Since the announcement of the Steam Deck, portable PC gaming consoles have been proliferating the market. We have another one coming next month: the AOKZOE (pronounced “a-okay-zoey”). AOK is translated into English as “perfect,” while ZOE is translated as “sports life.” Devices start shipping in September. From the photos I was sent it looks like this handheld will have a kickstand. The color of the face buttons kind of reminds me of the SNES controller.

For those who are still waiting on their Decks to arrive, know that I feel your pain. I had to wait a long time too. But if there’s any sort of comfort that I can give, it would be that FedEx – the company responsible for shipping Valve’s handheld PC – will soon be rolling out a program for delivery drivers to take photos of their deliveries, proving that they actually delivered to the customer.

Prepare to burn a hole in your pocket as the Steam Summer Sale is now live. Sale will go on until July 7th. Here’s some notable titles on sale: DRAG – 75% off, native Them’s Fightin’ Herds – 40% off, native Project Heartbeat – 40% off, native Gang Beasts – 50% off, native Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga – 25% off Forza Horizon 4 – 67% off TUNIC – 10% off Hot Wheels Unleashed – 50% off Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl – 70% off Guilty Gear -Strive- – 40% off Hades – 40% off Among many others.

A new update should be available in your Steam client for Proton Experimental, which landed just a few hours ago. Newly playable titles include The Rising of the Shield Hero: Relive The Animation and Paladins. Tekken 7 should no longer crash at launch. Also, several titles, particularly those using the Unity engine, no longer require the MFDXGI hack, including Rust, The Long Dark, Monster Train, V Rising, and many others. In other words, video playback in these games have been improved; they shouldn’t have any graphical distortion anymore.

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.

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.

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.