Everybody knows that if you try to get a cat to do what you want—sit up, fetch a stick, search for explosives—it will do nothing more than stare at you with contempt. That’s why console pitches to PC gamers tend to fall flat: we’re generally not as interested in hearing how a bunch of suits want us to play our games. Nvidia took a much different approach with the Shield, on the other hand, that seems to account for what PC gamers have in common with cats: give us great hardware and the freedom to do whatever we feel like doing, and we’ll show ourselves a great time.

And oh, what hardware! Closed, the Shield looks like a largish Xbox 360 controller, with a handsomely textured plastic chassis and contrasting magnetically-attached silver plate on top (called a “tag”) that can be swapped for glossy or carbon fiber tags (available separately at $20 each). The top flips upward on a firm hinge to expose the 5-inch, 1280x720 glossy LCD touchscreen display and controller surface. The layout of the controller combines the best of the Xbox 360 and PS3 controllers with dual analog thumbsticks, a D-pad, A/B/X/Y buttons, left and right analog triggers and bumpers on the shoulders, as well as five buttons in the center for system controls.



At 1.3 pounds the Shield isn’t lightweight, but the ergonomics are nearly perfect—including a smoothly contoured undercarriage that allows your ring fingers to rest beneath the device—so I was able to play well over an hour before any fatigue set in (and over ten hours on a single battery charge, although that included a half-hour sandwich break and finger yoga). Only the slightly recessed thumbsticks felt a bit awkward at first, but the slight arch in my thumbs necessary to work them actually made depressing them easier.

On the Engineering deck you’ll find the brawniest Android hardware you can fit in a jacket pocket, centered around Nvidia’s own 1.9GHz Tegra 4 processor (with a 5-core CPU and a 72-core GPU) and 2GB RAM. The Shield also includes 802.11n dual band Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 3.0, GPS, an internal gyroscope and accelerometer as well as 16GB of internal flash-based storage and a MicroSD slot where I’m currently storing 32GB of movies, music, emulators, and disc images I ripped from vintage games (more on that in a moment).

But the real stroke of genius is the Shield’s unmolested Android 4.1 (“Jelly Bean”) operating system, by far the most popular mobile operating system in the world. All you have to do is pop open the Shield, hop onto your wireless network, and help yourself to any of the hundreds of thousands of Android games available through the Google Play store. The Shield wisely highlights Android games with controls and visual enhancements customized for the device and its Tegra 4 proc, as not all Android games support game controllers or control remapping, and not all the ones that do aren’t guaranteed to work well with the Shield. And you’ll want to be very wary of games designed specifically for touchscreens: while some are a pleasure, such as the enigmatic puzzle game The Room, there’s simply no way to comfortably play others, such as the Android port of the classic adventure game The Last Express which bizarrely only supports portrait orientation.



The games tailored for the Shield, on the other hand, play beautifully, with super-crisp detail and unflappable smoothness—especially first- and third-person action games such as Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, zombie abatement shooter Dead Trigger, and Max Payne.

The Shield’s most unique feature—no, make that its most downright bitchin' feature—is PC streaming. You can launch any supported game from your PC—via the Shield interface or Steam’s Big Picture mode—and play, oh, let’s say Dishonored, in the bathtub. Which I did. Or Tomb Raider on the couch. I did that, too. I won’t tell you where I played BioShock Infinite, but the main idea is that your PC does the heavy lifting and squirts the results to your Shield with—under ideal conditions—negligible latency. But Nvidia was right to label this a “beta” feature, because getting it to work is something of an adventure in itself. Non-Steam games need to be manually added to your Steam library in order to work, and the hardware requirements are extremely steep: You need at least an Nvidia GeForce GTX 650 (laptop GPUs aren’t supported yet), and your results will depend on the speed and sophistication of your router and the strength of your wireless signal. I used a $180 Asus RT-N66U provided by Nvidia, and even then, in the labyrinth of dead spots that is my home, it took a great deal of experimentation to figure out where to put it—and how far away I could move away from it—so that I could stream without excessive lag or hiccups.



