Steam Deck The Verge did an interesting interview with Pierre-Loup Griffais and Lawrence Yang regarding Steam Deck 2, Steam Controller 2, and their thoughts on the 6800U Crisis Core remake works great Tuesday’s client update (beta) fixes OSK on game exit and adds support for the Armor-X Pro attachment Wednesday’s client update (beta) adds better UI scaling at higher resolutions and adds Xbox Elite/Switch Pro layout preview pages Thursday’s client update (beta) fixes gamepad focus issue on the Steam store, adds minor fixes to login UI layout SteamOS 3.

The Verge recently conducted an interview with Valve’s Lawrence Yang and Pierre-Loup Griffais – arguably the two most vocal employees about the company’s handheld device that is the Steam Deck. I wanted to mention it because there was an interesting tidbit regarding AMD’s Ryzen 7 6800U APU, which is currently shipping in devices like the AOKZOE and the OneXPlayer Mini handhelds. As I had alluded to in my Aya Neo 2 post, the 6800U is using Zen 3, RDNA 2 680M graphics, eight cores, and can clock up to 4.

Aside from the corny artwork, Frontier Hunter: Erza’s Wheel of Fortune is a great example of how a Metroidvania should get done right. It combines the 2D side-scrolling of both the Metroid series and the Castlevania series, and incorporates a lot of fighting elements as well. Furthermore, there’s some RPG at play here, as your character’s stats will increase after gaining enough experience from defeating monsters. Frontier Hunter is the successor to Tower Hunter: Erza’s Trial.

More, upon more, upon more fixes for the Steam Deck. This time around, the Steam store should no longer have any gamepad focus issues, and footer buttons should properly be displayed. In Desktop Mode, the login interface got some minor layout fixes. It shouldn’t stretch past the bottom of the window. Context menus should now work after closing the Update news dialog. Subbed workshop items should properly display now when “there were thousands of them.

VKD3D-Proton – the layer responsible for translating DX12 calls to Vulkan, and an essential part of Proton – version 2.8 just released, and “rolls up some significant new developments before the holidays.” First of all, 2.8 adds support for the VK_EXT_descriptor_buffer extension. This “removes a ton of CPU overhead.” This will particularly benefit desktop users who are on NVIDIA, Intel, Turnip, and “other AMD driver implementations” that are not pertaining to the Steam Deck.

More fixes in yesterday’s Deck client update (beta). Xbox Elite and Switch Pro layout preview pages have been added, Desktop Mode got plenty of fixes, and there’s now an option to launch the new Big Picture Mode in windowed mode. Full patch notes are as follows: General Fixed issue where a browser opened by a game was sticking around after closing the overlay Fixed launch options dialog not closing when cancelling game launch Various fixes to make the UI scale better in higher resolutions Fixed issue where the virtual keyboard would continuously be made visible after exiting a game Added option to start in windowed mode under Settings => Display => Big Picture Mode => Windowed Desktop Mode

Though 2.5.2 might be labeled as a hotfix, it got a few features as well. Arm64 builds are now available for M1/M2 Macs. The Linux version adds support for a DXVK limit FPS option. DXVK installation has been fixed, the Wine status should now be properly updated after install or uninstall, and some fixes have been added to the UI and GOG saves. See the full patch notes on GitHub.

Cemu got a pretty sweet update: it now supports Vulkan for Wayland. The AppImage got “minor” fixes; it fixes an incorrect recursive copy and adds a metainfo file. Screenshots should now work across all three operating systems. Some other commits made it in: fix MSVC workflow automatically scale imgui text based on display pixel density correctly create screenshot directory if it does not exist, and better screenshot error handling PPCAssembler: Fix incorrect cast sign of branch distance calculate make codebase more CPU-agnostic + MacOS disclaimer Linux/MacOS: Use faster clock_gettime() for tick_cached() add check for backwards delete fix SDL controller reversed y axis in UI See the commit history for more details.

Yet another update slipped my mind. This came out yesterday. The Armor-X Pro pad in PS4 mode is now supported, and several fixes have made it in on desktop and in general. Patch notes are as follows: General Fixed keyboard re-opening incorrectly on game exit Added support for the Armor-X Pro gamepad in PS4 mode Fixed long delay at startup when the Razer Huntsman Elite keyboard is plugged in Fixed the Logitech G29 controller showing up as a gamepad instead of a wheel Desktop Mode

Well well well…the 15-year-old game gets a new makeover. Loved the original back on the PSP. In fact, my older brother at the time took over my PSP and bought the game just so he could play it. Despite it not being as full-fledged of a remake as Final Fantasy VII, I still welcome it, as it’s a really good game. In a nutshell, the Crisis Core remake has been ported to Unreal Engine and has the following advantages over the vanilla PSP version, besides the obvious graphics upgrade: