gaming

Rally Arcade Classics is a fun ’90s-throwback racing game

Cars, game review, gaming, Rally Arcade Classics / Mike M. / October 3, 2025

Over the years, racing sims have come a long way. Gaming PCs and consoles have become more powerful, physics and tire models have become more accurate, and after COVID, it seems like nearly everyone has a sim rig setup at home. Sim racing has even become an accepted route into the world of real-life motorsport (not to be confused with the Indy Racing League).

But what if you aren’t looking to become the next Max Verstappen? What if you miss the more carefree days of old, where the fidelity wasn’t quite so high, nor were the stakes? Rally Arcade Classics is worth a look.

Developed by NET2KGAMES, you might think of RAC as a spiritual successor to legendary titles like Sega Rally and Colin McRae Rally. Forget about the Nürburgring or even street circuits laid out in famous cities you might have visited; instead, this game is about point-to-point racing against the clock—mostly—across landscapes that long-time World Rally Championship fans will remember.

Not a Focus but a Sufoc WRC, getting air in Finland. Credit: NET2KGAMES

There’s Finland, with plenty of fast dirt roads, complete with crests that will launch your car into the air. Or the dusty, sinewy mountain roads of Greece. Catalyuna (in Spain) provides technical tarmac stages. And Monte Carlo combines tarmac, ice, snow, and challenging corners. But since this is rallying, each location is broken into a series of short stages. Oh, and some of them will be at night.

Then there are the cars. This is an indie game, not a AAA title, so there are no official OEM licenses here. But there are plenty of cars you’ll recognize from the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. These comprise a mix of front-, rear-, and all-wheel drive machinery, some of them road cars and others heavily modified for rallying. You start off in the slowest of these, the Kopper, which is an off-brand Mini Cooper, a car that won a famous victory at the 1964 Monte Carlo Rally, despite being many, many horsepower down on the mostly RWD cars it beat.

The models of the cars, while not Gran Turismo 7-level, are close enough that you don’t really notice the Peugeot 205 is called the Paigot 5, or the Golf GTI now being the Wolf. The Betta is a Lancia Delta Integrale, the Fourtro is an Audi Quattro, and the Selicka is the Toyota Celica, but I must admit I’m not quite sure why the Subaru Imprezas are called the Imperial R and the MR Bang STI—answers in the comments if you know, please.

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Hands-on with Fallout 76’s next expansion: Yep, it has Walton Goggins

bethesda, Bethesda Game Studios, Fallout, fallout 76, Fallout 76 Burning Springs, gaming / Mike M. / October 1, 2025

TV tie-ins aside, it’s the combat tweaks over the past year that really matter.

There aren’t a lot of games set in Ohio, but here we are. Credit: Bethesda

Bethesda provided flights from Chicago to New York City so that Ars could participate in the preview opportunity for Fallout 76: Burning Springs. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

Like anybody, I have a few controversial gaming opinions and tastes. One of the most controversial is that Fallout 76 —the multiplayer take on Bethesda’s rethink of a beloved ’90s open-world computer roleplaying game—has been my favorite online multiplayer game since its launch.

As much as I like the game, though, I’ve been surprised that it has actually grown over the past seven years. I’m not saying it’s seen a full, No Man’s Sky-like redemption story, though. It’s still not for everyone, and in some ways, it has fallen behind the times since 2018.

Nevertheless, the success of the streaming TV show based on the game franchise has attracted new players and given the developers a chance to seize the moment and attempt to complete a partial redemption story. To help make that happen, the game’s developers will soon release an expansion fully capitalizing on that TV series for the first time, and I got to spend a few hours playing that update to see if it’s any fun.

That said, don’t get distracted by the shiny TV tie-in. The important work is a lot less flashy: combat overhauls, bug fixes, balance updates, quality-of-life improvements, and technological tweaks—all of which have been added to the game over time. Ultimately, that little stuff adds up to be more impactful than the big stuff for players.

With that in mind, let’s take a quick look at where things stand based on my seven years of regularly playing the game and a few hours with the next major expansion.

Months of combat and game balance overhauls

You probably already know that the game originally launched without NPCs or the kinds of story- and character-driven quests most people expect from Fallout and that those things were added to the game in 2020, with more similar additions in the years since.

You could make a case that the original, NPC-free vision made sense for a certain kind of player, but that’s not the kind of player who tends to like Fallout games. Bethesda clearly pictured a Rust-like, emergent social PvP (player vs. player) situation when the game first came out. By now, though, PvP is almost completely absent from the game, and story-based quests loaded with NPCs are plentiful.

It still wasn’t enough for some players. There were several small frustrations about gameplay balance, as some folks felt that combat wasn’t always as fun as it could be and that the viable character builds in the endgame were too narrow.