That’s frustrating, but in a sense, it’s also inspiring. Because PC gamers have always been tinkerers, and we’re used to adapting hardware to our needs; at the very least, we’d rather have the option than not. Nvidia cut no corners on the hardware, so I was able to watch my MKV rip of “The Brothers Bloom” Blu-ray without recoding (using VLC). I played my FLAC files of Tomáš Dvořák’s tasty soundtrack to Machinarium through the superb speakers (which are better than most laptop speakers, though light on the bass). And by pairing the Shield with a Bluetooth keyboard for experimenting with command-line instructions, I was able to play the gruesome DOS classic I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream (with the $3.50 DosBox Turbo utility) from a ripped ISO of my dusty CD-ROM. I plugged in the Shield to my PC, and as it charged over the USB connection, I transferred a rip of The Neverhood through Windows Explorer and ran it on the Shield using the free “Windows, Linux, Unix Emulator” on the Google Play store—and played it on my living room TV via the HDMI-out. I used a PlayStation emulator to play Fear Effect on a warm night on my fire escape. I even surveilled my backyard with the AR.Drone 2.0 from Parrot, with a live color video feed from the hovercraft streamed to my Shield.

That’s not to say these feats were easy—not all of them were. But they’re possible, and don’t require “rooting” or workarounds as a result of file system lockouts. You have the same freedom to improvise and experiment that you expect from your PC or laptop—and don’t ever get from console manufacturers. Instead, you get the benefits of an operating system with an open architecture in a handheld that’s several orders of magnitude more sophisticated in hardware and design than any handheld that came before it.

If you have the desire and patience to exploit the Shield’s whopping potential, it’s a must-have—if you tried to take this thing from me I’d tear your arm off and make you eat it. If you don’t, it’s a tougher sell without reliable PC streaming and iffy compatibility with many Android games. Either way, the Shield is a magnificent funmaker that’s worth every penny, and if Nvidia can bullet-proof the streaming and continues to promote compatibility and support among developers, it has an even more glorious future ahead of it.

It's November 12! That's for part one of Bioshock Infinite's first chunk of story DLC, set in that fragile underwater utopia/horrorshow, Rapture. Phil's played it, and he's writing a few impressions down right now. Episode One throws Booker and Elizibeth back to a time to a point before Rapture transitioned from endless parties to mutant massacre.

Ken Levine mentioned on Twitter that there will be new weapons, plasmids and gear, including an "old man winter" plasmid. I'm more excited about wandering around a still-living Rapture, as captured in this splendid piece of concept art for Bioshock 1.

Part one of the DLC will be Booker-centric, but apparently we'll get to play as Elizabeth in part two, but will there be reality tears? Will there be Skyhooks? Will we once more be able to fire thousands of bees out of our palms? We'll have to pay £10 / $15 in a few week to find out. Stay tuned for Phil's impressions on PCGamer.com shortly.

According to Polygon, 2K Marin, which worked on BioShock, BioShock 2, BioShock: Infinite, and most recently The Bureau: XCOM Declassified, is undergoing a “staff reduction” of unknown size and scope.

"We can confirm staff reductions at 2K Marin,” a source told Polygon. “While these were difficult decisions, we regularly evaluate our development efforts and have decided to reallocate creative resources. Our goal to create world-class video game titles remains unchanged.”

Distressingly, another source claims that 2K Marin as we know it is completely closed, with developers either laid off or transferred to Bay Area 2K, the new 2K studio managed by Bioshock Infinite producer Rod Fergusson.

Bioshock Infinite's first story-based DLC campaign is on a bathysphere ride to release. That means a return to the base game's quirky "Fact From Myth" trailer series, sending up '70s educational video making. Rather than tracking down the magical flying city of Columbia, this time the fictional documentary makers are in search of clues relating to the magical underwater city of Rapture - the setting for the two-part DLC.

You can see the original "Truth From Legend" trailers below. They had a tendency to focus on the more lore-heavy aspects of Columbia, whereas here it hints at a more specific part of the story: the poster of Elizabeth and Booker dancing prompting a reaction from a mysterious character interviewed after the fact. We'll find out the extent to which this story beat is explored when Burial at Sea is released this "Holiday".

“I have a huge amount of confidence in Valve,” Ken Levine tells PC Gamer. The creative director of Irrational Games and writer of BioShock Infinite is excited about Valve’s newest plan for PC gaming: SteamOS. Levine took a break from working on Infinite’s Burial At Sea DLC (which he says is “nearing the end” of development) to discuss how Valve’s Linux-based operating system might change how we play games through our PCs.

Open is good

Levine characterizes the move to use Linux as a base for SteamOS as “a brave and powerful idea,” and thinks the open nature of Linux matches up with how gamers want to interact with developers.

