My Arcade has been making retro gaming devices for many a year, with classic games appearing on mini arcade machines and all manner of form factors. However, it really struck gold with its Atari Gamestation Go handheld released a year ago.

Now it's back with a follow-up, and this edition is arguably even better. The Gamestation Retro Go has a similar form factor, with an 8-inch 4:3 high-resolution display, additional buttons, and more than 200 officially licensed games.

This latter aspect is important. Most retro gaming handhelds – Evercade aside – come packed with emulators and if games are included, they are generally sourced in a highly dubious manner. Yeah, you often get a microSD card packed with thousands of roms, but the chances of any of them being legitimate is close to zero.

Not so the Gamestation Retro Go. Thanks to deals with Bandai Namco, Capcom, Jaleco and Piko Interactive, every game available on this particular handheld is fully authorised.

That includes Street Fighter II, Final Fight, 1942, Pac-Man, Galaga and Dig Dug. We're still awaiting a full list, but considering the licensees are among the biggest arcade game manufacturers of all time, you can bet it'll include many favourites.

The console is set for release on 18 December 2026, with a US price of $199.99. We're still awaiting UK pricing and release details, but it's now on pre-order at GameStop in the States.

Canadian gamers can also pre-order one from EB Games in your homeland, for CA$279.99.

Hopefully, a UK retailer will emerge soon, too. Amazon and Argos currently list the Atari Gamestation Go for £149.99, so that could be an indication on how much and where we could see the new handheld over here.

And who knows what price that might end up at around Black Friday time?

PlayStation has just unveiled arguably its best looking PS5 side plates and DualSense controllers yet. The Prism collection includes three console covers and controllers in transparent Flare Orange, Emerald Green and Graphite Grey.

They'll be available to purchase from the PlayStation Store online from 10 November and are likely to be extremely popular. I particularly like the Flare Orange version – the console cover is especially eye-popping.

However, there's one special edition PS5 that tops those and then some.

Goldgenie is renowned for its luxury customisations of consumer tech, often replacing the shells of iPhones and other smartphones with pure gold and leather. The end results can run into the thousands of pounds and dollars, making them as bling as you can imagine.

And that's the case with its latest – a pure 24k gold PS5.

The atelior brand first released a gold PlayStation 5 in 2020, when the console originally debuted. But this latest version is different. Where that one had a golden skin, this is plated in 24k gold.

Goldgenie has used the casing from each model, plus its included DualSense controller. So you're not getting a skinned console, you're getting the shop bought model cased in real gold.

Also, the version chosen this time is the PS5 Slim with the disc drive. It is a limited edition and once all units are sold out, there will never be another of that type.

Of course, it's not exactly in the same price bracket as PlayStation's new accessories. Even with the latest pricing of the PS5 taken into account, you're going to have to dig a bit deeper.

The Goldgenie 24k Gold PS5 will set you back £9,997 in the UK, $13,585.92 in the States.

It's available to order from the brand's own website now and will ship within 14 days to anywhere in the world.

If that's a bit too steep for your liking though, Sony's transparent PS5 covers start at £64.99 / $74.99, with the matching DualSense priced at $84.99 / £74.99.

As a retro games enthusiast, I own a sizable collection of gaming handhelds of all shapes and sizes – and at all budgets. But there are few that offer as much value for money as the R36S.

Capable of comfortably playing games up to PlayStation One, it comes packed with emulators for all the classic systems. And it's always worth hunting out each major sales period.

In fact, you can often find bargains on the build up to the likes of Black Friday, as I have. Amazon is currently selling the R36S with more than 20,000 games to play for under £30 right now.

It's not the most powerful or famous retro gaming handheld out there, but has a decent display and workable user interface to get to and start each game. I own a couple of them already, in fact.

One thing to note is that as the R36S is such a popular device, whenever I find it for under £30, it gets snapped up sharpish. So be quick with your order – it's unlikely to hit a price much lower than this.

Also, while the white model is at the unbelievable price of around £28, you can pay a tiny bit more to get the colour of your choice. That includes the great-looking transparent black model for just £29.98.

What is the R36S retro gaming handheld and is it worth it?

The R36S is a decently spec'ed gaming handheld with a 3.5-inch 640 x 480 4:3 display. It runs on the Rockchip RK3326 processor, which has been the bedrock of retro gaming devices for a few years.

That means it is capable of playing all the 8-bit and 16-bit games comfortably – such as NES, SNES, Master System and Mega Drive – as well as original PlayStation titles.

You might even be able to eke a bit of PSP or N64 gaming out of it.

Most suppliers include a card filled with dubiously sourced ROMs (the games) and so it comes largely plug-and-play.

Only recently we suggested that like the PlayStation 6, the next-gen Xbox console – currently codenamed Project Helix – will be delayed until 2028 at the earliest. Now another source has repeated that claim.

In a profile of Xbox CEO Asha Sharma, Fortune revealed that "plans" include releasing "the next console by the holidays in 2028".

However, we could see another device before then. It is also claimed that there will be a "next-generation handheld device" by the end of next year.

Unfortunately though, Fortune also wrote that Helix could cost as much as $1,800 (£1,344) with today's component market taken into consideration. The business outlet revealed that internal projections priced the console between $1,200 and $1,800.

That's if the components crisis continues, of course. And as I said about the PS6 in my latest report, delayed release dates could allow Sony and Microsoft to reduce their costs.

I spoke with an LG executive at IFA in September who told me RAMageddon could be over by the end of 2027, early 2028 at the latest. That could enable memory and NAND storage prices to become more sensible before console production begins.

Hopefully, the savings will then be passed onto the consumer in the form of lower price points.

After all, who would want to spend the equivalent of a decent gaming PC on a new console? The PS5 Pro currently retails for $899 / £789 and that's considered far too expensive by most.

It also depends on Helix's capabilities. Original plans were to release a premium PC/Xbox hybrid, which can play both types of games at a high level. However, reports have since said that the plans have been adjusted, to keep the console more affordable.

That could also have contributed to the delay. Either way though, existing Xbox Series X/S (and PS5) owners can rest safe in the knowledge that their consoles will continue to be fully supported for the next few years.

Who knew we needed another ROG Xbox Ally X? Well, when Asus spun up a whole heap of limited editions to celebrate ROG's 20th anniversary this year, it clearly decided that the Xbox Ally X was a great candidate for an update.

After all, I was one of many reviewers who felt the debut handheld missed one key thing – an OLED display – and now we've got a revision with that addition. However, it's also packing a new design (featuring retro transparency) and a massive new price tag.

So how does it fare as a value proposition? I've been gaming on it for a couple of weeks to see how it holds up, and it's safe to say that, just like the Xbox Ally X before it, this could end up being down to your personal finances as much as your personal tastes.

Price and Availability

There's no two ways around it – the Xbox Ally X20 is a chunky ask when it comes to the price. In the US, it comes in at $1,299, which is a $300 hike over the original Xbox Ally X. In the UK, meanwhile, we're subjected to a price of £1,299 (where $1,299 is actually £980 when exchanged at the time of writing), which is even more heinous.

These figures are steep, and no mistake, but they're likely to be complicated by the issue of stock, too. The Xbox Ally X went in and out of stock fairly regularly at launch, and I wouldn't be surprised if the same is true of the new model now that it can be ordered. So the demand is certainly there, price irrelevant.

Design and Specs

The X20 looks much like the Xbox Ally X at first glance, and indeed feels the exact same in the hand, because its dimensions haven't changed. This isn't a new design in any real way, but rather just a new case for the existing one – but that case is really cool.

It sees the handheld put into a dark grey transparent plastic shell, which lets you see hints of components inside it, especially on its back, where fans are pretty clearly visible. It's a really nice retro touch that does indeed speak to the aesthetics of 20 years ago in tech.

This and some gold buttons, to really sell the anniversary theme, are the main differences in design terms compared to the last version of ROG's Xbox handheld, and that does start the conversation about whether enough has really changed here; that debate is at its spiciest when we turn to the machine's specs, though.

When it comes to internals, there's no change here, either. The same processor powers everything, meaning you get the AMD Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme chip – and it remains a very impressive piece of mobile work.

That said, since this chip debuted, Intel's entire Panther Lake generation of chipsets has arrived, and the top-end versions have staggering GPU performance that has made the Z2 Extreme look less bleeding-edge than it used to.

The most eye-grabbing change in component terms, though, is the new screen. For a start, it's 0.4 inches bigger than the previous version, but the crucial difference is that it's an OLED panel – just like we wanted from the start.

It's got HDR, too, making for a substantial upgrade in most ways, while still running at Full HD (1920x1080) and with a refresh rate of 120Hz. This means that all the smoothness you'd like can be achieved with the right graphical setup in your chosen games, but also ensures that you should get better image quality while getting it.

Still, the fact is that this is the sum total of the changes – you still get 1TB of internal storage on an M.2 solid-state drive, 24GB of RAM, and all the same controls and extra buttons as last time. You also get the exact same software suite, with Windows as its base and a layer of Xbox's software on top for convenience.

In fact, it's really worth reiterating this – to all intents and purposes, this machine will feel identical to the ROG Xbox Ally X, apart from its screen. Thus, despite its name giving a slightly muddled impression, it really is the same as going from a Steam Deck to a Steam Deck OLED.

Performance and Display

So, if the ROG Xbox Ally X20 is just a new shell and a new screen, how does that translate in terms of performance? Well, the answer is pretty simple – it performs near-identically to the Xbox Ally X, as you'd expect given that same chipset powering everything.

There might be tiny differences in battery life because of the newer, bigger display, and while there are miniature changes in benchmarking across technical tools, in actual gameplay we're talking the exact same frame rates as you'd have gotten a year ago on the Ally X.

That's not a huge issue, of course, because the Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme remains a really impressive portable chip. You'll be able to play Cyberpunk 2077 on its Steam Deck preset at around 50fps, for example, and running more recent games like Pragmata, you can get a pretty reliable 40fps, too, if you tune it right.

Capcom's newer games are great for their scalability, but the obvious caveat is that some newer titles will stretch the handheld past its limits, and it's a simple reality that you shouldn't necessarily buy this device in the expectation of playing newer titles for years to come – that's just not what it's best at.

Where it does excel is with a back catalogue, whether it's through Xbox Game Pass or Steam, and less graphically demanding titles like Hollow Knight: Silksong or Disco Elysium are pretty stellar to play through.

That also brings me to the software question, which is significant. Once you've set up the Xbox Ally X20, you'll be greeted by a sort of software shell, Xbox Mode. This launched a while back with the original Xbox Ally, but it's been upgraded in a few ways over time, and is now smoother than ever.

There's seemingly a big new version coming out imminently, but I didn't get the chance to try that for this review. Instead, I used the public version out now, and found it reliable enough, even if I did end up using it to just boot Steam quite often.

The fact is that Xbox Mode runs games with better performance than just doing so straight through Windows, so it's a welcome addition that also makes navigating through menus with your controls a good deal easier.

Putting performance aside, though, the display upgrade that really feels like the only reason the Xbox Ally X20 exists is a huge success in gaming terms. The change to OLED is indeed felt immediately, with inkier blacks and beautiful, vivid colours – and with no trade-off in refresh rate, there's really no downside here.

It's the upgrade I wanted the moment I tested the original Xbox Ally X, albeit at a price that I can't pretend to love.

In terms of battery life, meanwhile, I got about three hours from Cyberpunk 2077, but closer to five when running Silksong, which makes it a solid enough performer.

Asus ROG Xbox Ally X20 review: Verdict

This was always going to be the way – the never-ending crunch of the memory price crisis means that the ROG Xbox Ally X20 feels a little compromised by its wild price. That's a shame, because adding an OLED panel basically fixes the one flaw with the Xbox Ally X, and it is therefore really quite lovely to game on.

However, in a world where Intel's Panther Lake chips are now in real handhelds that outperform this one, meaning it's no longer an apex predator, it does look increasingly like a niche option. If you're a big fan of Xbox Mode and want its best implementation yet, this is your best bet, but I think most people might end up bouncing off that price.

Also Consider

If you're shopping at the top end of the gaming handheld market, why not get the newest and shiniest option available? In this case, that's the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ – a genuine beast that features the latest in Intel chipsets and is therefore just about the best performer you'll find. That said, it's ferociously expensive.

The more sensible option is to accept that portable gaming might not be for uber-fidelity, and instead save loads of cash by going for something older like the Lenovo Legion Go S (SteamOS), which remains my favourite PC gaming handheld. It runs SteamOS natively and is a little beauty to play on, but doesn't come close to the ROG Xbox Ally X20 in terms of performance.

It's been just past a year since Battlefield 6 came out – something that you might have noticed thanks to a big promotional push around its new "Game of the Year" edition. That's a label you're allowed to use even if your own mum's the only one who gave it to you, but in this case there's a pretty decent shout about its success.

After all, the franchise had languished far behind Call of Duty for years, through some real low points (the monetisation in Battlefield V being possibly the nadir), only to leapfrog it brutally in 2025. It was the best-selling shooter of that year, and might have a chance at keeping that label this year even with Modern Warfare 4 arriving in a matter of days.

Sales don't make a game good, of course, and if anything, sometimes mean it has to come from behind in terms of my expectations. Yet, without any artifice, I can say that I play Battlefield 6 almost every day on my PS5 Pro, with a group of friends for whom it's completely supplanted COD at present.

We all fell back into that latter franchise in a huge way when Warzone released, but in the last few years the crazy in-game movement it required alienated us, so when Battlefield returned to a more grounded system it was music to our ears. Now, a year on, its fifth season is proving just as much of a hit, and its new maps (set in Las Vegas and Area 51) have already hosted a good half-dozen hours of team play.

I've particularly enjoyed the new Area 51 map, which is expansive and full of varied terrain – and unlike some of the arrivals in previous seasons (like Blackwell Fields), it doesn't feel like one big plane of similar situations to fight in. It has verticality, sprawl, and a whole heap of routes between points.

Crucially, though, the game is also finally at a point where it sounds as good as I remember it being during the pre-launch beta, when footsteps were incredibly clear and could help you win fights multiple times per round. After quite a few months of muddy audio, Dice has tweaked things to the point where wearing a headset once again feels completely essential.

While my friends all play on launch PS5 consoles, I'm also enjoying the game on my PS5 Pro, and it's one of those titles that makes me feel good about the admittedly sizeable investment it represents. It's sharper and a little more fluid than it would otherwise be, not least thanks to its use of PSSR (PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution) to sharpen its base image.

