Among the trio of new hardware devices Valve just announced for 2026 – which also include the Steam Frame VR headset and a redesigned Steam Controller – the new Steam Machine is probably the most surprising. Mainly because the original Steam Machines, a series of partner-built SteamOS mini-PCs, sank like rectangular stones upon launching in 2015.

Designed and built entirely in-house, the new model is a very different proposition, though it’s not so much the updated hardware that has Valve believing it’s time to give the Steam Machine another chance. According to engineers Yazan Aldehayyat and Pierre-Loup Griffais, the biggest problem faced by those doomed Machines was one that the Steam Deck’s Proton software has solved: a lack of SteamOS-compatible games.

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Wall World 2 isn't as easy to explain as its predecessor. Yes, it is still a roguelike in which you split your time between piloting a robotic spider up and down a giant wall in search of weak spots from which you can mine deep into the cliff face, digging up minerals to spend upgrading your mecha-arachnid's weapons, enhancing its ability to fight off periodic waves of pustule-covered aliens, until you either kill the biggest pustule-covered alien or die in the attempt. But now it's become a much more complex game, embellishing both its mining and combat halves and thinning the divide between them.

This is going to take a little explaining, with a lot of changes falling into the plus and minus columns, so here's an easy improvement to tide you over. You can now name your robospider; mine is called Nigel.

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The final episode of swish and salacious Telltale-style caped tellydrama Dispatch released yesterday. It's been a surprise hit - according to the gabbling labcoats at GameDiscoverCo, AdHoc's superhero workplace comedy is approaching two million sales. Reasons given for this range from the appealing but uninvestigated - there's a Galactus-sized untapped audience for narrative single player games, and all the publishers are absolute spanners for doubling down on live service projects instead - to the boring - people are still keen on superheroes, especially sociopathic and disgusting superheroes that cut against archetypes from the more pompous Marvel films, and Dispatch is simply a very well-made game.

Good games sell? What a gauche>, back-of-napkin excuse for industry analysis. There must be a more arcane and clever-sounding explanation for Dispatch's meteoric fortunes. Ah yes, here we go: speaking to GameDiscoverCo, AdHoc's CEO and exec producer Michael Choung has suggested that it's partly down to the weekly episodic release schedule.

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Start setting up tripwires and stretch your bow strings, a Horizon MMORPG dubbed Horizon Steel Frontiers has been fully revealed by Sony and developers NCSoft. As ever, it's all about slapping up and taming big metal bears, birds and the like, this time as a custom character in a world filled with other players who're also in the robo-hunting business.

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Hello. My name is Julian Benson and, as you will have gathered from the headline, I am the new Editorial Director of Rock Paper Shotgun.

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Undoubtedly the only thing anyone in the PC world will be talking about for the next week is Valve's trio of hardware announcements, the Steam Machine, the Steam Frame, and their new Steam Controller. But don't forget about the old Steam Deck just yet! While Valve didn't announce anything handheld related today, they have commented on where they're at when it comes to anything like a Steam Deck 2.

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