Nuclear Monster

  • When we last left the new (2026) Steam Machine it’d been announced, but plans weren’t certain due to a coming tidal wave of price hikes and a lack of availability for hardware components.

    Since then, the Steam Deck‘s had large price hikes of about $200 per model, the Steam Controller has launched at $99 with waves of availability that already are projected into 2027, and prices for all kinds of modern memory and storage have shot into the stratosphere compared to their prices just a year ago.

    We now have the initial Steam Machine price, before any future hikes and other launch details. There are four models of Steam Machine up for sale in a lottery format.

    The base model with 512GB of storage is $1,049. If you want a Steam Controller (2026) bundled in, it’ll cost $1,128. About a $20 discount over the full price of a Steam Controller.

    Almost any controller will work with SteamOS, and there are some terrific and far options out there from companies like GameSir, 8bitdo, and others who use good components that don’t fail as easily as Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo’s controllers. What you’re getting with the Steam Controller are trackpads that make it easier to use the interface if you want to type or do mouse business without plugging in or using bluetooth for mice and keyboards.

    Want more storage? A 2-terabyte Steam Machine (2026) is $1,349. A controller bundle with the 2TB-tier is $1,428. You can also replace or add-on to the storage yourself, the NVMe is replaceable and there is a microSD slot.

    These aren’t guaranteed pre-orders, you have to enter a queue that will be randomized on the 25th of June at 10AM pacific time just to have the chance to buy a Steam Machine. After the randomized lottery-style drawing on the 25th, Valve will start sending notifications to customers during the week of the 29th.

    Anyone who enters after the cut-off on the 25th will be at the back of the queue. There are different queues per machine, and per-region, and other limitations to prevent people from buying multiple Steam Machines and reselling them for a profit.

    Once you get picked from the queue, you’re given 72 hours to buy the variety of Steam Machine from the queue you’ve selected. If you get picked for a queue you didn’t really want, you can’t change your selection then and there.

    I believe the lottery-style selection is a good choice for the first group of orders, given the situation. It eliminates Steam from getting overloaded as everyone struggles to get their orders in.

    Build your own, instead?

    With a generic copy of SteamOS you can theoretically build your own Steam Machine, but you’ll be fairly limited in terms of hardware compatibility and it’ll likely be missing basic console-like functionality like waking on sleep from the controller or automatically turning on your TV through HDMI-CEC. The good news is that Valve has updated SteamOS to work on more varieties of hardware with the latest update, unfortunately it is still limited to AMD GPUs for the moment.

    If you want even more hardware compatibility right now you’re looking at Bazzite or another fork of SteamOS. Valve is also working on adding Nvidia GPU support to SteamOS, but they aren’t sure if that will arrive this year according to an interview with The Verge.

    Even more Bad News

    The other bad news is that as far as we are aware, Valve has not found any compatibility improvements for multiplayer games with anti-cheat that aren’t already compatible with the Steam Deck. Games like Fortnite, Call of Duty, Battlefield, just won’t work right now on any SteamOS devices. It seems like this isn’t for a lack of trying on Valve’s part. More of an issue with a relatively small user base for Valve’s hardware causing a chicken-and-egg situation. Of course these high prices combined with low availability aren’t helping that situation, either.

    No word yet on Valve’s Steam Frame (standalone VR HMD) availability. I’m very curious to see where that one ends up, price-wise, given the lack of other third-party VR hardware. I can’t imagine most people are happy buying hardware from Facebook/Meta, and the ARM internals of the Steam Frame are very interesting. I very much want to see Valve re-use those to get a Steam Deck “mini” or something similar. Already, smaller handhelds that run Android are fairly successfully running computer games downloaded directly from Valve’s Steam and other platforms through an x86-to-ARM translation layer called FEX.

    I’m playing through Hades on my Retroid Pocket Flip 2 through one of those translation layer interfaces and although the compatibility isn’t perfect, it’s way better than I expected.

  • In 2018 a journalist walked into the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul, excited about finalizing the papers for getting married to his fiancee, but worried that he might be abducted due to his criticism of the Saudi Arabian government. He was right to be concerned, they tortured and dismembered him in retribution for speaking out against the regime.

    Khashoggi’s fiancee waited outside the consulate and wasn’t invited to the barbecue they held in order to cover up the stench of the giant sized oven they supposedly installed just for the purpose of cremating him.

    SNK, the company behind Neo-Geo, has been almost entirely owned by Mohammed bin Salman’s personal foundation since 2022.

    Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s ruler, likely ordered the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.

    For the past few weeks there has been a lot of coverage of the new Neo-Geo AES+. It’s a $250 reproduction console coming this November licensed by SNK, from Plaion. You may remember Plaion as Koch media, who were behind TheC64 and other emulation systems.

