Best Steam Deck games under $5 in the Couch Co-Op Fest sale
The Steam Couch Co-Op Fest sale is now live, and here are the best Steam Deck games you can get for under $5.
I'd also recommend SteamDeckHQ's recommended couch co-op games list. This one isn't limited to games $5 and under.
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Cassette Beasts is a a great monster catching game! To me it hits the spot where the original pokemon games should have naturally progressed to
That game heats up my steam deck and burns battery like a mofo… some Godot games are brutally inefficient like that. I’m guessing CB uses older Godot 3.5? Wonder if that kind of issue is easier to avoid with the 4.x series. Oh well I like the game and love Godot engine to bits (I just make little projects for myself so far)
This is true. I recently got cassette beasts after wishlisting it on release. After about 20 minutes I looked at my battery and it had dragged down by about 25%.
What a battery hog that one is.
Have you tried forcing lower TDW? I don't have the game, but I wonder if that would help
For whatever reason I’ve not had a lot of luck limiting TDP with almost any game.. I’ll need to sit down and really test shit out at some point. I haven’t even messed with the default settings on CB yet so there’s likely performance gains to be had there - it’s just that in other Godot games I’ve messed around with I couldn’t get them running much better. There is that one 3D graphics shooter game (think kinda like the old 1944 NES game or whatever) that was not graphically impressive but used more power than flippin’ Metal Gear Solid 5…. Like WHAT
I've found I can cap the TDP on several games without any noticeable change in performance. The important part is to remember that you set a cap, if you start getting FPS drops in another part of the game. It sucks to have a game performing poorly, and not remember that you set a TDP limit when you tried the game out months ago.
There are also some games that have bugged cpu or gpu clock speed, where the game will run one at max clock speed unnecessarily causing extra power drain and performance issues (for example the CPU may be using too much power and staving the GPU, even though the CPU doesn't need to be running at max speed). For capping cpu you have to use the decky plugin power tools or another method.
Checking on ProtonDB is a good place to look for recommended performance tweaks, looks like a lot of reviews there mention capping Cassette Beasts at 10 TDP, and a couple more mention capping the GPU speed at 800.
I’ve capped it at 8w now with decent results. Still gets warmer than I feel it should but it’s a lot better.
I dont use per game profiles at all, so forgetting a cap on isn’t an issue for me. I just manually change settings each time to match the game im playing hahaha. But I am a nerdy dork who loves to tinker so the tedium in doing that is actually pretty satisfying for me.
I've experienced similar in 2D games that are more or less fancy Flash games. I wonder if that has less to do with Godot (it might, anyway) and more to do with optimization and LOD.
Either way, I still appreciate the heads up that it's battery intensive. Good to know before traveling and winding up searching for an outlet.
It’s likely more to do with optimazion (or lack thereof) mostly on the game devs side of things - but I think Godot has a lot of room for improvement in that regard as well. BUT take that with a grain of salt I could be wrong!
Anyway I set CB to 8w and it plays at 60 fps mostly, and the deck is much cooler and less battery intensive. Dropping the games graphics and limiting to 30 fps would probably be a good idea for this game if longer battery is gonna be needed. Cheers!
I've heard really good things about it. There's a lot of strong competition in that space (people don't feel pokemon is suitably meeting the needs of the genre), but it's one of the games I hear recommended the most.
It's definitely got similar vibes with a lot of weird interactions added to it that they don't tell you about until you've already done the action.
For example, a fire type attacking an air type causes an air wall, which then blocks the next two attacks. But you don't know that until you've already attacked.
A glitter type attacking any other type turns the target into a glitter type, and any element attacking a glitter type turns it into that element. That means that a battle with glitter types causes weaknesses and strengths to vary wildly throughout a battle. And battles in the game are 2V2, so it can get pretty chaotic and confusing.
Some of these buffs or debuffs don't really make any sense and if you don't look up interactions ahead of time, you wouldn't expect them to happen.
