Shmups on Steam Deck (Compatibility list)

[Steven]

Raiden III works. Use Proton Experimental.

[PC Engine Fan X!]

The Japanese indie danmaku stg of "Aisz Plus" works just fine on Steam Deck (no need to run any Proton apps with it) with booting straight to the main title screen.

Upon initial 1st time boot up, controls-wise, nothing registers in regards to button pressing of buttons A, B, X & Y (I thought that it was broken "control-wise"). You'll have to rebind the keys of Z, X & Shift to your Steam Deck's button configuration liking (as Aisz Plus is regarded as a pure WASD keyboard-based stg game anyways). Then it'll work just fine. D-pad registers but no analog stick functionality from the get-go.

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~

[Steven]

RefRain - prism memories - works, but you'll probably want to assign shot and lock on shot to L1 and R1 so you can use the face buttons for the other stuff. L2 and R2 don't seem to be usable for some reason. That's another PC-exclusive that everyone needs to play.

edit: Got L2 and R2 working. Not sure why they didn't work at first.

[professor ganson]

I got Kamui and it’s looking and playing great, so thanks again for the advice! I’m also keen on picking up Crimzon Clover, but I’m going to wait for a sale.

I’m mainly going to be playing digital pinball on the deck for now. If I get more into pc shmups, I’m going to need a controller to synch with the deck. The dpad on the oled deck isn’t bad, but I’m used to playing shmups with a Saturn pad. Not sure I can adjust at my advanced age!

[Steven]

One of the first things I did when I got mine was to install Space Cadet pinball on it. You don't even really have to go look around for it either because someone made a native Linux version and it's available to download in Discover once you are in desktop mode.

[shmuppy-puppy]

I have my entire shmup collection on the deck.
In my experience almost everything just works. Since many of the great games are actually years or even decades old, I never encounter performance issues.

[professor ganson]

I didn't see Truxton on the compatibility list. Has anyone given that a try? I would love to get the PC Engine hucard, but it's more than I can justify spending.

[Steven]

All of the Bitwave Toaplan games are designed specifically to work on Steam Deck and have unique Steam Deck button icons and stuff. I highly recommend avoiding all of them due to the broken sound effects and insufficient autofire options, but Tatsujin also has broken music.

[professor ganson]

The auto-fire issue is definitely a dealbreaker for me. Huge thanks again for the valuable insights!

[Steven]

I am putting my GOG R-Type Final 2 on the Steam Deck now. This is seemingly not recommended because the Steam shader caches don't exist on non-Steam games, so the GOG version will theoretically not perform as well as the Steam version, and no Steam Cloud because GOG version without GOG Galaxy = no save file synchronization. I don't even know if this is going to work due to how I'm transferring it.

The game already has performance problems on PS4, PS5, and Switch, and it's not optimized very well on PC, but due to the much smaller resolution of the Steam Deck's screen I have a feeling that at that resolution it may outperform the PS4 version and still have better graphics. At worst, it's still going to run at a higher framerate than the PS5 version because I don't think they bothered to give that version the 360 FPS cap of the PC version, which there is no way in hell the Steam Deck can do, but it should be able to hit 90 FPS if I turn the graphics down.

Tested the first three stages a lot and it's excellent as long as you don't want 90 FPS.

If you want 90 FPS at 1280x720, you have to set everything on the lowest settings and you will still drop slightly below that sometimes and battery life is not good. It still does technically outperform all of the console versions when you play it on the system's screen, but I didn't test it on my PC monitor to see how it runs there at 1920x1080. Steam version probably might be okay on the system's screen at 90 FPS at the lowest settings. Still looks comparable to the PS4 version even on minimum settings, so it looks surprisingly nice. GOG version can probably maintain 60 FPS at a mix of medium to high settings, but you might as well put AA to low because on that screen size you're not going to notice much of a difference no matter what you set AA to.

Not going to test 60 FPS performance, both because I'm about to go to bed and also because it didn't transfer my GOG save and I don't want to have to unlock all of the ships for the third time, but if you're going to play any games on this thing you should probably get them on Steam if possible.

[PC Engine Fan X!]

I got Kamui and it’s looking and playing great, so thanks again for the advice! I’m also keen on picking up Crimzon Clover, but I’m going to wait for a sale.

I’m mainly going to be playing digital pinball on the deck for now. If I get more into pc shmups, I’m going to need a controller to synch with the deck. The dpad on the oled deck isn’t bad, but I’m used to playing shmups with a Saturn pad. Not sure I can adjust at my advanced age!

Yes, Crimson Clover plays awesome on the Steam Deck with it's silky-smooth 60fps framerate presentation. Just pick up a Steam Deck docking station and hook up an Xbox 360/One or PS4/5 arcade stick via usb interface and you've got the proper arcade controls at your fingertips (albeit further modded with genuine world-class Sanwa Denshi or Seimitsu flavored arcade components -- take your pick), professor ganson. It doesn't get any better than that if you want to replicate that truly "old-school" arcade stg experience (something different for a change of pace, controls-wise, indeed).

PC Engine Fann X! ^_~

[professor ganson]

Sounds awesome, and Crimson Clover is on sale right now! In the videos I've watched, the game is a bit...overstimulating compared to old-school shmups. But I could definitely see myself adjusting to that aspect of the game.

[Steven]

Warning for Steam Deck humans: the latest update on Stable, 3.6.19, has removed the ability to separate max framerate from refresh rate. The framerate limiter induces input lag, so if you're planning on setting a new world record on Crimzon Clover Unlimited or whatever else on Steam Deck you should either set framerate to unlimited or not use 3.6.19. This is mostly just going to affect OLED owners due to the 90Hz screen and most PC STGs being capped at 60, so LCD humans should probably be fine.

While I'm here I might as well mention that the PC version of Triggerheart Exelica that was released 6 months ago (still) does not work on Steam Deck unless you enjoy playing the game at half speed. It seems the devs have given up fixing it and are blaming Valve for some reason that I forgot, so you can expect this to probably never work properly.

[Lander]

If you're willing to fuck with desktop mode (or whatever it's called), I've found Bottles can yield better results for certain games under Linux; it has its own set of compatibility layers that don't use Proton stuff, and follows a more up-to-date Wine distribution. Quite easy to configure too, next to most launchers for the platform.

[Stevas]

Warning for Steam Deck humans: the latest update on Stable, 3.6.19, has removed the ability to separate max framerate from refresh rate. The framerate limiter induces input lag, so if you're planning on setting a new world record on Crimzon Clover Unlimited or whatever else on Steam Deck you should either set framerate to unlimited or not use 3.6.19. This is mostly just going to affect OLED owners due to the 90Hz screen and most PC STGs being capped at 60, so LCD humans should probably be fine.

While I'm here I might as well mention that the PC version of Triggerheart Exelica that was released 6 months ago (still) does not work on Steam Deck unless you enjoy playing the game at half speed. It seems the devs have given up fixing it and are blaming Valve for some reason that I forgot, so you can expect this to probably never work properly.

It's somewhat embarrassing that all of four people noticed this, tbh. Apparently it got removed in the beta and nobody noticed it there either. Boils my piss.