Through a series of many patches over just this past year, Bethesda has been making significant changes to that aspect of the game. Go to Reddit and you’ll see that some players have gripes—mainly because the changes nerfed some uber-powerful endgame builds and weapons to level the playing field. (Also, some recent changes to VATS are admittedly a double-edged sword, depending on your philosophy about what role it should play in the game.)

You’ll definitely engage in some combat in this Deathclaw junkyard battle arena. Credit: Bethesda

As someone who has been playing almost nonstop this whole time, though, I think the designers have done a great job of making more play styles viable while just generally making the game feel better to play. They also totally overhauled how the base-building system works. That’s the sort of stuff that is hard to convey in a marketing blitz, but you feel it when you’re playing.

I won’t get into every detail about it here since most people reading this probably haven’t played the game enough to warrant that, but you can look at the patch notes—it’s a lot.

But I want to point that out up front because I think it’s more important than anything in the actual expansion the developer and publisher are hyping up. The game is just generally more fun to play than it used to be—even a year ago. You love to see it.

Technically, it’s a mixed bag

Earlier, I mentioned that the game has fallen behind the times in many ways. I’m mostly talking about its technical presentation and the lack of modern features players now expect from big-budget, cross-platform multiplayer games.

The assets are great, the art direction is top-notch, and the world is dense and attractive, but there are some now-standard AAA boxes it doesn’t check. A full redemption story requires addressing at least some of these things to keep the game up to modern standards.

By and large, the game’s environments look great on PC. Consoles are a bit behind. Credit: Bethesda

First up, the game has no executable for modern consoles; the Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5/5 Pro consoles seem to run the last-gen Xbox One X and PlayStation 4 Pro versions, respectively, just with the framerate cap (thankfully) raised from 30 fps to 60 fps.

But there’s good news on that front: I spoke with development team members who confirmed that current-gen console versions are coming soon, though they didn’t specify what kinds of upgrades we can expect.

I hope that also means a rethought approach to how the game displays on HDR (high dynamic range) TVs. To this day, HDR does not work like you’d expect; the game looks washed out on an OLED TV in particular, and there are none of the industry-standard HDR calibration sliders to fix it. HDR also didn’t work properly in Starfield at launch (it got partially addressed about a year later), and it is completely absent from the otherwise gorgeous-to-behold The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion remaster that came out just this year. I don’t know what the deal is with Bethesda Game Studios and HDR, but I hope they figure it out by the time The Elder Scrolls VI hits.

I also asked the Fallout 76 team about cross-play and cross-progression—the ability to play with friends on different platforms (or to at least access the same character across platforms). These features are likely nontrivial to implement, and they weren’t standard in 2018. They’re increasingly expected for big-budget, AAA multiplayer games today, though.

Unfortunately, the Bethesda devs I spoke to didn’t have any plans to share on that front. Still, it’s good to hear that the company still supports this game enough to at least launch modern console versions—and to continue adding major content updates.

OK, we can talk about the TV show update now

Speaking of major content updates, Bethesda is planning a big release called Burning Springs this December. It marks the second significant map expansion. Whereas the first expanded from the game’s West Virginia locales southward into Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park, this one pushes the map farther west, into the state of Ohio.

Ohio is a dust bowl now, it seems, so Fallout 76 will see its first desert locale. That’s an intentional choice, as the launch of this expansion will be timed closely to the release of season two of the TV show, and the show will be set in Nevada (specifically, around New Vegas). It obviously wouldn’t make sense to expand the game’s map all the way out to the western US, so this gives the developers a way to add a little season two flavor to Fallout 76.

As I was leaving my home to go to Bethesda’s gameplay preview event for Burning Springs, my wife joked that they should add Walton Goggins to the game as the ultimate tie-in with the show. Funny enough, that’s exactly what they’ve done. Goggins’ character from the show, The Ghoul, can be found in the new Burning Springs region, and he voices the character. This game is a prequel to the show by many, many years, but fortunately, Ghouls don’t age.

The Ghoul will give players repeatable bounty hunter missions of two types—one that you can handle solo and one that’s meant to be done as a public event with other players.

The Ghoul's ugly mug — Walton Goggins voices his character from the TV show in *Fallout 76*. That must have been expensive! Credit: Bethesda

I got to try both, and I found they were pretty fun, even though they don’t go too far in breaking the mold of Fallout 76‘s existing public events.

I also spent more than two hours freely exploring the game’s post-apocalyptic interpretation of Ohio. Despite the new desert aesthetic, it’s all pretty familiar Fallout stuff: raider-infested Super Duper Marts, blown-out neighborhoods, and the like. There is a very large new settlement that has a distinct character compared to the game’s existing towns, and it’s loaded with NPCs. I also enjoyed a public event that has players battling through a junkyard with a cyborg Deathclaw at their side—yep, you read that right.

I’m told there will be a new story quest line attached to the new region that involves a highly intelligent Super Mutant named the Rust King. I didn’t get to do those quests during this demo, though.