With PSSR actually getting upgrades over time from Sony, this means that BF6 is, if anything, also feeling better than it used to, and it's nice to be able to rely on a game for this long. I have reservations about some of the cosmetics in the game, to be fair, and the "Secuty" typo on a skin this season is particularly embarrassing.

I'm more fussed about the basic fun factor than I am about skins, though, and BF6 continues to nail that side of things. For a game to be drawing me in on basically any free evening an entire year on from release is really impressive enough on its own, frankly.

While some originally suggested that the PlayStation 6 and Xbox Project Helix could release in 2027, it's looking like both could be delayed further. And their prices could be astronomical when they do arrive.

The ongoing components crisis (AKA RAMageddon) has put a kybosh on the next-generation of console gaming, with one industry insider claiming that Sony is struggling to get its PS6 costs down to an affordable level.

That's because the price of memory and storage has skyrocketed over the last two years with the demand from AI data centres making both rare. And according to KeplerL2 (via VGC) that will leave Sony facing a $680 (£510) bill just for the RAM and NAND storage for each PS6.

Responding to a post on NeoGaf that suggested the PS6 will cost $680, he pointed out that the memory and storage would be more than that on their own. You then have to factor in the AMD chipset, GPU, heatsink, fan, power unit, and everything else besides. Not even including a packaged controller, that would put the manufacturing cost alone at just shy of $1,000 (£750).

Even if Sony is willing to sell its next-gen machine at a loss, it can't take too much of a hit per unit.

KeplerL2 is a much-respected AMD expert, so he knows a thing or two about component prices and the potential hardware being considered.

A PS5 costs £569 / $599 today – much more than its launch price – while the PS5 Pro has a retail price of £789 / $899. It would not be a massive leap to suggest the PS6 will be considerably more expensive if the component crisis continues.

What's perhaps more likely is that Sony will wait until the wholesale prices of RAM and NAND reduce. LG recently told T3 that could happen by the end of 2027 or early 2028, which would allow production on a new console to start at a lower cost in spring 2028.

So the holiday season 2028 would be a better bet for the arrival of both the PS6 and Project Helix. And a lot kinder on your pocket, we hope.

It's no secret that 2026 has been a bit of a disasterclass for Xbox, with new leadership clearly feeling the time is right for a brutal clearout of employees and studios. In light of those decisions, it's quite a spicy time for Gears of War: E-Day to finally come out – a game that The Coalition made instead of finishing its new trilogy (Gears 4 and 5), itself quite a big change in plans.

Rather than finding out what'll happen to Kait and her team in the future timeline, we're instead rewinding right to the start and returning to the objectively massive boots of Marcus Fenix. E-Day, as the name suggests, shows off what the actual invasion of the Locust Horde looked like to live through, and it's unsurprisingly gritty as a result.

In gameplay terms, things are also pretty old-school. While there are sequences that let you explore a little, they're far from the vehicle-driven open zones of Gears 5, and the running and gunning also feel impressively Xbox 360-coded (although they're actually a lot quicker than they used to be).

What's taken me aback, though, is how unbelievably good the game looks, playing on PC. I have a loan PC from Nvidia, kitted out with an GeForce RTX 5070 Ti, and it's pretty amazing to see E-Day push it to its limits, or at least exploring those limits. Playing at 1440p (my preferred avenue, for performance reasons), I've been able to play the game on its Ultra preset, with a few extra settings like hair strands toggled on, all at a pretty steady 60fps.

That performance has been rock solid while the game pushes out frankly gorgeous lighting and reflections – with the pre-release work between developers The Coalition and Nvidia to get this all working so smoothly seeming obvious. The fact that game-ready drivers for Nvidia cards were there on release day is all you really need to know on that front.

The game's opening sequences are played out largely in night-time scenes and dimly-lit interiors, giving it the perfect opportunity to show off ray-tracing's more subtle side. It's not all about shiny cars reflecting the world perfectly; the interactions of different light sources on a scene are just as important, and can often be more impactful.

Nvidia's crowing about the new feature that E-Day debuts on this front: the catchily titled RTX Mega Geometry. This basically marks a big step forward in how geometry in a level interacts with lighting – and it means that objects in a scene have a noticeable step up in lighting detail and shadowing.

You might not think it makes a huge difference, and in some ways you'll be fine to play without it, but if your card's capable of it, this is the sort of less shouty step that makes a real difference to a game's sense of reality, moreso than something like DLSS 5.

Of course, much of the fun of benchmarking a game when you have a 50-series card to play with is in figuring out where the ceiling is with frame generation enabled. With so many levels of the tech now available to use, it's about finding the right balance for you.

I've been playing with frame-gen largely turned off, but turning it on at all can bring huge rewards in terms of frames – and the first couple of levels really don't introduce enough latency to feel like they have much downside. Crank it up to the maximum, and you'll get hundreds of frames per second, although input lag might start to weigh on you a tiny bit.

Having that headroom to play with at all is pretty great, though, and leaves E-Day feeling like a really polished PC launch. In fact, its visual quality and launch day parity has me feeling (once again) good about selling my Xbox Series X a few years ago. It was a machine I didn't use enough, and getting this sort of massive Xbox release on PC right from the start underlines that I still don't need one.

When it comes to retro gaming handhelds you don't get much more premium than AYN. The manufacturer has regularly risen to the top with its successive Android devices, proving that there's a healthy market for power and portability.

Its dual-screen AYN Thor is arguably the best gaming handheld you can buy today, with two OLED screens and more than enough grunt to play Switch and PC games, let along Nintendo DS and 3DS. And as the proud owner of an AYN Odin 2 Portal myself, I can safely say that there's not been many to better it.

Not until now, that is.

AYN has announced on its Discord that a new model is coming – the AYN Odin 3 Portal. And considering how popular the current device continues to be, it's bound to be a massive draw for retro gamers who want the best.

In fact, thanks to the likes of Game Native for PC emulation and the new DroidDeck app which runs SteamOS on Android devices, those looking to replace their aging Steam Decks might be interested too.

We don't yet know any of the specifications or features, but the posted marketing image does show a handheld that looks very similar to the existing Portal. I would assume therefore that it will have a 7-inch OLED 16:9 display (likely 1080p).

However, because it's part of the Odin 3 family, surely we'll be getting similar processing inside. The AYN Odin 3 runs on the Qualcomm Dragonwing Q8 chipset, which is the gaming equivalent of the Snapdragon 8 Elite – basically without the mobile network capabilities. I'd imagine the same will be the case on the Portal.

That will definitely make it a powerhouse in Android gaming terms. AYN itself highlights its "flagship power".

Add to that the SteamOS compatibility through third-party apps and we could have one of the best all-rounders heading our way.

The price could also be a winner. The Odin 3 tops out at $529 / around £399 for the 16GB / 1TB model (the 2TB version was cancelled), so when you consider the Steam Deck OLED starts at $789 / £649 and is arguably lower powered, you could say its days are numbered.

The marketing image for the Odin 3 Portal claims that the device is "coming soon" and lists today's date, so hopefully more information is imminent.

If you're building a list of the best RPGs ever made, there's no doubt a lot of personal opinion that'll inform your choice for the top spot, but some games just have to be in the upper echelons. No matter your persuasion, most people would agree, for one, that The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt belongs in that conversation.

It's one of the finest open-world games of all time, but also one of the most intriguing, expansive and immersive RPGs ever, and it's been attracting accolades for donkey's years now. In 2026, though, CD Projekt Red has seen fit to bring it up to date once more by releasing a remastered version for modern consoles and the PC.

That means a new version of the game running natively on the Nintendo Switch 2, which previously just had the near-miraculous but very blurry original Switch version to turn to. This new port is available as a new purchase, but crucially is also a free upgrade for those who already have the Switch 1 version – so you might already own the newest version without realising it.

This generosity is a great start to the experience of testing out The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered, but it doesn't end there. This past weekend I've put in around five hours in the game, refreshing my memory of its brilliant campaign and sizeable expansions, and I'm basically in awe of how it runs on Nintendo's machine.

Before we get to performance, though, it might be worth underscoring that this is a third-person, action-focused RPG with long, winding questlines. Geralt of Rivia, the series' hero, is on the search for his adoptive daughter Ciri, but she's not easy to track down, and he'll also circle around the sorceress Yennefer while he hunts. The story is peak fantasy, the action is relatively simple but very satisfying, and the setting is dark and gritty in a hugely satisfying way.

The fact that this game ever ran on the first Switch was a superb feat, but the performance on offer meant that I never really got into it – playing the game on any other platform felt like a better pick for me. Now, though, I think the portable experience on the Switch 2 is genuinely at the point where the compromises are no longer really there.

The developers have embraced Nintendo's hardware, including that variable refresh-rate screen, to give the game a 40fps mode as default, which means that it feels impressively smooth without the same demands as a 60fps version. There are areas where this performance dips a little into the mid-30s, but I haven't found that distracting, and the benefits to perceived smoothness are huge.

It's also drastically less blurry than the previous port, as you'd hope, and while there are still clear fuzzy edges to things when you're playing in handheld mode (these really clear up when you dock the console), it's extremely legible and clear. This means that I really do think you could play the game's entire saga from start to finish without feeling like you should have done so on other hardware.

If that feels like damning the port with faint praise, think again – I love this game to death, and to be able to play it on the go, on a machine with just a faint whirr of fan noise rather than a cacophony, is quite special. My girlfriend also only really games on the Switch 2, so this means that she's now lined up to play one of the best stories in gaming, something I've been saving for her for ages.

All of this is also doubly reassuring given that the game is getting a new expansion next year – Songs of the Past. The gap between the original game's release and this DLC is staggeringly long, but it promises to set the scene for The Witcher 4, which sounds like a real treat, and it'll come to this Switch 2 version from the start.

This all means that you can get the game on Switch 2 and be confident that even if you manage to hoover up all of its content by the end of the year (which would be quite a feat, given its scale), you'll still have more to enjoy next year, at presumably the same level of performance. That, in turn, means this is a great investment, and the smartest way to buy it is probably to find a used copy of the Switch 1 port, buy that and then score the free upgrade that way. That's a hot tip in case it hadn't occurred to you!

I can't be the only one who'd never played an Ace Combat game until this week, right? The series just got its eighth iteration, Wings of Theve, and while I've known about it for quite a few years, I've never had the circumstances align to the point where I've actually knuckled down and played one.

Now, with a review code provided by Bandai Namco, that's changed, and I've been slotting down a virtual visor to go on sorties for a few days, notching hours of flight time and realising that even in-game flight can be way more challenging than I thought.

This isn't a game that dresses itself up with multiple different types of gameplay, either – it's all plane, all of the time. While you do get a surprising amount of story content delivered in briefings and cutscenes before and after missions (in which you can move the camera a little, and occasionally press a button to, for instance, shake someone's hand), the gameplay is all flight-based.

You play as a pilot who's on an early mission with an ace, the Wings of Theve, before being shot down, with that ace passing away. Rather than admitting such a damaging blow, though, the PR operation behind your military (aiming to retake its own territory after invasion) decides to pretend that you are the Wings, continuing the legacy of this larger-than-life figure.

That's all a framework around which a long series of missions play out, as your forces make advances and beat retreats according to the overarching military plot. To help, you'll fly a wide range of missions, from escorting landing troops to retake a city, to strafing a giant land battleship as it crawls towards the battlefield, or long dogfights against enemy squadrons above the ocean.

There are an impressive number of different scenarios to experience, and two main control schemes to do so with. The older-school of the two lets you control pitch and roll, and while it's easy enough in isolation, in the middle of battles (if you're anything like me), the ground becomes your biggest enemy. The more casual option leaves you able to do far fewer interesting manoeuvres, but makes it miles harder to crash, and I've ended up using it to avoid frustration.

That's something I know I'll probably have to change if I decide to dive into the world of online play once I finish the campaign, which is daunting. What's also daunting is that I'm playing on PC, where people are a bit more likely to have access to flight sticks and other equipment; I normally play my multiplayer games on PS5 Pro, where my friends also game, but that option isn't the one I went with this time, and part of me regrets that choice for social play's sake.

Graphically, though, it's hard to argue with the PC version of the game. I'm playing on the Nvidia rig that I have on loan, complete with its 5070 Ti, and Wings of Theve is quite the looker at 1440p. It's a super-demanding game, too, with 4K play stretching my system to the point of needing frame generation to level things out.

Instead, I've dropped to 1440p without any real compromises on clarity, and am playing the game on the Ultra preset with no complaints and no hitches. While smoothness is really important (and I'm getting a steady 60fps without issues), it's also interesting that the pace of dogfights means that I don't feel the need to push for results closer to 120fps at this point.

The game's beautiful, though, and around 10 missions into the campaign, it's doing a great job of showcasing its natural weather systems and cloud formations. Whether it's a golden sunset cascading through high clouds or a dark and rainy night with low visibility, there's a really fun vibrancy to how the stages look.

The aircraft themselves, meanwhile, are also ridiculously detailed and impressive, with moving parts that really sing with authenticity, which makes sense since almost all of the planes you can fly in the game are, in fact, real and licensed.

I wasn't sure whether I'd click with Ace Combat 8, especially in a release calendar so ridiculously busy that I have multiple other new games waiting to be started (I'm looking at you, Silent Hill: Townfall). I'm having a blast, though, and have already carefully plotted how I'll be progressing through the campaign's unlockable skill tree – a sure sign of commitment.

Whether you aim to play it on PS5, Xbox or PC, I'd give Wings of Theve a firm recommendation as an entry point to a long series. If, like me, Ace Combat has always flown by as a theory, not something you've actually tried, then I'd tell you to get on my six, and try it out.

Nex Playground has created quite a buzz since its release in 2023 – so much so that many have tried to copy it, but without hitting the same level of quality.

It's a games console entirely focused on motion gaming for the whole family. You place the small cube in front of your TV and its camera can track natural motions to interact with more than 60 games.

Priced at £204.24 as a Prime Big Deal Days offer, it means you save almost £65 on the console itself.

• Shop all Amazon Prime Big Deal Days offers

You get five games included with the package – Fruit Ninja, Starri, Whac-a-Mole, Go Keeper and Party Fowl – all of which are kid-friendly, but can be played by all ages. If you want to expand the library, you can add a PlayPass subscription which then unlocks the entire games catalogue.

A PlayPass usually starts at £45 for three-months access, with a whole year available for £90.

