Steam

Hori’s spiritual successor to the Steam Controller is up for preorder on Amazon today

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Hori’s latest addition to its controller lineup, the “Horipad Wireless for Steam,” is now available for preorder on Amazon. After already releasing in Japan at the end of October, now the gamepad is coming to the US. Tailored for use with Steam, this controller is compatible with Windows 11/10 PCs and the Steam Deck and … Read more

Dragon Age: The Veilguard is Veil-good on the Steam Deck

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Discourse? Look mate, I’m just here to test the Steam Deck. Dragon Age: The Veilguard runs like a tap on any halfway decent desktop hardware, so was naturally going to be worth trying on the weaker Deck. And sure enough, Bioware’s RPG (which is really more of an action game with the occasional verbal spar) settles comfortably into handheld life.

In fact, Valve have festooned its Steam page with a Verified medal, a seal of approval for any game that performs and controls well on the Steam Deck without any glaring weaknesses or impractical annoyances. It’s still worth playing around with the settings – more on those later – but I’ll back up that official assessment, having played for several hours without so much as an undersized tooltip.

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Respawn have killed Apex Legends’ Steam Deck support in the name of anti-cheat

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The Steam Deck is something of a talisman for gaming on Linux, its popularity and penguin-powered SteamOS having almost singlehandedly dragged it past MacOS as the second-most-used operating system among Steam users. Sadly, this also means the Valve handheld is the primary casualty when developers decide to stop bothering with Linux support, as Respawn Entertainment have decided to do for Apex Legends.

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Zotac Zone review: want a faster Steam Deck OLED? It’ll cost ya

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Zotac are one of the better graphics card makers of the post-EVGA era, so even as the early pangs of handheld gaming PC fatigue start to creep in, I’ve been keeping a hopeful eye on the Zotac Zone. This is their take on a Steam Deck rival, or more specifically, the Steam Deck OLED, as this is the first real competitor to go for a similarly star-bright, colour-erupting AMOLED display. Cor, phwoar, and indeed, wowzers.

Much like a Zotac GPU, the Zone is chunkier than you might like but ultimately well-crafted. It successfully combines that rich screen with oodles of input features and Deck-thrashing performance, though between its high price and a downright vampiric thirst for battery juice, it’s definitely more of a specialist tool than a crowd-pleasing portable.

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The new Steam Deck OS update improves a little bit of everything

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It’s hard to pick out the highlights from the Steam Deck’s latest SteamOS update, 3.6.19, just because its collection of tweaks and fixes seems to span the entire gamut of handheld PC hardware as a concept. Graphics driver improvements! Third-party SSDs working better! More balanced display colours! No more “spurious power LED blinking”! Brilliant, I hate spurious power LED blinking. The original LCD Deck also now gets the Steam Deck OLED’s overclocking controls in the BIOS, which you’re welcome to try if you’re braver than I am about cranking up the temperatures of a already squished-in handheld chip.

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