Burning Springs doesn’t do anything to rethink Fallout 76‘s basic experience; it’s just more of it, with a different flavor. But since Bethesda has done so much work making that basic experience more fun, that’s OK. It means more Fallout 76 is, in fact, more of a good thing.

TV tie-ins don’t fix a broken game, but they bring new or lapsed players back to a broken game that has since been fixed.

If you don’t like looter shooters, survival crafting games, or the very idea of multiplayer games—and some Fallout players just don’t—it’s not going to change your mind. But if the reason you skipped this game or bounced off of it was that you liked what it was going for but felt it stumbled on the execution, it can’t hurt to give it another try with the new update.

I don’t think that’s such a controversial opinion anymore. As a longtime player, it’s nice to be able to say that.

Samuel Axon is the editorial lead for tech and gaming coverage at Ars Technica. He covers AI, software development, gaming, entertainment, and mixed reality. He has been writing about gaming and technology for nearly two decades at Engadget, PC World, Mashable, Vice, Polygon, Wired, and others. He previously ran a marketing and PR agency in the gaming industry, led editorial for the TV network CBS, and worked on social media marketing strategy for Samsung Mobile at the creative agency SPCSHP. He also is an independent software and game developer for iOS, Windows, and other platforms, and he is a graduate of DePaul University, where he studied interactive media and software development.

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Fortnite disables Peacemaker emote that might resemble a swastika

culture, epic games, gaming, Peacemaker / Shannon Garcia / September 29, 2025

If you watch this for a full hour, leave a comment to receive absolutely no prize.

Epic Games has disabled a Fortnite emote based on the HBO show Peacemaker after the latest episode cast the dancing animation in a potentially different light.

The remainder of this post contains spoilers for Season 2 of Peacemaker.

The “Peaceful Hips” emote, which was first introduced to the game on September 15, mirrors the dance motions that John Cena’s character Christopher Smith makes during the opening credits sequence for the show’s second season. In the dance and the emote (which can be applied to any character in-game), the dancer briefly flails their arms at opposing right angles before shaking their hips seductively.

Some are seeing the dance in a different light after the sixth episode of the show’s second season, “Ignorance is Chris,” which revealed that the alternate universe featured throughout the season has been controlled by swastika-brandishing Nazis. With that knowledge front of mind, the arm movements in the dance emote could be seen as a winking reference to the arms of a swastika.

“[In] season 2 there’s a lot more of the story of the season in the intro, [in] the first season there wasn’t as much of a reference to the story,” choreographer Charissa Barton said in a video interview posted by Warner Bros. last month.

The opening dance sequence to Season 2 of Peacemaker.

The arm motions mean what?

Fans have been picking up on hints of the show’s eventual Nazi-related reveal (including from that opening dance) as the second season has aired over recent weeks. But the confirmation of the link in Sunday’s episode had Epic quickly re-evaluating the emote by Sunday night.

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It’s official: EA is selling to private equity in $55 billion deal

Battlefield, buyout, EA, EA FC, Electronic Arts, gaming, leveraged, madden, market, private, purchase, stock / Beth Washington / September 29, 2025

The Saudi Arabia PIF also has significant investments in gaming giants such as Nintendo, Take Two, Activision Blizzard, Capcom, Nexon, and Koei Tecmo managed through the Savvy Games Group. In 2023, the PIF backed out of a mulled $2 billion deal for gaming acquisition firm Embracer Group.

Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner on the South Lawn of the White House. Credit: Win McNamee/Getty Images

Silver Lake was part of the consortium involved in this month’s controversial deal to bring TikTok under the control of US-based companies. In 2013, the private investment firm also helped take computer-maker Dell private in a $25 billion deal.

Kushner, Affinity Partners’ CEO and the son-in-law of President Trump, said in a statement that he has “admired [EA’s] ability to create iconic, lasting experiences, and as someone who grew up playing their games—and now enjoys them with his kids—I couldn’t be more excited about what’s ahead.”

EA went public with an IPO on the NASDAQ stock exchange in 1990, and by 1996 its market cap had risen to $1.61 billion. Last week, the company’s valuation was hovering around $43 billion.

EA brought in $7.5 billion in revenue in the 2025 fiscal year (ending March 31) on the strength of franchises including Madden NFL, EA Sports FC, Battlefield, The Sims, Dragon Age, and Plants vs. Zombies.

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30 years later, I’m still obliterating planets in Master of Orion II—and you can, too

4X, C:ArsGames, gaming, gog, Master of Orion II, MOO2, PC Gaming, strategy / 9u50fv / September 28, 2025

I love 4X games. I’ve tried other strategy game genres, but frankly, they don’t stick if they’re not first and foremost 4X games—at the heart of it, it must be about exploring, expanding, exploiting, and yes, exterminating.