“I think we’ve seen a move toward openness,” he says. “There’s been a democratization effect with Kickstarter or the Humble Bundles, or even Steam Workshop, where you putting faith in the audience to help enhance the experience and make the experience better. And that requires openness to a certain degree.”

We’ve worried that getting the games running on a Linux-based system could be tricky, but Levine doesn’t see it as a large hurdle. “There’s a lot of Linux porting to do, but if you’ve done a Mac version of something, you’re pretty close already, because Mac is based on the Unix kernel,” he says. “It’s nice to have where nobody can say, ‘Okay, this is what we’re doing with it, whether you like it or not.’ I think that’s interesting, because it’s not something we’ve traditionally seen.”

Levine thinks the focus should be less on Linux and more on the fact that Valve is building an operating system specifically for gamers. “The message to me is that it’s an operating system designed around gaming, and it’s pretty open,” he says. “Linux is a means to an end.”

Any screen you want

Porting aside, Valve plans to let gamers stream existing Windows and Mac games to devices running SteamOS. It’s this concept of local streaming that Levine finds the most exciting.

“To me, an important part of the future is in-house streaming, where you have a machine somewhere in your house, and you can stream that gameplay out to any screen in your house, effectively turning those screens, whether it’s a TV or a monitor or an iPad or whatever, into a dumb terminal, and relying on the processing power of a central powerful machine.” Levine points out that there are some systems that do this already in the console world, from Nintendo’s Wii U to Sony’s Remote Play for PS3, Vita, and PS4. But instead of using proprietary systems, he thinks Valve’s emphasis on openness could mean a world where you can stream your PC games to any screen you want.

“I would like to see every screen turned into a receiver,” says Levine. “And if you look at the Chromecast, they’re already doing something like that, where they have this dongle that you attach to your TV, and you can stream things out from your computer, your iPad, whatever, to that screen.”

The idea harkens back to mainframe computing in the ‘60s and ‘70s, where terminals acted as interfaces with hulking “super” computers. Levine envisions a world where, thanks to SteamOS, you can use any screen in your home to play your PC games—even pausing in one room and picking up in another, or in bed with a tablet device. Valve already says that SteamOS users will be able to use cloud saving to move back and forth between devices, as we can do now in the Steam application.

Levine is entranced by this possible streaming-friendly future. “It means you can choose to be screen agnostic,” he says. “Like, owning the living room could be less interesting than owning every room. And for the gamer perspective, being able to play in any room, pause your game, go to bed, go to your iPad, pick up a controller, and play from there.”

What gamers want?

When Steam first launched in 2004 on the strength of Half-Life 2, few gamers saw a reason to require an always-online application like Steam. Today, the digital distribution platform is the driving force of the PC gaming industry. Is that strength enough to get gamers to switch operating systems, or move to the living room?

“The most important phrase in selling anybody anything is, ‘What’s in it for me?’” Levine says. “Steam, at the beginning, had the problem of asking a lot from the gamer and not giving enough back in return. Now when you use Steam, you’re like, ‘Oh you want me to use this thing, and I get to install games trivially wherever I want? You auto-update my games? I never have to deal with patches? I get Workshop? I get community? I can make hats and sell them?” It’s like, I get so much stuff and all you’re asking from me is a little bit of DRM? Okay, I’ll take it.”

“I think it’s always going to come down to—is Valve going to provide a value proposition that is attractive to people? Put that in human terms, are they going to give people stuff that they want? Because gamers aren’t stupid. The gamer’s going to say, ‘Fuck you dude, that’s not what I want’ if they don’t want it. But Valve has traditionally been excellent at understanding that it needs to provide value to the gamer. They have to give you something that works for you.”

Levine says his studio isn’t currently developing natively for SteamOS—“Right now, honestly, the truth is that we’re developing Burial at Sea for PC, PS3, and Xbox 360, and nothing else right now.”—but confirms his excitement for the concept. "I think what they’re building is going to be awesome,” he says. “I don’t think anyone ever lost any money betting on Valve.”

Read more of our coverage of Valve's announcements.

The folks at Irrational Games are once again offering fame and fortune to a lucky few in a new contest, the winners of which will find their names somewhere in episode two of BioShock Infinite’s upcoming DLC, Burial at Sea.

Those interested can enter the contest by completing all 60 Blue Ribbon challenges in the recent Clash in the Clouds DLC by August 27 at 9 a.m. EDT. For those who missed our coverage of Infinite’s first piece of DLC, the Blue Ribbon challenges are optional objectives that generally restrict which weapons you use or require you to kill enemies in a certain way.