Nex Playground – other details

The Nex Playground console can recognise up to four players at once, for group play and family friendly competition. And with the cube measuring just 3-inches on all sides, it's small enough to tuck out of the way when not in use.

It also has privacy protections built into the device, including kidSAFE+ COPPA compliance. The manufacturer is also a member of the Family Online Safety Institute and promises that no data is shared online. All motion-tracking data and processing is only stored locally on the device. You also get a built-in camera cover.

Like most retro gaming fans, I was looking forward to getting my hands on Blaze's first clamshell devices – The Spectrum Handheld and The C64 Handheld. Both were due on 15 October, so my excitement was ramping up.

However, the company has announced that both have been delayed to next spring, and for good reason. It didn't want to release inferior products.

"During production, we identified areas where the product construction was not meeting our high standards," said Blaze in an official statement.

"While we could address some issues quickly and release the products in 2026, we believe taking this additional time is the right decision to give you the best experience possible."

This includes standard and collector's edition versions of both devices. They will now release on 22 April 2027.

Does this affect my pre-order?

Some retailers, such as Amazon UK, are still listing the handhelds for pre-order for their original 15 October release date, but we expect that to change soon. You'll need to contact the retailer if you want to cancel your order.

Personally, I'm happy to wait a bit longer. I'd much rather have a better device than one rushed through the production process – flaws and all. And especially so when it comes to The C64 and The Spectrum Handhelds.

First announced in May, each retro gaming handheld comes preinstalled with a collection of 25 classic games specific to their original 80s system. For The Spectrum Handheld, that includes Manic Miner (of course), Head Over Heels, and Skool Daze.

The C64 Handheld sports a selection including Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe, Paradroid, and Nebulus.

You can also add your own ZX Spectrum and C64 games respectively through each device's microSD card slot. Even the buttons on the lower half of each clamshell are designed around original hardware, while at the top you get a 4:3, 4.3-inch IPS display that's protected when closed.

Each is priced at £109.99 in the UK, $129.99 in the US. The Collector's Editions, which include a travel case and exclusive copy of Crash or Zzap!64 magazines, now seem to have sold out.

Sadly, The Spectrum Handheld and The C64 Handheld are not the first retro gaming consoles to have been delayed in recent times. We also learned recently that the NeoGeo AES+ has also been put back – to next September in this case.

"We didn't have a choice," said manufacturer and distributor, Plaion Replai.

I have been writing and collecting retro gaming devices for many years, and so I find myself scouring online retailers each big sales period for new models to add to my lineup.

That's lead me to check out Amazon once more, as its Prime Big Deal Days sale will start once more – for two days from 6 October 2026 – and I've already spotted a perennial favourite at a great price.

The R36S might not be the most powerful or famous retro gaming handheld out there, but is capable of emulating classic systems up to original PlayStation. I own a couple of them already, in fact.

This particular model comes with many thousands of classic games on a microSD card, so what's not to like at just £25.99? Most other retailers are listing it for at least £39.99.

One thing to note is that as the R36S is such a popular device, whenever I find it for under £30, it gets snapped up sharpish. So be quick with your order – it's unlikely to hit a price lower than this.

Also, while the white model is at the unbelievable price of under £26, you can pay a little more to get the colour of your choice. That includes the great-looking transparent black model for just £1.49 more – at £27.48.

What is the R36S retro gaming handheld and is it worth it?

The R36S is a decently spec'ed gaming handheld with a 3.5-inch 640 x 480 4:3 display. It runs on the Rockchip RK3326 processor, which has been the bedrock of retro gaming devices for a few years.

That means it is capable of playing all the 8-bit and 16-bit games comfortably – such as NES, SNES, Master System and Mega Drive – as well as original PlayStation titles.

You might even be able to eke a bit of PSP or N64 gaming out of it.

Most suppliers include a card filled with dubiously sourced ROMs (the games) and so it comes largely plug-and-play.

Xbox is allegedly asking its own gamers whether it should scrap physical discs or not. It has reportedly started to survey Xbox Insiders on potential features for Project Helix, and if it should retain the option to install games from disc.

A lot has been said about Sony's decision to ditch disc versions of games from 2028, while Xbox was also thought to be doing something similar. It recently launched an initiative to convert disc copies of Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S games into digital versions, to use without the disc being inserted. This lead to many believing that it was to phase out the format.

However, its survey suggests a final decision is yet to be made.

According to screengrabs posted on X by Power Up Gaming, the survey asks Insiders on the importance of being able to "install games from a physical disc" on its "next-generation Xbox console".

Insiders are asked whether this is "not necessary", "nice to have", or a "must have" on the new console.

There are also questions on game exclusivity and the saving of automatic gameplay highlights.

Not all Xbox Insiders have received the survey (I haven't on my own machine), so we're not sure how widespread this is or which regions it might be operating. But if genuine, it does suggest that Xbox's plans for its new machine are still not set in stone.

It has been said in recent times that the original idea of a premium machine that combines the capabilities of an Xbox with a PC have been curbed a touch, not least due to the rising costs of components. Xbox itself has hinted that it might have to trim back some of the plans to make the next console more affordable.

Adding a disc drive will naturally add expense, but it could also give the brand a strategic advantage over Sony and its next PlayStation. It's almost certain that the PS6 won't be compatible with physical media – either as a home console or handheld (both are rumoured).

We'll likely have to wait a fair while longer to find out. But if you do happen to be sent the Xbox Insider survey, at least you'll get to have your say.

The NeoGeo AES+ has been one of the year's most exciting retro gaming announcements, and pre-orders were taken up in their droves this spring. However, the hype had to be tempered a touch earlier this month when its manufacturer, Plaion Replai, had to delay the product.

It will now be coming out in September 2027, but even that looked tentative at one point.

Speaking to VGC, the company's hardware and software director explained that at one point the project was "almost dead". And it was a common foe at fault.

After unprecedented amounts of orders were received, Plaion entered the hardware procurement phase and discovered an issue: "[We] advised our partners in the Far East what our requirements were, and it’s the first time I’ve ever been refused ordering chips. I’ve worked with Plaion for nearly 20 years in this field," said Ben Jones.

"What do you mean I can't get these chips? Oh, AI!"

Yep, RAMageddon was striking again. The global chip shortage enforced by the demand of AI data centres meant that essential components were unavailable. In this case, Plaion could not source parallel NOR flash. chips.

It meant the design team had to return to the drawing board. Thankfully though, as Jones revealed to VGC, a solution was found. The serial NOR flash chips the company was using in the cartridges to be released with the console would work as an alternative, with some conversion wizardry.

Additional development was required to find the answer and add technology to perform the conversion, but it meant the NeoGeo AES+ project was resurrected.

This did result in the delay though. The new system needs extra testing, although Plaion does have "thousands of these chips ready for the cartridges" already, so at least the procurement issues have been ironed out.

Shipping for the console will now start on 16 September 2027, with pre-orders continuing to remain open in the meantime. The NeoGeo AES+ starts at £179.99 for the console and controller, with cartridges priced from £69.99 / €79.95 apiece.

One of the most exciting retro games console reissues was unveiled in April this year, with the NeoGeo AES+ to be a faithful recreation of SNK's iconic 1990s machine.

It proved to be a hugely popular announcement, with pre-orders flying in for the new version and the multiple game cartridges to go with it. All in the hope of getting hold of one before the end of this year.

However, we have learned from distributor Plaion that the NeoGeo AES+ has now been delayed – by almost 12 months. We've been told that it won't ship until 16 September 2027.

Sadly, there's a common reason for its delay: the RAM and components crisis.

"The response to NeoGeo AES+ has been extraordinary, but global component supply constraints mean we simple cannot manufacture enough systems to deliver the worldwide launch our community deserves," said Plaion in a statement sent to T3.

"Rather than launch with severely limited availability, we're taking the extra time to expand production, secure the components we need, and invest in an even bigger future for NeoGeo AES+.

"If you've already pre-ordered, your order remains secure and keeps its priority place. There is no price increase and no action is required."

Existing orders will also get a "Founding Supporter Bonus". Standard and Anniversary Edition orders will receive a free NeoGeo AES+ Gamepad, while those who have paid for the Ultimate Edition with get 30% off future NeoGeo AES+ games.

As for new orders, they are being accepted now (albeit with a much lengthier shipping estimate). The NeoGeo AES+ will cost £179.99 in the UK without a game. It's compatible with old NeoGeo AES cartridges from the 90s, along with new reissues priced around £69.99 / €79.95 each.

The Ultimate Edition bundle also still available. Priced at £799.99, it includes 10 classic NeoGeo games in a cartridge set, with the likes of Metal Slug, The King of Fighters 2002, and Samurai Shodown V Special part of the pack.

If you've been using Xbox Cloud Gaming as an easy way to play without downloading games or owning an Xbox, there's some bad news coming.

Microsoft has announced that Game Pass subscribers will soon have a monthly limit on how much time they can spend gaming in the cloud. The change is due to arrive in November and applies to both existing and new subscribers.

The amount of cloud gaming you get will depend on your Game Pass plan. Ultimate subscribers get 15 hours a month, while Premium subscribers get 10 hours and Essential subscribers just five.

That's a significant change from the current system, where cloud gaming doesn't impose a monthly playtime allowance.

Microsoft says the change is necessary because the cost of providing cloud gaming increases as more people use the service and spend longer playing. It also says that the new limits will affect around 4% of Game Pass subscribers, suggesting the majority won't regularly hit their allowance.

For those who do burn through their allowance, there's another option: buy more cloud gaming time through the Xbox Store. Microsoft hasn't announced how much those additional hours will cost yet, with pricing expected to be revealed closer to the November launch.

That could make sense for occasional players who don't want another monthly subscription. But for existing Game Pass subscribers, particularly Ultimate members who use cloud gaming regularly, it means a service that was previously bundled without an explicit time limit is about to become another metered part of the subscription.

And with Xbox continuing to push cloud gaming onto TVs, phones and other devices, the timing is curious. Microsoft is expanding access to the service at the same time as it puts a ceiling on how much subscribers can use it.

The good news is that this doesn't limit the amount of Game Pass gaming you can do on an Xbox or PC. The restriction is specifically on games streamed through Xbox Cloud Gaming.

Still, if cloud gaming is one of the main reasons you're paying for Game Pass, it's worth keeping an eye on how much you actually use it. From November, 15 hours might sound generous, until you realise that's only around 30 minutes of cloud gaming a day.

The last few years have seen a major increase in gaming handhelds. While the Nintendo Switch has aided this rise, it's really been the Windows PC makers that have risen to advance what's on the market.

Earlier this year, my colleague attended Computex in Taipei and tested all of the latest and greatest options – from MSI, Acer, Asus and OneXPlayer – and his consensus was that, while they're all great, they're all just rather large.

Acer's latest gaming handheld, the Predator Atlas 7, looks to address that balance, though, fixing the one big problem with the previous Atlas 8 – ultimately its size. That's achieved in part by opting for a 7-inch rather than 8-inch display.

As a result the 7-inch handheld maxes out at 48.4mm thick, compared to the 58.4mm of the 8-inch version. That might not sound like a lot, but trimming down on the chunkiness factor will make a big difference in comfort and usability.

There's nothing trim about the Predator Atlas 7's internal hardware, though, offering up to an Intel Arc G3 Extreme processor and even 24GB LPDDR5x RAM and 1TB storage if specified in your build.

The handheld runs Windows 11 Home and comes with an Xbox Game Pass subscription out of the box, so you'll have access to loads of titles. The 7-inch display runs at up to 120Hz, supports Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) and is protected with Corning Gorilla Glass Victus.

But all that power brings inevitable heat, which is where Acer's Predator AeroBlade fan setup comes into play. One metal fan is joined by a second plastic one, cooling the system in tandem with internal channels to dissipate heat.

Despite being a smaller system, the Atlas 7 offers up to an 80Wh battery – the same capacity as found in the larger Atlas 8 and, therefore, offering the same or better longevity potential. That's a big win in the handhelds world.

However, the Predator Atlas 7 doesn't replace the Atlas 8. The latter will finally be available in Europe from later this month, while the newer, smaller model will be coming in November. Pricing is yet to be revealed.

Razer may have a new solution to the problem of phone sized gaming console controls. The new Prio is a foldable USB-C controller that shrinks down to roughly the size of a credit card when you're not using it, then opens out into a full-sized gamepad when it's time to play.

The Razer Prio measures just 107 x 67 x 23mm when folded and weighs 101g, making it small enough to disappear into a pocket or bag. Twist it open and it expands to accommodate phones up to 7 inches, including the iPhone 17 Pro Max and Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra.

Despite its diminutive folded dimensions, Razer hasn't gone for a stripped-back control layout. You get analogue sticks, a four-way D-pad, face buttons, bumpers and triggers, giving the Prio much more in common with a traditional console controller than a clip-on phone accessory.

The sticks are really interesting. They're capacitive rather than relying on traditional physical contacts, which Razer says should reduce the potential for stick drift and keep movement accurate over time.

There's also no internal battery to worry about. The Prio connects directly to your phone over USB-C, so there's no Bluetooth pairing and nothing extra to charge. Razer says the flexible design can also accommodate most slim and medium-sized phone cases.

The Prio is designed as much for short bursts of gaming as it is for longer sessions. Its tactile face buttons are designed to be quiet, which should make it less conspicuous when you're gaming on public transport or sitting in a waiting room.

It supports iPhone running iOS 18 or later and Android 14 or later, and can be used for local games or cloud and remote play through services including Xbox Cloud Gaming, Steam Link and PS Remote Play.

There's also a dedicated Razer Cortex Mobile button for quickly accessing your game library, with Razer's PC Remote Play allowing compatible PC games to be streamed to your phone.

The Razer Prio is available now for £99.99 / $99.99 / €109.99. That makes it a fairly serious investment for a mobile controller, but its unusual folding design could be a super practical options for anyone who wants proper controls without permanently attaching a bulky gamepad to their phone.

Microsoft is making the shift towards digital Xbox games a little easier for people who still have a shelf full of discs. The new Disc-to-Digital feature lets you insert an eligible game disc into your Xbox One or Xbox Series X and claim a digital version without buying the game again.

The feature is due to start testing with Xbox Insiders on 31 August, with thousands of Xbox One and Series X titles expected to be supported. Publishers can decide whether their games are included, so this won't work with every disc in your collection.

There's an important catch to how the system works. The digital entitlement remains tied to the physical disc, so you can't simply turn a game into a permanent digital copy and then sell the disc while keeping the game.