I suspect that the first 4X game most people played was some entry in the Civilization franchise—though certainly, a select few played precursors dating back to text-based games in the 1970s.

But for me, the title that kicked off my obsession was Master of Orion II (MOO2)—a game that has you develop and build up planets across a simple galaxy map, researching speculative future technologies, and ultimately wiping out your opponents and claiming dominion over the known universe. (There are other victory conditions too, but that one is the most fun.)

There is something satisfying about making a couple thousand small choices that all add up to that galaxy map gradually changing color in your favor until the final cut scene plays, declaring you the true Master of Orion.

The games I love the most are the ones where you make decisions that compound over many, many hours to a long-term payoff. I’ll take that over games with bite-sized, contained challenges and short play times any day. The deeper and longer the experience, the better the payoff can be. To me, that’s ultimately what makes 4X games great. MOO2 is no exception.

A high score screen declares the player the ultimate master of the universe — I needed this validation. Credit: Samuel Axon

Nostalgic but flawed

That said, it’s not a perfect game. It benefited from the lessons it could learn from more than a decade of 4X games before it, and its designers were clearly thinking about how to make it balanced and fun.

They just missed the mark sometimes. For example, a big part of the game is choosing perks that customize your empire from before the first turn. One of those perks is called “Creative,” which allows you to learn multiple technologies at once rather than one at a time. It’s pretty hard to imagine anyone consciously declining to choose that perk unless they’re looking to make things a lot harder for themselves.

30 years later, I’m still obliterating planets in Master of Orion II—and you can, too Read More »

Reports: EA set to be sold to private investors for up to $50 billion

gaming / 9u50fv / September 27, 2025

Video game mega-publisher Electronic Arts is planning to take the company private in a deal that could be worth as much as $50 billion, according to reports from The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and Financial Times.

All three outlets cite anonymous sources in reporting that the deal could be announced next week, with Silver Lake, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), and Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners reportedly interested in investing. The Wall Street Journal says the move “would likely be the largest leveraged buyout ever.”

The Saudi PIF already had a roughly 9 percent stake in EA as of a year ago, making it one of the largest shareholders in the company. That fund also has significant investments in gaming giants such as Nintendo, Take-Two, Activision Blizzard, Capcom, Nexon, and Koei Tecmo managed through the Savvy Games Group.

EA’s stock price immediately jumped roughly 15 percent on Friday afternoon, following a month in which its stock price had remained relatively flat.

EA went public with an IPO on the NASDAQ stock exchange in 1990, and by 1996 its market cap had risen to $1.61 billion. Before today’s stock price bump, the company’s valuation was hovering around $43 billion, driven by franchises such as Madden NFL, EA FC (formerly FIFA), The Sims, and Battlefield.

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Asus’ new ROG Xbox Ally X set to break the bank at $999.99

ASUS, asus rog ally, asus rog ally x, gaming, Portable gaming / Beth Washington / September 26, 2025

Microsoft and Asus revealed the ROG Xbox Ally handheld PC gaming line in June and promised an October 16 launch date in August. But they waited all the way until Thursday night to reveal preorder pricing set at $599.99 for the base ROG Xbox Ally hardware and a whopping $999.99 for the souped-up ROG Xbox Ally X.

Those prices put the baseline ROG Xbox Ally units in the same general price tier as competition like Valve’s Steam Deck OLED, Lenovo’s Legion Go S, and even Nintendo’s Switch 2. But the higher-grade ROG Xbox Ally X is significantly more expensive than almost all competing gaming handhelds, thanks in part to components like a Ryzen Z2 Extreme processor and an NPU that Asus says will ensure it is ready for a future when “AI enhancements” are rolling out in new games.

That may seem like overkill when Steam Deck users seem content using their handheld mainly for low-end games like Vampire Survivors and Hades. But Asus said that, in pre-release hardware tests, the ROG Xbox Ally X gets “up to a 30% performance boost” over 2024’s ROG Ally X on high-end games like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. The newer hardware also gets “up to twice the battery life” over the ROG Ally X on a game like Hollow Knight Silksong, Asus said.

The new Xbox Ally line keeps the same 7-inch 1080p screens and starting RAM and storage capacity as the regular ROG Ally units from years past. But in addition to upgraded processors, Asus’ new handhelds also sport branded Xbox-style controls and logos and promise easy access to “all of the games available on Windows” through the new “Xbox experience for handhelds” that can handle games from various storefronts and manage launchers.

We’ll have to wait until we get our hands on our own testing units to see how that extra power and new interface compare to the competition. For now, the ROG Xbox Ally can be preordered directly from the Asus shop or retailers like Microsoft and Best Buy.