The announcement notes that you don’t have to complete all the challenges in one sitting—just be sure to have all 60 blue ribbons by that date if you want to apply. Thankfully, any of the blue ribbons you’ve collected prior to the announcement still count. According to the official rules, the three winners will be announced “on or about” August 30 but no later than September 8.

Irrational didn’t specify exactly where the winners’ names would show up, saying it will make that decision at a later date. Those lucky enough to be immortalized in the upcoming DLC will receive a hi-res screenshot of their name from Irrational, along with instructions on how to find it.

This isn’t the first time Irrational has emblazoned a fan’s name into BioShock Infinite, though the sweepstakes it held reportedly had over 100,000 submitted entries. Here’s hoping the Blue Ribbon challenge requirement cuts that number down a bit.

This week, Logan, Evan, and Cory ponder over the recent batch of game remakes, scan for inconsistencies in Papers, Please, and take an Nvidia Shield with them to the bath. The guys also make a strong case for the shopkeeper's right to bear arms in Spelunky. All this, our playlists, and more, on...

PC Gamer Podcast 360 - Drunk-lunky

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Bioshock Infinite’s first episodic DLC, Burial at Sea, is headed our way in the next few months, and the biggest news for fans of the series is that we’ll get a chance to step into Elizabeth’s shoes. Now we’re getting some new information about what designing Elizabeth has been like, and how her character will shape the game.

“Liz is such a different character to Booker, and if we were to just put Booker in a dress,” level designer Amanda Jeffrey told IGN, “then that would be the most awful betrayal of what we're doing for Liz, and players would just feel like it was a cheap way out, and that's not something that we want to do.”

Booker, of course, is a soldier, and his strategic but strong-handed approach to things informed a lot of what we saw in Infinite. “He's very much about storming the gates, or taking it head on, and he has these other tools available to him, but generally he's all about going head to head with his enemy...” Jeffrey continued. “Elizabeth was a much more thoughtful person. She would be more considerate about keeping out of danger, and assisting you with various different things, and looking for things around in the environment and keeping an eye out for stuff.”

In terms of the game, it sounds like Burial at Sea will be a much more stealth- and puzzle-based type of game. It will also be our first chance to revisit Andrew Ryan’s submerged utopia, Rapture, since Bioshock 1 and 2.

For more details, check out the full interview with Jeffrey and series creator Ken Levine.

BioShock Infinite Creative Director Ken Levine held an impromptu Q&A session over Twitter on Wednesday, handing out bits and snippets of information regarding Booker and Elizabeth’s return to Rapture in the upcoming DLC, Burial at Sea.

Levine tweeted that Burial at Sea will host “mostly tweaked Infinite gameplay systems,” but promised that there were other new systems in the pipeline. For the record Levine said those systems include weapons, plasmids, gear and enemy types, though the plasmids aren’t necessarily ones you’ll recall from the original BioShock.
There is def. SOME new systems (weapon, plasmid, gear) but the level geo almost all new assets. Objects largely new. Story all new.

— Ken Levine (@IGLevine) July 31, 2013
 

Levine also specified that most of the Rapture we see in Burial at Sea will be built with almost entirely new assets and level geometry. While the prospect of diving back to Rapture's briny depths already gives me goosebumps, it's nice to know we won't be re-treading the damp, metallic floors we covered six years ago.

But don’t worry—the most important news has yet to come. Burial at Sea won’t include the hacking minigame from the original BioShock, and the Circus of Values machine you know and either love or despise will, in fact, talk.

Will the clownish vendor utter any new phrases? That, my friend, is still a mystery.

If you're still puzzling over BioShock Infinite's mind-bendy, nearly inscrutable finale, you might just want to set that aside at noon today (PST) and dig into Clash in the Clouds, the first of three DLC packs arriving throughout the year ($5 for Clash in the Clouds alone, or $20 for the BioShock Infinite Season Pass that includes Clash in the Clouds, Burial at Sea: Episode One and Burial at Sea: Episode Two, as well as a handful of "Day One" combat bonuses). Clash takes one of the most consistently problematic aspects of Infinite - the constant, often repetitive combat - and turns it into spectacularly entertaining arena-style skirmishes that surpass many of Infinite's own set-pieces.