That does mean you can still lend or sell the disc, with the digital entitlement moving with it. It's a fairly smart way of dealing with physical games as Xbox moves towards a more digital future.

The bigger benefit comes if you eventually move to hardware without a disc drive. A supported game you've converted can be played digitally on Xbox, and some titles can also take advantage of Xbox Play Anywhere and cloud gaming, giving you more ways to play without having the disc in the console.

Microsoft hasn't confirmed whether its next-generation Project Helix console will include a disc drive. Xbox president Asha Sharma has said the company is thinking about affordability and efficiency, while Microsoft continues to push towards an ecosystem where Xbox games can work across consoles, PCs and other devices.

So this isn't really Microsoft saving physical games. It's more practical. If you've already spent years building a physical Xbox library, Disc-to-Digital gives you a way to carry at least some of it into what's increasingly looking like a disc-free future.

We're living through an era of price hikes right now, and gaming consoles are acting as some of the most obvious and visible examples of how the memory crisis is affecting consumer prices. While Xbox relentlessly raises the price of its own consoles, and PlayStation broadly keeps pace, Nintendo has been taking things slightly more slowly.

It announced earlier this summer that it would be raising the price of the Switch 2, but it gave us all plenty of time to get ready by confirming that the price hikes would only come into force on 1 September.

In case you weren't concentrating, though, we're now in extremely late August, which means you don't have much longer to grab a Switch 2 for its launch price.

The real point here is that anyone thinking about buying a Switch 2 would almost certainly be well advised to do so now, or at least before this month is out. I'm normally a big fan of advising people to wait until their budget allows for a splurge like this, but the fact is that I don't think it's ever going to be this price again.

In the US, we know that the console will go from $449.99 to $499.99, while Europe will see it go from €469.99 to €499.99. We actually don't yet have a confirmed new price for the UK, but you can fairly reasonably conclude that it'll go up by at least £30 and possibly as much as £50.

The real worry, though, is that this won't be the final price. Nintendo announced these changes a few months ago, in May. Even since then, the price of memory has continued to go up, and giants like Xbox have indicated that every indication is that we can expect it to continue rising through all of 2027.

That means the new price of the Switch 2 might realistically only hold for a number of months before it, too, has to be revised upwards to account for the new cost of bulk memory orders for Nintendo.

Sure, we might also get a Switch 2 OLED at some point, but that console is likely to be even pricier still, thanks to a fancier display, and it all starts to add up to a really grim scene eventually.

I love the Switch 2, and its flexibility is why it's my default console for massive RPGs that I can play over a series of weeks, and I want as many people as possible to experience what it has to offer. Right now, I think that means buying it sooner rather than later, though.

It'll come as no surprise to anyone who knows me that one of my favourite booths at this year's Gamescom belonged to the resurrected Commodore brand. One of my first jobs was as editor of Your Commodore back in the day, so it's part of my heritage.

But even with my intrinsic, long-standing link to Commodore hardware, the company is still capable of pulling out a surprise or two. And announcing a Cyberpunk 2077 edition of the C64 Ultimate on the eve of the show was certainly one of them.

Cyberpunk is tricky to run on a moderate, modern PC, let alone a Commodore 64. And when you think of the classic titles to have released for the machine over the years, there's nothing really comparable. But hey, these are new days for the reimagined and renewed firm, and a bright yellow C64 certainly turns head.

I managed to see it in the flesh on the booth, in fact, and it looks resplendent in its new colourway. And while I didn't get to play on it or even turn it on (it was in a glass case, in fact), I had an instant desire to buy one for my collection.

That's furthered by the spec sheet and what you'll get for your money.

The Commodore 77, as it's cheekily renamed, actually comes with an improved processor that runs up to 77MHz (a nice nod), and while the full Cyberpunk 2077 will never run on it, an exclusive 8-bit Cyberpunk game will come with the computer in demo form.

You also get a themed box, enamel pin badges and some BASIC Cyberpunk-centric programmes to type in and enjoy.

That's about it, but I'd imagine it'll appeal to both CD Projekt Red fans and retro gaming enthusiasts alike. It's certainly a collectable in every sense of the word – only 500 pre-order models are being made.

You'll just have to splash out $377 / £276.79 to secure yours.

Also available to pre-order now is the slimline version of the Commodore 64 Ultimate, in Beige, Starlight, and Founders Edition variants.

Based on the C64C released in 1986, and even using the original case mouldings, the new version has a flatter profile – rather than the breadbin shape.

It feels as authentic as these things get, and instantly took me back to my origins in the games industry. I'd like to spend a bit more time with one to really deliver my full impressions, but you can see from my pictures just how convincing it all looks.

I also got to see the Commodore Callback 8020 phone – albeit without being able to use any of the functions or features, due to unfinished software. But the brand seems in great hands under the stewardship of Christian "Perifrantic" Simpson.

Long may it continue to surprise.

A lot has been made about the death of physical media in gaming recently, with Sony announcing that it is to stop releasing PlayStation games on disc, and Xbox hinting that it will follow suit. But the Hyperkin SupaBoy is proof positive that physical media will never truly die.

Retro gaming enthusiasts will already be very familiar with the handheld – it's actually been around so long, it's arguably a retro classic itself. However, I'm not one of those who imported one originally and it's only now being officially released in the UK and Europe.

That's why it was all new to me when I finally got to play with one (two, in fact) at Gamescom in Germany this week.

We're getting the Hyperkin SupaBoy Prime model in the UK, which comes in a colourway that pays homage to the PAL Super Nintendo, so I focused on that. There was also the Crimson version at the show, but that is sadly destined for other regions only.

Where the SupaBoy differs from most other retro gaming handhelds is that you don't load it with countless, legally-questionable rom files. Instead, it is more like the Analogue Pocket or ModRetro Chromatic in that it takes original games cartridges.

However, while they are essentially modern versions of the Game Boy – a handheld itself – the SupaBoy has a slot for SNES cartridges (PAL or NTSC). This makes for a wacky-looking, chunky device, but also something fun and unique.

Owners of original Super Nintendo hardware will also appreciate that there are joypad connectors on the front, so you can hook up the SupaBoy to a TV and use it with the original gamepads for up to two-player action.

But it also works well as a handheld, save for the sheer size of the unit. It's a beefy boy, that's for sure.

I'm be reviewing one of them fully in the coming weeks, but from my 10 minutes or so with it at Gamescom, I soon got used to the girth. And the 4.3-inch, 800 x 480 screen is a highlight. It's nice a bright and has a physical button to switch the display from 4:3 to 16:9 – the latter for those who don't want black bars and don't mind stretching the pixels a touch.

It's 4:3 all the way for me (well, a slightly stretched 8:7) and I particularly liked the shader being used on the demo unit – it looked resolutely CRT-like. I was instantly taken back to the early 90s, and to when I loaded Super Mario World for the first time.

The controls are the same ones used since 2015, I understand, so have a slightly spongy feel to them but are accurate and authentic. And we even had an issue with one of the cartridges initially, having to blow on its pins to get it to work. Anyone around back then will know exactly what that means.

And that's why, even with such a little amount of time with it, the Hyperkin SupaBoy already stands apart as one to watch – especially if you have access to a decent library of Super Nintendo games.

I'm looking forward to reviewing it in full, with several of my own classic carts. At the very least, it puts the switch to a digital-only future to shame.

It'll be available in the UK and Europe this autumn, priced at £119.99 / €129.99 per console. You'll also be able to get the new version(s) in the US for $129.99.

It's been no secret that an upgraded version of the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X was on its way, but we finally have more details.

The ROG Xbox Ally X20 runs on the same Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme CPU but swaps the display for a 7.4-inch Full HD OLED panel with a 120Hz refresh rate.

Pre-orders are now open for a release date of 15 October 2026, and the handheld starts at £1,299 in the UK, $1,299 in the States..

Like the previous model, there's 24GB of LPDDR5X RAM on board, along with 1TB of SSD storage. The display supports HDR, Freesync Premium Pro, and is covered by Gorilla Glass for scratch protection.

It runs on Windows 11, of course, with the Xbox Mode front-end, and should be very capable with games on its own screen and when outputted to an external TV or display.

You can order the ROG Xbox Ally X20 as a standalone handheld or in a bundle, with a collection including a Dbrand Killswitch case, custom Pelican case, and the ROG XREAL R1 Edition 20 Gaming AR Glasses. That set is also available to pre-order for the princely sum of £2,299 / $2,499.

The glasses are also available to order separately.

We said that the standard Xbox Ally X is a "portable beast" when we reviewed it last year, and that should be the case again here. However, its price was already mighty, even before the RAM and component crisis hit its hardest.

You can get the previous model for £849.99 in the UK, $999.99 in the US, so you are paying a considerable, additional premium for the new OLED panel.

The announcement was made ahead of Gamescom starting in Germany this week, where T3 will be attending to bring you more news from Europe's biggest video games show. Make sure you check the site daily to keep up with the latest.

Details about the next Xbox console have leaked and they're not painting a pretty picture – either for the model coming before Christmas, or the potential price of Project Helix.

Microsoft announced its special edition Xbox Series X25 console in June, but we've not heard much about it since. However, trusted leaker Billbil-kun claims to have learned the release date and price. And we hope you're sitting down.

Reporting on French site Dealabs, the leaker revealed that the 25th anniversary Xbox Series X will cost a jaw-dropping €899.99, with the US version likely an equivalent $899.99. That could equate to around £849 in the UK.

It's €100 / $100 more than a standard Xbox Series X at today's prices.

You do get the special translucent green shell and a wireless controller to match, but the innards are the same as the model released six years ago. It's a lot to ask for a current-generation machine, especially when it matches the price of the more powerful PS5 Pro.

Xbox Series X25 special edition release date

Billbil-kun has also confirmed that the Xbox Series X25 will be available from Friday 27 November 2026, which just so happens to be Black Friday. That's thought to be a coincidence, but it could mean standard Xbox models might be available in the sales, so you'll have a decision to make.

There's no doubt that the XSX25 is a cool thing to covet, especially if you fondly remember the translucent green original Xbox. But that sort of money for a current-gen console that's coming to the end of its run seems steep.

Sadly, the components crisis shows no signs of letting up any time soon, so this is just a continuation of elevated pricing for gaming kit, it seems. And how much will Project Helix be in comparison?

It's looking ever more likely that it will be a $1,000 console – possibly with an even higher ticket.

It's starting to make the Steam Machine look normal.

I've been writing about games and games systems for the best part of four decades, and in that time I've seen and owned just about every console, handheld or otherwise. Except one.

Strangely, 2001's Game Boy Advance eluded me. I didn't just decide to skip it, I failed to realise it existed until years later. By then it was too late and I'd moved onto the Sony PSP. The same with its fip-style successor, the Game Boy Advance SP.

But now I've finally had the chance to correct that error, and in some style. The Konkr Pocket Advance is, for all intents and purposes, the perfect handheld to catch up on GBA emulation and then some.

Made by Ayaneo – the pinnacle of the retro gaming handheld industry, for me – it is both premium yet affordable. It is also shaped exactly like an original Game Boy Advance, with a 3:2 display that's a direct match for GBA games, and it even shares the chunkiness and heft of an early 2000s device.

I'm besmitten by it and while I've enjoyed playing several GBA titles since it turned up on my doorstep, I'd argue that it's the best retro gaming handheld under $100 / £100 full stop.

Design and build

That's partly down to the build quality. Ayaneo is renowned for its attention to detail and use of quality materials for its handhelds. I own both a Pocket Air Mini and a Pocket Evo and while they are vastly different in price, they each feel premium.

Konkr is the main firm's budget brand, but nothing feels budget about the Pocket Advance. Its plastic is reassuringly sturdy and grippy, and the overall feel is solid and dependable. On top of that, it has some of the best buttons I've ever used on an affordable device.

There's no thumbstick here, but the rubber membrane D-pad and action buttons are accurate and almost eerily quiet. Most of my handhelds click and clack like an ex-rugby player's knees, but not so the Pocket Advance.

That includes the top triggers, which are a little louder but not by enough that you can't play (almost) silently. There are also more buttons than you'll likely ever use, with additional ones on the top, including programmable LC and RC types.

It'll also great to note that, while you can alter the volume in the Android OS you also get a physical wheel on the bottom (alongside a 3.5mm headphone port). That's rare these days and a great touch.

The only caveat to all this is that, as normal with Ayaneo handhelds, the start and select buttons are range together on one side of the display, with menu and home buttons on the other. This makes it hard to use them as hot keys for Retroarch, for example, as pushing them both at the same time is tricky.

The last thing I'll say about the design is that I was thrilled to learn that my review unit was the indigo blue model – the exact one I liked best in the images. You can also get the device in orange/coral, retro grey and there are a couple of special edition variants that have since been announced too, but the blue seems more fitting to me.

Display and sound

Also built into the frame are stereo speakers. They are down-firing which isn't ideal, but the sound that comes from them is robust and clear.

The music in retro games is often overlooked because of tech limitations at the time, but some of the most iconic composers worked on soundtracks that deserve to be heard at their best.

Then we get to the display which, for this price point and use case, is superb. It measures 3.5-inches, LCD and is capable of refresh rates up to 60 frames per second. It has excellent colour saturation too, and can be set extremely bright if needed (albeit at a faster drain to your battery).

You get a 960 x 640 resolution, which works out as a perfect 4x integer scale for Game Boy Advance games, and it handles shaders well. Personally, I prefer to see pixels represented at their best on the modern hardware rather than degrade the effect to look like the original, but I get it either way. And that's easy here.

You can also change the brightness and check frame rate, etc, by opening Ayaneo's trademark Android sidebar using the dedicated button on the front. And that will come in handy when it comes to performance too.

Performance

One significant difference between the Konkr Pocket Advance and original hardware lies in its capabilities beyond GBA games. Running on the octa-core MTK Helio G90T processor and up to 4GB of RAM (the option I tested), the device can play other systems – up to the original PlayStation comfortably, and even PSP and Dreamcast if you are willing to accept that there's no thumbstick and use workarounds.

Some GameCube and PS2 titles will even work, although it's a bit more hit and miss and the control system might get in the way even more.

As for everything else, it is buttery smooth and a joy to use. You will have to spend a fair while setting it up and supply your own games. Ayaneo doesn't supply ROMs or shady apps with its devices, just the Android operating system (Android 12 here) and its own AyaSpace software that can act as a hub for emulators that you'll need to download yourself.

Personally, I always use the ES-DE front-end on Android handhelds, plus Retroarch for the vast amount of older systems – GBA, Game Boy, SNES and that sort of thing.