Company	Name	Release year	Current starting price	Processor	Starting storage	RAM	Screen size
Valve	Steam Deck LCD	2022	$399.00	AMD Zen 2	256GB	16GB	7 inches
Asus	ROG Ally	2023	$499.99	Ryzen Z1	512GB	16GB	7 inches
Valve	Steam Deck OLED	2023	$549.00	AMD Zen 2	512GB	16GB	7.4 inches
Asus	ROG Xbox Ally	2025	$599.99	Ryzen Z2 A	512GB	16GB	7 inches
Lenovo	Legion Go S	2025	$649.99	Ryzen Z2 Go	512GB	16GB	8 inches
Lenovo	Legion Go	2023	$749.99	Ryzen Z1 Extreme	1TB	16GB	8.8 inches
Asus	ROG Ally X	2024	$799.99	Ryzen Z1 Extreme	1TB	24GB	7 inches
Asus	ROG Xbox Ally X	2025	$999.99	Ryzen Z2 Extreme	1TB	24GB	7 inches

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Baby Steps is the most gloriously frustrating game I’ve ever struggled through

baby steps, bennet foddy, devolver digital, gaming, hike, hill, mountain, qwop, walking, walking simulator / DJ Henderson / September 23, 2025

A real “walking simulator”

QWOP meets Death Stranding meets Getting Over It to form wonderfully surreal, unique game.

Watch out for that first step, it’s a doozy! Credit: Devolver Digital

There’s an old saying that life is not about how many times you fall down but how many times you get back up. In my roughly 13 hours of walking through the surreal mountain wilderness of Baby Steps, I’d conservatively estimate I easily fell down 1,000 times.

If so, I got up 1,001 times, which is the entire point.

When I say “fell down” here, I’m not being metaphorical. In Baby Steps, the only real antagonist is terrain that threatens to send your pudgy, middle-aged, long-underwear-clad avatar tumbling to the ground (or down a cliff) like a rag doll after the slightest misstep. You pilot this avatar using an intentionally touchy and cumbersome control system where each individual leg is tied a shoulder trigger on your controller.

Unlike the majority of 3D games, where you simply tilt the control stick and watch your character dutifully run, each step here means manually lifting one foot, leaning carefully in the direction you want to go, and then putting that foot down in a spot that maintains your overall balance. It’s like a slightly more forgiving version of the popular ’00s Flash game QWOP (which was also made by Baby Steps co-developer Bennett Foddy), except instead of sprinting on a 2D track, you take your time carefully planning each footfall on a methodical 3D hike.

Keep wiggling that foot until you find a safe place to put it. Credit: Devolver Digital

At first, you’ll stumble like a drunken toddler, mashing the shoulder buttons and tilting the control stick wildly just to inch forward. After a bit of trial and error, though, you’ll work yourself into a gentle rhythm—press the trigger, tilt the controller, let go while recentering the controller, press the other trigger, repeat thousands of times. You never quite break into a run, but you can fall into a zen pattern of marching methodically forward, like a Death Stranding courier who has to actually focus on each and every step.

As you make your halting progress up the mountain, you’ll infrequently stumble on other hikers who seem to lord their comfort and facility with the terrain over you in manic, surreal, and often hilarious cut scenes. I don’t want to even lightly spoil any of the truly gonzo moments in this extremely self-aware meta-narrative, but I will say that I found your character’s grand arc through the game to be surprisingly touching, often in some extremely subtle ways.

Does this game hate me?

Just as you feel like you’re finally getting the hang of basic hiking, Baby Steps starts ramping up the terrain difficulty in a way that can feel downright trolly at time. Gentle paths of packed dirt and rock start to be replaced with narrow planks and rickety wooden bridges spanning terrifying gaps. Gentle undulating hills are replaced with sheer cliff faces that you sidle up and across with the tiniest of toe holds to precariously balance on. Firm surfaces are slowly replaced with slippery mud, sand, snow, and ice that force you to alter your rhythm and tread extremely lightly just to make incremental progress.

Grabbing that fetching hat means risking an *extremely* punishing fall.

And any hard-earned progress can feel incredibly fragile in Baby Steps. Literally one false step can send you sliding down a hill or tumbling down a cliff face in a way that sets you back anywhere from mere minutes to sizable chunks of an hour. There’s no “reset from checkpoint” menu option or save scumming that can limit the damage, either. When you fall in Baby Steps, it can be a very long way down.

This extremely punishing structure won’t be a surprise to anyone who has played Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy, where a single mistake can send you all the way back to the beginning of the game. Baby Steps doesn’t go quite that hard, giving players occasional major checkpoints and large, flat plains that prevent you from falling back too far. Still, this is a game that is more than happy to force you to pay for even small mistakes with huge portions of your only truly irreplaceable resource: time.

On more than one occasion during my playthrough, I audibly cursed at my monitor and quit the game in a huff rather than facing the prospect of spending ten minutes retracing my steps after a particularly damaging fall. Invariably, though, I’d come back a bit later more determined than ever to learn from my mistakes, which I usually did quickly with the benefits of time and calm on my side.

