Steam punk magical-realist world-building at its finest. Back in 2012, Dishonored earned the first Game of the Year honor of my tenure at Ars Technica. Looking back on the game some 13 years later, Arkane’s well-constructed world of steam punk magical realism earns its place as a modern classic.…
Tariffs, component volatility, and Valve’s tolerance for losses all lead to uncertainty. If you ask random gamers what price they think Valve will charge for its newly announced Steam Machine hardware, you’ll get a wide range of guesses. But if you ask the analysts who follow the game industry…
Even a 50 percent performance-per-watt improvement wouldn’t be enough, engineer says. Yesterday’s announcement of new living room and VR hardware from Valve obviously has many gamers clamoring for any news of a more powerful version of the nearly 4-year-old Steam Deck. In a new interview with IGN, though, Valve…
SteamOS-powered headset sports semi-modular design, wireless “low-latency” PC streaming. Six years ago, Valve made its second big virtual reality push, launching the Valve Index headset alongside VR blockbuster Half-Life Alyx. Since then, the company seems to have lost interest in virtual reality gaming, letting competitors like Meta release regular…
SteamOS-powered cube for your TV targets early 2026 launch, no pricing details. Nearly four years after the Steam Deck changed the world of portable gaming, Valve is getting ready to release SteamOS-powered hardware designed for the living room TV, or even as a desktop PC gaming replacement. The simply…
But author warns that Direct3D 7 “is a land of highly cursed API inter-operability.” For years now, Valve has been slowly improving the capabilities of the Proton compatibility layer that lets thousands of Windows games work seamlessly on the Linux-based SteamOS. But Valve’s Windows-to-Linux compatibility layer generally only extends…
Vampire Survivors-esque battler sets itself apart with great weapons, unique graphics. If you’ve played any number of RPGs, you probably know the skill tree as a break from the game’s core action. It’s a place to pause, take a breather, and scroll through a massive visual menu of upgrade…
Once rare $14K knife now sells for $7K, some common guns jump from $10 to over $100. From the outside, Counter-Strike 2 looks a lot like a game that’s primarily about shooting people. For millions of players, though, the game is more about collecting and/or buying rare in-game loot…
What if point-and-click games weren’t about the puzzles? Even in my youth, I always loved the idea of point-and-click adventure games more than I did the reality. I appreciated how they transported me to other worlds, each with its own rules, histories, and interesting characters. However, like many people,…
UZDoom fork promises to fix other top-down leadership problems with the decades-old mod. If you’ve even idly checked in on the robust world of Doom fan development in recent years, you’ve probably encountered one of the hundreds of gameplay mods, WAD files, or entire commercial games based on GZDoom.…
