City-building games offer players the chance to create, manage, and shape entire civilizations. Steam has become a hub for some of the best city-builder games in the industry, offering a massive library of titles that cater to different types of players. These games allow you to step into the shoes of an urban planner and make decisions that will shape these virtual worlds. In this article, we’ll explore ten of the best city-building games you should try on Steam, each offering its own unique take on the genre and a new challenge to take on.

If you regularly move files between folders, manage multiple drives, or manage complex directory structures, the default Windows File Explorer just isn't enough. It's because it doesn't support multiple-panes to ease out your work. Yeah, there's always an option to open multiple windows of the Explorer, but that just doesn't work smoothly, as not all windows can remain active simultaneously, limiting the actions you can perform. So, that's where dual-pane or multi-pane third-party file managers will help you.

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 78, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, sorry everything’s about to get so expensive, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)This week, I’ve been reading about baseball bats and work-life balance and BYD and Scarlett Johansson, watching Paradise, rekindling my love of pear-flavored jelly beans, sharing Robin Sloan’s AI take with anyone who will listen, grooving to the greatest unexpected Doechii remix of all time, and finally finding the monitor mount that makes my webcam upgrade work.I also have for you a couple of great new apps for streaming and gaming, a look back into Microsoft’s history, the latest on the Switch 2, a screed against screen time, and much more.Oh, and a programming note: Installer is off next week. Taking a little break before we ramp up for Developer Conference season. But we have lots to do today! Let’s get into it.(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you into right now? What should everyone else be reading / listening to / watching / downloading / sipping on this week? Tell me everyth …Read the full story at The Verge.

Google Workspace is a phenomenally powerful tool with a rich interface, a slew of AI options via Gemini, and tons of third-party integrations — but it isn't the most private option. For all of Google's measures to protect your data, it's still stored on Google servers and subject to its privacy policies. If you want something a bit more secure, Collabora is a great self-hosted alternative that gives you total control of the data stored on the server. Yes, it requires more upfront work, and more effort goes into maintaining functioning servers, but when privacy is paramount, you'd be hard-pressed to find a better option.

I had a good time gaming on my Switch, but I really needed an SD card to store all my games on. After a while, that puny 32GB of storage space really didn't cut it. It was good to hear that the Switch 2 would boost that storage space up by eight times to a more generous 256GB, but if the Switch 2 games would be bigger than its older brother's titles, there was a chance they'd devour eight times the storage, setting us back to square one. Well, turns out that they're not as big a data-hog as I thought, and 256GB should actually last you a while.

If you're a creative professional, you know that nothing slows you down quicker than not being able to access the files you need. Maybe the network connection is overloaded, so your cloud-hosted tools are glacially slow, or you're waiting for someone to email you the latest revision on the presentation deck you need for that client-facing meeting in the afternoon.

While I'll always argue that SUM is my favorite and most-used Excel formula, there are plenty of other powerful functions included in the software. These features go far past using Excel as a digital calculator and can unlock valuable insights.

Breaking down the confusing world of color spaces.The best method that we have for defining color is by using math. Specifically, mind-boggling mathematical models called color spaces that use geometry to assign colors as a fixed point that we can reference, ensuring the blue that I see is the same blue you see. As a creative-leaning person who can barely split a bill without a calculator app, all that math is extremely daunting.The good news is that computing software will do all these complicated calculations for us, allowing us to rely on our eyeballs to pick whatever colors look best. The bad news is that there’s an equally daunting number of color spaces to choose from, and they’re all optimized for different tasks across web design, photography, video editing, physical printing, and more. And if you select the wrong one at any point between creating, editing, and viewing something, it can really mess with what colors are supposed to look like.It’s a lot to absorb. Thankfully, most of us will only ever need to understand the basics, and that knowledge can be useful to everyone — not just creative professionals. Learning about it can help you buy your next phone, TV, laptop, or computer monitor, and get the most o …Read the full story at The Verge.

The ninth generation of gaming has entered its fifth year now, and it’s been a bit of snoozefest, hasn’t it? Plus, it’s a largely sad state of affairs with a few exceptions that serve as a ray of hope in an otherwise dark tunnel full of false promises — grand scales, bleeding-edge visuals, and better games than ever before.

Developers have been prodding at concepts for using generative AI in gaming. One of these concepts involves having the AI generate the entire game, which is just as weird as it sounds. We've seen people do their own take on this concept by feeding an AI tons of visual data based on a game and then allowing players to play in a generated world. Microsoft has released its own take using Quake 2, and while it's surprisingly playable, it still feels like something I'd dream up while running a nasty fever.

Emulation is not only a great way to experience the games we loved when we were younger, but it's also a fantastic way to experience the classics for the first time. Playing on original hardware might be the "purest" way to play retro games, but getting access to consoles can be a mission. They're expensive and are not guaranteed to work.

Got more than one home lab? Maybe you’ve got one at home and another tucked away in a family member’s basement, or you’re spreading your infrastructure between your primary residence and a vacation home. Whatever the case, there’s a smart, secure, and surprisingly easy way to connect them: a site-to-site VPN using Tailscale.