It’s frequently not entirely clear where you’re supposed to go in *Baby Steps*. Credit: Devolver Digital

Baby Steps is also a game that’s happy to let you wander aimlessly. There’s no in-game map to consult, and any paths and landmarks that could point you in the “intended” way up the mountain are often intentionally confusing or obscured. It can be extremely unclear which parts of the terrain are meant to be impossibly steep and which are merely designed as difficult but plausible shortcuts that simply require pinpoint timing and foot placement. But the terrain is also designed so that almost every near-impossible barrier can be avoided altogether if you’re patient and observant enough to find a way around it.

And if you wander even slightly off the lightly beaten path, you’ll stumble on many intricately designed and completely optional points of interest, from imposing architectural towers to foreboding natural outcroppings to a miniature city made of boxes. There’s no explicit in-game reward for almost all of these random digressions, and your fellow cut-scene hikers will frequently explicitly warn you that there’s no point in climbing some structure or another. Your only reward is the (often marvelous) view from the top—and the satisfaction of saying that you conquered something you didn’t need to.

Are we having fun yet?

So was playing Baby Steps any fun? Honestly, that’s not the first word I’d use to describe the experience.

To be sure, there’s a lot of humor built into the intentionally punishing designs of some sections, so much so that I often had to laugh even as I fell down yet another slippery hill that erased a huge chunk of my progress. And the promise of more wild cut scenes serves as a pretty fun and compelling carrot to get you through some of the game’s toughest sections.

I’ve earned this moment of zen. Credit: Devolver Digital

More than “fun,” though, I’d say my time with the Baby Steps felt meaningful in a way few games do. Amid all the trolly humor and intentionally obtuse design decisions is a game whose very structure forces you to consider the value of perseverance and commitment.

This is a game that stands proudly against a lot of modern game design trends. It won’t loudly and explicitly point you to the next checkpoint with a huge on-screen arrow. You can’t inexorably grind out stat points in Baby Steps until your character is powerful enough to beat the toughest boss easily. You can’t restart a Baby Steps run and hope for a lucky randomized seed that will get you past a difficult in-game wall.

Baby Steps doesn’t hand you anything. Your abilities and inventory are the same at the game’s start as they are at the end. Any progress you make is defined solely by your mastery of the obtuse movement system and your slowly increasing knowledge of how to safely traverse ever more treacherous terrain.

It’s a structure that can feel punishing, unforgiving, tedious, and enraging in turns. But it’s also a structure that leads to moments of the most genuinely satisfying sense of achievement I can remember having in modern gaming.

It’s about a miles-long journey starting with a single, halting step. It’s about putting one foot in front of the other until you can’t anymore. It’s about climbing the mountain because it’s there. It’s about falling down 1,000 times and getting up 1,001 times.

What else is there in the end?

Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper.

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Google Play is getting a Gemini-powered AI Sidekick to help you in games

Games, gaming, Google, google play / Mike M. / September 23, 2025

The era of Google’s Play’s unrivaled dominance may be coming to an end in the wake of the company’s antitrust loss, but Google’s app store isn’t going anywhere. In fact, the Play Store experience is getting a massive update with more personalization, content, and yes, AI. This is Google, after all.

The revamped Google Play Games is a key part of this update. Gamer profiles will now have a public face, allowing you to interact with other players if you choose. Play Games will track your activity for daily streaks, which will be shown on your profile and unlock new Play Points rewards. Your profile will also display your in-game achievements.

Your gaming exploits can also span multiple platforms. Google Play Games for PC is officially leaving beta. Google says there are now 200,000 games that work across mobile and PC, and even more PC-friendly titles, like Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor, are on the way. Your stats and streaks will apply across both mobile and PC as long as the title comes from the Play Store.

At the core of Google’s app store revamp is the You Tab, which will soon take its place in the main navigation bar of the Play Store. This page will show your rewards, subscriptions, game, stats, and more—and it goes beyond gaming. The You Tab will recommend a variety of content on Google Play, including books and podcasts.

Google Play is getting a Gemini-powered AI Sidekick to help you in games Read More »

Steam will wind down support for 32-bit Windows as that version of Windows fades

32-bit, gaming, steam, Tech, valve, Windows 10, windows 10 22h2, Windows 11 / DJ Henderson / September 21, 2025

Though the 32-bit versions of Windows were widely used from the mid-90s all the way through to the early 2010s, this change is coming so late that it should only actually affect a statistically insignificant number of Steam users. Valve already pulled Steam support for all versions of Windows 7 and Windows 8 in January 2024, and 2021’s Windows 11 was the first in decades not to ship a 32-bit version. That leaves only the 32-bit version of Windows 10, which is old enough that it will stop getting security updates in either October 2025 or October 2026, depending on how you count it.

