Technologies

I Love GeForce Now on My Steam Deck — Until It Starts ‘Waiting for the Next Available Rig’

It was the first time I’d encountered it in the past week, but 20 to 45 minutes seems like an eternity when you have a console in your hands and are ready to play.

I started chair dancing when Nvidia told me about its GeForce Now cloud-gaming app for the Steam Deck. My Deck OLED is my most frequently used nonessential device, so I was stoked that GFN provided a way to play Xbox Game Pass Ultimate games on it. And it was great, even on my pretty uneven Wi-Fi connection, until it started tossing me into queues with up to 40 people ahead of me. And that was on Ultimate, the priciest tier with the shortest wait times and longest sessions.

It was a blip in my otherwise great experience during the past week — relatively glitch-free, low-latency gameplay, including when attached to a monitor with a hub for keyboard and mouse — and it cleared up later in the day, but it was a frustrating blip nonetheless. (I contacted Nvidia, but the company didn’t have an explanation like «East Coast servers down for maintenance!» at the ready.) It’s something people on the Premium and free plans might experience, though, so it merits discussion.

And yet, it’s still less glitchy and frustrating than Xbox Cloud Gaming. Sigh.

To me, the Game Pass support is the most important feature because a lot of Xbox Cloud gameplay is really erratic for me on my mobile devices. To Nvidia, battery life is most important, I suspect partly because it’s critical and quantifiable.

And yes, the Deck can last much longer — I’d say I get a couple more hours out of it — because it takes a lot less power to run the game in the cloud and stream to you than it does to run locally, which requires a lot more processing to run and render the games. That said, I also tested the app on the Lenovo Go S SteamOS model (which I’m working on a review of and otherwise really like), and that, thus far, seems to have poorer battery life than the Deck, so it may become an important factor for me as well.

In general, even weighty games such as Doom: The Dark Ages and Clair Obscur Expedition 33 (the first from Game Pass, the second Steam) played zippily (60-plus fps) on a monitor at Epic/Ultra/whatever quality presets, although I didn’t get a chance to test HDR. Platformers like Have a Nice Death (Steam) seemed equally responsive and relatively latency-free compared with running locally.

The app provides extensive, or more compact, statistics if you want, but even shrunk down, they take up a relatively large amount of (sometimes critical) real estate on the Deck’s small screen. On the flip side, the icon indicating a Wi-Fi bandwidth issue is tiny and easy to miss. While GFN occasionally gave me network warnings, which I’m used to, it never seemed to result in more than the occasional stutter.

I do find that after about an hour in most games — especially my current addiction, The Blue Prince (see above re: Game Pass) — my connection gets wonky enough that some games become bogged down until they become pretty unresponsive and unplayable. GFN seems to provide the most consistency, although I did get dizzy once from buffered camera rotations racing around the screen to catch up with my stick movement.

I have a few nitpicks about the implementation that aren’t really Nvidia’s fault. Installation requires switching to desktop mode, which I always forget to customize, so I can actually hit what I want in the touch interface. I have to look up how to switch every time. Installing only happens once, though, so it’s not really a big deal.

More long-term annoying is the app’s relegation to the Non-Steam Games section of your library, combined with the absence of any content on its screen. GFN also has its own overlay and doesn’t provide any statistics, such as how many hours you played a given game for, in its interface, even aggregated for GeForce Now use. All the info is in there, but not always where you expect or want it. As a whole, these make the GFN experience feel disconnected.

Note that for free or even Premium plans, your mileage may vary because they run on lower-end GPUs rather than the GeForce RTX 4080-class versions. And you’re still restricted to games GFN supports, which is a fraction of the games universe. But it’s still a great way to play games on the Deck, especially non-Steam games, if you have one.

Technologies

Today’s NYT Mini Crossword Answers for Saturday, June 7

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for June 7.

Looking for the most recent Mini Crossword answer? Click here for today’s Mini Crossword hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Wordle, Strands, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Today’s NYT Mini Crossword could be tricky. 1-Down and 5-Down stumped me for a while, but the other letters filled it in for me. Need some help with today’s Mini Crossword? Read on. And if you could use some hints and guidance for daily solving, check out our Mini Crossword tips.