There's not a lot of setup here, and not a lot is required. You walk into the chambers of the Columbian Archaeological Society were you'll find, amid the droning chatter of a Motorized Patriot, four paintings that represent Clash's four combat arenas: The piers of the Ops Zeal, the Duke & Dimwit Theater (with a rotating ferris wheel and fireworks overhead), the Raven's Dome aviary, and the snowy promenades of the Emporia Arcade. Pressing the action button in front of any of them whisks you to a galley where you're then presented with the types of enemies you're about to engage. From there, you select your weapons: Infinite's entire arsenal is made available to you from the get-to, as well as a selection of Vigors - you'll be able to upgrade both from cash you loot from corpses in battle as well as cash earned from achievements and "Blue Ribbon Challenges." Each of the 15 "waves" of enemies you'll face in all four arenas is preceded by a new Blue Ribbon Challenge - and while many are predictable, requiring you to rely on a certain type of weapon or tactic, others can be maddeningly precise and demanding (I never was, for example, able to "Defeat the Handyman while he's electrocuting a Sky-Line"). When you're ready, you enter a tear in the side of the wall, and all hell breaks loose.

You'll generally have a few moments to strategize before being spotted by any of the enemies, although it's possible to extend this time by taking cover immediately and peeking around corners. But once you're spotted or you've fired, it's on.



What sets apart the combat in Clash of the Clouds is the undulating Sky-Line threaded through each multilevel arena in a loop. Where Sky-Line combat in Infinite felt sometimes awkward and halting, Clash's loops - as paradoxical as it sounds - opens them wide up. It's easier and far more exhilarating, for example, to survey for and pick off enemies from their redoubts while you're being flung from one end of the map to the other than it is to grovel to Elizabeth for some cover to cower behind. That said, Elizabeth is your constant companion throughout with all her abilities intact: she'll activate tears for weapons, health, and cover, as well as toss you health and ammo when things start looking grim.

If you get nailed before you catch that sloshing flask of health or mid-way between Sky-Line and a Health Kit, you're returned to the galley and given some tough love: a choice between forfeiting your ranking in the Leaderboard, restarting from the first wave all over again, or returning to the Archaeological Society gallery to sulk.

But even death gets a fresh coat of paint in Clash in the Clouds. Off to the right in the galley is the translucent window to Booker's office, where you can buy and bank a single resurrection for $500 a piece; with that in your wallet, dying in a wave allows you to continue without starting over from the first one.



Advancing through the waves in each arena is, not surprisingly, an increasingly difficult process whether or not you feel up to taking a Blue Ribbon home. You'll want to pay attention to the roster of enemies announced before each one, as it'll inform what kind of weapons you want to go in with (some weapons are also available within the maps, or can be snatched from corpses and tears). I stuck with my beloved Carbine and Sniper combo throughout most of the early waves in each arena and invested a lot of cash upgrading them as I had in Infinite. This wasn't a problem while I was being harassed by Soldiers and Firemen, but when the Handymen and the unbearable mosquito-like buzzing of the Siren arrived, I realized I'd made some foolish decisions.

Look, the truth is, I'm just Not That Good. God knows I tried, but in about 45 waves I played out of the 60 available in the game, I went home with two Blue Ribbons, and one of them may have been a fluke. Lead Level Designer Forrest Dowling told me, perhaps out of pity, that the team knew they had gotten a wave just right when only one out of sixty play-testers could bag the Blue Ribbon.



But that's the magic of Clash that wasn't there for me in many of Infinite's battles, where bits and pieces of the story replayed and enemies sprang from the same positions over and over again as I navigated my way through the game. Clash in the Clouds became more satisyfing with repetition, not less, as I committed terrain to memory and leaned more heavily on Vigor combos to buy myself some distance (I'm happy to report, however, that the Murder of Crows upgrade that turns bodies into Crow traps is still a winning play in nearly every circumstance). The closed loops of the Sky-Lines accelerates the pace of combat while elevating some of their hazards - such as death by electrocution - as well.

Stripped of their painstaking ornamentation, the arenas are not radically different from each other - nor do they intend to be. Though I would have preferred more varied locations mined from Infinite's vast catalog, the emphasis here is on becoming more proficient and creative with weapons and Vigors, not exploration or hiding while you chug an energy drink. And goofy moments of chaos - like hopping up, down, back and forth on a Sky-Line dodging rockets as I tried to take out an airship - seem less incongruous and thus more enjoyable than they did in Infinite. After playing three-quarters of the waves and achieving a small fraction of the goals set before me, $5 feels like a bargain to experience Infinite's combat distilled to its most enjoyable essence.

Read about the rest of Bioshock Infinite's planned DLC here.