I was looking for some shmups to play on the Steam Deck when I bumped into a couple of really old favourites, games that I’ve not played in DECADES. But first, let me tell you what led to this. I’ve played a fair bit of Vampire Survivors on the Steam Deck, but one can only take so much of the graphics before feeling ill.

Bent Out Of Shape In Geometry Wars 3

So it started, the search for some more shoot-em-ups to enjoy on the Deck. Going through my games library on Steam, I found Geometry Wars 3: Dimension Evolved, and this was a game that I reviewed 7 years ago on the Mac and it was a hoot. And to add, the soundtrack was a blast. The game is listed as “Playable” on the Steam Deck, one level lower than the desired “Verified“.

While Valve’s testing indicates that some of the game’s functionality is not accessible via the default controller configuration and that the game sometimes shows mouse, keyboard or non-Steam-Deck controller icons, what I found to be the main issue for Geometry Wars 3 on the Steam Deck was the random crashes. I’ve since uninstalled the game from the Deck.

Enter The Shareware Shmups

The funny thing about this search was that I ended up recalling not one, but two western shmup titles from the 90s. These were Tyrian and Raptor: Call of the Shadows. Yup, I can imagine the “woah” from retro gamers reading this, even I was impressed with that bit of self-recollection.

Tyrian was released by Epic MegaGames (now known as Epic Games, and yes, these are the same folks responsible for Fortnite) back in 1995. Back then, Tyrian was known as a piece of software called “shareware”. Shareware games were distributed in diskette or CD formats and tend to feature a part of the game in the form of a single episode with several levels. The physical format of the games made them easy to “share” with just about anyone, hence the term “shareware”. Sending in a money order to the game publisher was one way to get full game mailed to you.

Raptor: Call of the Shadows was released by Apogee (now known as 3D Realms, and you may recognize them as the folks responsible for Max Payne and Duke Nukem Forever) back in 1994. The release of the game was through the same shareware model used by Epic MegaGames with Tyrian. While I’m still looking for a copy of Raptor to install on my machine, I found out that GOG.com was giving out Tyrian 2000, a version of the game with an additional episode, for free.

Settings

The game utilizes DOSBox to run the game on modern day PCs, and you may need to tinker with a configuration file within the game’s installation directory (look for a dosboxT2k.conf file) in order to get a better experience from the game. This involves setting the full resolution to match your monitor, memsize and scaler. The following are the values that I used for mine:

  • fullresolution=1920×1080
  • memsize=32
  • scaler=none

So instead of blowing stuff up on the Steam Deck, I’ve ended up playing a nearly 3-decade old game on my PC. That’s a pretty cool trip down memory lane.