PC Gaming

Here’s the GitHub for the $100 Jsaux E-Ink Faceplate, and here’s the GitHub for the $90 Pixel Matrix. The company isn’t open-sourcing what you need to flash new firmware, though — just a portion of the software that could beam your content to the panels. For a refresher, here’s my Today I’m Toying With video:

Don’t get too excited yet; it’s running in a virtual machine, and trees and water in The Witcher 3 aren’t supposed to look like that! But SteamOS on Arm-based Macs is now a thing with surprisingly decent performance, ETA Prime demonstrates in this video. Here’s the GitHub page.

Three weeks ago, I told you a free mod for a 10-year-old game is one of the best things I’ve ever played in VR. That wasn’t an exaggeration, and now it has multiplayer. Last night, I grappling-hooked and wall-ran and summoned titans from the sky to battle human foes. At 2AM, I still wanted more. Join me?

About a year after Valve introduced the feature, which recommends new and upcoming games you might be interested in and even shows some on an actual calendar, it’s now considered a “full feature” of the Steam Store, Valve says.

If you’ve got one of the Microsoft/Asus collab handhelds, let me know if this is game-changing? You can find the update in Command Center > Armory Crate SE > Update Center > Preview Updates. Asus does warn “it may still contain bugs or instability, designed for those who can’t live without the latest and greatest.”

I feel like this is not how we would learn about such a thing — maybe he meant to say “Half-Life Alyx” — but you never know. Last year, Tyler McVicker (below) suggested the entire game was already playable end-to-end. Sounds like he’ll have extra scuttlebutt to share soon!

Humble is now offering the Sci-Fi Exposure bundle at its site, with pledges for all eight games costing $25. You’ll get Bungie’s 2026 version of Marathon (great game), all three remastered Crysis games, RoboCop: Rogue City, and both Ghostrunner games, to name the most notable inclusions. Proceeds are split between Humble, the publishers, and the charity.water non-profit organization.

Digital Sun thanked Steam players for signing up for a first playtest of an upcoming game called ReVamp, but said that:

I’ve spent the past week testing Asus laptop instead of Asus handheld, so my X20 review got pre-empted. But since you can buy it for $1,300 today, here’s my insta-review: it’s not necessarily the new champ. It’s so refined, but I want to play Star Wars Zero Company right now. That game looks terrible here, but runs fine with the extra power of my Claw EX review unit.

The first expansion DLC for post-post-apocalyptic roguelike Caves of Qud — one of my all-time favorite games — will let you play as a mutated plant or animal, among other new features.

The $199.99 Barracuda V2 Pro is $50 cheaper than its predecessor, yet contains quite a few improvements. Notably, the ANC-ready headset ships with a USB-C wireless dongle hidden within the left ear cup. It supports simultaneous 2.4GHz and Bluetooth 6 audio, as opposed to making you swap between them, and includes a detachable mic for better voice capture than its beamforming mics. It’s available now at Razer’s site.

The collection celebrating Xbox’s 25th anniversary includes games like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition, Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary, Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition, Minecraft Dungeons, and Gears of War: Reloaded. Microsoft says you can also play some of the free games on Xbox Series X/S with Xbox Play Anywhere.

As spotted by Kotaku, some people are posting videos showing strange visual issues with the updated launcher that agents wrote code for. Right now, the launcher is in preview.

Steam Frame Hub reports that the Steam Frame kernel source code includes branches referencing a “Plano” device and says the headset will have a resolution of 3552 × 3840 per eye (higher than the Frame) and a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip (same as the Frame). Valve watcher Brad Lynch speculates that it could be Valve “just trying to prototype headsets with this optical stack based on what’s already lying around.”

There’s a huge changelog, including the screensaver feature with a bouncing Steam logo and support for an experimental video codec called Pyrowave that “allows high bandwidth, low latency video streaming” for Remote Play. Lots to dig into.

“For gamers, DLSS 5 is a simple on-or-off toggle,” Nvidia told us in September, claiming DLSS 5 would “preserve artistic intent” behind games instead of just aging characters’ faces. But modders will have access to the same tools as developers, Nvidia now says — on October 23rd, it’s adding DLSS 5 to its RTX Remix tool for modding older DX8 and DX9 games. Used properly, it doesn’t look bad?

GamesBeat is reporting the timeline, citing “four industry sources familiar with the studio’s plans.” That would be much quicker than the PC launch for GTA V, which came out more than a year and a half after the game’s console release.

The new flagship is available now for $169.99 with improvements that include two additional customizable buttons bringing the total to 14, an upgraded four-way tilting scroll wheel, a 50,000 DPI sensor, and an 8,000Hz polling rate in wireless and wired modes. Battery life is estimated to max out at up to 275 hours on Bluetooth, or up to 200 hours with a wireless HyperSpeed connection.

I might be The Verge’s part-time PC handheld reviewer… but I don’t actually have any modern Android ones! Now there’s software that easily makes an Android handheld act like a Steam Deck, I should probably try again. Or should I wait for one with the new 6th-gen Snapdragon Elite?

The video game decompilation movement has done it again. Not only do we have 128 player Halo across Windows, Linux, and Android , you can also just fire it up in a web browser thanks to OpenHaloCE and immediately start campaign or a huge multiplayer match. It’s not just one dev: lots of people made this happen.

Buying used PC parts to dodge price hikes could come with a catch, like the hardware ban a Reddit user claims they got stuck with after trying to run Valorant with a pre-owned Ryzen 7 5800X3D. The CPU was reportedly already blacklisted in the Vanguard anti-cheat system because its previous owner was flagged for cheating.

As of September, 42.2 percent of Steam users have 32GB of memory, with 16GB now trailing at 37.8 percent, down from 41 percent in August. It looks like some Steam users may still be upgrading their RAM, despite months-long shortages and price hikes.