I have a curated ROMs library I can transfer to microSD cards whenever a new handheld arrives too. That said, it still takes me about 30 minutes to an hour to set each device up, so factor that in.

Once going though, the Pocket Advance is simply brilliant. Even 4:3 games run well on the excellent display, with minimal black bars either side. And I don't mind the bars top and bottom on PSP titles either.

But for me, this handheld will be primarily used to catch up on the GBA games I so sorely missed back in the early 2000s. Especially considering that with the less intesive games, it can last many hours of play on its 4,000mAh battery. It should last me the entire London to LA flight I'll be taking in a few weeks time, that's for sure.

Conclusion

Admittedly, I have a mighty collection of handhelds that I can call upon for numerous circumstances, including an AYN Thor, Odin 2 Portal, Anbernic RG Rotate (which I mainly use for original Game Boy), and a myriad of Chinese clone devices in all shapes and sizes, so I can afford to dedicate the Konkr to the one main task.

Others won't be so lucky (or foolhardy with their money) so are looking for a one-size-fits-all kind-of device. But if you're willing to stick to the earlier systems, the Pocket Advance can tick that box too.

The lack of a thumbstick or two means it won't be for everyone or every type of game, and the fan noise can be aggressive if you need to bump up the profile to play the more modern titles, but personally I prefer the earlier retro games anyway and this is easily my new favourite handheld in that field.

Then when you consider that it's currently just $89 (around £65) for the 3GB / 32GB version on the Ayaneo webstore, or $109 (around £80) for the 4GB / 64GB one I tested, it's a true no-brainer.

And even when those early bird prices raise by $20 each, the Konkr Pocket Advance is a steal. Now I just can't wait to see what Ayaneo has up its sleeve next.

Well, after just one more game of ChuChu Rocket! that is.

It's been a touch more than a year since I last wrote about GamerCard – the superthin gaming handheld from the nephew of Sir Clive Sinclair – but now it's finally arrived and available to order.

I'm in the process of fully reviewing the superthin device, having had one in my hands for a few days, but I can already safely say that I've never used anything quite like it before.

Using a Raspberry Pi Zero architecture, but heavily customised, the handheld is mind-boggingly slim – just 6.5mm. It's roughly the same shape and size as a voucher card with backing – the sort you regularly find in grocery stores. And it even has the display slot at the top to hang it.

However, this is no mere disposable gift. This is a fully functioning gaming handheld that gives you access to dedicated games, a Pico-8 library, and your own retro games library stored on a microSD card.

There's a 4-inch IPS display with a 1:1 aspect ratio, 254ppi resolution (718 x 718) and 60Hz refresh rate. Charging is through USB-C with a 1,600mAh battery inside. I've not yet fully tested the battery life, but it's claimed to last from two to eight hours depending on the types of games played and brightness of the screen.

Bar its extremely thin case (which is surprisingly comfortable to hold), the other unique design choice are the snap-dome switch buttons. They are all covered by silicon, with the direction pad and action buttons underneath two large circles.

This feels odd at first, but you soon get used to it – especially once they've been worn in a bit (they are stiff from the box). It's particularly unusual on the D-pad side, where you have to learn to feel your way around the direction buttons, but it ends up surprisingly effective.

Clearly, the silicon coverings were chosen to keep the Gamecard as thing as possible, with few protrusions.

As for the software, you get a simple grid-like homescreen with settings and game icons. There are a few preinstalled (depending on the model you choose), but then there are others available through the Raspberry Pi Games store and the Pico-8 hub (which came with countless homegrown titles to play).

You can also add your own retro games via Retropie, which can also be installed from the Pi store. This uses a cutback version of Emulation Station and actually arrives with three homebrew ZX Spectrum titles – fitting for a device from Grant Sinclair.

I need more time with the GamerCard before I form my final impressions, but it must be said that the display is a real standout. It has deep, involving black levels and colour presentation, especially so for an IPS panel.

I haven't yet added my own retro games to play through emulation, but suspect it'll work particularly well with Game Boy and Game Boy Color titles, thanks to the 1:1 screen. Sinclair also wants to release new games for the Gamercard over time, so it should mix the old with the new.

You can check it out now for yourself, with orders now open on grantsinclair.com. It was originally designed to ship with internal storage, but due to the global components crisis, you can select models with included microSD cards instead.

The GamerCard starts at £99 with no microSD, so you'll have to provide your own and add the operating system and games yourself. Alternatively, a 32GB bundle is available for £125 that comes pre-loaded with six games and can be used straight from the box.

Then there's a 128GB bundle for £149, which also comes with the six games but features more storage for downloads and your own ROMs.

I'll be posting my final thoughts in the coming days. For now though, it feels like something different and new in an market so used to cheap Chinese clones. And that in itself should be applauded.

The Hyperkin SupaBoy has been around for more than a decade, but there's finally good news for those in the UK and Europe – it'll be available officially in those regions for the first time this autumn.

It is set for release in two new colourways – Crimson and Prime (a see-through white version), although the concept is the same as before.

The retro gaming handheld is a bit different to most others on the market. Rather than play digital ROMs – games either ripped from original releases or downloaded from the internet – it has a full-sized cartridge slot that's compatible with physical SNES and Super Famicom titles.

This doesn't just keep physical media alive at a time when it's a hot topic, but breathes new life into old carts.

Each SupaBoy sports a 4:3 IPS display to play an inserted game on, although you can also use it as a SNES replacement too. There are two SNES controller ports on the front and an integrated AV output to connect it to a TV.

A rechargeable Li-ion battery can be found in each handheld too, offering up to 10 hours of playtime on a single charge.

The new colours have been chosen in honour of the original Japanese Super Famicom and European Super Nintendo designs. And Hyperkin has revealed that it plans to release further colour options yearly.

"In a time where the existence of physical media is under continued threat, we hear gamers loud and clear," said Hyperkin's product developer, Nathan Perez.

"They want to preserve the excitement and collectible nature of game cartridges and the SupaBoy is dedicated to serving the rapidly growing retro audience who want ownership of their software and play without breaks, delays or need for Wi-Fi."

The new SupaBoy models will ship this fall (autumn) priced at £119.99 / $129.99 / €129.99 apiece.

Gaming is in a weird spot right now, with price rises every which way, mass redundancies across multiple studios and publishers, and a reset by Xbox to try to stabilise its financial situation. The current console generation is in a perilous state, let alone the next one.

However, one leak has given us a more positive outlook on what we can expect in the coming year or so. A memo obtained by The Verge suggests that Xbox's next console, Project Helix, could be an endgame machine – and not just because it'll play PC titles.

Acquired by The Verge's resident Microsoft expert, Tom Warren, the leaked memo suggests Helix will be capable of running every game released through Xbox's history.

That won't just include the backward compatible games already available on Xbox Series X/S, but everything – as long as the publishers approve.

It is claimed this will mean the next-gen console will offer a vast library of available games from day one, with compatibility with original Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S titles. Plus new Helix games too, of course.

Will Xbox Project helix have a disc drive?

The gaming giant is yet to decide whether it will include a disc drive, but at the very least you'll be able to access an archive of digital games released in the last 25 years.

On top of this, while it's possible the internal hardware could be downgraded from the "premium" specs originally planned – thanks to the component crisis and costs – there are still plans for the machine to support PC games. So if Steam was included, for example, the launch lineup for Project Helix would run into many thousands of games available across Xbox and Windows.

The memo itself was allegedly sent to publishers, to convince them to allow their games to work through backward compatibility. It asks them to range their older titles on the Xbox Store, it seems.

This strategy won't be exclusive to Helix. Xbox has already started to release backward compatibility onto PC, with original Xbox games now being playable on PCs and gaming handhelds. It is expected to follow-up with Xbox 360 titles soon.

Of course, this is just a memo for now and plans can certainly change. But if Xbox does manage to get the vast majority of publishers and developers on its side, it makes Helix a compelling prospect – especially if Sony follows tradition with its PlayStation 6 and curbs backward compatibility to the last generation or so.

It is no exaggeration to suggest something's gone wrong with gaming. At least when it comes to consoles.

The ongoing RAM crisis has proved disastrous for the industry as a whole and console gaming more specifically. Not only have Valve's ambitious Steam Machine plans been wrecked by rising component costs, but now the full impact of Xbox's price rises are known – and they're not pretty. Especially for those in the UK and Europe.

After originally announcing the new US prices, which came into affect on Saturday 1 August, it seems Brit's are faced with even heavier hikes. The same with buyers in the EU.

A 1TB Xbox Series X with a disc drive now costs a staggering £669.99 / €799.99 – a rise of £170 / €200 respectively, in comparison with its launch price. For those without a calculator handy, that's around 30%.

Those in the US got off lighter, with less than a 25% rise.

Even the underpowered Xbox Series S – released six years ago to be a much more affordable route into "next-generation" gaming – has received a shocking markup. The standard 512GB version is now almost expensive as the Series X was at launch.

And the 1TB Xbox Series S is a mind-bending £519.99 / €599.99 / $599.99.

The new Xbox Series X and Series S prices (as of 1 August 2026)

• Xbox Series S (512GB): £429.99 / €499.99 / $499.99
• Xbox Series S (1TB): £519.99 / €599.99 / $599.99
• Xbox Series X (1TB, disc-free): £619.99 / €749.99 / $749.99
• Xbox Series X (1TB, disc): £669.99 / €799.99 / $799.99

Where does this leave console gaming?

Of course, Xbox isn't the only console maker to inflate its prices in the face of RAMageddon. Sony also heavily increased its PS5 prices earlier this year, with the standard PS5 costing today £569.99 / €649.99 / $649.99.

A PS5 Pro will set you back £789.99 / €899.99 / $899.99.

While Valve's all-new Steam Machine starts at £879 / €1,039 / $1,049 – and that's without a controller.

Let's not even get into how much Project Helix or the PS6 might cost, if the components market doesn't settle down again.

Then there's Sony's decision to ditch discs from the start of 2028 – with Xbox likely to follow suit. That has resulted in a big backlash from console gamers. And staff across some of the best and biggest game studios have either already lost or face losing their jobs this year. It's a mess.

It all leaves the console scene in a very perilous place. While PC gamers have hardly been unaffected over the last few months, especially when it comes to upgrading their systems.

It's hard to see where we can go from here. Although it can be argued that, with more than 120 million Xbox Series and PS5 consoles out there already – not including the number of Nintendo Switch owners there are – there's still an enormous market for games, if not the machines themselves.

And of course, there's still cloud gaming – of which Xbox is trialling a free, ad-supported version as things stand. Maybe that's the future after all. It's certainly a way to circumnavigate rising hardware costs if you can serve the best games to devices people already own.

That's if there's anyone left to make the games, of course.

When MSI took the wraps off its latest gaming handheld at the Computex show in Taiwan, I was one of the first people to get my hands on it and see what sort of power it was packing. The new Intel G3 Extreme chipset meant it was a given that it would have an eye-watering price, but we had to wait weeks to have that confirmed.

Now, the handheld is actually here, and the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ is indeed quite the beast. I've been gaming on it for a week to see how it holds up in regular use, but also to check whether it can make that sky-high price seem a little less crazy.

Price and Availability

The MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ has had a slightly confusing regional roll-out. In the USA, it's available now, having launched in late June – so you can order it through a few storefronts.

Here in the UK, however, there's still no clear and precise date, but you can pre-order it through Scan Computers now. It's listed on Amazon, but the shipping date remains a vague window.

That brings us to the price. The Claw 8 EX AI+ comes in at £1,399 in the UK and a massive $1,799 in the US. No matter how you slice it, that's a big chunk of change for a gaming handheld.

Design and Specs

I didn't expect MSI to make as many revisions between generations of the MSI Claw 8, but here we are, and the good news is that it's clearly been listening to feedback.

The most recent Claw 8 designs were frankly not great – the handhelds were huge, but didn't pair that bulk with great ergonomics, making them a trial to hold for long periods.

With the Claw 8 EX, that's been solved neatly, with much more rounded grips to keep hold of and more of a palm-friendly shape overall. That said, this is still a seriously large and tall handheld, so there's no doubt that those with smaller hands should probably seek one out to try before they buy.

The handheld also comes in a new default colour, a dark purple with just a hint of shine to it, and again, I think it's a great change. The two tones of the older Claws didn't do it for me, but this looks smart. It's also got RGB lighting around each analogue stick, something that doesn't move me much anymore. Those sticks are Hall-effect for drift resistance, as are the triggers.

In terms of inputs, there are all the traditional controller buttons, as well as some shortcuts on either side of the screen. These let you access pause menus but also MSI's software overlay to change power settings or access different games. Atop the machine, there's a power button with fingerprint reading, two USB-C ports, a microSD slot for expanded storage, a 3.5mm jack and the volume keys.

The back of the handheld has two extra macro-enabled buttons that you can easily programme to your chosen controls, along with a big MSI crest and quite a lot of air intake – the venting mostly happens out of the top of the machine.

The real star of the show, though, and the most eye-catching part, is that screen. It's an 8-inch 1920 x 1200 resolution touchscreen IPS display, with refresh rates of 48 to 120Hz and VRR compatibility to make it super smooth. It's vibrant and lovely to look at, although some might ask how this price doesn't bring an OLED panel instead. Still, it's an expansive panel, even if the way it protrudes at the bottom gives it a bit of a chin.

In terms of specs, the huge inclusion here is Intel's new portable chip, the Arc G3 Extreme – basically the most powerful handheld gaming chip on the market right now. It's a total beast, and probably a big part of why the Claw 8 EX is so expensive.

You also get a 1TB internal SSD for storage, a chunky 32GB of RAM, and an 80WHr battery, all of which are at the very top end of what any competitor can offer. It means that the specs list of the Claw 8 EX is basically best-in-class.

The whole thing, meanwhile, runs Windows, but with all the flexibility that you might want. Xbox's new handheld experience runs really nicely, for instance, but you can also get anything else you like running, including Steam and GOG. Some apps are more likely than others to be recognised by MSI's software, which can make for some awkward swaps between handheld and desktop modes, but the amount of options on offer is terrific.

Performance

The MSI Claw 8 EX lives or dies by its power – that much is obvious from the intersection between its price and its specs list. If you're going to ask this much for a handheld, it needs to deliver seriously eye-opening performance.

