With the recent update that Valve pushed to the Deck, it’s now easier than ever to use custom boot animations or videos. And as Steam Deck Life brought out earlier today, there’s a website where you can easily find quality videos – Steam Deck Repo, founded by Reddit member u/waylaidwanderer. Featuring Love, Death & Robots, Kill Switch, a PS3-styled bootloader, a Cyberpunk-themed one, the GabeCube, and a plethora of other cool-looking animations, you can easily download them now and put them on your Deck.

Great news! Starting today, you are no longer placed in a queue when ordering a Steam Deck. You can order one and have it shipped right away! Just keep in mind the following, per @OnDeck’s Tweet: We’re doing our best to keep Steam Decks in stock, but there’s always a chance demand will be outside our expectations. If that happens, some models in some regions might temporarily revert back to reservations, while we catch up.

SteamOS and the Steam Deck client have both been updated on the Stable branch. SteamOS 3.3.2 adds external display output resolution and refresh rate selection options in the Display Settings, as well as tons of bug fixes, ranging from the crash in Red Dead Redemption 2, in-game camera control issues when using a mouse, and SD card formatting failing erratically. As for the Steam Deck client, well, there’s just way too much to list here.

Remember that tutorial on how to replace the Deck’s bootloader animation? Well, all these guides that have been popping up caught Valve’s attention. Today’s new beta Deck client update makes this process even easier. Custom videos will now go in /home/deck/.local/share/Steam/steamui/overrides/movies/ (note that this directory will need to be made first). These videos will now be in a safer place, and they won’t get wiped with every update. Not only this, but these videos will be played in fullscreen automatically; no need to modify the library.

Reddit user Bar_Har spotted a Deck running Genshin Impact during the Tokyo Game Show. Apparently the game isn’t available on Steam, and playing it on Linux requires disabling the anti-cheat software that it uses. And even then, your account is at risk of getting banned. So who knows. Maybe that particular Deck was running Windows. Or, for all we know, that could just be a picture blown up in fullscreen. Or maybe Valve really is working with the developers of the game to get it to run nicely on the handheld.

EDIT (2/12/2023): this is for the UNOFFICIAL remaster. Not the official. If you’re like me, you were probably left with a bad taste in your mouth after this year’s Nintendo Direct. No Metroid announcements whatsoever. There were rumors of an official remaster of Metroid Prime coming this year. It would have made sense considering this year marks the 20th anniversary of the beloved title. But, of course, our expectations got crushed.

Two new Deck client updates have been pushed out to the Beta/Preview channel, both of which have come out on the same day. The first mostly focuses on fixes, including cloud sync being attempted while offline. Virtual menu previews in the Configurator now highlight the appropriate button when navigating to its associated command in the command list. On the Preview channel, a few more bugs have been fixed pertaining to the resolution dropdown screen, changing resolutions causing a crash, and the resolution dropdown sometimes showing an incorrect current resolution.

The folks at PressEngine were kind enough to send over a review copy of Kena: Bridge of Spirits to me. While I won’t have the full review until a few weeks from now, I at least wanted to give a brief overview of how this game plays on Deck. Kena: Bridge of Spirits is Deck Verified. And, low and behold, they finally got the rating right this time. It works well out of the box with Proton 7.

UPDATE (10/7/2022): this tutorial is no longer relevant, Valve has made it easier to replace the bootloader video with this week’s update to the Steam Deck client. The beauty of the Steam Deck is how insanely customizable it is. We can go so far as replacing the Steam intro video when turning the device on, or when switching to Game Mode. So if you wanted something like this: Your browser does not support the video tag.

When downloading games on the Steam Deck, more space on the hard drive gets occupied than just the game itself. Shaders will either be downloaded along with the game, or they will get added as you play the game. While these shaders can be useful for reducing in-game stutter, these shaders will pile up over time. Games that you no longer play will still have their shaders intact, thus taking up space that could be used for something more important.