Even though I have been lurking and involved in the Steam Deck community, they never cease to amaze me. A couple of days ago, we reported on someone who modified their Deck to be a dual-screen device, like the Nintendo DS, and it became a semi-clamshell handheld. And today, I came across another gem. If you are looking for an extra challenge when gaming, you can always try using your old Apple iPod as a controller.
Originally posted on Reddit by user nekomichi, they showed it off both playing Sleeping Dogs and Skyrim, which the latter apparently felt much better than the former.
After seeing how it was done, it seems like it's one of the easier modifications to do than a lot of others, but very hard to actually master using it. Here is a comment they made under the first of two posts showing this off and explaining how they did it:
Both iPods in this video have been modified with the Rockbox custom firmware, which allows them to act as USB input devices.
The iPod Mini on the left is acting as a mouse cursor controlled by the four directional keys with the centre button acting as a left click (attack), the iPod 4th generation on the right is acting as a multimedia controller, with fast forward acting as taking a step forward and rewind as taking a step back. Due to limitations in the firmware, it's not possible to send button-hold commands which means in order to continuously walk forwards I have to mash the fast forward button repeatedly. Also the Click Wheel is faulty and detecting ghost scrolling, in multimedia mode that controls the volume which is why the Deck's volume keeps jumping up and down randomly.
nekomichi - Reddit Post
While I don't have iPods to try this out with, I am definitely tempted to just see how difficult it is to use. Even though I am not surprised, seeing this kind of stuff still amazes me, especially since I would have never imagined trying to turn iPods into controllers to begin with. Either way, there's a reason I love this community, and nekomichi embodies one of those reasons.
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Want another challenge?
Try finding an offline FPS game that allows you to play against BOTs on Deck. Yeah, I haven't found one.
Counter Strike 2 "shows non-Steam Deck icons", so it's keyboard & mouse; Call of Duty Ghosts spits an error whenever I try to play with Bots, and I've just tried Military Conflict: Vietnam an there's input lag, frame rate is all over the place, rendering it a struggle to play on the Deck. Could someone please recommend me an FPS shooter game that won't complain whenever I launch it with no active internet connection?
Interesting...are you looking for something that has competitive modes or doesn't matter as long as it's an offline FPS?
Dude, at this point, I don't even care about competitive modes. I'll take whatever the game throws at me, being it capture the flag, Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Last Man Standing.. whatever. But that's only half of the story. The other half comes down to the GUI. For example, I'm addicted to playing on my Deck and whenever it needs some juice, I just sit down and play with my 8BitDo and the Deck sits on a Dock. That means I don't want to be bothered with "Oh you gotta use a mouse to navigate around this game because we didn't implement controller support for the GUI", and that's why I'm letting go of yet another candidate, Insurgency. It plays... fine, hits 60FPS (mostly) when docked but Jesus that GUI has got to support a controller because I played the game using a controller, so duh. That was a given. But nooo New World turns a blind eye to that, grr. Anyway, I'm not sure Insurgency: Sandstorm is a different story, but I'm feeling discouraged to search even further. Man, even Valve doesn't offer controller icons for the Deck, meaning keyboard and mouse gameplay, which beats the purpose of the Deck as a mobile device. Let that sink in.
I can't believe I'm saying this but, the only device that gave me a joy of playing an FPS offline with Bots was the PSVita, playing Killzone: Mercenary. I would sit through multiple 5-min rounds against the Bots and never had to worry about Proton version, controller icons, controller priorities, launch options and the like. Too bad the left stick is now drifting.
So to answer your question, it doesn't matter as long as it's an offline FPS that supports Bots and has a serviceable GUI, meaning either with full controller support or one that offers at least the ability to simulate a mouse cursor with either stick. (Insurgency doesn't allow that when using a Bluetooth controller)
I've been quite partial to Ravenfield. It's a little indie project, it runs natively on Linux, and I enjoy it a lot.