According to Steam Hardware Survey data from August, usage of the 32-bit version of Windows 10 (and any other 32-bit version of Windows) is so small that it’s lumped in with “other” on the page that tracks Windows version usage. All “other” versions of Windows combined represent roughly 0.05 percent of all Steam users. The 64-bit version of Windows 10 still runs on just over a third of all Steam-using Windows PCs, while the 64-bit version of Windows 11 accounts for just under two-thirds.

The change to the Steam client shouldn’t have any effects on game availability or compatibility. Any older 32-bit games that you can currently run in 64-bit versions of Windows will continue to work fine because, unlike modern macOS versions, new 64-bit versions of Windows still maintain compatibility with most 32-bit apps.

Steam will wind down support for 32-bit Windows as that version of Windows fades Read More »

Microsoft raises Xbox console prices for the second time this year

gaming, increase, inflation, microsoft, price, xbox / DJ Henderson / September 20, 2025

Here we go again

Higher than usual inflation can help explain some of the nominal price increases for the oldest Xbox consoles affected by today’s price hikes. The $300 for an Xbox Series S at launch in November 2020 is worth roughly $375 in August 2025 dollars, for instance. And the $500 for an Xbox Series X in 2020 is now worth about $625.

But the particularly sharp price increases for more recent Xbox configurations can’t really use that inflation excuse. The disc-drive-free Digital Xbox Series X Digital and 2TB “Galaxy Special Edition” are now a whopping 33 percent more expensive than they were at launch in October 2024. A year’s worth of inflation would account for only a small fraction of that.

Even accounting for inflation, though, the current spate of nominal console price increases goes against a near-universal, decades-long trend of game console prices dropping significantly in the years following their launch. Those days seem well and truly gone now, as console makers’ costs remain high thanks in part to current tariff uncertainty and in part to the wider slowdown of Moore’s Law.

We’ll see just how much the market can bear aging console hardware that increases in price over time rather than decreases. But until and unless consumers start balking, it looks like ever-increasing console prices are here to stay.

Microsoft raises Xbox console prices for the second time this year Read More »

Nvidia will invest $5 billion in Intel, co-develop new server and PC chips

gaming, intel, NVIDIA, Tech / 9u50fv / September 18, 2025

Intel once considered buying Nvidia outright, but its fortunes have shifted.

In a major collaboration that would have been hard to imagine just a few years ago, Nvidia announced today that it was buying a total of $5 billion in Intel stock, giving Intel’s competitor ownership of roughly 4 percent of the company. In addition to the investment, the two companies said that they would be co-developing “multiple generations of custom data center and PC products.”

“The companies will focus on seamlessly connecting NVIDIA and Intel architectures using NVIDIA NVLink,” reads Nvidia’s press release, “integrating the strengths of NVIDIA’s AI and accelerated computing with Intel’s leading CPU technologies and x86 ecosystem to deliver cutting-edge solutions for customers.”

Rather than combining the two companies’ technologies, the data center chips will apparently be custom x86 chips that Intel builds to Nvidia’s specifications. Nvidia will “integrate [the CPUs] into its AI infrastructure platforms and offer [them] to the market.”

On the consumer side, Intel plans to build x86 SoCs that integrate both Intel CPUs and Nvidia RTX GPU chiplets—Intel’s current products use graphics chiplets based on its own Arc products. More tightly integrated chips could make for smaller gaming laptops, and could give Nvidia a way to get into handheld gaming PCs like the Steam Deck or ROG Xbox Ally.

It takes a while to design, test, and mass-produce new processor designs, so it will likely be a couple of years before we see any of the fruits of this collaboration. But even the announcement highlights just how far the balance of power between the two companies has shifted in the last few years.

A dramatic reversal

Back in 2005, Intel considered buying Nvidia outright for “as much as $20 billion,” according to The New York Times. At the time, Nvidia was known almost exclusively for its GeForce consumer graphics chips, and Intel was nearing the launch of its Core and Core 2 chips, which would manage to win Apple’s business and set it up for a decade of near-total dominance in consumer PCs and servers.

But in recent years, Nvidia’s income and market capitalization have soared on the strength of its data center chips, which have powered most of the AI features that tech companies have been racing to build into their products for years now. And Intel’s recent struggles are well-documented—it has struggled for years now to improve its chip manufacturing capabilities at the same pace as competitors like TSMC, and a yearslong effort to convince other chip designers to use Intel’s factories to build their chips has yielded one ousted CEO and not much else.

The two companies’ announcement comes one day after China banned the sale of Nvidia’s AI chips, including products that Nvidia had designed specifically for China to get around US-imposed performance-based export controls. China is pushing domestic chipmakers like Huawei and Cambricon to put out their own AI accelerators to compete with Nvidia’s.

Correlation isn’t causation, and it’s unlikely that Intel and Nvidia could have thrown together a $5 billion deal and product collaboration in the space of less than 24 hours. But Nvidia could be looking to prop up US-based chip manufacturing as a counterweight to China’s actions.

