After announcing several new Xbox Series X consoles including a $600 special edition model, Microsoft may be working on another one. In response to a question from IGN about portable gaming, Xbox chief Phil Spencer said "I think we should have a handheld."

That's a vague comment, but it certainly shows that the company is taking notice of all the portable PC gaming devices out there like the new Rog Ally X from ASUS and no doubt Sony's PlayStation Portal remote handheld. Such a device would also make a lot of sense for the Xbox platform. 

"The future for us in hardware is pretty awesome, and the work that the team is doing around different form factors, different ways to play," he said. He then deferred any future questions about consoles to Xbox president Sarah Bond.

Spencer hypothetically kiboshed the idea of a Sony-like internet- or cloud-only device when asked about it, though. "I think being able to play games locally is really important," he said.  

This by no means confirms the development of such a device and it wasn't the right event for such an announcement in any case. "Today was about the games... but we will have a time to come out and talk more about platform, and we can't wait to bring it to you." 

ASUS has been busy at Computex 2024 this year, announcing not only the ROG Ally X gaming handheld but a bunch of new laptops. Now, the company has moved on to monitors, unveiling several interesting entertainment and content creation models, including its first Google TV and 8K ProArt displays.

The 27-inch 4K (IPS) ZenScreen Smart MS27UC is the company's latest entertainment display. As mentioned, it's ASUS' first with Google TV and includes a remote with a built-in Google Assistant microphone. 

ASUS

Along with what ASUS calls "ultra-thin display bezels and a small footprint stand," it has built-in front output 5W Harman Kardon speakers and a headphone port on the back. One unusual feature is a rear shelf that lets you store a keyboard, mouse and the Google TV remote. Other features include a DisplayPort 1.4 and HDMI 2.0 port, USB-C (PD 90W), dual-band WiFi, Bluetooth 5.0 and Miracast.

ASUS

ASUS also dropped some impressive (and probably fairly expensive) ProArt displays aimed at content creators. The first is the ASUS ProArt Display 8K PA32KCX, what ASUS calls "the world's first 8K mini-LED professional monitor." The 32-inch display offers 7,680 x 4,320 resolution and a peak brightness of 1,200 nits (sustained brightness 1,000) nits, thanks to the Mini LED tech with 4,096 local dimming zones.

It offers professional level specs, with a delta E of less than 1 in terms of color accuracy, true 10-bit color and 97 percent coverage of the DCI-P3 (HDI) color gamut. It includes a built-in motorized flip colorimeter for auto- and self-calibration, while offering dual Thunderbolt 4 ports with up to 96 watts of power delivery (along with HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 2.1 ports).

ASUS

Meanwhile, The 27-inch ProArt 5K PA27JCV and 32-inch PorArt 6K PA32QCV displays support 5,120 x 2,880 and 6,016 x 3,384 resolutions respectively. ASUS doesn't say what display technology is used, but they have something it calls "LuxPixel" technology that uses an anti-glare coating that offers a "paper-like" effect without softening the image.

Both offer 99 percent DCI-P3 coverage, a Delta E less than 2 and DisplayPort™ over USB-C® with 96 W power delivery. Both appear to be fairly low profile and come with with metal stands.

ASUS

Finally, ASUS showed off some new dual-screen displays that may appear in laptops or standalone monitors down the road. Those include the ZenScreen Duo OLED, that features a 14-inch 16:10 FHD dual-0LED display that can fold out to 21 inches for increased productivity. So far, there are no prices are delivery dates set for any of the new displays. 

After years of teasing its arrival, Xbox has finally announced a release window for the upcoming Fable reboot. The game is slated to hit Xbox Series X/S and PC in 2025, and will be available on Xbox Game Pass from day one. The company dropped a new trailer for Fable during the Xbox Games Showcase on Sunday. The game, which is being developed by Playground Games, was first announced with a teaser back in 2020.

Xbox is billing it as “a new beginning” for the series. The new Fable focuses on a washed-up ex-hero named Humphry, who we see in the latest trailer. He’ll be “forced out of retirement when a mysterious figure from his past threatens Albion's very existence.” In our last glimpse at the game, released during last year’s Summer Game Fest, we were introduced to a character named Dave, who is voiced by Richard Ayoade. The new trailer gives us a bit more of a look at some in-game footage and doubles down on the offbeat tone of the previous teasers.

We'll still have to wait a while for it to actually be released, but at least now there's a timeframe we can cling to. 