Luckily, that's almost exactly how I'd describe its gaming prowess. This handheld offers up the sort of graphical capabilities that I thought would be beyond a portable machine for a good while yet. Intel's G3 chip is a monster, especially in this Extreme configuration, and I have the benchmarks to underline that fact.

Cyberpunk 2077 remains about as demanding as a game can come, even years on from its hyper-ambitious release, and even if I didn't tweak a thing in the settings, it comes out of the gate supremely smoothly on the Claw 8 EX. Its default configuration goes for "Ray-tracing Low", and averages 47.75fps in the benchmark test, which is already pretty great.

Turn on XeSS, though, to get frame generation, and things leap forward, giving 76.14fps on the XeSS Auto setting with all other presets the same. That's a major boost, but there's still more headroom. If you go with XeSS Ultra Performance, you can get 104.63fps, or if you want to get super stable image quality, XeSS Ultra Quality gets you 67.87fps.

That last option, Ray-tracing Low with XeSS Ultra Quality, is probably how I'd play the game, but those who want zero input latency can always opt for turning off XeSS and going with the Steam Deck preset to get a similar outcome of 66.8 with slightly fewer graphical bells and whistles.

Whichever way you cut it, those are phenomenal numbers for a gaming handheld, and they put plenty of gaming laptops from recent years to shame when it comes to unplugged power. All of these are at the screen's native resolution, too, so you have scope to turn that down for even more performance.

Of course, numbers are all well and good, but testing the handheld on a range of other games, from Doom: The Dark Ages to Assassin's Creed: Black Flag Resynced, I've been consistently impressed with how easily I've been able to get challenging games running smoothly on the hardware.

That performance is particularly staggering because ray tracing is often enabled – a feature that is generally beyond the ken of other expensive gaming handhelds without major resolution compromises. It honestly feels like a big leap forward in real terms.

It goes without saying that you can expect older or simpler games to run phenomenally, and battery life is thankfully also really impressive. I've been getting between two and three hours of gaming when cranked up to high settings on a demanding game, but in lower-power situations you could get way more – even up towards double digits.

That's remarkable, and underlines just how good Intel's power management options are, paired with MSI's implementation. I observed when this chipset launched that its efficiency could be just as important as its power, and that's how it feels in the hands some time later.

All of this looks excellent on that VRR IPS display, with the Variable Refresh Rate bit being key, since it eliminates most stutters to keep games feeling super smooth if they're in that generous VRR window (which they should be). That said, I'll say again that at this stonking price, you really would expect and hope for an OLED display for inkier blacks and better colours.

This superb power does come at a cost in terms of heat, though – while the Claw 8 EX never got uncomfortably hot in my testing, there's no denying that it gets pretty warm. It also has enough fan noise that you'll want headphones for any high-powered gaming to avoid distraction.

Verdict

The MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ is a genuinely remarkable gaming handheld and very arguably the best ever released by a mainstream brand in terms of raw power and performance. MSI has improved its design work massively, and the sheer brunt of Intel's newest portable chip is jaw-dropping to experiment with.

It's unfortunate that it comes with a price tag that makes it a luxury reserved for those who need the best of the best. In most ways, that's far from MSI's fault, of course, with the current economics just pushing back against it so hard, but it doesn't really change the arithmetic from a prospective customer's point of view.

So, buy the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ if your budget is chunky, and you insist on performance that puts other handhelds to shame. But for many of us, it might make sense to sit out a year or two to see if Intel's chip starts to trickle into more affordable devices.

Also consider

The gaming handheld market is getting harder and harder to navigate as price hikes bite – so in many cases the best alternatives are second-hand.

That said, in some territories, you can now get the ROG Xbox Ally for a reasonable price, and while it's not as powerful as this MSI machine, it's very good for being miles cheaper.

Still my favourite PC gaming handheld, meanwhile, is the Lenovo Legion Go S (SteamOS). It's the perfect size, and while it again can't hold a candle to MSI's power, as an indie game machine, it's hard to fault, with all the convenience of SteamOS.

The handheld gaming PC market has become increasingly crowded over the past couple of years, but ONEXPLAYER is aiming well above the likes of the Steam Deck OLED, Asus ROG Ally X and Lenovo Legion Go 2.

Its latest X2 Mini Pro is built around AMD's Ryzen AI Max+ 388 processor, one of the company's powerful Strix Halo chips, pairing an 8-core, 16-thread CPU with Radeon 8050S graphics. That's desktop-class silicon squeezed into an 8.8-inch handheld, backed by up to 64GB of LPDDR5X RAM and 2TB of SSD storage.

There's a 144Hz OLED touchscreen with a 2.5K resolution, detachable controllers inspired by the Nintendo Switch, an optional magnetic keyboard cover that turns it into a compact Windows tablet. Plus there's support for an external liquid cooling dock for those wanting to squeeze every last frame from demanding games.

The entry-level model starts at around $2,399 with 48GB of memory and a 1TB SSD, while the fully loaded version with 64GB and 2TB storage reaches roughly $2,799. That's several times the cost of a Steam Deck OLED, and enough to buy multiple Nintendo Switch 2 consoles instead.

For most gamers, that's likely to be a step too far. But ONEXPLAYER clearly isn't chasing the mainstream. Instead, it's targeting enthusiasts who want the fastest handheld PC currently available and are prepared to pay desktop-PC money to get it.

Whether the X2 Mini Pro can justify that price in real-world gaming remains to be seen, but on paper it's shaping up to be one of the most powerful handhelds we've ever seen.

Xbox is currently undergoing a reset which has resulted in a vast amount of jobs being lost across the business. It is also dramatically changing strategy – nigh-on reversing a decade of decisions to refocus the company and brand. And it seems that some of the endeavours are working.

It has been revealed that, in the US at least, sales of the Xbox Series X and Series S consoles have "more than doubled" year-on-year.

In comparison, hardware sales for PlayStation and Nintendo have dipped – with the latter falling by 79%.

To be fair, that's understandable. The Nintendo Switch 2 launched in June 2025 so the company reported a massive spike in sales as pre-orders were shipped and launch stock sold out quickly. The sales for June 2026 were always likely to be much lower.

More interestingly, perhaps, is that PS5 sales dipped by 19% YOY. But then, Sony did recently raise its console prices significantly. And the Xbox Series X/S equivalent price hike is yet to come into affect.

It'll occur in just over a week, on 1 August, so consumers could be snapping up the consoles before that happens.

The sales figures are also relative. Mat Piscatella of data firm Circana revealed on Bluesky that while Xbox performed better than many expected last month, it still sold fewer consoles that its rivals. The Nintendo Switch 2 continued to be the best-selling option, in both units and dollars earned, with the PS5 in second.

Uncertainty in the games business

Whatever the trends, the games market is still looking uncertain at present. When it comes to the next generation, at least.

Xbox has admitted that its Project Helix plans might have to change in the light of the ongoing components crisis. Its hope to launch a "premium" PC/console hybrid might have to be scaled back to remain affordable.

Meanwhile, Sony is said to have delayed the PS6 for similar reasons, and we all know what happened with the Steam Machine. While it seems to have found a market, it is undeniably overpriced for what you get.

And so it seems we'll see this current console generation continue for the foreseeable, which is good news for those who already own a PS5, Nintendo Switch or Xbox Series X/S. At least the games are still coming thick and fast.

The Steam Machine was never intended to be one of the most expensive games consoles of all time. It was meant to be an affordable entry point to PC gaming in the living room.

However, AI came along and munched on available RAM chips like locusts in a wheat field, and Valve's good intentions ended up going awry. So, instead of a cheap and cheerful PC console, we got an overly-priced, under-spec'ed mini PC (albeit one that's cute).

That's not to say it's been a flop. Even starting at over $1,000, Valve is struggling to make enough units to meet demand. It is thought to have sold up to 15,000 Steam Machines so far and many on the lengthy waiting list are still awaiting.

If you're still undecided though, or are waiting for a price drop in future, we might have some bad news. There's every indication that the price will actually go up at some point.

As quoted by Jason Schreier at Bloomberg, one of the engineers that worked on Steam Machine, Yazan Aldehayyat believes the scarcity of components and the knock-on effect on prices isn't going to get better anytime soon: "Honestly, it’s still getting worse," he said.

The products and stock currently being sold are old, he suggested, and are soon to run out: "What people are seeing on retail shelves right now, from our observations, is lagging what we’re seeing from a bulk supply by at least three to six months."

The likely result of further price hikes for RAM and storage is that Valve will be facing higher costs to make more Steam Machines. And as a small company, those costs are likely to be passed on to the customer – just as they are now.

Aldehayyat's colleague, Pierre-Loup Griffais recently admitted that the existing elevated price the Steam Machine "ends up matching pretty closely" to the cost of its components. A sombre thought.

It could be why Valve has seemingly switched tact in recent times, from wanting its own console in some gamers' hands to wanting Steam OS in everyone's. It has recently started to release a version of its excellent front end and gaming platform for PCs of all shapes and sizes.

And so, if you want a more powerful Steam Machine, that's entirely possible. You just won't be buying it from Valve.

As a lover and collector of retro gaming tomfoolery, I've been a big fan of the HyperMegaTech Super Pocket handhelds since they first emerged in 2023, but few of them have ticked my boxes as much as the latest.

The Super Pocket – Rare Edition has the same specs as the other six in the collection (that are currently available) but with one important distinction. Rare has been inarguably one of the finest game development studios for four decades, and so the games library found here demands attention.

There's Banjo Kazooie, which is the headline inclusion (of course), and some of its console greats from the 8-bit, 16-bit era and Game Boy era, such as Battletoads and Conker's Pocket Tales. But what really helped transform me back to my own childhood, and even help me realise a long-standing ambition, are the ZX Spectrum games.

One in particular, in fact.

Rare started out life as Ultimate Play the Game and it ruled the scene in the 80s. Its games were inventive, highly addictive and often took the Speccy's limited hardware to whole new levels. And considering its earliest games had a file size lower than an average email today, they still hold up well.

Jetpac is the one that I remember most fondly – not least because I never managed to complete it first time around. I likely never got past the third or fourth level, in fact.

It ran on a 16K Spectrum, so was accessible to all owners (I had a 48K model that was also custom upgraded to eke a bit more from it), and its simple platforming premise made it a quick, fun experience. Still does.

It's why it was the first game I loaded on the new Super Pocket and I can now finally say I have bested it. Well, I've beaten the eight levels before it loops back and ups the difficulty, but that's pretty much my original childhood target.

Now I have to finally finish Knight Lore, which is also present, and I can retire happy. Until the Rare collection 2 arrives, that is.

What is the Super Pocket?

Unlike many retro game handhelds, the Super Pocket is a cartridge-based handheld that comes with a collection of preinstalled games. You cannot add your own roms or emulators, but each of the included titles has been optimised to work perfectly on its 2.8-inch 4:3 IPS display and using the Game Boy-style controls.

It is made by Blaze, the company behind the Evercade products, so while you can't add downloaded games, you can purchase Evercade cartridges and use them with the Super Pocket, too – thanks to the cartridge slot around the rear.

That opens up a vast library of additional games that you can purchase and collect.

There are several Super Pocket models available – all for £50 or under. Other particular favourites include the Atari Edition (of which I have the special edition version with fake wood panelling on the front) and the Neo Geo Edition, which includes 14 classic games.

As they are all officially licensed, much like the cartridges, there's no worrying about "illegal" roms or setting up different emulators. You can add shaders to the display, to make it look like there are scanlines to mimic the CRT TVs of the period, but things are keep simple. It truly is a pick-up and play device.

Now please excuse me, there's a Knight that needs Loreing – or something. Ahem.

The games console scene is currently going through its biggest most troubling times since the 80s. PlayStation has announced it is ditching physical media releases, sparking much anger, Valve's Steam Machine has underwhelmed with its performance for the price, and Nintendo is withdrawing the Switch family of consoles in Europe.

But they all seem minor inconveniences in comparison with what's going on over at Xbox.

A company-wide reset has resulted in studio closures and mass layoffs across the brand – with 1,600 losing their jobs immediately and another 1,600 redundancies expected to follow next year. It has left Xbox's game makers on tenterhooks at best, unemployed at worst.

Asha Sharma, who took over as CEO earlier this year admitted that the gaming giant was in shambles, with the last decade of acquisitions and strategical decisions not paying off. It is simply losing money on the likes of Xbox Game Pass and many of the studios it bought, and is thus restructuring for a complete reset.

Some might wonder where that leaves Project Helix – the company's next Xbox machine, which was originally announced as a premium PC/console hybrid. But while that's facing its own challenges due to the ongoing components crisis, it seems it's business as usual for the hardware division.

In fact, that's the part of Xbox that will now be given more attention.

According to T3's sister site Windows Central and its sources, Helix is "safe and on track".

The hardware division has been hit by the layoffs the least, while the team working on Project Helix have been tasked to find ways around the RAM and storage pricing issues that are plaguing every corner of tech right now.

According to the site, they are tackling "margin pressure" through "aggressive innovation". This will hopefully reduce costs yet keep the core ideals of the next-gen console – maintaining its premium capabilities through workarounds, rather than reducing the spec, as Valve seems to have done with the Steam Machine.

Of course, that might have put Project Helix back by a few months, even a year, but with the latest announcements, it seems the entire company is backing on it to be a success.

That will come as scant compensation to those who have lost their jobs so far, or are worried that they will be in the next round of planned cuts. But Xbox itself might be able to weather the storm.

The only question is, will you still be waiting on the other side?

2026 is turning into a fairly terrible year for the gaming industry, with the last few weeks in particular feeling like a parade of one depressing announcement after another. Hot on the heels of Sony declaring that it's binning off all physical disc publishing from early 2028, Xbox has now swung the axe that we all knew was hanging over its gaming portfolio.

Alongside some other layoffs around Microsoft's large empire, Xbox is being hit extremely hard, with a total of 3,200 people set to lose their jobs as part of what it's calling its most significant restructuring ever. 1,600 of those professionals will be laid off today, making for an absolutely brutal day.

There's no real way to sweeten that pill, and to its faint credit, the announcement that Xbox has published is frank and self-critical. It also confirms much of the reporting and rumours that have circulated around the gaming giant for years now, including the theory that its Game Pass bet isn't all that close to paying off, and that its acquisitions look extremely suspect in terms of a return on the investment.

In fact, the acquisitive phase that Xbox went through now seems to be definitively over, and the fact that four (or potentially five) of the development studios it bought are now trying to transition back to independence is quite the indictment of both its strategy and its management.