    Plaion claims the Neo-Geo AES+ skips emulation in favor of “legacy ASIC chips” that supposedly are more accurate than even FPGA hardware. It looks very interesting if you have zero ability to empathize with the family of Jamal Khashoggi and other people who were murdered and oppressed by the Saudi Arabian government.

    PCGamesN, The Outerhaven, Tom’s Hardware, Retro Handhelds, Games Radar, Video Games Chronicle, Engadget, and many more sites covered this hardware announcement without any mention of who owns SNK.

    The only people I could find that even mentioned this situation are Time Extension’s Damien McFerran who has an excellent article about SNK’s ownership and Wes Fenlon who wisely titled his Read Only Memo newsletter on the subject “If you’re going to hype up the Neo Geo+, at least admit you know about all the blood.”

    There are plenty of other ways to play Neo-Geo games without funding the new SNK. The MiSTer FPGA if you want more accuracy, emulation handhelds, there are a million options that don’t involve directly funding people who murder journalists and dissidents.

  • My biggest personal complaint about Blue Prince was that it was completely inaccessible without typical color vision. I had to ask people watching my stream to help with more and more of the game as it went on. When I wrapped up Blue Prince in October it felt like the accessibility options promised in the menus would never arrive. After a year, the accessibility update for Blue Prince is finally here on Steam for Windows and will be available soon on console versions and the macOS port.

    This update also fixed a bunch of other issues that people can run into, and adds basics like key remapping.

    Dogubomb didn’t mention other expected features in these patch notes, including a cat and a playable version of an arcade game that shows up inside Blue Prince, but this was the most important update to me.

    Wildly, the other key technical issue I’ve seen, lost save games on the PlayStation version, are still getting fixed in this update: “We have updated the save file architecture again on PS5 to further address an issue with some save files exceeding size limits.”

    I haven’t gotten a chance to check out Blue Prince‘s accessibility update yet but when I do I’ll update this post with some more thoughts on how successful it was.

  • Coincidence Games, nuZachtronics, announced a new engineering puzzle game today called U.V.S. Nirmana. We won’t have to wait long, it’ll be out next week on May 4th on Steam for Windows, macOS, and Linux. No price yet.

    The folks at Coincidence say U.V.S. Nirmana is “…about conduits and the energies that flow through them.” that’ll last between 4 and 6 hours if you already know how to play a Zach-like. Managing the conduits looks similar to an advanced Pipe Dream where you’re routing flows instead of programming or automating, though there are a bunch of different tools to change the flow.

    Players can also make their own puzzles and distribute them, though the Steam listing says designers of custom levels can observe “… as others solve them.” which implies something a little different from how these games have worked in the past, but we’ll see next week.

    This wouldn’t be a Zachlike without a solitaire game, and Eternal Solitaire looks similar to Mancala.

    As for the story of the U.V.S. Nirmana:

    Set off on the Unreturning Void Ship Nirmana as it continues a journey of uncountable eons toward the edge of the universe. Stop by distant worlds and ancient civilizations, helping them as part of your pilgrimage with your companions, the Renunciants.

    The U.V.S. Nirmana awaits.

  • Remember how early this year we were supposed to get a new Steam Machine, Steam Controller, and VR Headset called the Steam Frame? Well, at least the controller is going up for order on May 4th through Valve directly and it’ll be $99. Everything else is still stuck in AI-induced RAM-and-storage shortage hell that has also put the Steam Deck out of stock

    The reason why you might want a Steam Controller is that it has TMR sticks which shouldn’t drift, gyro support if you’re into that, dual mini trackpads for playing games that are designed for mice, and other cool features. The only downsides I see are the built-in rechargeable battery, because they all die over time and this size of device can handle rechargeable AA’s better, and the nearly $100 price tag. I bought a wired gamepad with TMR sticks for $15 last month. You can get similar controllers that are wireless for around $30 these days.

    Reviews are out for the Steam Controller, James Archer has a good one for RPS:

    The Steam Controller Mk.II is far easier to use than the original, and for every blemish that remains, it exhibits three or four little triumphs of function and design – many of them unique to this one gamepad. I haven’t even mentioned what might be my overall favourite quirk: how the wired charging puck magnetically jumps onto the Controller’s rear contacts when you wave the latter over it, clinging in place and refuelling the battery without ever having to manually insert a wire into a port.

    Archer also notes that the controller doesn’t work seamlessly with games from other stores on the PC, unless you can launch them through Steam.

    Jacob Ridley tore down the steam controller for PC Gamer and found it’s easy to fix and Valve claims that replacement parts will be available through iFixit.