Catch up on all of the news from Summer Game Fest 2024 right here!

It seemed like a missed opportunity for Microsoft and Bethesda to not have a new Fallout game ready to capitalize on the TV adaptation's success. However, Bethesda does have Fallout 76 up its sleeve at least, and the latest expansion of the multiplayer RPG is just a few days away.

The publisher revealed the Skyline Valley expansion during the Xbox Games Showcase on Sunday. The DLC expands the map for the first time into a new region called Shenandoah. The telethon-themed trailer offers a peek at some of what's in store. For instance, you'll be able to explore the remnants of Vault 63 and try to discover what happened to its dwellers. As you might expect, there will also be Ghouls to contend with. The trailer ends on a spicy tease, as starting early next year, you'll actually be able to play as a Ghoul.

Fallout 76 had a rough debut, but by all accounts the game has gotten much better over time (following in the footsteps of some other Bethesda games). As with other Fallout titles, it had a huge surge in players in the wake of the Prime Video show. On Steam alone, the average number of concurrent players shot up nearly fivefold from 5,975 in March to 25,673 in April.

With so many new and returning players enjoying the game, it’s nice that they won’t have to wait long for more things to see and do. Skyline Valley, which is free for Fallout 76 players on all platforms, will arrive on June 12.

Break out your blankets and settle in, everyone. It’s time for the cozy games.

The latest Wholesome Direct showcase offers an hour-long celebration of innovation and coziness in indie development, featuring more than 30 meditative, calming and absolutely adorable experiences. Some of the titles are brand new, some are getting updates, many of them have demos, and others simply deserve time in the spotlight. One thing they all have in common is an inherent ability to warm your heart.

The entire Wholesome Direct 2024 showcase is worth watching. It’s packed with brilliant indie gems and brand-new trailers, and many of the featured titles already have demos available to download. Here, we’ve collected four games that came out today as surprise drops tied to the showcase: Kamaeru: A Frog Refuge, POOOOL, The Palace on the Hill and Tracks of Thought. I spent some time playing the first three games on this list and each one is lovely in its own way; I’ve left my thoughts with the game descriptions below.

Watch, read about and then play a bunch of cozy, wholesome games — that’s not a bad way to spend a Saturday. Or a summer.

Kamaeru: A Frog Refuge

This one’s for the players who can’t get enough of games like Neko Atsume and Usagi Shima, or for folks who just really love adorable amphibians. Kamaeru: A Frog Refuge is a farming sim about building and maintaining a protected space in the wetlands where wild frogs can thrive, and it gets much deeper than simply buying new poufs for the animals to sleep on. In Kamaeru, players have to dig out the wetlands, harvest ingredients to make jam and other treats for selling at the market, monitor their environmental impact, and purchase items to create an inviting space for all of their frog friends. Players are able to take photos of the frogs, feed them, name them and even breed them, mixing their colorways in a tic-tac-toe Punnett square.

Kamaeru is a relaxed, methodical and surprisingly deep experience that happens to be filled with cute and colorful frogs. It’s much more than a passive animal-observation game, and it takes a fair amount of grinding — but like, in a really cozy, froggy way — for the on-screen rewards to start rolling in. After about an hour of play, I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface of this game. 

Kamaeru is available now on Steam, itchi.io and Nintendo Switch, and it’s verified on Steam Deck. It's developed by Humble Reeds and published by Armor Games Studios.

POOOOL

Count 'em, that’s four Os. POOOOL is a sweet and simple game with infinite replayability, much like the stick-and-ball sport that inspired it. In POOOOL, players fling bouncy balls of various sizes around a contained rectangle, one at a time, in an attempt to make spheres of the same color touch. When two matching balls collide, they instantly combine into a bigger ball, which can then be combined with another of the same size, and so on. It’s kind of like Threes! but with colorful balls instead of numbers. Eventually, the globes reach their limit and they disappear with a pop, leaving plenty of room for new balls to spawn. The round ends and the score is tallied when there’s no more room for the spheres to be flung.

POOOOL is a lovely little physics simulator with a friendly art style and soothing, repeatable mechanics. This is a game that rewards strategy, but it’s also incredibly forgiving of mindless clicking and dragging, and both play styles result in a satisfyingly bouncy experience. Put it in your pile of games to play while killing time or pretending to get work done, and you’ll get plenty of use out of it. POOOOL comes from developer Noah King and publisher digimoss, and it’s available right now on Steam.

