Unboxing and Testing the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+

So first off, no blog post will  be worth the sort of exposure a Youtube unboxing and testing can offer, but a blog post with no sponsorship and just an enthusiast's opinions can help contextualize those Youtube guys in their reviews. For the record, here are the three Youtube videos I most reccommend for figuring out what the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ is all about:

Haviq Tech compares the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ to the MSI Claw 8 AI+

128KB goes over what to do when you get the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+

Retro Game Corps' Exaustingly In-Depth Review

Right off the bat the biggest issue with the MSI Claw EX (henceforth I'll drop the 8 AI+ part) is it's price. At an MSRP of $1799 this machine is less expensive than the Legion Go 2 (which currently retails for $1999) but more expensive than the other two closest competitors, being the Xbox Asus Rog Ally X (or it's fancier X20 edition) at $999 and $1299 respectively, and the Acer Predator Atlas 8 which I think is selling for $1300 but also has lower specs in RAM and storage. The Claw EX predecessor (MSI Claw 8 AI+) is also still around $1150 currently, offering the last generation of intel chips, which still provide (imo) the best overall performance of last year's chipsets.

Bottom line: you could buy a decent laptop for about the same price as this machine, so if you are considering paying that much cash it means you are seriously interested in the specific qualities a handheld form factor offers. 

As a handheld, this device feels like the MSI designers took a close look at all the previous handhelds and worked out the best way to compete with the comfortable grip of the Xbox Rog Ally X while also avoiding the pitfalls of the very heavy Legion Go 2 and also the slightly akward long-term play prospects of their prior MSI Claw 8 AI+, which could be rough to hold for more than an hour at a time (I'd start to get a rictus grip after a while with it, which is rough as it's my favorite handheld out of 2025). 

The larger screen projects slightly below where the grips rest (see pic above), but the result is the handgrips for the control sides are extremely comfortable. They almost border on slightly too large, but not really....I found myself far preferring the Claw EX in terms of its grip and overall comfort. It is also not too heavy, at least not compared to the competition. While I think the Xbox Rog Ally X is still slightly more comfortable, the Claw EX comes in a very close second, and takes first due to being slightly lighter weight in feel.

Missing from the Claw EX (and most other handhelds) is a kickstand. @MSI add a kickstand next time, it would be appreciated. Nintendo figured this out a long time ago. The Claw EX will stand upright, but it looks like its going to fall down face forward if you bump the table.

The screen is a decent IPS screen at at19:10 ratio and it looks fine to me. I do get that OLED is a very nice screen to have, but I have not found it to be amazing enough to justify noticeable price hikes. That said....I think if the Claw EX had an OLED screen and rested at this price many people would be a bit more forgiving of the price. For comparison, the Legion Go 2's OLED screen is still top dog in this category of comparison.

Something I didn't realize until getting it is that the Claw EX's MicroSD slot supports MicroSD Express cards, which became normalized by the Switch 2 and are noticeably better for running games from. I had a spare 512GB MicroSD Express card available and the difference is light night and day in terms of its load speeds. The Express cards tend to be more expensive, and good luck finding a 1TB card, but this is a feature I wish all the other handhelds supported already, so well worth it.

Of the current handhelds, only the MSI Claw EX and the Acer Predator Atlas 8 offer the new Intel G3 Extreme chipsets, which are the main selling point of this new generation of handheld devices. The specs suggest (based on Youtube reviewers who are better at analysing this stuff than me) an average of 50-56% performance improvement, which may or may not sound impressive to you, but I can state that I have been quite impressed with the Claw EX after firing up several games that I knew had performance issues on older handhelds to see how well the new machine could handle them. One game in particular, Cronos: The New Dawn, is rather notorious for its performance issues on handhelds (from my personal experience), with the best performance ironically being on the Legion Go S (a SteamOS build), and being wildly harder to run well on every other gadget without a lot of tweaking or compromises. It actually runs at 1080p in medium or high settings quite well on the Claw EX, which was a pleasant surprise. 

Another game I tried is Deadzone Rogue, my go-to handheld shooter for the last year and a half. It runs on everything quite well, but the degree to which it runs well and the settings it defaults to can vary wildly. The Claw EX is the first one I was able to run on 1080p and high resolution with uncapped framerate, and it felt natural. 

