CES 2026 doesn’t technically end until tomorrow, but then if it were a football match, it’d be the kind where the home side gets battered 4-0 and the cameras keep cutting to a stream of season ticket holders slumping towards the doors with 20 minutes left. An all-timer in the history of Consumer Electronics Show, it has not been.
Ghost Ship Games could learn a thing or two from Rockstar about hiding secrets in cobwebs. While RDR2’s spider-spun mystery continues to vex seasoned easter egg hunters, the message behind a piece of Deep Rock Galactic promo art – posted on the game’s Discord server earlier today – was seemingly spotted in about twenty minutes. Still, at least it looks to be a handy bit of info: a release date for its big Season 6 update.
That poll I posted the other day suggests that over half of you RPS reader types play games on Linux, either in part or exclusively. And if a poll says it, I’m in no position to argue, so boy do I have just the CES 2026 story for you: Lenovo are making a SteamOS version of their premium Legion Go 2 portable, joining the lower-end Legion Go S in spreading the Linux-based SteamOS beyond the confines of Valve’s own Steam Decks.
007: First Light may not be the choppy, stuttering overextender of gratuitous explosi-pixels that its big action reveal led us to believe. The official PC system requirements are out, and they’re very reasonable indeed, only asking for old mid-range graphics cards and merely halfway decent CPUs. Could IO Interactive have delayed their young Bond adventure to May 27th so as to polish up performance, especially around the more Brosnan-era detonationfests in that footage? Maybe, maybe not. But at least you won’t need John Cleese to build you a machine that can run it.
In what has become CPU tradition, AMD have announced a new fastest-ever gaming processor to replace their last fastest-ever gaming processor. The newcomer, detailed at CES 2026, is the Ryzen 7 9850X3D, which actually shares the same architecture, socket, core and thread counts, and power usage rating as the erstwhile big dog, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D. It’s mainly a quicker maximum boost clock, up from 5.2GHz to 5.6GHz, that grants it a performance edge.
CES 2026 is underway in Las Vegas, and while Nvidia have passed on the opportunity to announce any new RTX 50 Super graphics cards – perhaps in the knowledge that they’d be hurled directly into the raging vortex of an ongoing component pricing snafu – the tech show has yielded some interesting GeForce news. Namely, there’s a new version of Nvidia DLSS, 4.5, launching today, that promises to sharpen up and boost performance on any RTX GPU.
Cubey sandbox crafter Hytale launches into early access next Tuesday, January 13th, after a dicey few months in which it was cancelled, bought out by the original developers, and revived like a majestic square-beaked phoenix. It’ll also have a native Linux version, allowing anyone fed up with Microsoft’s continued bullshit to play it on a system running something that isn’t an increasingly bloated or prematurely abandoned Windows.
There are caveats, mind. In a Xitter post announcing the Linux version, Hypixel co-founder and tech director Kevin Carstens – well spotted by Gaming on Linux – stresses that it’ll be an "experimental" endeavour, potentially susceptible to bugs specific to different distributions (sub-versions) of the open-source OS. And the Steam Deck, which runs the Linux-based SteamOS, is in a trickier position still. Carstens explains that limited testing on a docked Deck, with the handheld aided by a mouse and keyboard, suggests it can run local singleplayer fine, though it’s "not officially recommended" as a Hytale-playing device as the game currently lacks controller support.
A recap: of the seven hopefuls I slipped into our bulk 2025 list of "Oh, that looks alright" games, only three actually released in 2025, and one of them wasn’t very good. If it’s the hope that kills you, I am therefore dead four, arguably five times over. Real Necron shit, honestly.
RPS Advent Calendar voting remains an esoteric and mercurial process, even to those of us who practice in it. If two games get the same amount of votes, which goes higher in the list? Did Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor technically release in 2025 or 2024? These are questions most of us dare not ask, and those that do often vanish mysteriously overnight. Until January 3rd or so, when they come back from holiday.
One thing’s for sure: I had a bunch of games that no-one else voted for. Don’t be sad, games. I still like you.
We reach the penultimate door, and good cripes has it been a long time coming. When was the last door? Like 2017? Ah well, surely everyone’s been completely normal about it.
It’s Hollow Knight: Silksong!