The Palace on the Hill

This is a special one. The Palace on the Hill is a thoughtful and robust slice-of-life game set in a fictional town in rural India in the 1990s, starring a young man who’s helping his family earn money over the summer. Players plant, tend to and sell their crops, they work shifts at the local tea shop, and they pick up odd jobs in town, getting to know the residents along the way. The young man is an aspiring artist, and he finds inspiration for new paintings around the village, sharing stories about the area’s past in beautiful watercolor vignettes. There’s a rich history here and plenty of things to do in each moment.

The Palace on the Hill is a sweet surprise of an adventure game, riveting, methodical and illuminating. The rural town where it takes place feels alive and its boundaries expand delicately as the game progresses. Each NPC has a distinct personality and a unique relationship with the protagonist, and their world quickly feels familiar, even as it remains filled with secrets. I heartily recommend this game.

The Palace on the Hill is available today on Steam, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, iOS and Android, and it’s verified on Steam Deck. It comes from indie studio Niku Games.

Tracks of Thought

Tracks of Thought is a game about chatting, managing cards and solving mysteries, and it all takes place on a long-haul locomotive heading to an unknown destination. After passing through a strange tunnel, every passenger on the train forgets where they’re going, and it’s up to the protagonist, an amiable purple ladybug, to figure out what’s going on. The ladybug’s personality is shaped by the player’s interactions with other passengers, and conversations play out as card battles where the goal is to resolve conflict and help everyone get on the same page.

Tracks of Thought has a cartoony art style and a cast of cool, bug-like characters, and it seems to offer a clever blend of conversation and card battles. With today's showing, this game has been featured in a total of four Wholesome Directs (yes, that's nearly all of them), so it's especially great to see it out now on Steam and the Epic Games Store. Tracks of Thought comes from developer Tidbits Play and publisher Freedom Games.

Catch up on all of the news from Summer Game Fest 2024 right here!

And now for a game that’s actually 50 games — at least.

UFO 50, the latest project from Spelunky studio Mossmouth, is due to hit Steam on September 18, about six years after it was originally expected to launch. That’s merely an observation, not a criticism — UFO 50 is an ambitious project that offers 50 full, retro-styled games in a single package, and it’s all coming from a team of just six people.

In UFO 50 lore, UFO Soft was a game developer who was active between 1982 and 1990, peak NES and Genesis years. The games collected in UFO 50 feature recurring characters and sequels from UFO Soft’s fictional past, and they’re restricted in terms of color and audio, as if they had actually been developed for bygone hardware. Mossmouth is manifesting an alternate timeline of video game history here, and it looks like a ton of fun.

“The story of UFO 50 is that the games were all created in the ‘80s by a fictional company that was obscure but ahead of its time,” the game’s FAQ reads. “They're also connected by a unique 32-color palette and other restrictions we decided on to make them feel more authentic. (However, we don't force sprite flickering or slowdown, as we didn't feel that it would make the games more enjoyable.)”

Every game in UFO 50 is unlocked from the start, and the collection features a wide variety of genres, including platformers, RPGs, roguelites and shoot-em-ups. None of the titles are mini- or micro-games, and while they’re all done in an 8-bit aesthetic, their visual and mechanical styles evolve with the years. Every game is playable solo, and half of them include multiplayer elements.

All that said, I think Mossmouth is selling itself short by calling UFO 50 a collection of just 50 games. Sure, it includes 50 individual experiences inspired by classic games of the 1980s, but there’s also one huge, hidden title in the collection — UFO 50 itself. Don’t forget to factor that into your pricing deliberations, Mossmouth.

Catch up on all of the news from Summer Game Fest 2024 right here!

Simpler Times, the game that’s sweet like honey on a summer’s day, is out right now. Simpler Times is a soft and slow exploration game set in a supremely cozy bedroom, featuring a lifetime of memories to uncover and a soundtrack of soothing lo-fi music. Simpler Times is available on Steam.

The game takes place over four seasons, as the protagonist, Tania, clears out her childhood bedroom and looks back on her life. Her room is compact, with a wide bay window, a desk, a bed and a record player, which controls the game’s soundtrack. Players have to physically swap out the vinyl to keep the lo-fi beats going: remove the record, select a new one, slide the arm back and forth, drop the needle down. The process is meditative and rewarding, just like the rest of the game.

Indie studio stoneskip and publisher iam8bit announced Simpler Times’ surprise launch during the Day of the Devs showcase, which is part of Summer Game Fest. We played the demo at last year’s SGF and found it to be the coziest game of the show.