Diablo IV is another go-to I love to check out, primarily because it runs on anything (Steam Deck runs Diablo IV just fine), but also the degree to which it can be customized is par for the course with Blizzard excellence, as Blizzard likes making sure all of its games run on as many devices as possible. Diablo IV on the Claw EX runs on high settings at full resolution, and with XeSS features turned on its comparable to desktop performance in feel, so I am really pleased with it.

One game which continues to cause issues for all handhelds, though perhaps due to the fact that its just too darned fast, is Star Wars Galactic Racer. While I found it the best overall performance on the Claw EX, this game still (for me, at least) requires a large screen TV to actually enjoy properly....the racers just go too fast and its too easy to miss tiny details and wipe out when playing on a handheld. Scrib Doon!

During testing I noticed that this thing can get hot, and can spew out a lot of hot air. It's quieter than the Legion series devices, but definitely generates some heat and wind.

I've got more testing to do, but so far my go-to games are all working great on the new device. Is the performance worth $1800 style great? Well, that's a good question. I am still of the opinion that if all you want out of a handheld is a handful of decent games to play, optimized for a handheld experience, and you don't need an expensive gadget to do it, then you might as well get a Switch 2. If you can get a Steam Deck for its old price, I also suggest that would be fine, but to be fair the Steam Deck is starting to look long in the tooth. In fact, if you were to upgrade to the Claw EX from a Steam Deck, then the performance jump will be startling....the Claw EX eats the Steam Deck's lunch and then beats it up, easily. 

However, if you have an existing device such as the prior Claw 8 AI+, Legion Go S or Legion Go 2, any of the Rog Allys, or such: then the value added proposition of upgrading at the $1800 price is a debate you should have with yourself. Do you have the money lying around, consider yourself an enthusiast, and really like being on the cutting edge? Then maybe, yeah, this is a good proposition. I know that US release of the Acer Predator Atlas 8 comes with fewer frills (512GB storage vs. 1 TB), and I believe it also comes with 24GB RAM rather than 32GB, but maybe you don't have the ability to fill up a whole TB and still be wishing you had 3 more TB on board like I do, so if that's the case, maybe take a look at Acer's device.

For me, this device is so good that I now think I can safely start to trim my collection down. Indeed, if I want to look at this from the angle of "one handheld to rule them all," I think the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ is totally it for me. 

A Year of Handheld PCs - The OneXPlayer 2 Air, MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ and Other Oddities

 Since this blog is about me writing about things I am up to or interested in, I keep coming back to the phenomenon of handheld PCs. Last year was a brutal time for handheld enthusiasts, and I severely over-indulged. In 2025 I had in my possession the OG Steam Deck OLED, the Legion Go S (SteamOS edition), an OG Rog Ally, Legion Go 1, and a Rog Ally X which I gave to my wife. I subsequently sold the OG Rog Ally and Legion Go 1 (which both went to good homes with sensible people still using the two devices), to make room for an MSI Claw 8 AI+, Legion Go 2, Xbox Rog Ally regular edition and then to top it off an Xbox Rog Ally X. I tried to pawn one off on to my son but he has associated obsession with handheld PC gaming as a Gen X dad thing and would have none of it; real PC Master Race gamers use laptops, keyboard and mice, and I have fallen far from the PC Master Race tree, apparently....so my son remains pure. Also, Gen Alpha/Z are super into retro analog gaming (not modern retro handelds, but the actual deal) so he will still drag around an old GameBoy Advance he found as well as his original Nintendo 3DS.

Take note that this means that by January 2026 I had 6 handheld gaming PCs in my possession. That is 5 more than any sane enthusiast probably needs to have. We won't talk about retro handheld consoles, which are a different and equally vexing bag of cats.

Anyway, cut to the rest of 2026, and I have sort of juggled between these handhelds, partially regretting the excessive spend, while also appreciating that I have gotten to know and understand these devices far better than I would have without owning and using them. I also was happy that I did buy at least the Legion Go 2 when it came out at the original MSRP of $1349 because that sucker shot up to $1999 MSRP just a few months later. It's a great handheld but not $2,000 great.

