Isn’t the Steam Deck an incredible piece of hardware? Just look at it, hanging around Steam’s front page in all its matte black glory, promising those with copious patience and money modern PC gaming absolutely anywhere they dare take it. Valve’s machine is a bold and beautiful thing: the present pinnacle of portable PC play, and the beginning of another generation in a long and haphazard family tree. Its roots are the chunky Game Boys and laptops of the ’90s, but the Steam Deck’s closest (or at least quirkiest) ancestor is Sony’s now sixteen-year-old, but still astonishingly chic, Vaio UX.
