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Morgan Park
What I’ve been taking part in lately as an alternative of latest stuff: Deus Ex (2000), Batman: Arkham Asylum, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, Judgment, Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon, Halo: Combat Evolved.
Let’s check out the scoreboard: A 1TB Steam Deck prices $1,000. A top-of-the-line gaming PC prices $7,000. A PS5 begins at $650, an over 50% improve from its launch six years in the past. A modest laborious drive goes for lease cash. The RAMpocalypse continues unabated. The Steam Machine is a tough promote out of the gate. The causes for the gradual, suffocating demise of the {hardware} market are well-documented on this web site, however mainly: it is greed once more.
For the common individual, the most recent tech is so out of attain it would as properly not exist anymore. It’s laborious sufficient to justify the price of an honest laptop with years-old elements when every other part of life is more expensive than ever.
What will we do with that data? One concept is to maintain speaking about how a lot it sucks and hope it adjustments. A a lot better one, I believe, is to refocus: Challenge the stranglehold that the “latest and greatest” has on our consideration, and as an alternative respect what’s already in entrance of us. Embrace your mid PC! Become overly taken with controllers! Buy an emulation handheld! Get into the wonderful world of Linux!
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Welcome to the great Tech Pause. It could be worse.
Your PC is already amazing
It’s hard to mourn the accessibility of powerful hardware when the cutting edge keeps showing us how inessential it is. Generational GPU improvement has stagnated hard in the past five years—maybe since the pivot to ray tracing, even. Manufacturers now pitch us a future where every game looks so real it’s boring—look no further than Halo: Campaign Evolved—and AI shovels slop into our eyes in real time under the guise of “better graphics.”
For that privilege we’re expected to accept shortage prices in quadruple digits. Kindly eat my shorts.
The mediocrity of the new is so profound that being stuck with “just OK” hardware is increasingly a savvy move. If you have an aging PC, or a four-year-old Steam Deck, or a solid laptop, then congrats: you already own a device that can play 40+ years of videogames, including most of the new ones. Everyone I know has a backlog the size of a phonebook, and if you’re building one for the first time, sales are deep and constant.
Developers, both indie and otherwise, are beginning to recognize the diminishing returns of extreme graphics and respond with reasonably-specced games. One of the best multiplayer games of 2026, Meccha Chamelon, is advanced hide-and-seek with basic art. Our 2025 game of the year, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, is an all-timer RPG that scales surprisingly well on older hardware. Nine of the top 10 games in PC Gamer’s Top 100 list (2025 edition) will run on anything these days.
I know I’m arriving late to the party suggesting we play some old games, but I’ve never been more enthusiastic about looking backward than right now, specifically. I’ve spent the last year enjoying old games that run flawlessly on anything remotely modern, and it’s been so enriching that new releases are losing the fight for my time.
It sank in recently that there are enough great games I haven’t played to fill the rest of my days. That thought is definitely rewiring my brain a bit—I’m still playing new stuff, but it doesn’t seem as urgent as it once did.
It helps that what counts as “old” now includes the games I once knew as cutting edge. Recently I bought Deus Ex: Human Revolution—an immersive sim I played in 2011 but couldn’t remember for the life of me—for $2. It’s incredible. Eidos Montreal’s rendition of cyberpunk Detroit is still striking and original, and it employs these painted skyboxes that blend 2D and 3D to incredible effect. There’s so much texture in the parts of the world you can’t actually touch—I couldn’t stop looking at this imposing view of the Hengsha’s upper city:
Today, I think a modern game would just model that imposing upper city in high-detail 3D. It’d probably look nice, too, but I’m not sure it’d elicit the same overwhelming reaction. And just look at these artsy 4K screenshots of the sequel, Mankind Divided, that we featured on PC Gamer in 2016. 2016!
As I rolled credits on Human Revolution last week, I wondered why I didn’t appreciate it when it came out. Then I went to YouTube and reminded myself what it looked and ran like on a PlayStation 3: blurry, choppy, and jank.