Catch up on all of the news from Summer Game Fest 2024 right here!

The massively popular free-to-play tactical shooter Valorant is finally coming to consoles, as announced on-stage at Summer Game Fest. The game will be available for both Xbox Series X/S and PS5 as a limited beta starting on June 14. Once the beta concludes and Riot Games works out all of the bugs based on player feedback, it’ll be available globally to all users.

There are some caveats. You have to sign up for the beta right here and it will initially only be available in the US, Canada, Europe, the UK and Japan, with more regions to follow. Riot has also stated that there will be no crossplay between PC and console players, so as “to maintain Valorant’s renowned standard for competitive integrity.”

To that end, the game has been redesigned specifically for console controllers, with the company teasing “custom-built” gameplay. This won’t allow for crossplay, but will allow for a connected inventory and shared gameplay progression. Riot has also promised that both console and PC players will receive simultaneous updates, so patches, agents, maps and premium content will drop at the same time.

“We knew we had to be able to offer the same uncompromising, competitive experience that we’ve provided to PC players for years: a precise, team-based, tactical shooter,” said Arnar Gylfason, production director at Riot Games. “We hope we nailed it, but ultimately, our players will have the final say.”

For the uninitiated, Valorant has made a name for itself by focusing on precision and strategy, a rarity in the free-to-play FPS space. If you go in guns blazing without some serious tactical planning and some check-ins with your team, you’ll lose every single time. It’s more about outsmarting your opponents than shooting. It’s also a major player in the esports scene.

Catch up on all of the news from Summer Game Fest 2024 right here!

The Summer Game Fest Live showcase started with a bang — depending on how much you enjoy both Aloy and Lego games. Lego Horizon Adventures, a spinoff of Guerrilla Games' Horizon series, is coming to PS5 and PC this holiday season. Oh, and it'll be available on Nintendo Switch too.

For the first time, you'll be able to play a Horizon game in co-op, either locally or online. It seems that this version will retell some of the story of the mainline games too, albeit with lots of digital bricks. While Aloy is often funny in the two mainline Horizon series, she's usually deadpan. It'll be interesting to see how that squares with the typically offbeat humor of Lego games.

Lego stalwart Traveller's Tales isn't involved here. Instead, Guerilla is working on Horizon Adventures with Studio Gobo, a team that's helped out on games as varied as Hogwarts Legacy and For Honor. 

Catch up on all of the news from Summer Game Fest 2024 right here!

Bluetooth trackers are handy little devices that can help you keep track of items you're worried about losing. Which model you opt for depends on several factors, such as the physical form factor and the phone operating system or brand you use. In any case, a few of our favorite Bluetooth trackers are on sale, including Samsung's Galaxy SmartTag 2. A four-pack is currently $70, which is $30 off and matches a record low. A single tag has dropped from $30 to $21 — just $1 more than the lowest price we've seen for it.

The Galaxy SmartTag 2 is our pick for the best Bluetooth tracker for folks with Samsung phones. While Samsung perhaps doesn't have as many smartphones out there as Apple (the Find My network uses every iPhone in the vicinity to track AirTags), it has an extensive enough number of devices in the wild to make its own finding network fairly robust. Unfortunately, the Galaxy SmartTag 2 does not yet work with Google's Find My Device network, which would allow any compatible Android device to help hunt for a misplaced tag.

That quibble aside, we quite like the SmartTag 2. Setup is a cinch, for one thing. In our testing we were able to quickly find items tagged with one, while the left-behind alerts worked well when a Samsung phone detected that we were moving away from a SmartTag 2. The design is useful, since it's easy to attach the tracker to a set of keys. It has a louder ring than an AirTag or Tile Pro as well.

The battery will run for about 16 months, according to Samsung, and it's replaceable. The SmartTag 2 is also IP67 rated for water and dust resistance. While the SmartTag 2 may not be quite as precise as an AirTag for finding a misplaced or stolen item, it's still a solid Bluetooth tracker option for Samsung users.

If you're looking for an option that both iPhones and Android devices can help track down, it's worth considering the Tile Mate. A single tag in white is available for $18, which is $7 off the regular price. This has a Bluetooth range of up to 250 feet and can be easily attached to keys as well thanks to a small hole in one of the corners. The battery is not replaceable, unfortunately, but it will power the tracker for up to three years, Tile says.

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