I’m fortunate to have the Huaying fan in my Deck (the quieter fan), but the folks at Linus Tech Tips decided to take matters into their own hands with the Delta fans: putting in a heatsink and fan into the unit. I won’t get into detail about it, but essentially Linus dremel-cut the back part of the Deck so a custom-shaped piece of aluminum could be fit into the device. A heatsink was then applied on top with some thermal paste, and they even went so far as to attach a fan to it.

Steam Deck I got a Deck! More to come in the next few weeks Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade is now available on Steam and is Deck Verified new website to look out for: Steam Deck HQ. Describes what are the best settings for certain games on Deck Native Games Them’s Fightin’ Herds gets level 3 supers BeamNG.drive adds experimental Linux support Feral Interactive has ported Total War: Warhammer III to Linux 19 new games released this week Hardware I did a review on the HP Dev One.

While Valve might have given me the middle finger by never giving me a review unit of the Steam Deck, I’m now happy to report the one that I pre-ordered had finally shown up at my door this morning. So what does this mean for LGC? Well, I’ve got the following articles planned, in no particular order (I may also not do them if I lose interest): a full review. I heavily debated on this one.

SteamTinkerLaunch – an awesome wrapper for games played through Proton – is now available on Flathub. Seems like the link isn’t available on Flathub directly, but you should be able to install the app with: flatpak install com.valvesoftware.Steam.Utility.steamtinkerlaunch Great news for you Steam Deck owners! Or for those of you who primarily use Flatpaks as your applications. Check out the overview of SteamTinkerLaunch on Boiling Steam.

I wanted to briefly talk about a new site – Steam Deck HQ. In a nutshell, this website covers specific games, how they work on the Steam Deck, and what the best settings are for balancing optimal battery life while maintaining a smooth framerate. Games covered so far include: Hitman 3 Guilty Gear -Strive- Horizon Zero Dawn Firewatch Devil May Cry When accessing the home page of the site, you’ll get a nice banner image for each game covered.

A few weeks ago I had talked about Aya Neo’s new handheld, which will sport AMD’s new Mendocino APU: the Aya Neo Air Plus. As it seems manufacturers are resorting to desparate measures, they go after cheaper processors such as the Mendocino APU to match the price of the Steam Deck. As in the case of the Air Plus, it’s even cheaper at $289, although there’s no mention of how much RAM or storage is supplied.

UPDATE: FF7R Steam store page is now live, and what’s more, it will be Deck Verified! Game launches about five hours from now. Final Fantasy 7 is getting a 25th-anniversary stream later today. The stream is only going to be 10 minutes but based on recent activity on SteamDB, as well as speculation on r/GamingLeaksAndRumors, we could be seeing Final Fantasy 7 Remake on Steam, or at least have an announcement about it.

Godot 4 is a pretty major release for the open-source game engine. As such, the developers behind the project have entered into the double-digits territory: alpha 10. New features with this alpha include initial support for temporal anti-aliasing (TAA), a CLI tool to convert your older Godot 3.x projects to the version 4 API, and a TileMap terrain center bit to support “connect” and “path” draw modes. Here you can observe the difference in graphical quality with TAA disabled, per the pull request:

A new version of the Heroic Games Launcher has shipped today, as a beta. That would be version 2.4.0. Included in this update are the following: plenty of UI/UX improvements, including a unified library between Epic Games and GOG games, a download progress bar on the left, and the ability to change game language several bug fixes, including the setting of controller on boot being disabled Linux-specific things; CrossOver support is gone, but now there’s an option to display the Wine executable path minor cleanup of things like the game setting keys being the only thing saved to the game config file during installation The stable 2.

I’m noticing a trend where each new release of Proton adds several new games and bug fixes. Shortly following the update to Proton Experimental earlier today, we now have the official release of Proton 7.0-3. Newly playable titles with this release include: Age of Chivalry Beneath a Steel Sky Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamer Edition Cities XXL Cladun X2 Cursed Armor Flanarion Tactics Gary Grigsby’s War in the East Gary Grigsby’s War in the West Iragon: Prologue MechWarrior Online Small Radios Big Televisions Split/Second Star Wars Episode I Racer Stranger of Sword City Revisited Succubus x Saint V Rising Warhammer: End Times - Vermintide We Were Here Forever Bug fixes include: