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It's Friday again, and we're back with another Classics on Deck article! Last week, we took a look at the remake of Pirates of the Caribbean (2003), known as Beyond New Horizons, as well as the 2001 RPG Arcanum. This time, we're taking on Midnight Club 2, by Oliver Stogden, and topically, the original Marathon game, by Michael Baker.
Classics on Deck #7:
Midnight Club 2 (2003)
- Digital Availability: None, Game was on Steam until 2018, use Disc or equivalent ISO
- Version Tested: Physical Disc
- Wine/Proton Version Used: Wine GE 8-26
Installation
If you own the game on Steam, you should be able to install it through Steam and skip this section.
There is a Lutris installer for Midnight Club 2, so open Lutris, add a game, and search for installers. Once you find Midnight Club 2, click on it and select the "CD" release, rather than the PlayStation 2 one. Insert the "Install" disc into your disc drive, or mount the ISO for it, and then follow the onscreen prompts of the installation. Once the installation is done, you may need to manually create a Steam shortcut through Lutris (by right-clicking the game in your library), as it wasn't done automatically for me.
Once you've done this, the game is installed. Now, for Steam Deck configuration.
Steam Deck Performance & Issues
Midnight Club 2 doesn't have good controller support, so it's probably easier to just map your controls to keyboard functions. I've prepared a controller layout below that should meet your needs.
D-Pad steers, A/X Accelerate and Brake, R1 is Handbrake, L3 for Weapons/Lights, R3 for Horn, View button for Camera, Menu button for Pause, Left Trackpad controls songs, backgrip buttons control the pause menu, L4/R4 up and down, L5/R5 are confirm and cancel.
Ideally, I would recommend you use the right trackpad as your mouse and R2 to click to make decisions in the main menu, but you can probably use the backgrips fine for that too.
On the downside, steering and acceleration are digital, and not analog, so it can be difficult to do fine control.
As for performance, the game runs perfectly with very little power draw. You can play at 90 FPS, and it will use around 7W of power. The game also supports 1280x800 as a resolution in-game, so there are no black bars.
Gameplay
Midnight Club 2 is a solid classic racer. There's a career mode that spans three different cities: Los Angeles, Paris, and Tokyo. Each manages to distinguish itself from the other with distinct urban features. The game starts off with slow cars, but you can quickly unlock a fairly large range of different cars and bikes.
The game is complete with arcade features such as nitrous and slipstream to gain an advantage and mid-air weight transfer, which is especially useful for bikes.
The game still supports LAN play, even though the online servers are offline. If you play a network game, you might want to agree on a frame rate limit, as sometimes physics can go wonky if players are all running different frame rates.
Marathon (1994)
- Digital Availability: Steam and GOG
- Version Tested: Latest Version of the game From Steam
- Wine/Proton Version Used: No Forced Compatibility Required
Installation
With the Marathon reveal this week, I decided to look at the original Marathon games! Last year, the classic trilogy was re-released on Steam with many improvements under the Aleph One developer team, and they are all free to play. While they are available on GOG and Steam, Steam is the easiest way to get these going.
For Steam users, install the game as you would any other. You do not need any compatibility layer for the Steam version.
For GOG, you can install the executable file using Lutris or Heroic Game Launcher. Proceed with the installation as usual, and wait for the game to install. 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. In the controller settings, you can use the standard gamepad layout, as Marathon Classic comes with full controller support.
Steam Deck Performance & Issues
Marathon Classic is over 30 years old (God, I feel old!), and these relaunches are beautiful on the Steam Deck. They come with full controller support out of the box and have a few different visual options. I prefer the modern interface layer because it makes the game look better than the 1990s graphics, but it is nice to have the freedom to pick what I wish.
In terms of performance, Marathon runs like a dream. You can push it to 90FPS on the Steam Deck OLED with everything maxed out and not blink, and the game even plays on a 3- 4W TDP with a steady 60FPS. I saw an average power draw of just 5 watts, but even with no tinkering, you will get hours of juice with Marathon. The only thing you might want to tweak is the sensitivity, as I found the stock controls slightly twitchy, but this is an easy fix, and overall, Marathon runs great.
Gameplay
Set on a massive colony ship orbiting Deimos, Marathon is a pioneer of the 1990s. One of the first shooters to have an extensive narrative, it is set on a mysterious ship and players delve through it in a desperate battle of survival against hostile creatures intent on exposing their faces to sharp implements. With the help of Aleph One, the gameplay still holds up in the present. With these newer versions' more modern QOL features, Marathon is still worth playing today.
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.
If you enjoyed this article, check out the rest of the content on SteamDeckHQ! We have a wide variety of game reviews and news that will help your gaming experience. Whether you're looking for news, tips and tutorials, game settings and reviews, or just want to stay up-to-date on the latest trends, we've got you covered!
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I love these articles. I really do like the satisfaction of getting a game to run on linux/steam deck. I have submitted and followed a bunch of protonDB reports. Recently, I used it to set up Grandia 1 HD Remaster. I was looking at the Game Arts RPGs when the great on deck review of Lunar Remastered came out. Grandia 1 remaster annoyingly, even though it was remade in 2019, has forced sprite filtering and FMVs based on ancient Windows libraries. Both of which can be worked around with some tinkering I found in the Steam community guides and proton DB. Great to have the Linux gaming community to document this stuff.