Enlarge / I'd like to pretend I'd built a settlement this neatly compact and organized—with street grids, even—but alas, this is a provided screenshot. (credit: Hooded Horse)

Back when WarCraft , StarCraft , and other real-time strategy games were all the rage, I could never actually play them against other people. Even playing against the computer, I might only eke out a victory through dumb luck or an opponent's huge mistake.

The problem was, I was never ready to attack until I had my base perfectly in order—until the workers carrying oil or crystals or whatnot had the most efficient route from the mine to the base or until my buildings were arranged for optimal use of the revealed land. I just needed one more little guy, one more tower. OK, maybe two. I'm a turtler's turtler .

Against the Storm , which releases from Early Access on Steam for Windows today, has been a deeply satisfying outlet for this pent-up need to build and prosper—in a delightfully WarCraft -ian manner—without the messy business of war. There is still adversity: an ever-advancing "Impatience" meter, hostile spirits you uncover in the woods, and the typical constraints of resources, supply chains, and worker morale. Plus the rainstorms in the title, which occur both in-level, slowing you down, and at a macro level, washing away your little towns to make you start again.

Enlarge / The Steam Deck OLED (bottom) sunbathing with its older brother.

When the Steam Deck first launched, our extensive review specifically called out the "ho-hum" LCD screen as “the system's biggest heartbreak.” The “washed-out” color reproduction and “obvious light bleed” were among the more obvious effects of Valve “cut[ting] corners to save cash” on the Deck’s 7-inch LCD panel.

In the many months since that launch, Valve has offered frequent software updates to fix other early issues in areas like game compatibility, stability, and system-level features. But that lackluster LCD screen has remained the Steam Deck’s biggest flaw, a headache that users need to tolerate to enjoy a portable PC gaming experience that's otherwise quite low on compromises.

With the Steam Deck OLED, Valve is ready to eliminate that issue. The new unit, which goes on sale later this week , sports a brilliant screen that’s finally on par with the one Nintendo provided to eager Switch owners over two years ago . Paired with a handful of other small quality-of-life hardware upgrades, the new version of Valve’s handheld should arouse plenty of jealousy in those who are stuck with a now-outdated LCD unit.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

For most PC gamers, the ability to update their game with a wide variety of mods is a huge benefit they can claim over most ( but not all ) console players. But Japanese publisher Capcom ( Resident Evil , Street Fighter ) says it sees unauthorized modding of PC games as a problem akin to cheating, bringing with it the risk of headaches for the company's reputation and support costs. That's according to a 50-minute presentation covering "anti-cheat and anti-piracy measures in PC gaming" that was posted to the Capcom R&D YouTube channel last week (and noticed recently by GamesRadar ).

The presentation describes modding as an "inseparable part of PC gaming" and a reflection of a PC platform that lets you "do anything you want compared to the game console." At the same time, these facts make the PC a place "that allows you to create freely, but [where] people are also free to tamper with the game."

“No different than cheating”

One obviously bad form of PC game tampering, according to Capcom, is piracy. If anti-piracy tools are not used for PC titles, Capcom says, "pirated copies appear in less than a day [and] paid content such as DLC will be made free," leading to what the company calls "an immediate loss of profit." Then again, Capcom does admit that the size of this profit loss is "unobservable" because there is no suitable control case to compare it to. "We can only speculate on the cost of cheats and piracy," Capcom says, "but it's clear that if we don't do anything, the damage will surely be greater."

• 

  The release will include the California-based expansion that was recently launched. [credit: Sony ]

Sony has announced that the sprawling open-world sci-fi epic Horizon Forbidden West will make its way to PCs "in early 2024," almost two years after it debuted on the PlayStation 4 and 5 and four years after its predecessor Horizon Zero Dawn reached PC gamers.

Titled Horizon Forbidden West: Complete Edition , the PC release will include both the base game and the recently released Burning Shores DLC, which takes place in a post-apocalyptic Southern California. The complete edition will also launch on PlayStation 5, but a bit earlier, on October 6 of this year.

The PC port will be handled by Nixxes, which previously did a mostly bang-up job porting Sony studio Insomniac Games' Spider-Man and Spider-Man: Miles Morales to PC. Sony hasn't announced any details about PC-specific features for the game, but some recent ports of first-party PlayStation games have included features like ultrawide monitor support, DLSS AI upscaling, and more. The Spider-Man games prominently featured ray tracing, but ray tracing was part of the PS5 feature set for those games already. Horizon Forbidden West does not have ray tracing on PS5, so its inclusion in the PC version is less certain.

Enlarge / Playing Starfield on the Steam Deck does not feel like reveling in mankind's great capacity for wonder and discovery. (credit: Bethesda Game Studios)

Starfield , Bethesda's epic planet-hopping first-person RPG , is now widely available, and that includes on handheld gaming PCs. Both Valve's Steam Deck and the Asus ROG Ally picked up recent system updates that made it possible to play the game without crashes.

I can confirm the game runs on both systems, having experienced early access crashes and now a bit of normal gameplay today. But I don't think there's much point to playing locally on either system. Streaming remotely with Game Pass, or locally with Moonlight or Xbox Remote Play , is a better option, presuming you can do so without much input lag.

If you do try to force Starfield to load on your handheld, the graphics and frame rates will range from muddy to just acceptable, the battery life will be quite bad, and your experience with perhaps the best part of Bethesda RPGs—the sense of wonder and discovery in wide-open spaces—will be severely limited.

CES introduced an OLED PC monitor with quantum dots. (credit: Scharon Harding)

At the turn of the millennium, it was easy to define what a PC game was: a game programmed to run on a machine with x86 hardware, booting (in most cases) a DOS or Windows operating system, and controlled by a keyboard and mouse. The answer is less clear today, though. Most console games are ported to the PC. Many PC games are ported to console. And the most popular new PC gaming device of 2022, the Steam Deck, doesn’t even have a (physical) keyboard.

I’m all for more choice in how gamers choose to play, but something is lost when a PC game is forced to fit within the design constraints of console hardware and gamepad input. Fortunately, some titles (and franchises) still take a PC-first approach.

In the wake of a series of high-profile bad ports from consoles, a years-long GPU shortage, and other challenges for PC gaming, I took a dive back into my Steam library to identify recommendations for anyone who remembers the golden age of PC gaming fondly and wants to recapture some of that magic. Of course, some games are part of classic franchises, but others are fresh takes on the genres that characterized that lost era.