October appears to be yet a busy month with many new game releases and this coming week is jam packed with new releases, even though none of them can exactly be called a AAA release. That said, we do have a couple of big releases nonetheless, the major one being a new take on a classic console game. The rest of this week's releases range from strategy puzzles to action-adventures and a touch of hell, to dungeons and hot wheels, to finally finishing the week with some horror.

Sonic Superstars / This week's major release / Tuesday 17 October
Adventure through the mystical Northstar Islands in this all-new take on classic 2D Sonic high-speed action platforming. Play as Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, and Amy and harness all-new Emerald powers to move and attack in dynamic new ways. Navigate gorgeous, never-before-seen environments solo or with up to 3 other players and stop Dr. Eggman, Fang, and a mysterious new adversary from converting the islands' giant animals into Badniks before it's too late!

We knew this was coming, given Valve's own teaser confirmation from March, and then a faux pas that resulted in an incomplete Steam store page ending up public for a short time. Valve had promised more details would come in May, and here we are with a lot of information available about the Valve Index headset, the controllers, the base stations, as well as retail pricing + availability.

Name aside, the Valve Index specs that leaked before end up holding true with the retail product. The headset uses dual 1440x1600 RGB LCDs which Valve claims helps provide 50% more subpixels relative to an OLED display. This in turn should result in higher effective sharpness for the same rendering horsepower, and is further accentuated via a 3x better fill factor to mitigate the dreaded screen-door effect. The headset runs at 120 Hz with full backwards compatibility to 90 Hz to work with VR titles built around that specification and, more interestingly, also supports an experimental 144 Hz mode. PC gamers have long known the benefits of higher framerates, and this is especially valid with VR, but time will tell how the rest of the ecosystem works around this. Equally important to VR gaming is the illumination period, which allows on-screen imagery to remain sharp while you are in motion just as well as when at rest. Valve claims up to a 5x reduction here, with a rated illumination period of 0.33 to 0.53 ms depending on the real time framerate. More to see past the break, so be sure to do so if this interests you!

PAX East 2019 brought with it some exciting news, and the world of virtual reality no doubt sees this news as the biggest in quite some time. Valve has finally made good on their promises from yesteryear, bringing in personnel to work on both the hardware and software side of the VR market. We first saw a hint of this via a prototype VR HMD late last year, with leaked specs confirming it was Valve's own design going beyond the established competition at the time from HTC Vive and Oculus. Since then, the Vive Pro has come out with an even higher-end version using eye-tracking to target prosumers initially, and also showcasing foveated rendering that will no doubt herald VR getting more mainstream and allowing for a higher graphical fidelity as well.

The so-called Valve Index has been listed on Steam now, with no other information to see than from the image below. We know it is coming in a couple of months, perhaps even during Computex although it is unlikely. It certainly looks similar to the prototype HMD, and presumably retains the 135° field-of-view and 2,880 x 1,600 total resolution. No mention of the Steam Knuckles controller here, but that is no surprise for a teaser. What we can tell is the headset has a physical slider, presumably to assist with pupillary distance calibration, as well as fairly large lenses that extend outwards which may assist with IR-based tracking. There is no mention of HTC anywhere here, and it would be right up Valve's alley to introduce this at a relatively affordable price point to then make up on software and distribution (savings via Steam) instead. Perhaps we will see the long-rumored Half Life VR as a launch title? Time will tell, and this may well be the big boost to gaming VR that is sorely needed.

Even though current VR controllers already do a competent job of tracking our movements in the 3D world, there is always room to improve (and VR has much, much room to improve.) AS such, valve is looking to improve the way we can interact with the VR worlds we are offered. And one of those ways is by improving gesture and hand recognition in these worlds. If ever something seemed to be designed to allow you to taunt your opponent, Valve's "Knuckles" controller is it.

Through the use of a new "CapSense" tech, which basically adds capacitive fields to the grip of the wand controller, games will be able to know whether you're fully gripping the controller or not. These sensors, which for now need to be calibrated on a per-user basis, can "detect the state of the user's hands", meaning, they're able to track the degree to which your fingers are curled or sticking out. Valve has used a technologically impressive solution for those cases where you might drop your controller for eagerness of showing your fingers to your enemies: an adjustable strap on both controllers that tightens around your hands. Valve has started to ship the Knuckles controllers out to developers, but there's no word yet on when consumer versions of the device might be available.After the break: bonus taunts.