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:

Small update has landed for Proton Experimental. Karmaflow: The Rock Opera Videogame should now work. In addition to this, the following titles should now have proper video playback: POSTAL: Brain Damaged Turbo Overkill Slayers X Demo Some bug fixes have been added: fix The Ball displaying error message on the first launch fix SCP: Secret Labratory crashing on launch after a game update fix Bloons TD 6 crashing on touch input Additionally, copy on write is now used for prefixes on supported file systems.

Version 5.25 of the excellent KDE Plasma desktop has shipped today. It probably won’t be long before SteamOS on the Deck gets this update. A brief overview of what’s new with this release would be: an overview effect, which shows all of your open windows and virtual desktops apps, browser tabs, and documents can all be searched with KRunner and the Application Launcher virtual desktops can be added, removed, or renamed new touchpad gestures to open the Overview, switch between virtual desktops, present windows, or activate the Desktop Grid new touchscreen gestures that offer similar functions as the touchpad dynamic theming based on the colors of your desktop background automatic switching between touch mode and desktop mode depending on if a keyboard is attached.

Them’s Fightin’ Herds – a fighting game featuring adorable animals – has finally received an update. The last update was shipped in February. But we’ve got some great things to look forward to with the 3.0 update. Probably the biggest thing is the introduction of level 3 supers (have a look at the trailer; they’re pretty flashy). This will certainly change the meta of the game, for sure. All characters have been adjusted, whether cosmetic features have been added as part of their moveset, some of their moves have been balanced, and/or received bug fixes.

Imagine a big computer manufacturer taking interest in a Linux-based distribution, such as Pop!_OS, and wanting to collaborate to put said operating system on their hardware. That’s exactly what HP did. They got in touch with System76, told them how much they liked their Pop!_OS distro, and wanted to tailor-make a notebook with this distro in mind. Thus the HP Dev One was born. No, this isn’t a notebook designed specifically for Windows and then marketing comes along and says, “We support Linux too.