If the likes of Double Fine and Ninja Theory manage to survive, finish their current projects, and go on to greener pastures, then it'll almost be the perfect confirmation that the problem was Xbox and its approach from the beginning.

In theory, those studios will be taking their IP with them, so franchises like Psychonauts and Hellblade needn't loiter in limbo for the rest of time, but it's still far too early to be feeling particularly optimistic about any of this.

That Xbox is now admitting it has too many layers of management, and that those layers are often too disconnected from the projects over which they have power, is more surprising than the facts themselves. It also means that the next generation of Xbox hardware is even more important than it already looked.

With the Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S generations having seen Sony establish a crushing lead in hardware sales, if Xbox is to have any hope of remaining a genuine competitor, it surely needs Project Helix to be a big hit. How might that happen, given the rumours about lofty prices and no disc drive mean it's unlikely to be obviously differentiated from the PlayStation 6?

Well, raw power has some appeal, obviously, but I honestly couldn't plot a way out of this mire from Xbox's point of view, although cost reduction does have a certain depressing logic to it. Microsoft runs a brutal business, and these decisions are often made by spreadsheet, so it's no surprise that a terrible downturn in Xbox's fortunes has brought these layoffs about, whether it's self-inflicted or not.

The question is whether this makes for the leaner and more efficient Xbox that this press release is trying to sketch out, or whether it just makes an ailing division look more anaemic and therefore easier to cut further when things don't turn around. That's the fallacy behind all layoffs, of course, and I'm not in a pay grade that gets to solve such issues.

With the memory crisis showing signs that it'll get worse before it gets better, and Xbox now shrinking its roster of franchises, though, it's hard to avoid the sense that we're going through some sort of end of days in gaming. What the landscape will look like in five years is hard to predict, but it's a little difficult to imagine Xbox having the same presence that it does now.

It's had a glorious run, but Nintendo is to discontinue its Switch family of consoles.

Released over a decade ago, the original Nintendo Switch faced its fair share of criticism – mainly due to a poor launch lineup of games. However, that proved to be short lived with the console and its follow-ups – the Switch Lite and Switch OLED – proving incredibly popular ever since.

Indeed, Nintendo has shipped around 160 million of them since. That's almost 50% more than the hugely popular and successful Wii.

But all things must come to an end, and Nintendo is calling time on the Switch. As revealed on an official support page (via VGC), it will cease providing units to retailers by February next year. Nintendo will also stop selling Switch consoles on its own web store.

This has partly been prompted by new EU regulations that come in effect that month. They state that any electronics with chargeable batteries must make those batteries easy to repair and replace. Manufacturers must adhere to these new rules or face a ban in the European Union.

Nintendo will release a new version of the Switch 2 for the region, with a user-replaceable battery, but it doesn't make sense to release upgraded models of the consoles it succeeded.

As for existing Switch owners, your console will continue to be supported with updates, games and Switch Online for the foreseeable future. The announcement specifically relates to new consoles sold.

It's not exactly clear if this will affect all regions or just EU member states for now, but it seems likely that it's a global decision. The Switch has had a 10-year run, after all.

Hopefully, with retailers looking to shift their remaining stock from now until February 2027, it'll mean that big sales periods, like Black Friday, will see Switch units at very affordable prices. So it might mean you can pick one up for a bargain – if you don't own one of the 160 million consoles already out there, of course.

The PlayStation 5 Pro is expensive. Like, really bloody expensive. But, hot on the heels of Rockstar Games announcing Grand Theft Auto 6, I'm going to take the tumble and actually buy one. Gulp.

Sure, I don't need one, as I already own an original PS5 console. And, to be fair, I use that aplenty thanks to its disc drive – my 4K Blu-ray Club wouldn't have an output source otherwise. So I'll need to buy that pesky separate Sony disc drive, too. And probably a dedicated 4K Blu-ray player.

So, why now? The PS5 Pro launched back in November 2024, so it's kinda getting old already. But we've already seen a price increase since that date – and not a small one, either, as it was a £90 / $100 hike back in April. That's not down to inflation, it's down to market conditions.

When that happened I was further put off rather than thinking "I'd better get in line to buy one". But now, just two months on from that rise, I think yet more bad news could be imminent. Nothing's official yet, mind.

The Xbox impact

Take, as a key example, the recent Xbox boss's comments in revealing significant price rises for Microsoft's console across the board. That's not an isolated issue, it's down to significant memory price increases that affect the whole PC and games industries – and beyond, quite frankly.

So, in my mind, it's not a case of if Sony will be forced to follow suit, but rather when. Currently PS5 Pro sales have significantly dropped – but that's no surprise, as many rushed to buy in April, with a 50% sales drop thereafter being a direct consumer response to the price rise.

But here's what I believe will happen next. As someone who's just ordered GTA VI, which arrives this November, there's now a 'countdown clock' ticking away for the next five months. The game's release is undoubtedly going to be huge – and people are going to want to play it in the best way possible.

The GTA VI effect

Right now, even Sony is leveraging that GTA VI "plays best on PS5". In that official blog post, a number of reasons are given – but a key one, for me, is that the game "leverages the PS5’s ultra-high speed SSD, enabling you to experience ... near-instant load times."

The step up from PS5 to PS5 Pro is sizeable. Current rumours suggest that you'll get a locked frame rate on the Pro version. So it'll "play even better on PS5 Pro" (my words, not Sony's – yet, anyway). And people, myself included, are going to want a slice of that pie.

I think that's eventually going to cause a sudden rush of PS5 Pro purchases. Not right this second, granted, as people need to brush the April price rise off their shoulders and have ample time to forget it ever happened. But once they do and more Pro units continue to sell, the stock dwindles, the production line needs to source more components – and, you guessed it, those will cost more.

Result? The increased production is pushed onto you and I, the consumers. So I cannot see how the PS5 Pro won't be more expensive by the time GTA VI launches this November. I'm sure an official bundled box set will be arranged prior to the holiday period to really capitalise on the game's launch.

The offer of good credit

As it stands, however, promotional bundles are already available. Indeed, EE is currently selling one in the UK market for £808. I can't even find a Pro console on Amazon – which seems to me like a precursor to what's incoming.

Therefore EE's deal above is tempting. In particular as the offer of 9 months interest-free credit is an option, at £89.78 per month to cover the full purchase (longer payment plans are available – but the APR is high, so you'd pay over the odds).

I could hit the 'payday f-it button' right now, have a PS5 Pro in my lounge by next week, and have everything – GTA VI included – paid off and fully my own by next March. There's not going to be a PlayStation 6 to worry about in 2027, so assume an earliest 2028 launch for that – and I'm sure my Pro as a trade-in option will provide a decent discount as and when.

I know, it's bonkers to drop almost £800 / $900 on Sony's best current console. But with Valve's Steam Machine showing where prices are heading and, get this, the Xbox Series S (not X!) now set to cost more than a Switch 2, prices surely aren't going anywhere but up. And I want to be ahead of that curve – even if I'm a little late to the party already.

It's been a rough year for gaming hardware, with prices that just keep on rising, but Xbox's latest round of hikes is arguably the most shocking yet. That isn't because they're unexpected (they're very much not), but rather because they push pretty much all of Xbox's current-generation hardware into territory where you'd be hard-pressed to recommend that anyone at all should buy them.

The announcement was made in typically low-key fashion, in the form of a blog post on Xbox Wire, and there's no sugar-coating it. The post confirmed that on 1 August 2026, Xbox's 512GB consoles will get a $100 rise, while 1TB versions will go up by $150.

The damage that this set of price rises will do is perhaps underlined by the fact that Xbox didn't then do the math for its readers, but here's what the hikes actually look like in practice:

• Xbox Series S (512GB): Up from $399.99 to $499.99
• Xbox Series S (1TB): Up from $449.99 to $599.99
• Xbox Series X Digital (1TB): Up from $599.99 to $749.99
• Xbox Series X (1TB): Up from $649.99 to $799.99y

Those are prices that are almost impossible to swallow, in all honesty, and they're particularly terrible where the Xbox Series S is concerned. Once Nintendo's price rises come into force in September, the Series S will be the same price as the Switch 2, and there's no planet where I'd recommend the former over the latter.

Meanwhile, $750 for an Xbox Series X also looks fairly laughable when compared to the PS5 Pro for $100 more, and again, there's no way I'd point anyone towards Xbox's console when the comparison is made. If you bring the standard PS5 into play at $599 (for now), there's just no competition whatsoever.

Xbox's blog post is full of explanations for the hikes, with the biggest being the rise in memory component costs, as we all know by now – although in this case, Microsoft itself is obviously a big driver of the AI boom that's fuelling the crisis, something that isn't acknowledged.

Perhaps the most important part of the post, though, is the second half of this line: "Unfortunately, console storage and memory prices have increased by more than 2.5x, and we expect another doubling by the fall of 2027."

That's right, folks – this is far from the end of things, and if that doubling comes to pass in the next 12 months, we might get to the point where once mainstream consoles are priced at genuinely luxury levels. People have been speculating about $1,000 PS6s, but at this rate, the Xbox Series X might get to that point well before a new generation of consoles is ready.

That should worry basically anyone interested in console gaming – the market wasn't built up around consoles priced this prohibitively, and there's no way the impacts of unaffordable hardware don't ripple out over time. Xbox is already bleeding badly from a console war that was honestly already lost midway through the Xbox One era, but this could be another dismal turn.

With a scattergun approach to exclusive titles now leading to unpredictability about its biggest franchises, and layoffs happening left, right and centre in studios that it owns, Xbox is in full-blown crisis, whatever it's projecting in press releases.

It probably does need the reset that it claims to be going through, but it's hard to know what'll come out of that process. The Xbox Series S was intended to be a cheap entry point to get people hooked on Game Pass, but when it's $500, and Game Pass is no longer the top priority, where does that leave things?

We might know more in a year or so, as its plans for the next generation continue to leak and be reported on, but right now, there's only really one thing I can say – buying an Xbox just went from an interesting choice to a downright bad idea.

Ever since I bought my Lenovo Legion Go S (SteamOS) during the Black Friday sales last year, I've used it on a daily basis. More powerful that the Steam Deck and with a larger, 8-inch display, it is a superb PC gaming handheld that can play just about everything I chuck at it.

And, with the Steam Summer Sale underway, even the games are very affordable.

Now you get another change to experience it for yourself, as the 1TB Z2 Go version is available at a rock-bottom price. John Lewis is selling the Lenovo Legion Go S (SteamOS) for just £449.99 – almost £50 off.

If you consider that the Steam Deck starts at £649 for half the storage and a lower-spec'ed processor, it's a no-brainer really.

The 8-inch touchscreen display on the Lenovo Legion Go S also features a 120Hz refresh rate and supports variable refresh rate (VRR) technology. That means it games will run smoothly even if the frame rate jumps around a bit.

And, just like the Steam Deck, the Legion Go S runs on SteamOS, so it works exactly the same way as Valve's own handheld. You get the same experience and can buy games from the Steam Store in the same way.

I bought the step-up model running on the Z1 Extreme CPU myself, which also comes with increased RAM. And while that Black Friday price is not available this time around, Very.co.uk is offering the variant with a very decent £100 off.

That puts it in the same ballpark as the 1TB OLED Steam Deck, but with a vastly superior processor, screen resolution, refresh rate and RAM. Also, that version of the Steam Deck is hard to find in stock.

Whichever model piques your interest, you can be assured you're in for a whole lot of mobile PC gaming fun. I've certainly not looked back since.

It's been a busy week in the world of PC gaming, which is always going to be the case when Valve has a big announcement to make. It chose this week to finally confirm the pricing for its long-awaited Steam Machine, and to start collecting registrations for its randomised pre-order system.

With the most affordable version (sans Steam Controller) coming in at £879 / $1,049, there's no way to sugarcoat it – the Machine looks pretty overpriced relative to the raw performance on offer. In fact, I'm not the only person questioning it – our news editor Rik is wondering whether he needs to cancel his pre-order registration already.

If you want a flexible PC gaming machine right now, though, there's actually good news. Thanks to Prime Day, there's a really nice saving on the excellent Asus ROG Xbox Ally, which is relatively recently-launched and offers far more bang for your buck if you're happy playing on the go.

The state of the gaming market means that deals like this are likely to be looked back on in 12 months with pure nostalgia – the price rises we've all been seeing seem to be inevitable and have no real counter, so brace yourself for far crazier prices in a few months' time.

For now, though, this deal will get you a really handy gaming machine for portable use. It can also be docked to connect to an external display, although you probably shouldn't expect the world from it in performance terms. On its own two feet, though, it's a great bit of kit, and with support from Xbox it's actually more user-friendly than many pure Windows alternatives.

If you're looking for something a bit more old-school, though, we've also rounded up the best retro gaming deals this Prime Day – check them out here.

As I predicted at the end of last week (and reiterated yesterday) Valve finally launched its Steam Machine yesterday, announcing pricing, full specifications, and the pre-order process.

And as with many others, I expect, the moment the page went live I jumped at the chance to register my interest in purchasing one. Now though, I'm not so sure.

The price is obviously a barrier. Starting at £879 / $1,049 for the 512GB model without a Steam Controller makes it considerably more expensive than the more powerful PS5 Pro. And if I needed a Steam Controller too (I already have one), that'd be £938 / $1,128.

Then there's the 2TB version at a whopping £1,149 / $1,349 or £1,208 / $1,428 with the controller, putting it in the desktop gaming PC category.

However, I was still willing to take a punt on the 512GB version. I have a spare 1TB SSD card lying around that I could upgrade it with, so storage wasn't my concern. And while still expensive, I appreciate the market conditions and challenges presented by the ongoing components crisis.

But then I discovered something else – a decision Valve has made that affects performance and one I'm not sure I'll be able to live with.

Steam Machine specs issue

There are some red flags when it comes to the Steam Machine's specifications, which don't really match the original promise of 4K 60fps gaming. But according to several online reviews that have appeared already (such as from Digital Foundry) it's still possible to eke decent 1440p performance out of the PC console in AAA games.

The "semi-custom" AMD Zen 4 6-core / 12-teraflop CPU and AMD RDNA 3 GPU with 28 compute units seem decent enough, even though the latter is effectively a cut back version of the three year-old Radeon 7600 graphics card with 8GB of VRAM.

Where it gets more concerning is when you consider the on-board RAM. While it sports 16GB of DDR5 RAM, Valve has opted for a single stick solution, rather than dual. This is something I've seen a lot during RAMageddon, especially from mini PC manufacturers and it truly throttles performance.

