My wife had gotten me the Nintendo Switch several years ago, and this year, we welcomed another handheld console into our home, Valve’s Steam Deck. Both are awesome consoles in their own right, and one would be lucky to own ONE of them . With two however, the question would be which console do I prefer. Well, it depends on the games I’m playing at the moment.

Entering the Arena – EA SPORTS FC 24 (Nintendo Switch)

Currently I’m playing a fair bit of FIFA, I mean, EA SPORTS FC 24 on the Nintendo Switch, and this has relegated the Steam Deck down the pecking order, not dissimilar to what Aaron Ramsdale is facing with David Raya over at Arsenal (my favorite football club, and mainstay in FC 24). While EA had deemed fit to score own goals every year for the past several years with the annual release of re-skinned “Legacy Editions” for FIFA on the Nintendo Switch, FC 24 not only drops the FIFA moniker, but overhauls the entire game, much of it for the better.

First up, the graphics engine gets upgraded and the game is now running on the Frostbite engine. There’s also Ultimate Team (with its microtransactions, I read somewhere there are folks that are addicted to spending money on this stuff), and not forgetting, Volta Football, which is basically street soccer. There are complaints that the game is running on 30 FPS and that the version on the Switch doesn’t have the much-touted HyperMotionV that is present in the Xbox Series X|S and PS5 versions of the game.

These drawbacks don’t matter much to me though, as I’m really enjoying the experience bringing Arsenal through the Premier League. The team is sitting peachy on top of the table but the game also realized that the difficulty level needed to be raised as I was beating teams by a margin of 5 goals or more. It has since set the difficulty level to “Semi-Pro”. The first time it did that, it was for a match against our London neighbors, Chelsea, and I struggled to beat The Blues 2-1. I’ve gotten a hang of the difficulty level now, having soundly beaten Newcastle 0-5 last night.

If you haven’t check out a soccer game on the Nintendo Switch due to EA’s past shenanigans with the Legacy Editions, you ought to do yourself a favor and check out FC 24. It’s not perfect, but its been pretty great. I’ve gotten the physical cartridge version of the game, and the local game shop gave me a free poster of Erling Haaland to go along with the purchase. Pro tip: while you get a physical cartridge, keep in mind that there’s a 19GB Day One download that you’ll need to do when starting the game for the very first time.

EA Sports FC 24 for the Nintendo Switch available at Play-Asia and Amazon.com.

Diablo IV Steaming Along

So what about the Steam Deck? Well, I booted it up today and did a little housekeeping which included updating the OS. Earlier this month, Blizzard announced that Diablo IV was going to be made available on Steam and at the same time, the game would be Steam Deck-verified. My mission was since I already purchased Diablo IV on Battle.net, I want to run that version of the game on the Steam Deck rather than purchase Diablo IV again, this time on Steam, just so that I can run Diablo IV on the Steam Deck. Doing so would save me about USD 60?

I used moraroy’s NonSteamLaunchers-On-Steam-Deck script (which is available on GitHub) to get the Battle.net launcher running on the Steam Deck, and proceeded to install Diablo IV on the Steam Deck , with the files being stored in my MicroSD card instead of the primary SSD on the Steam Deck. The script supports the automatic installation of a whole bunch of launchers including Epic Games, GOG, Humble Games, Rockstar and many more.

Having done a playthrough earlier today, I can safely say that Diablo IV looks great and plays really well on the Steam Deck. I was getting above 50 FPS for most part of the playthrough. I also installed Diablo II Resurrected on a lark, and like its newer sibling, it ran pretty well.

Diablo IV and its related merchandise can be purchased at Play-Asia and Amazon.com.

The Top Five for October 2023

OK, so what have we been playing (or are gonna play) this month?

  1. EA SPORTS FC 24 (Nintendo Switch)
  2. Diablo IV (Steam Deck)
  3. Red Dead Redemption + Undead Nightmare (Nintendo Switch)
  4. Heroes of Might & Magic III (Steam Deck)
  5. Vampire Survivors (Steam Deck)

Looking forward to Hot Wheels Unleashed 2 and Super Mario Wonder.