Now, here we are approaching the new holiday season and there is a new generation of next-gen machines popping up: the Intel G3 powered MSI Claw 8 EX AI+, the Acer Atlus Predator 8, and the somewhat less exciting last-gen powered X20 edition of the Asus Rog Ally X. The last one is an easy "no" as I already have the cheaper and older version, and the new one really only adds a slightly larger OLED screen and some cosmetic shine. If I could sell off my old one for about what I paid for it ($999) then I might consider getting the upgrade for the $300 difference.....but naw, not really; I have since acquired my first OneXPlayer and for various reasons that has hammered home to me that anything with less than an 8 inch screen ain't worth it. 

For 2026 I have only added one new serious handheld PC: The OneXPlayer 2 Air, which I got on a decent sale price. This is my first OneXPlayer, which has historically been the place you can see prestige, overpriced handheld consoles and not a competitor for the larger market until quite recently. With the shift in the market for big players such as Asus, Acer, Lenovo and MSI leaning to the more expensive, the OneXPlayer prices have remained relatively unchanged, and sometimes are even cheaper; as a result some of their devices are now looking competitive, relatively, to the bigger competition.

The OneXPlayer 2 Air is a 3 in 1 handheld, a device that functions like a 10.95 inch screen PC tablet, to which you can attach a keyboard to turn it into a laptop-like experience (sort of, it does not, in fact, work well on your lap and still benefits from a flat surface), or you can attach joycon-like side controllers to holding brackets on the side and hold the thing like a massive-screened handheld. This actually works, surprisingly well, despite being the heaviest handheld form factor I have. 

The OneXPlayer 2 Air basically functions with the same specs as the MSI Claw 8 AI+, which runs on Intel Core 7 and Arc integrated graphic processor chips, but the form factor of it working as a tablet that can convert to a laptop and handheld hybrid experience makes the versatility stand out, and the nearly 11 inch screen is actually what made me realize that the screen size really matters.

Now I'm ordering an MSI Claw 8 EX AI+, which is a sign of my appreciation both for the MSI Claw design (I have used my other MSI Claw more than any of the handhelds so far), and also to the Intel chips...I am very interested to see how much of a difference in performance the new G3 chips provide, so I will talk about that one soon enough once it arrives.

This does put me in a quandry, though. I don't need all these handhelds, and the current crop are a bit too expensive to just hand off or sell for cheap. I may look back to ebay, or maybe I will gift them out to friends and relatives; I think I have at least one niece who would apprciate the Legion Go 2, for example. Either way....if I can narrow down my collection to just the two MSI Claws and the OneXPlayer I think I can call it a year for 2026 and hope that I get through this expensive hobby of mine next year, when I suspect the price of devices will be driven even higher by the post-AI scarcity of memory chips and processors.

Sixty Second Rant: The Agony of Coffeee Table Book Formats for RPG Manuals

 So the very short story on how I got to this moment is as follows: The OSRIC 3.0 Kickstarter that happened a while back included an option for a landscape-formatted long rules tome for the Player's Guide and the GM's Guide. I, in my moment of weakness to novelty, ordered the landscape edition of both books with my order. Then some other shenanigans happened leading to a delay of the shipment, but they did eventually arrive.

Queue to now! I have been getting thoroughly back into the OSR groove, but mostly with Shadowdark and Old-School Essentials, both of which are lovely digest-edition rulebooks by design, extremely convenient to drag around and reference at the table. But I have not done anything as of yet with OSRIC, which is odd one might say, as the ruleset that OSRIC emulates (AD&D) is indeed well within the scope of the "ruleset that will most accurately scratch my 80's and 90's era itch" wheelhouse. So what gives?

The landscape format, that's what! It's a damned akward way to manage a rules tome designed for frequent reference. The satisfaction of long-wise pages opening up with extensive charts is brutally offset by the utter lack of proper utility in design. You can't open it in your lap and flip through it comfortably (well I can't anyway); you can't open it up behind the GM screen for reference because the landscape format makes the book longer than the hidden space behind your GM screen can comfortably accomodate. The paper used in the books is a bit thinner than normal, meaning there's a constant risk of a rip or tear while flipping through it. 