Valve’s quiet bankrolling of open-source emulation tools could make it heaps easier to play your PC games library on a humble smartphone, though it sounds like Gabe-made SteamOS phones are unlikely to be joining the company’s growing hardware catalogue. In an interview with The Verge, Valve engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais confirmed that they’ve been funding the development of Fex – a free compatibility tool that gets Windows apps functioning on mobile ARM processors – since well before revealing the ARM-based Steam Frame standalone VR headset.
To successfully deliver presents to every child on Earth within a single Christmas eve, Santa Claus would need to travel in the region of half the speed of light – enough to vaporise the flesh and disintegrate the sleighs of mere mortals. He’d therefore appreciate the sheer go-fastness of the roguelite running game that’s blasting out of door #3.
It’s Haste!
Seems it’s a good day to be a Helldivers 2 player: in addition to the buff-happy Into the Unjust 5.0.0 patch that launched earlier, developers Arrowhead have shared an update on their efforts to shave down the co-op shooter’s mammoth install size. And it’s not so much a shaving as a fully fuelled chainsawing, high vis vests be damned. As the Steam post explains, there’s now a beta build, available to try, that cuts the 154GB game down to 23GB – a 131GB (!!!) reduction. That’s like surgically removing an entire Black Myth: Wukong that was growing out of its back.
I was precisely whelmed when Fatshark revealed the mohawked, chem-huffing Hive Scum as Warhammer 40,000: Darktide’s next class; most of the existing player characters being unwashed crims as it is. Turns out, however, they make good company when it counts. Having played about six hours of Hive Scum, ahead of launch on December 2nd, I’m convinced the class offers something new – and even those who don’t drop the requisite $12 on it will still, on the same day, get a rollicking new mission type that delves into properly muddy 40K ground warfare.
I never bought a Lenovo Legion Go S, or even slotted it into our best handheld PCs list, though it’s funny how much a fat Black Friday price cut can massage the desirability gland. And it helps that these savings cover not just the budget Ryzen Z2 Go model I originally reviewed, but the top-of-the-line Z1 Extreme version with an upgraded 32GB of RAM – and the same SteamOS, instead of fiddly Windows. That extra memory’s probably worth about four billion quid by itself, though while it lasts, the primo Legion Go S is going for £599 in the UK (a £100 saving) and $650 in the US (a $250 saving).
Convention tells us that to be a PC gamepad, the gamepad in question must follow the layout – or, at least, match the button glyphs – of the Xbox controller’s ABXY design. Even the new Steam Controller is doing it. To convention, though, I say: appreciate you’re an important component of usability design but also get lost. One of the best PC controllers right now is the PS5-pattern DualSense, which today's Black Friday deals have brought down to its lowest price in months.
I, erm, write about the Steam Deck a lot, and keen eyed readers may have spotted a recurring theme among the accompanying photographs: a lurking Ugreen logo. That’s the Ugreen 9-in-1 Steam Deck Dock, aND what it lacks in sexy naming, it makes up for by being just the nicest little stand/port extender combo that a handheld PC could ask for. It’s also a mere £36/$40 on Black Friday, up to a third off its usual price.
Rejoice, those with nimble wrists or heightened gravity anomalies localised on top of their desks. Logitech’s G Pro X Superlight 2 gaming mouse, which for my money is the finest ultra-lightweight mouse in existence, is getting cut down in the Black Friday sales – so for your money, it’s down from an admittedly ambitious £149/$180 to a far more reasonable £104/$130.
I will begrudgingly accept that Black Friday, bleak as it is to anyone who didn’t grow up with framed spreadsheets above their beds, is at least a good opportunity to pick up dirt-cheap PC storage. Case in point, today’s sales include some nice, sharp slashings on some of the best Steam Deck microSD cards.
I’m trying something new for this year’s Black Friday coverage: drastically overestimating how long it would take to put together a guide to its best graphics card deals. How is it past 11 already. Still, I do hope this helps any potential upgrader or from-scratch DIY builder out there – GPUs haven’t been 'cheap' in years, and while RAM is currently doing its best to replace them as the most overpriced component type in PCdom, graphics cards are usually in drastic need of discounts. Just as, like, their default state of being.