Is not the Steam Deck an unbelievable piece of {hardware}? Simply take a look at it, hanging round Steam’s entrance web page in all its matte black glory, promising these with copious endurance and cash fashionable PC gaming completely wherever they dare take it. Valve’s machine is a daring and delightful factor: the current pinnacle of transportable PC play, and the start of one other era in an extended and haphazard household tree. Its roots are the chunky Sport Boys and laptops of the ’90s, however the Steam Deck’s closest (or at the least quirkiest) ancestor is Sony’s now sixteen-year-old, however nonetheless astonishingly stylish, Vaio UX.
The chicness of Sony’s Vaios has all the time come at a value—one so excessive that not even in my dual-wielding bank card section did I dare order Sony’s palm-sized PC. However the lust by no means light? Think about proudly owning a very tiny laptop, one so lovely it was utilized in considered one of Daniel Craig’s James Bond films.
I’ve wished one for years, so as an alternative of shopping for some uncomfortably tight leather-based trousers andhttps://www.pcgamer.com/or a dangerously quick motorcycle for my fortieth birthday, I splashed out on a Vaio UX as an alternative. To say it has lived as much as my very own decade-plus of hype is an understatement.
Measuring roughly the identical measurement and thickness as the unique Sport Boy, these distinctive gadgets all characteristic a slide up touchscreen with a full keyboard beneath—take that, frustratingly key-free 2022 tech. There’s Bluetooth connectivity, wi-fi, a reminiscence stick slot, entrance and rear cameras (full with a shot button charmingly positioned precisely the place you’d look forward to finding it on an actual digital camera), and handwriting recognition. Devoted mouse buttons on the left hand aspect of the chassis are designed for use alongside the helpful mouse nub sitting on the suitable. It is a actually self-contained, do-it-all-PC from the glory days of Home windows XP.
The Vaio UX is the proper time capsule gaming machine
The Vaio UX sequence handle to look lovely whether or not at relaxation of their glossy dock bristling with further ports, or held both horizontally (commonplace use) or vertically (supposed to make studying internet pages simpler). So completely designed is Sony’s long-discontinued {hardware} that I see echoes of its glossy form in final 12 months’s GPD Win 3. They’re solidly constructed, brilliantly purposeful, and effortlessly trendy—and so they bloody effectively ought to be, contemplating Sony tended to promote them for an eye-watering $2,000 after they had been new.
Simply in case I have not already made it apparent: I’ve by no means desired any amalgam of metallic and plastic greater than I’ve a Vaio UX. It was Sony’s forbidden tech fruit, as impossibly unattainable to somebody like me because the Aibo (the corporate’s sequence of robotic canines) or extra lately the PlayStation 5. I pawed on the postage stamp sized photos utilized in on-line critiques and rapidly scrolled previous the inevitable “No one wants this, it is too costly” feedback within the writers’ summaries. I wanted it. I knew in my bones I wanted it.
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(Picture credit score: Kerry Brunskill)
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(Picture credit score: Kerry Brunskill)
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(Picture credit score: Kerry Brunskill)
However what good is outdated tech within the age of the Steam Deck and ultralight laptops? Why waste time with a machine whose single-core processor and built-in Intel graphics chip had been put collectively for the sake of “productiveness on the go?” The Vaio UX was made to connect with a projector in a board assembly or be pulled out of a leather-based briefcase throughout the form of non-public jet I think about CEOs are all the time on, to not play video games.
The fantastic thing about PCs is that they are often regardless of the heck the particular person utilizing them needs them to be, which in my case makes the Vaio UX the proper time capsule gaming machine. No, it may’t run Elden Ring, Halo Infinite, and even Stardew Valley. What it may run—and run surprisingly effectively through the comforting sights and sounds of Home windows XP Skilled—are the likes of Baldur’s Gate, Wizardry 8, and Ys: The Oath in Felghana. The whole lot of System Shock 2’s barely awkward controls are right here for the wrangling on an actual bodily keyboard.
I may even sit within the backyard and faucet away at Age of Empires 2 or Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri utilizing the Vaio’s stylus till the battery runs out (which takes round two hours, relying on the sport).
The UX’s laborious drive house (typically hovering across the 30 to 40GB mark, relying on the mannequin) is woefully insufficient by fashionable requirements—I do know I’ve put in excessive decision texture patches that’d simply swallow that up in a single go. However when video games from the Vaio UX’s period sweetly warn you about their “monumental” 600MB set up measurement, you quickly realise there’s greater than sufficient room for every little thing you might want for with loads of house left over for a couple of DOS classics, too. I am at the moment attempting to avoid wasting humanity in opposition to the alien menace in X-COM: UFO Protection—it is not going effectively.
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(Picture credit score: Kerry Brunskill)
As soon as I’ve loaded up my UX with the likes of Grim Fandango or certainly every other late ’90s classics I’ve bought scattered round my residence the shape issue actually does make enjoying even essentially the most acquainted sport really feel model new, as homeowners of the UX’s fashionable descendants know all too effectively. There’s a bit of awkwardness to the expertise—none of those video games had been designed to be desk-free experiences performed on 4.5 inch screens in any case—however I will fortunately put up with that for the sake of respiration recent life into outdated recordsdata. And moreover, tweaking the system settings precisely to your liking is half the enjoyable of a brand new set up, proper?
I see enjoying video games on the Vaio UX the identical method I do selecting to purchase an album on vinyl, though tens of millions of songs are a fast scroll away on-line. The act of interacting with this forever-niche department of PC {hardware}, bringing out CDs to put in, manually organising my little gaming folder, and getting every little thing tweaked simply the best way I like it’s a big a part of the pleasure of all of it. Possibly moreso, even, than really getting a sport I first performed on a large CRT monitor and an off-white tower working within the palm of my hand.
Vaio UXs are simply enjoyable. It is a pocket-sized PC I can play a personally curated choice of all-time classics on, a land the place spam emails can by no means attain me and each boring system replace was already sorted out completely virtually a decade in the past.
They’re a lot enjoyable I feel everybody ought to give this unlikely mixture of take-anywhere sit-down PC gaming a attempt, whether or not you are wanting to play Sekiro in a subject on the Steam Deck, have a burning want to fill considered one of GPD’s handhelds with emulators, or get misty eyed on the considered all 4 of Planescape: Torment’s CDs put in on a teenage Vaio. Handheld PC gaming might by no means go actually mainstream, but when this always resurfacing area of interest proves something, it is that making the trouble to do issues a bit of otherwise can deliver new joys out of outdated favourites.
