been far happier with the experience of playing Switch games on a modded Switch than on the Steam Deck.