The Mini Crossword is just one of many games in the Times’ games collection. If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: Tips and Tricks for Solving The New York Times Mini Crossword

Let’s get to those Mini Crossword clues and answers.

Mini across clues and answers

1A clue: Yoga class need
Answer: MAT

4A clue: Umlaut, rotated 90°
Answer: COLON

6A clue: «That is shocking!»
Answer: OHMYGOD

8A clue: «___ You the One?» (reality TV show)
Answer: ARE

9A clue: Egg cells
Answer: OVA

10A clue: One of two «royal» sleeping options
Answer: KINGBED

12A clue: Bar seating
Answer: STOOL

13A clue: Favorite team of the «Chicago Pope,» for short
Answer: SOX

Mini down clues and answers

1D clue: Slices of life
Answer: MOMENTS

2D clue: Olympic gymnast Raisman
Answer: ALY

3D clue: Request at the end of a restaurant meal
Answer: TOGOBOX

4D clue: Hayes of MSNBC
Answer: CHRIS

5D clue: Medium for Melville or McCarthy
Answer: NOVEL

6D clue: Wood used for wine barrels
Answer: OAK

7D clue: June honoree
Answer: DAD

11D clue: Sticky stuff
Answer: GOO

How to play more Mini Crosswords

The New York Times Games section offers a large number of online games, but only some of them are free for all to play. You can play the current day’s Mini Crossword for free, but you’ll need a subscription to the Times Games section to play older puzzles from the archives.

Technologies

Despite War of Words, Trump May Funnel Billions to Musk’s Starlink With BEAD Changes

Technologies

Square Enix’s Next Game Blends Among Us-Like Murder Mystery With Bloody Carnage

Unveiled at Summer Game Fest, Killer Inn is an upcoming multiplayer murder mystery pitting players against each other in the search for the true killers.

Bet you didn’t have this one on your bingo list. Developed by Tactic Studios in partnership with Square Enix, the game was unveiled during the Summer Game Fest livestream, and it’s far from the famed RPG maker’s bread and butter. Killer Inn, as it’s called, is a multiplayer murder mystery that takes Among Us-like gameplay and ratchets it up by handing players knives, guns and many other weapons to kill or be killed while they search for the original killer.

Killer Inn might be one of those games that is best understood after playing a few matches, but even from the reveal trailer, there’s a lot going on. In each match, 24 players enter a sprawling castle-turned-hotel to determine who the real killers are as they’re picked off one by one. There’s deduction and mayhem aplenty.

Killer Inn’s play phases are patterned after detective-style games, from Among Us to Ultimate Werewolf to Mafia. A match begins with most players as cooperative participants («lambs,» in Killer Inn’s parlance) mixed with a few secret killers («wolves»). Players complete tasks to earn tokens redeemable for items and weapons, while the killers quietly go about their business — until someone discovers a body. On the corpse are clues left by the killer, so the lambs can try deducing the true culprit (or culprits).

Then it’s all about collecting clues and identifying the wolves — but unlike Among Us, there’s no group discussion to present evidence or vote them out. Killer Inn skips the parlor scene and dives straight into action: If you’re sure someone’s the killer, take them out. Use those token-bought guns and blades to put down the villain. Unless you accidentally murder one of your innocent teammates — in which case, you’re turned to stone for the rest of the match. Bummer.

Lambs have another win condition: assembling four keys to escape on the ship that brought them to the murder island. There are other mechanics, too, like finding relative safety in rooms with hotel staff, who will identify any wolves that kill lambs in their line of sight.

Players can choose between 25 premade characters that each have their own unique appearances and abilities, the latter of which improve as the match goes on, often reflecting the nefarious dark sides of the participants. For example, Winston is a surgeon who kills more efficiently with knives and, when leveled up, deals extra damage while covered in blood. The Otaku, by contrast, gains 25 HP from finding clues and eventually builds resistance to status effects. Levels don’t carry over between matches — everyone starts fresh at level one.

Killer Inn doesn’t have a release date, but the game will kick off a closed beta test over Steam in the near future.