For example, I built my own Steam Machine alternative months ago, from a Geekom A7 Max mini PC with 16GB of internal RAM. That too shipped with a single stick of DDR5 (5600MHz) and it struggled. I ended up adding an extra stick, increasing the graphics rendering performance by up to 80%.

But even when I tested it with two 8GB sticks instead, I was getting anywhere up to 20% more performance from the same amount and type of RAM.

It seems Steam Machine reviewers are seeing this in tests. It is underperforming in comparison with equivalent machines running the Radeon 7600 GPU.

One solution is to split or add to the RAM, which is something I might end up doing as I do have spares, but it's hardly the plug and play experience a console is designed for. And if I'm tearing it apart to add my own SSD and RAM, why not build my own Steam Machine (again).

After all, while I've been using the third-party Linux alternative Bazzite on my Geekom and AceMagic mini PC builds, Valve will soon launch Steam OS for all PC types so you can do it on your own.

It's certainly food for thought.

Steam Machine alternatives

That being said, I do love the design of the Steam Machine, and once FSR 4 arrives on it, higher performance will be possible.

I've also recently converted a Geekom A9 Max to a Steam Machine-alike, with its more powerful, AI-supported internal processing and GPU and am getting 1440p gaming out of it, but it isn't quite the same. Oh, and it's also well over £1K.

You could build a small form factor PC from scratch, of course, and even with component shortages, you might manage it for less than the 2TB Steam Machine, but that's hardly the point. In that respect, the Steam Machine isn't for you.

It's a games console, not a gaming PC replacement. It's designed to sit under a TV, not a monitor. It's really a PC for those who don't like PCs. And that's why I might hold onto my slot in Valve's lottery, after all.

Either that or just switch on my PS5 Pro and enjoy that instead.

This year is proving to be challenging when it comes to retro gaming and, in particular, new handhelds. The ongoing RAM crisis has hit the industry hard, leading to fewer new devices, stock shortages, and higher prices.

However, Amazon Prime Day has always been good for snagging retro gaming deals and I fully expect this week's event to carry on that trend. In fact, Take this unbelievable UK deal, for example.

Regular T3 readers might know that I'm somewhat a collector of retro games handhelds, with around 20-30 of them and ever growing. And so I'm always on the hunt for a good deal.

And the R36S for less than £30 is particularly good, especially with many thousands of games included. Indeed, if you tot it up and exclude the console itself, you're getting each game for around 0.0013 pence.

I own two of them already (in different colours) and the Rockchip RK3326 processor the R36S runs on is capable of emulation up to original PlayStation. That means you'll be absolutely fine playing the 8-bit and 16-bit games of yesteryear (NES, SNES, Master System and Mega Drive/Genesis). You'll also be able to play a fair few later 3D games.

And unlike many other handhelds in its category, the R36S comes with two thumbsticks, so you have bit more of an option on how you play.

Its 3.5-inch IPS screen is decent too – especially for the price – with a 640 x 480 pixel resolution and 4:3 aspect ratio. That's great for most of the older systems, while the likes of Game Boy and Game Boy Color look decent on it, too.

I'll also be looking for more retro gaming deals across this Prime Day week, and will continue to share what I find. So come back to T3 often.

But if you are looking for a cheap as chips retro gaming handheld you can just pick up and play, this deal is a no-brainer.

The Steam Machine hoves into view – we've been waiting months now for Valve to get into gear and announce both the release date and pricing for its highly-anticipated Steam mini-machine, and rumours are now swirling that everything will become clearer next week.

Depending on which leaker or report you pick, you might end up being told confidently that pre-orders will open on 22 June, next Monday, or that they might go live any time that week, but everyone seems to agree that we'll get some proper news in that window.

That's got us thinking once again about what we want from the Steam Machine, and what it has to do to really make a proper impact on the market – so here are three things we want to see from it.

1. Decent value, if not the steal of the century

If Valve had managed to get the Steam Machine ready a few years ago, it might have been too early to the market for the demand to have built up, but it probably would also have been able to build a proper little bargain of a machine for people. It's fairly clear at this stage that such a thing might be too difficult a demand in the year 2026, with the memory crisis continuing to wreak havoc.

Pricing is a huge variable for the Steam Machine, in case that wasn't obvious, and rumours about what it'll cost go from £999 here in the UK (which would be no disaster) to options closer to £1500 (which would indeed be fairly dire).

Where the machine lands is going to be massive for its long-term fortunes, and we can only hope that it ends up being around that £999 mark to give it a chance of looking like fair value. At this point we're no longer expecting a stunning deal, but something that looks solid enough might just be doable.

A decent amount of stock

Valve has been making popular hardware for a good few years now, but that doesn't mean that it hasn't had plenty of brushes with stock shortages. Even the new Steam Controller's launch has been noteworthy for how scarce it's been, albeit not to the levels of a launch PS5 back in the back old days.

So we're very much hoping that Valve has calculated the interest levels properly for the Steam Machine – it would be a real shame if it sold out instantly upong becoming available. Of course, it almost certainly will, but we're moreso hoping that Valve has plans in place for further waves of stock.

It should probably launch with an immediate reservation system much like the one now in place for the Steam Controller, but it's fairly hard to know whether that'll happen straight away. We hope it does, to cut down on pre-order chaos when things go live.

Some proper power

The last big question for the Steam Machine is how it'll run the latest games – meaning how much power it'll have at its disposal. Valve has already said that its machine should be able to run many modern releases at 4K resolution at 60fps, but there's still a lot of grey area there.

With FSR upscaling at play to sharpen things up, that means it sounds like there's quite good headroom in the Machine's capabilities, but it's still hard to know what that looks like until we get actual benchmarks out.

If we crank Cyberpunk 2077 up to its maximum settings, how will things fare? How will the Machine's ray-tracing capabilities stack up? And how will it do with even more recent releases like 007 First Light and Forza Horizon 6, both of which tie in really well with Nvidia GPUs, with less active partnership on the AMD side?

These are all unknowns until Valve goes deeper into the technical side of what it's offering, so all we can do right now is hope that the power on offer is enough to make this a proper living room option, something that can compete with the PS5 Pro but with more versatility and compatibility.

There's been a lot of talk about the Steam Machine this year – mainly in a "Will it? Won't it?" kind of way. The ongoing RAM crisis (lovingly called "RAMageddon") has had an impact right across consumer technology, and Valve is far from immune.

However, after confirming that it was still on course for a summer release, it looks like the console might only be days from launching – from preorders being accepted, anyway. Two clues have dropped into our laps that give us hope that we'll hear more very soon.

For starters, import listings have been found that suggest Valve has received tons of new product units in the last week. Posted on X by EOZ VR's Brad Lynch it claims that the company has taken in tonnes of "Game Consoles".

It has also received a huge selection of "Virtual Reality Devices", thought to be the Steam Frame.

On top of this, T3 has heard through the grapevine – not from Valve directly, though – that we could get an announcement early next week.

It might even be that we hear more this week about an imminent registration phase, in preparation.

It is already assumed Valve will adopt a similar preorder format to the recent Steam Controller sale period. Only existing Steam account holders who have bought items over the years will be allowed to order one, and even then it's like a ticketing system where you register your interest and will be invited to purchase later.

This was introduced to reduce the likelihood that they'd all end up in the hands of scalpers. It worked for me, as I got my Steam Controller about a week or so after I successfully registered my interest.

The big difference will be price, of course. While we still have no official confirmation, the current speculation is that the Steam Machine could be around $950 (around £707 at today's exchange rate). And while that might seem steep, it's around the same as a PS5 Pro, so it's all relative.

If Valve has managed to keep component costs down enough to hit $950, while RAM and storage is two to three times more expensive today, I'll be pleasantly surprised, in fact.

After all, the Steam Machine is targeting AAA PC gaming at 4K 60fps, while my current Steam Machine-like build using a Geekom A7 Max can only safely handle 1080p 60fps – although that has recently been slashed in price.

Thankfully, it doesn't look like we'll have too much longer to find out either way.

When the Switch 2 was first unveiled, I didn't realise that one of its biggest upgrades over the previous generation would involve older games. It was easy to be caught up in the hype around Mario Kart World and later exclusives like Donkey Kong Bananza without thinking about one of the biggest time-sinks on my old Switch 1, but now that I've had the console for a year, I've been unable to avoid it.

I used my Switch 1 to play a bunch of games I missed from previous generations, since it became a home to thousands of ports and remasters. While plenty of these were from eras long enough ago that they ran like butter, many others were limited to 30fps modes that didn't feel amazing to play.

Now, I'm playing a newly-released Switch 2 Edition that underlines just how much better the Switch 2 is for this sort of long-delayed play-through of a big game. Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition is a beast of an RPG that I've wanted to check out for ages, and its newly upgraded version makes it totally different to play on Switch 2.

The biggest change is an obvious one – the game's previous 30fps limit is now raised to 60fps, and that makes it wildly smoother to play. Frankly, the 60fps performance isn't even the most stable in the world, with some relatively obvious drops in places, but it's still way nicer than 30fps in my book.

The game's also miles sharper, with 4K resolution in docked mode (which is how I've been playing it over the weekend), and while you can still tell that it's an upgraded older game, it's still remarkable to compare it to something like Pokémon Violet and Scarlet, even with those games' Switch 2 patches.

In short, it's a really good-looking game, and so far I'm really enjoying its storytelling and battle system, having previously only played Xenoblade Chronicles 3, a later title that has a bit more involved of a combat setup. This one's more stripped-back since it kicked the series off, and I'm enjoying it a lot.

With a game of this size, the question is always whether I'll actually make it through the whole thing, and while I can't be sure on that front, it's still great to have the best possible version of it available on Switch 2 now. With the series' next game (Xenoblade Genesis) now unveiled and coming out in 2027, it's a fun time for the franchise.

The fact that there are two more Switch 2 upgrades coming later this year, too, for Xenoblade Chronicles 2 and 3, means that those who like a good JRPG but haven't yet dipped their toe in this series could queue up an absolute mountain of content for themselves if they're so inclined. That might be too much of one series even for me, but I'm having a great time for now.

It again raises the question of what I'll end up using my Switch 2 for the most over the next half-decade or more, and I think there's a really good chance that ports make up a huge part of that playtime. After all, being able to play things on the go and while travelling frees up loads of time for extra gaming, and that gives it a sustained advantage over my PS5 Pro and PC.

When the Nintendo Switch 2 was first unveiled, there were plenty of parts of its specs sheet that drew attention, but the inclusion of a 120Hz display was surely one of the most eye-catching inclusions. This means that games on the Switch 2 with some headroom in terms of performance can enjoy ultra-smooth performance, whether in handheld mode or when connected to a compatible display.

The reality, though, is that the there haven't been all that many games in the year since the Switch 2 arrived that have taken advantage of the feature. While the Switch 2 is drastically more powerful than its predecessor, it's also far from the power of a PS5 Pro, for instance, so only less graphically demanding games have a shot at utilising 120Hz mode properly.

It's been a little while since I've played a game that offers it, frankly, so I was really pleasantly surprised by its inclusion in Mina the Hollower, an indie game released last week that deserves the praise it's been getting (and some more sales, too). The game was actually announced with its 120fps mode as a flagship offering, so it's great to now get my hands on it to see how it fares.

The short answer is, "smoothly". The difference between 120fps and 60fps isn't always that obvious, but when you play both extensively you'll start to feel the extra smoothness offered by the higher refresh rate option, and it really does help with a game that's as fluid and responsive as Mina.

The whole game's built from the ground up to mimic the best titles from the Game Boy era, as a love letter to that time. That said, it expands on the sort of experience you could get on that old handheld, not least with a widescreen presentation and freer movement thanks to analogue sticks replacing D-pads.

The game sees you take on the role of Mina herself, a small mouse whose big plans have gone awry when a series of generators she designed malfunction due to evil influences. You then have to journey around an island fixing them, with a structure that's very Zelda-like, including some freedom to tackle things outside of the suggested order.

While doing so you'll juggle weapons and sidearms in a way that recalls the Castlevania series to mind, while a mechanic that sees your XP put at risk when you die is also quite Dark Souls. That's a heady blend of influential titles, but from the same developers that made the excellent Shovel Knight, it all knits together really nicely.

Tying things together is the extremely fluid action that makes it really fun to take on new areas and platforming challenges, as well as surprisingly crunchy and difficult combat. Impressively, the game's pause menu hides a wide array of modifiers and difficulty settings that you can tweak if you're finding it too frustrating, an approach which really should be copied by more game developers.

A couple of hours in, I'm still grinding away without activating any of them, but I make no promises about sticking to that, given that having fun is the whole point of gaming. Still, it's that 120fps smoothness that I've been enjoying most of all. If you pick up the game, be sure to head to the settings menu to turn it on, as it'll default to 60fps at first.

It was only recently that Valve confirmed its Steam Machine console is still on track for a summer launch. But it now seems that it could be even closer than many thought.

Public regulatory documents have been found that suggest it could, in fact, be released in the next few weeks – even before June is out.

Redditor wayTooManyBugs claims to have found some interesting dates contained within files associated with the Steam Machine.

All products that utilise wireless communications technology must be approved by the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) before being allowed on sale in the States. It posts the filings on its website, but often with some documents redacted or embargoed.

That's the case with FCC ID 2AES4-1016 – Valve's "Video Game Machine". While some of the reports and technical documents are viewable (and have been since the end of 2025) a selection are still locked.

These include the user manual and internal photos of the test unit, which are not yet available to click on – presumably because they reveal information that Valve doesn't want to reveal to the public yet.

However, as found by the Redditor, they will become available on 29 June 2029 – less than three weeks from the time of writing. And that has sparked speculation on a potential release date for the console.

WayTooManyBugs suggests that the filing for the Steam Controller – which is now available – successfully hinted at its release. The manual and photos were made public on 20 May 2026 – a few weeks after initial orders of the controller started to ship.

If the same pattern is followed with the Steam Machine, it could actually be formally launched any day now.

There is a mighty caveat to all of this. Valve didn't exactly expect to release its Steam Controller ahead of the Steam Machine, but market conditions and the ongoing RAM crisis forced its hand.

In addition, the FCC filing was submitted at the tail end of last year, which is when the 29 June embargo may have been set. It might be that the Steam Machine was planned for release by the end of June, but the components issues in the interim have caused delays.

Still, looking on the positive side, we shouldn't have too long to wait until we find out more, either way. And, at the very least, we'll be able to get a look at the user manual and internal photos.