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?
Yes. Switch emulation isn’t anywhere near 100% compatibility. It’s impressive that the Yuzu and Ryijinx teams have done what they have but if you care about playing any Switch game you want, the Switch is the way to go. Outside of the mainline Nintendo games, compatibility drops off significantly with emulation.
For multiplatform titles, wouldn’t someone just play it on their Deck natively? I only buy Mario, Pokemon, Zelda games for the Switch personally.
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.