There are domestic political considerations for Nvidia, too. The Trump administration announced plans to take a 10 percent stake in Intel last month, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has worked to curry favor with the Trump administration by making appearances at $1 million-per-plate dinners at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago golf course and promising to invest billions in US-based data centers.

Although the US government’s investment in Intel hasn’t gotten it seats on the company’s board, the investment comes with possible significant downsides for Intel, including disruptions to the company’s business outside the US and limiting its eligibility for future government grants. Trump and his administration could also decide to alter the deal for any or no reason—Trump was calling for Tan’s resignation for alleged Chinese Communist Party ties just days before deciding to invest in the company instead. Investing in a sometime-competitor may be a small price for Nvidia and Huang to pay if it means avoiding the administration’s ire.

Outstanding questions abound

Combining Intel CPUs and Nvidia GPUs makes a lot of sense, for certain kinds of products—the two companies’ chips already coexist in millions of gaming desktops and laptops. Being able to make custom SoCs that combine Intel’s and Nvidia’s technology could make for smaller and more power-efficient gaming PCs. It could also provide a counterbalance to AMD, whose willingness to build semi-custom x86-based SoCs has earned the company most of the emerging market for Steam Deck-esque handheld gaming PCs, plus multiple generations of PlayStation and Xbox console hardware.

But there are more than a few places where Intel’s and Nvidia’s products compete, and at this early date, it’s unclear what will happen to the areas of overlap.

Future Intel CPUs could use an Nvidia-designed graphics chiplet instead of one of Intel’s GPUs. Credit: Intel

For example, Intel has been developing its own graphics products for decades—historically, these have mostly been lower-performance integrated GPUs whose only job is to connect to a couple of monitors and encode and decode video, but more recent Arc-branded dedicated graphics cards and integrated GPUs have been more of a direct challenge to some of Nvidia’s lower-end products.

Intel told Ars that the company “will continue to have GPU product offerings,” which means that it will likely continue developing Arc and its underlying Intel Xe GPU architecture. But that could mean that Intel will focus on low-end, low-power GPUs and leave higher-end products to Nvidia. Intel has been happy to discard money-losing side projects in recent years, and dedicated Arc GPUs have struggled to make much of a dent in the GPU market.

On the software side, Intel has been pushing its own oneAPI graphics compute stack as an alternative to Nvidia’s CUDA and AMD’s ROCm, and has provided code to help migrate CUDA projects to oneAPI. And there’s a whole range of plausible outcomes here: Nvidia allowing Intel GPUs to run CUDA code, either directly or through some kind of translation layer; Nvidia contributing to oneAPI, which is an open source platform; or oneAPI fading away entirely.

On Nvidia’s side, we’ve already mentioned that the company offers some Arm-based CPUs—these are available in the Project DIGITS AI computer, Nvidia’s automotive products, or the Nintendo Switch and Switch 2. But rumors have indicated for some time now that Nvidia is working with MediaTek to create Arm-based chips for Windows PCs, which would compete not just with Intel and AMD’s x86 chips but also Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X-series processors. Will Nvidia continue to push forward on this project, or will it leave this as-yet-unannounced chip unannounced, to shore up its new investment in the x86 instruction set?

Finally, there’s the question of where these chips will be built. Nvidia’s current chips are manufactured mostly at TSMC, though it has used Samsung’s factories as recently as the RTX 3000 series. Intel also uses TSMC to build some chips, including its current top-end laptop and desktop processors, but it uses its own factories to build its server chips, and plans to bring its next-generation consumer chips back in-house.

Will Nvidia start to manufacture some of its chips on Intel’s 18A manufacturing process, or another process on Intel’s roadmap? Will the combined Intel and Nvidia chips be manufactured by Intel, or will they be built externally at TSMC, or using some combination of the two? (Nvidia has already said that Intel’s SoCs will integrate Nvidia GPU chiplets, so it’s likely that Intel will continue using its Foveros packaging technology to combine multiple bits of silicon into a single chip.)

A vote of confidence from Nvidia would be a big shot in the arm for Intel’s foundry, which has reportedly struggled to find major customers—but it’s hard to see Nvidia doing it if Intel’s manufacturing processes can’t compete with TSMC’s on performance or power consumption, or if Intel can’t manufacture chips in the volumes that Nvidia would need.

We’ve posed all of these questions to both Intel and Nvidia. This early, it’s unlikely that either company wants to commit to any plans other than the broad, vague collaborations that were part of this morning’s announcement. But we’ll update this article if we can shake any other details loose. Both Nvidia and Intel CEOs Huang and Tan will also be giving a joint press conference at 1 pm ET today, where they may discuss the answers to these and other questions.

Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue.

Nvidia will invest $5 billion in Intel, co-develop new server and PC chips Read More »