Classics On Deck #10: Freelancer (2003) / Open Rollercoaster Tycoon 2

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We're back with another Classics on Deck after taking a break last week. This week, we're looking at Freelancer from 2003 (by Michael Baker) and Open Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 (by Oliver Stogden).

Freelancer (2003)

• Digital Availability: None. Used Physical Disc.
• Version Tested: Latest Version of the game
• Wine/Proton Version Used: Proton Experimental

Installation

Freelancer is one of the most prolific video games ever made, and we wanted to see how it plays on the Steam Deck. Getting your hands on it can be a little tricky, as there’s no digital version anywhere, but the installation process is fairly easy with a physical copy of the game. Freelancer has a big modding community even today, but I’ll just try the vanilla game.

If you have a physical disc of the game, you can install it on a USB DVD drive and Lutris. Insert the Freelancer disc into your USB DVD Drive and select “Install a Windows game from an executable” when adding a game to Lutris. I named my folder "Freelancer”, but you can name it whatever you want. Proceed along the Lutris steps. Select the “Setup.exe” file on the root of the disc as the setup file for the game when Lutris prompts you for one. Proceed with the installation as usual. It will take a while.

Once you’ve saved the new configuration, you can boot the game as normal from Steam if you made a Steam Shortcut, or from Lutris otherwise. If all else fails, or if you run into a problem with Lutris, you can have it installed on another platform and transfer the installed folder to the Steam Deck through a flash drive, then make a shortcut through Steam.

For a controller profile, a few custom configurations are already available for Freelancer. The Keyboard WASD and Mouse stock profile works well enough, but Freelancer has many other tools that require more fine-tuning. I used the profile by -Clayer3.UK-.

Steam Deck Performance & Issues

A couple of alarming notifications come up when booting Freelancer. First, you will get a warning that the graphics card is not recognized, but this will not hurt the game. No wonder Freelancer doesn’t recognize the card! Just click okay, and the game will boot into a fuzzy screen of rainbow lights. Again, no reason to panic! This is the intro movie bugging out, but wait a few moments, and the main menu will load.

With the controller profile mentioned, Freelancer plays very well. I had no issues with the controls, although the complexity takes some getting used to. Freelancer’s stock resolution is 1024 x 768, but this is enough. Even at the highest settings, the Steam Deck chews through Freelancer like a dream. I will note that during cutscenes and in the station menus, the game is locked to 20FPS even with an unlocked TDP, but the action sequences are a butter-smooth 60FPS.

Freelancer is a pretty lightweight game. Even without any TDP tweaks, I found the game to average around 10 watts, providing an average battery life of 5 hours on the Deck. However, it was perfectly stable with a 5-watt TDP, which lowered the average power draw to 7 watts.

Gameplay

To call Freelancer prolific is putting it mildly. To put it politely, Chris Roberts is taking his sweet time with Star Citizen, but 2003’s Freelancer release, while not a huge seller on launch, has a big cult following. Exploring the galaxy in single or multiplayer and fighting pirates while taking on odd jobs is the big draw. While Freelancer’s vast ambition struggled, I still think the game is a vital part of gaming history.

To this day, Freelancer has tons of mods available that greatly expand the gaming experience. Space sims are hard to make, which is probably why we haven’t seen a true successor to Freelancer today. Being able to play it on the Steam Deck is pretty awesome!

Open Rollercoaster Tycoon 2

• Digital Availability: OpenRCT2 is available HERE. The game requires original RCT2 Files as well, available on GOG.
• Version Tested: 0.4.22, latest Stable as of Writing + GOG.com RCT2 Install.
• Wine/Proton Version Used: None, OpenRCT2 has a native Linux build.

Installation

There is a Lutris installer for RCT2 (GOG) + OpenRCT2; however, it returned a fatal error when I tried to use it, as it requires other dependencies. So, instead, we'll be manually installing Rollercoaster Tycoon 2.

Go ahead and link your GOG account to your Lutris install. Then click on Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 Triple Thrill Pack to install it in Lutris. Make sure to select the Wine (auto-generated) installer, and proceed with the install as you would on Windows.

After the installation, head over to the OpenRCT2 site on your Steam Deck and download the latest stable version, which was 0.4.22 for me. Once the .appimage file is downloaded, you can place the .appimage in a safe folder and execute it.

Once OpenRCT2 has booted, tell it you already have RCT2 installed, and then navigate to the directory where you installed it. For me, it was /home/games/gog/rollercoaster-tycoon-2-triple-thrill-pack/drive_c/GOG Games/RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 Triple Thrill Pack

You can now right-click the .appimage file for OpenRCT2 and click "Add to Steam" to boot the game from the Game Mode.

Steam Deck Performance & Issues

As you might expect, OpenRCT2 has no controller support, so you'll need to use the Keyboard (WASD) & Mouse controller layout template. Thankfully, it's not a hotkey-heavy game either, with the mouse being the main input method, so you shouldn't struggle with controlling the game if you're ok with using touchpads.

Once in the main menu, hit the options button at the top right and change it from Windowed to Fullscreen (Borderless Window). This will remove the black borders and let you play with the full display. You can also increase the Window Scale Factor to 1.50 to make reading text easier.

The game is very easy to run, and applying a 4W TDP limit should provide you with a stable 40FPS, which is what the game will cap itself to by default.

One performance issue I did notice is that if you go back to the main menu from a park, the performance seems to be pretty poor (15-20 FPS) until you reload back into another park or quit the game.

Gameplay

OpenRCT2 stays very faithful to the original RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 gameplay, which is, in turn, very similar to the original RollerCoaster Tycoon. Expect to start off small with some basic rides and provided amenities like toilets and food/drink for your guests before getting into the nitty gritty of designing your own custom coasters, monorails, go-kart tracks, and more.

There's a ton of nostalgia linked to these games for me, having grown up with the original RCT, and these games still hold up. Their only real competitor in this genre for me is the Planet Coaster series, and given their increased complexity, there's space for the simpler OpenRCT2 to co-exist and provide some good old-fashioned management fun.

That's it for this week's Classics on Deck. We'll return with more classic games on your Steam Deck next week.

Let us know in the comments below if you want us to check out any specific games, too, and we will add them to the list of games we plan on finding and testing.

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