TehCrazyCat
Published
Touchscreen emulation works fine but since you can also play the game with the arrow keys and use wasd to quickswap I modified the layout to allow me do that.
Either Valve or EA added the community patch into the game, so neither on Linux nor Windows you need to search for it. Works like a charm.
Default resolution is blurry as heck. Enable FSR on Steam QS to solve it.
If you're playing on Steam Deck, changing your layout is neccesary. The default one is good enough but most buttons pause the game if you press them by accident. Other than that, the game works flawlessly; I strongly recommend to enable FSR to 5 on quick settings, since otherwise the old, tiny res of the game makes it a really blurry mess, and FSR fixes that just fine. Finally, if you don't like the 4:3 res you can switch the scale from Auto to Adjust; might look a lil' weird at first when you enable it but you eventually get used to it and using the entire screen is way better than having those black holes. Tried with both ProtonGE and Proton 5.0-10 as the other submission suggested, and I didn't noticed any difference between the two. It's up to you to decide which one you use.
Blur/Anti-aliasing does not work as intended
You no longer need to use launch options to have audio on videos. Game runs just fine at 60 fps, if you want to save battery you can play at 45 fps. 10/10 would recommend
Swap Start button to Esc
Audio only comes from the right speaker/ear. Can be patched.
Framerate drops when theres a lot on screen (30-60fps)
The Deck is truly magical. I suffer to play old games like this on Windows, but SteamOS can handle them just fine.
As said, the game glitches and only plays audio on the right side, but this issue also happens on Windows, and it can be fixed by patching the exe. Other than that, the game has framedrops when there's a lot going on the screen, and for whatever reason stresses the CPU to be at full speed (3.5ghz) even though it shouldn't because it's a retro game, but as I said, it's still very playable and a way better experience than Windows.
Steam defaults to KB&M layout but using a Gamepad layout will correctly map the joystick to movement and all buttons to shoot, which makes it more convenient than emulating either keyboard or mouse, however since ALL buttons are mapped to shoot, you still have to manually set the Start button to Esc if you want to pause the game, other than that, the Gamepad layout works great even for local 3 player coop. Note that you ALSO have to configure the controllers within the game to be Joystick 1, 2 and 3 respectively, and since the game doesn't have Plug & Play capability, you must connect and configure your controllers BEFORE starting the game.
Oh, and since the game res is really low, I highly recommend setting FSR/Sharp to the max, so you can experience the clay graphics as intended.
Only issue is that the controller can't be remapped, but it work as it is. It's a free game so give it a try :)