Replaying it with every setting cranked to max on a handheld PC at 90+ fps was like playing a different, better game that I can now count among my favorites. I mapped quick save and quick load to back buttons, and used Steam Input’s inherent gyro support to add precise motion aiming I could activate only when I needed it.
The new retro gaming
A similarly magical experience was playing a native PC port of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess through Dusklight, a group recompilation venture that dropped a couple of months in the past. It’s an incredible package deal—each a remaster and a group replace bundle—that outclasses Nintendo’s personal preservation work with fashionable decision help, excessive framerates, and quality-of-life toggles. Within minutes I had Dusklight recognizing the gyro of my Steam controller, enabling bow movement aiming that is higher than a Wiimote.
Image credit score: Nintendo
Image credit score: Nintendo
The wildest half, to me, is that it additionally helps Mac, iOS, and Android. One of the most effective Zeldas (do not @ me) now runs natively in your cellphone.
The decomp/recomp scene is likely one of the most enjoyable issues taking place in videogames proper now, and you do not want a mighty PC to reap the advantages. Not solely are these hand-crafted ports an enormous win for preservation, however they inject new life into out-of-print classics whereas additionally making them extra accessible. The effort to develop them has turn out to be its personal AI-tinged battleground, however plenty of superb work is being performed (as dutifully cataloged by PCG editor Wes Fenlon on his emulation weblog).
Playing the most effective variations of aged video games in no matter kind I would like feels extra like residing sooner or later than stressing my graphics card. It’s by no means been simpler to turn out to be even essentially the most novice of tinkerers. I’m lower than a novice—only a man nonetheless studying what a “repo” is—however I can see the freeway to sicko laid earlier than me.
Tinkerer’s spirit
In that spirit, a class of gaming tech that I nonetheless think about value it, particularly if you will discover a secondhand deal, is PC handhelds. The Steam Deck has turn out to be a giant a part of my rotation (and a Linux gateway drug) due to its versatility. It crushes each sport from the 2010s and earlier, serves as an emulation powerhouse, and advantages from the most effective enter configuration within the biz. When I need to play one thing it could’t deal with, I stream them from my workplace PC with Moonlight, a community-made device that outperforms Valve’s equal. With the addition of a dock and an ideal finances controller, it has turn out to be the lounge PC that I default to as an alternative of my PS5.
But in terms of really reasonably priced tech, emulation handhelds are the place it is at. There’s this attention-grabbing factor happening the place Chinese producers repurpose middle-of-the-line cell chips and cellphone screens to make high quality, modernized transportable programs at accessible costs. Many of them run Linux, however extra fashionable is Android, a scene that is come thus far that plenty of your Steam library can now run natively via translation layers (just like how Linux can run Windows games through Proton).
You may’ve heard the thrill this yr about this unusual 3DS-looking object flying off cabinets, the AYN Thor. That’s an Android handheld, and a surprisingly beefy one. It can competently emulate video games all the way in which as much as Switch and even run lighter weight Steam video games via the early 2010s. It additionally begins at $260. That’s thought of lots for one for certainly one of these. Emulation handhelds are starting to really feel the squeeze of {hardware} shortages—the Thor has gone up in worth lately—nevertheless it will get much less dire once you scale right down to machines aimed toward Game Boy via PSP emulation.
Plus, this stuff are simply enjoyable. They’re genuinely pocketable, intentional gadgets with artistic shapes that expose the boring state of glass slab telephones and the Switch’s standardized “screen sandwich” gaming structure. I hold eyeing this RG Rotate, a mutant Game Boy with a T-Mobile Sidekick-like swivel motion that I’d’ve killed for in 2003.
These issues might not be PCs, however they reward the identical tinkerer’s spirit. It’s an incredible time of help for PC gaming so long as your eyes aren’t locked on the discharge calendar—a second when extra of us than ever are embracing the liberty of kind issue, of open supply software program, and of preservation, reasonably than pure {hardware} may. I’m having a blast.
If tech needed to pause someday (it did not, however , the greed), I’m at the least glad it is now, as a result of this interest was all the time a lot cooler than graphics.
This web page was created programmatically, to learn the article in its unique location you possibly can go to the hyperlink bellow:
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