It's ultimately more proof that landscape books work best in a specific environment: the coffee table, where long-form books go to reside and be admired by guests for their contents in an utterly casual environment, and not as game table references. I remember now that I ran in to the same problem with the "Your Best Game Ever" book from Monte Cook games, though in defense of that book it actually makes a fine coffee table tome to have lying around for casual inspection in the safety of a large common table area.*

Okay, my rant is over with! To show how much I am bothered by the lack of utility for the format, as well as how much I'd like to use OSRIC 3.0 at the table soon, I have now caved in and ordered some standard format copies from Mythmere.

*Monte Cook Games earns a different ire though for the fold-out pages in the Cypher Bestiary, which are terrible ideas for use at the game table. Paizo also gets some condemnation for the use of these fold-out pages in one of their books, too, The Lost Omens Dragons book iirc.

 Post Script: You know, I can't think of too many other game books in this format off-hand. Trilemma Adventures did publish their collection of lovely maps and dungeons in a landscape format, but that was a sturdy book with very sturdy pages. Maybe the real issue with OSRIC 3.0's books is that the pages are too thin. If the paper quality had been higher then the sturdiness factor would have offset the landscape format a bit.

I'm Getting Old: Why I am finding Old-School Essentials more fun than Pathfinder 2E (and it's mostly not nostalgia)

 Actually, to be clear, I do enjoy Pathfinder 2E in the moment. But I had a real breaking point the other day when I was contrasting my PF2E campaign against the somewhat less frequent but more fun OSE campaign. The specific scenarios that arose were as follows:

1. I had worked out a number of planned encounters that would be ready for me to use when the time was right in the PF2E game. But this shined a light on the more RNG-friendly encounter system of OSE, where I actually had sections of the scenario that said, "This room has a random encounter from Table X in OSE" type stuff (or the B/X books specifically). The players invariably were having more fun with the decidedly less certain encounters in OSE due to the fact that the game system by design could flex with a measure of uncertainty and randomness that is hard to accomplish in PF2E. 

2. The second situation involved one of these "built but held until the time was right" encounters, a technique I use to have something ready but held for use when the situation/player choices call for it. This is a necessary technique in PF2E, which by design does not favor random encounters, encounters that fall outside of a certain balance range (which if you go too high or too low leads to tediously easy or insanely hard/lethal results), and the books themselves do not offer up randomized encounter or loot tables. 

Anyway, the prebuilt encounter was missing the loot...I had fogotten to figure it out, or misplaced it, and so I had to improvise on the fly, which is "technically doable" but its pretty obvious I think to the players I'm just trawling through the confusingly organized loot tables trying to find stuff, and also make sure that stuff is level-balanced, another issue with PF2E where handing out loot that's too powerful too soon or too weak too late leads to further power/performance issues for future encounters. It was a pain in the ass; in contrast, the treasure tables in OSE (B/X) make no assumptions about balance; its all about luck, and sometimes things go very well for the party, and other times they roll a cursed item, or maybe the monster hasn't accrued any treasure at all. It can swing both ways....and its deliberate by design. This is a much more interesting result because it means two different games in the same scenario can very wildly from one another.

3. I had some NPCs I wanted to design, and I figured I could build them in Pathbuilder 2 and then turn them into statblocks. This led to a moment where I was reminded of just how much I hate the nit-picky nonsense of feats, especially skill feats, in PF2E. There is no analog here in OSE; you get abilities by class, but not very many, and most of your character's "character," if you will, is determined by actual play, deeds, luck and cool stuff you might find or do. 

The two feats that broke me were (without recalling the exact names) one in which you remove a specific penalty against being attacked while climbing, and another where you can take a Step action into difficult terrain. The first one got me to thinking about how rarely a situation has cropped up in 3rd edition era games (and I consider PF2E to be a descendant of 3E era games) in which you can be attacked while scaling a cliff. Does it happen? Sure, but it is far less common given the predisposition of this era of D20 systems to favor maps and minis, which are notoriously difficult at representing verticality. 

The other feat, where you can "take a Step action into difficult terrain," made me actually mad and irritated at the game. First I had to figure out the Step action,* and realized its just PF2E Revised's 5-foot step from classic D20 terminology, probably now renamed because you can't just call it a 5 foot step anymore for some reason. Second was the realization that unless you have this feat, no one, regardless of their acrobatics or athletics skill, will ever be allowed to try for such an action by the RAW unless your GM is like me and actively disdains the skill feat system as nothing but annoying limiters. 

