This was one of the most popular pages on Boiling Steam since 2014: our Recommended Games list. Since we migrated away from Wordpress, we had temporarily lost that page. I knew that we would ultimately bring it back, so here it is:

The Recommended Games Page

It’s now updated with a few more games since the last version we had in early 2024, for good measure. We have also added the Steam Deck rating for many games as an additional indicator. More importantly, we have automated the process to update and refresh that list. Now, when adding a game to the list, we can automatically fetch:

• the appid (with fuzzy matching on the name)
• The presence or not of a Linux native port
• The Steam Deck rating
• The official name of the game
• The link to the store page (some are still missing right now)

Why bother automating it? After all, adding just one game now and then is not that much work, so the edits can be added one by one, manually.

The advantage of this new process is that it’s easier to maintain. Now the core the list is in a dataframe with versionning, and it is then used to produce a markdown table whenever we need. If we want to refresh the Steam Deck statuses at once, it’s just a click away. And if we want to add new features down the road (such as linking our reviews automatically), it’s fairly easy to produce as well.

In any case, I hope the resurgence of this link will be helpful for you guys. In the great tradition of this page, we plan to keep on testing on super old laptop hardware which games can actually run - this is what the Intel HD column is all about - and fill in some of the gaps in that list.