I maintain a to-do list of story ideas to write at Ars, and for about a year "monthly column on DOS games I love" has been near the top of the list. When we spoke with the team at GOG, it felt less like an obligation and more like a way to add another cool angle to what I was already planning to do.
I'm going to start with the PC game I played most in high school and the one that introduced me to the very idea of online play. That game is Descent.
As far as I can recall, Descent was the first shooter to be fully 3D with six degrees of freedom. It's not often in today's gaming world that you get something completely and totally new, but that's exactly what Descent was 30 years ago in 1995.
Yesterday, I mentioned how GPD is teasing the most potent handheld yet made — a GPD Win 5 that will house the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 chip, with AMD’s most powerful integrated graphics yet, inside a PlayStation Vita-shaped machine.
If you’ve been wondering how that huge chip could even fit, handheld expert Cary “The Phawx” Golomb now has the answer: the 7-inch handheld will apparently have no internal battery taking up space. The Win 5 is designed to either be plugged into the wall, with a gaming laptop sized 180-watt charger providing the juice — or powered by a big 80 watt-hour external battery “backpack” that will (only? additionally?) be sold separately.
We can see the full spec sheet for the new Win 5 in the Phawx’s video, and as he notes, GPD had to make its Win 5 larger than the Win 4 even before you add that backpack battery.
While the Win 4 is a compact 6-inch handheld with a 45 watt-hour pack, the Win 5 with its 7-inch screen will be narrower but thicker than the Asus ROG Ally X handheld — which is an apt comparison, considering that handheld similarly pairs a 7-inch screen with an 80 watt-hour battery pack.
Here, though, the battery will add extra girth: it’s roughly 4 inches (110mm) wide and tall, and 0.7 inches (18mm) deep; it’s not clear how it attaches yet, as GPD has only shared the one dark video of the Win 5 filmed from the front, but the spec sheet mentions a “Battery to Host Dedicated Connector” as an accessory, so it might require plugging in a cable.
If you’re curious what the handheld’s controls might look like in better light, I tried brightening it up:
Other intriguing things we can see in the full spec sheet include:
A 120Hz variable refresh rate screen, where the Win 4 was limited to 60Hz
Two configs: AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 (16C/32T/ Radeon 8060S) or AI Max 385 (8C/16T/ Radeon 8050S)
32, 64, or even the full 128GB of unified memory AMD offers for these chips
USB-4 with 100W PD charging and 8K/60 DP output
Two fans and four heat pipes for cooling
An optional HDMI and USB dock with a “battery charging slot,” presumably for the external battery
No mention of any integrated keyboard, whereas previous Win devices had a hidden keyboard underneath a sliding screen
You can peruse the whole sheet at your leisure in the Phawx’s video or the screenshots we took from Phawx (with his permission) below. Be sure to tap a couple of times to make them large enough for full reading.
The Nintendo Switch 2 is easier to find than ever.
Perhaps we've been thinking the same thing, you and I. That there won't be a long-standing drought of Nintendo Switch 2 availability after all. The console has been easy to buy online from several retailers this week, including Best Buy, Target, and Walmart. Amazon, which didn't sell the Switch 2 at launch, is currently selling it by invitation only.
The console's messy preorder process and spotty launch availability made it feel a little like late 2020 all over again, when the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and Nvidia RTX 30-series GPUs launched in extremely limited quantities due to component shortages. However, Nintendo appears to have ad …
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Indie game clearinghouse itch.io is the latest online gaming storefront to take action to remove or limit the availability of some adult content, bowing to pressure from payment processors spurred by an Australian grassroots group's campaign against certain sexualized content.
Wednesday night, itch.io creators and users begannoticing that many adult-oriented games and content were no longer appearing in search results on the platform. Other creators reported that their adult-focused titles had been removed from the platform entirely, without any advance warning.
By early Thursday morning, itch.io had confirmed in a blog post that it had "'deindexed' all adult NSFW content from our browser and search pages." Itch said the move—which it admitted was "sudden and disruptive"—came in response to a pressure campaign from Collective Shout, an Australian nonprofit that describes itself as "a grassroots movement challenging the objectification of women and sexualization of girls in media, advertising, and popular culture."
Julian LeFay, the man often credited as "the father of The Elder Scrolls," has died at the age of 59, his creative partners announced this week.
"It is with profound sadness and heavy hearts that we inform our community of the passing of Julian LeFay, our beloved Technical Director and co-founder of Once Lost Games," his colleagues wrote in a Bluesky post.
LeFay spent most of the 1990s at Bethesda Softworks, culminating in his work on The Elder Scrolls series into the late '90s.
The first look at Battlefield 6 is here, and although no release date has been confirmed just yet, new leaks suggest the game will launch as early as October.
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