More to the point though, it got me to realizing just how many of the feat choices in character design in PF2E are just pedantic little "get out of jail" cards for gotcha rules. It shined a light on why a skill-based system like Basic Roleplaying or a non-skill-based system like OSE (or B/X if you use the optional skill system introduced in the Gazetteers) allow for a lot more storytelling flexibility because you aren't having to fight the rules every step of the way. This might not be a problem for some groups, if you don't have any players or GMs with a sense of rules mastery or rules-lawyerism in their mental perspective, but if you have even one rules lawyer at the table or just a sense that ignoring the rules detracts from the experience, then that can lead to PF2E being very bogged down in these little gotcha bits.

There have been other contrasts that broke me a bit. I tried working out some potent magic items in PF2E but realized the only way the game is mechanically comfortable with allowing such flex in items is through level scaled relics. OSE doesn't care; you can stick the Nine Lives Stealer from AD&D into a gang of level 1 PCs and consequences be damned. Can you do that in PF2E? Sure, but the Nine Lives Stealer is not going to be the cool sword you think it is, and if you ignore all the design expectations and just make it happen, its going to make one player in that group far more balance-wrecking for the rest of the party. 

There are things I like about PF2E, but the devil is in the details. My love for the game stems from the fact that it "feels" better to play in terms of dice, probabilities and threat/risk than D&D 5.5, but the game's fun factor dies by a thousand cuts for me when I realize how much of the game is dedicated to micromanagement, niggling exception rules, and artificial limiters designed to prevent players from doing stuff (not even cool stuff, just regular stuff) all so the mechanics can induce the illusion of choice through its labyrinthine feat system.

The problem I face is....I may be having issues with PF2E, but my players on that night do seem to enjoy it. Only one of them is in my OSE game (the rules lawyer, ironically! But he loves OSE as well and its got plenty of rules, too) and I don't know if I could convince them all to give OSE an earnest, permanent try.**

So all of that is why I say my fascination for OSE (and Shadowdark, and DCC) is not nostalgia driven. In fact if anything I keep entertaining the notion that deep down, in terms of complexity vs. ad hoc flexibility, D&D 3rd edition (and even Pathfinder 1E) managed to handle this better than PF2E. But those are dead systems, and hard to get a group into these days without being able to point to a virbant, living character creator (hmm, I think the original Pathbuilder may exist, though....) but also I just really love OSE's revival of B/X, even though I never really played B/X in the 80's, using it instead as a rules system cypher for interpreting and resolving Gygax's particularly confusing rules moments in AD&D instead. In a way, that works in its favor, as actually thinking about playing AD&D 1E straight up just sounds....unpleasant....to me, thus why I love how OSE's blend of B/X with advanced options "feels" like the game I used to play, even though its really just a sort of approximation of the zeitgeist of the era. 

Anyway.....just some thoughts! I'll bring up the idea of OSE to the group tonight. 

*So for reference I have been running PF2E games since it came out, including one game that ran from level 1 to 20, and yet seeing "Step" in text threw me for a loop; this is where the "I'm getting too old" part comes in, as in "Too old to remember all these dumb little rules." It also probably doesn't help that I run theater of the mind in PF2E as I am too old and tired anymore to drag many pounds of maps and minis around (and also too tired to spend hours designing VTT environments while listening to everyone try to talk at the same time on a single audio channel," so thus the old man yelling at clouds vibe at this moment. 

**I could probably convince them to move to Tales of the Valiant, though. My group is fairly in agreement that D&D 5.5 is now just too banal, unchallenging and simplistic for veteran players, but TotV manages to capture a sense of natural progression and improvement from what regularD&D 5E used to be, so this may be a good option. 

Post Script: So I didn't bring up switching last night. The group is having fun with PF2E and we enjoy the campaign enough, so I will plow ahead and get that campaign to its natural conclusion, after which I can then monkey around with some different suggestions. Given that the group on Wednesday does prefer a bit more crunch in gaming, I will probably lean to Tales of the Valiant, or maybe something a bit more unusual like BRP or Dragonbane. I'll keep my OSE night on Fridays for the moment. And I am entertaining the idea of running Shadowdark on Saturdays, too.